Azure Astronomy 2024-09-30T21:40:25-07:00 Astrea https://automatictiger.neocities.org/blog My Actual Final Word on Cohost Astrea https://automatictiger.neocities.org/blog/my-actual-final-word-on-cohost.html 2024-09-30T21:37:21-07:00 (reposted from my Cohost, it felt right to put it here too) In my head, it's impossible to separate Cohost from a very very very important time in my life: 2022. I'd thoroughly broken up twice in 2021, one of which was the longest relationship… ]]>

(reposted from my Cohost, it felt right to put it here too)

In my head, it's impossible to separate Cohost from a very very very important time in my life: 2022. I'd thoroughly broken up twice in 2021, one of which was the longest relationship of my life. I'd been in a state of uncertainty with what to do with my life, an aimlessness, that had meant for like four solid months I painted miniatures every week at a local game store.

It uh, wasn't the worst time in my life. Covid numbers were pretty low, I'd finally started getting out of the house again (though I was masking as I still do), and I sort of thought I was making friends. Albeit very surface level ones.

And then my life changed overnight: I got a VR headset, got into VR chat, and suddenly started making friends there. At nearly that same moment I got an invite to Cohost. The idea of the website intrigued me "So it's like old Tumblr but I can't see likes? That sounds perfect".

By coincidence, this was true for a lot of folks I had started meeting in virtual reality. A bunch of us were all at weird turning points in our life, and we were all turning to Cohost as a way to talk, shitpost, and share interesting stuff we knew. Oh and VR photos! SO MANY VR PHOTOS.

Cohost was not necessarily how I made those friends. But eventually, that changed too. There's a few folks I'm very good friends with now I wouldn't have ever interacted with without it.

It's genuinely hard to say if Cohost was the reason for all this, but it definitely was where it happened. Cohost in my heart was a place where I figured myself out, where I deepened existing friendships, where I rekindled an interesting in writing longer form essay stuff. It was where it all happened.

And that's the thing I'll remember about it, beyond it's different approach to social media. Beyond the color-scheme (which is excellent IMO), and beyond the discussion of whether or not the tech made it a good place...it was my good place for a while. And now I'm off to see if I can make new good places outside of it.

Thank you cohost, you've been great.

~Astrea

]]> Welcome to the Azure Astronomy Blog Astrea https://automatictiger.neocities.org/blog/welcome-to-the-azure-astronomy-blog.html 2024-09-26T00:14:03-07:00 Pardon my dust! I've been rushing to get this thing up before Cohost is shut down. I really really really started enjoying long-form blogging again and I needed a place to put all of the writing that bluntly, doesn't fit in a tweet/toot/meow/skeet/etc, and MAKING… ]]> An anthro blue tigress with black stripes and hair, an open red jacket, and a bikini top stares at you with yellow green eyes on a beach in front of an ocean.

Pardon my dust! I've been rushing to get this thing up before Cohost is shut down. I really really really started enjoying long-form blogging again and I needed a place to put all of the writing that bluntly, doesn't fit in a tweet/toot/meow/skeet/etc, and MAKING A WHOLE WEBSITE seemed easier than Wordpress, less likely to be killed by Google, and appropriately retro for my taste. 

The rest of the website is still a work in progress, y'know, like in Ye Olde Internet Days. But if I understand this place correctly, I already have an RSS feed for you to follow the blog. I want to repost some of my hit Chosts, and maybe expand on a skeet or two I put online to see if long form was something that played nice with my brain and the web?

And uh, I made this blog which should tell you how that worked out.

In any case, thank you for clicking a link, maybe even 2-3 links, each farther away from the warm embrace of social media's graces and reading this page. I hope to put things here going forward to make it worth your while.

Thank you to Azure Astronomy, I'm really happy you're here 💙

~Astrea

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