Trading Passion for Paycheck

Sometime in the last six months, I started following Katie Van Slyke, mostly because she was served up to me by YouTube’s Shorts algorithm, which had previously also shown me such hits like soap pouring and snake breeding. These are things I would never search out on my own, but enthralled me nontheless. If you are unfamiliar, Katie Van Slyke is a horse breeder with a rather large Internet following. She does have a merch shop, affiliate links, and is not immune to clickbaity titles for her videos. However, following her over the last few months has me feeling nostalgia for what feels like a bygone era of the Internet.

I am referring to that time before ad revenue, and sponsored posts, and sometimes course hawking became the norm on our social media feed, back when we were all just dorks on the Internet sharing things we were truly passionate about. Katie clearly (contrary to certain Reddit opinions) loves her horses, her goaties, and all the new calves being born. I honestly have a hard time remembering the last person I followed who showed such passion for something that’s not directly attached to trying to sell something to the viewer. Even with her merch shop and affiliate links, it’s just a different vibe than what I have unwillingly grown used to over the last seven to eight years.

Prior to 2019, I can remember having a list of people that I followed because they inspired me. Writers, artists, musicians, and probably some other odds and ends of people just doing things that they loved, and not always for profit. They lived for the thing that, pardon the overused phrase, lit them up, and I found that so inspiring and uplifting. It made me, more than ever, want to always have a notebook and pen on me, to live my identity as a writer, with or without publishing under my belt.

Somewhere along the line though, these people dropped off. They disappeared off the Internet. Their platforms shifted to be geared more towards making a paycheck, whether it was through affiliate links, sponsorships, or in a lot of cases, expensive courses. That last one is what I remember being a critical turning point for my own perception of the Internet, when an author who was barely ankle deep in the publishing game, put a $2k price tag on her so called “expertise.”

I know I’m not the first person to observe this transition, and I would love to read a book or watch a documentary on this if one were to exist. I know we all have to make a living, and to be able to do it by sharing your life online is an amazing thing, if we’re being honest. I do think it’s interesting to note how the “influencer era” seems to be losing its luster and shine, at least according to the YouTube commentary channels I watch. Economic downturns hit them in their wallets just like the rest of us. Even so, I don’t see the Internet ever going back to the way it was. Even accounts like Katie Van Slyke can’t fully take us back, but it is nice to come across every now and then, and remember what we once had.

The Digital Breadcrumbs We Leave

There is a video floating around on Instagram right now of a mom who discovered the hard way just how much information we actually give away when we consistently post to social media. To sum it up, she posted a video of her and her small child singing in the car to Facebook, and when she did that, Meta AI had one of its search prompts at the bottom of the post: Who is the child in the car? Curious, the mom clicked it, and went down a rabbit hole of AI piecing together an alarming amount of information just from the breadcrumbs of information she’s shared over the years, even including deleted photos.

Years and years ago, I was watching some crime show or another, I can’t even remember which one. They were searching for a missing girl and found a conversation she’d had with someone online. She never directly gave any personal information away however, based on pieces she let slip, like the name of her teacher, maybe what city she lived in, a predator was able to cobble together enough information to find her and kidnap her.

I bring this up because the idea of the small bits of information we share online being enough to give away critical details about ourselves is not new. This is why I think anyone who posts an image of the front of their new house to social media is an absolute idiot because reverse image search is a thing and people can find out where you live (and how much you paid for your house, consequently). What AI has done now is make piecing together that information super easy. You don’t even have to dig through thousands of photos anymore, the clankers will do it for you.

Anyone who’s ever spent any amount of time on an gossip message board knows just how easy it is for people with enough motivation (or boredom) to find out everything they want about you. I’ve seen threads of conversation where people have tracked down court records, real estate transactions, and gods know what else for this YouTuber or that influencer. They make it easy with how much they share just by nature of what they do, but also, public record is a thing. If you have someone’s name, maybe even their date of birth, it’s amazing what you can find out about them.

Is it AI’s fault that information is this easy to access? Not really, but it should be regulated to the point where someone whose intentions we can only guess at cannot use it to make their stalking easier. It’s like how Instagram added that insane feature where you could share your location on a map, so your followers could know at all times where you are. I still don’t understand why they ever thought that was a good idea. I have yet to see any of my individual friends engage with it, it’s all public business pages.

I’ve talked before about how much social media, and the Internet in general, has changed since 2009. It’s been a wild change to witness in real time. When I started college, we put everything on Facebook. Smartphones weren’t as prevalent yet, but we still tagged our live location whenever we could. We had whole photo albums dedicated to every single aspect of our lives, and that is kind of horrifying to think about now. Not just because these companies scrape everything to train their clankers, but because even with a profile locked down to private and friends only, it’s still putting a large amount of information out on the Internet where it can’t easily be permanently erased. The right person could access it whenever they wanted to. One of my first professors in college made a point to drill it into our heads as upcoming professionals that a good IT person can find ANYTHING, even if you delete it. I don’t think I appreciated the severity of that reality back then but I do now.

I can’t speak for others but I know I don’t want to become a social media hermit. I’ve had my Facebook mostly deactivated for the last three months and I don’t want to go back, but that doesn’t mean I want to disappear off the Internet entirely. So the trouble now is figuring out how much to share and what is off limits. My personal guard rails have changed, and regardless of whatever “safety features” Meta swears they’re adding after that lawsuit they just settled on, my kids will not be getting Instagram accounts anytime soon, or TikTok accounts for that matter. I’d almost rather they stayed off all social media until they are adults, but I have no idea how well that will hold up in the coming years as they grow and make friends and those friends are online.

It’s a tricky world we live in, to be sure.

The Devil Still Wears Prada, but needs a hug

I think designer labels are a scam, but I’ve always loved The Devil Wears Prada. Even when she was decked head to toe in clothes and accessories snatched from the Closet, Andy Sachs had enough disdain for the fashion world that my sixteen year old self felt a kinship with her. Plus, she wanted to be a writer. I never went to New York, never really had any aspirations to, but she was one of my people nonetheless.

I love the movie, it’s a comfort watch for me, and I’ve read the book twice now, and the sequel as well. When the movie’s sequel was set to come out, I was excited. And when the words “tone deaf” started to trickle into people’s reviews of it, I consciously blocked them out, not wanting other people’s opinions to color my enjoyment of The Devil Wears Prada 2. I finally got to watch it.

In short, I loved it. It hit familiar beats of the first movie while  still telling a new story set in the current era. I love the easter eggs and nods to the first movie, they were so fun. The music was great. I think it’s hilarious that by virtue of how no one in fashion save for one designer would touch the first movie out of fear of Anna Wintour, it shows that the original book might not have been far off the mark in its portrayal of Miranda Priestly. I don’t think the first movie was missing anything for it, to be honest, and being in Anna’s good graces for this movie didn’t necessarily add anything amazing to it, to my admittedly non-fashion savvy eye.

That being said, I am glad the movie was more forgiving in its portrayal of Miranda Priestly than the book, by a long shot. The first movie made her symapthetic, and this one continues that. While one might have to suspend disbelief that everyone would be so willing to bend over backwards to keep Miranda Priestly in her position after the way she’s always treated those who work for her, it works even more in this case than in the first movie. I won’t get into spoilers, but I just want to say this.

Shilling $3,000 handbags in a cost of living crisis is not a good look, but where And Just Like That fell flat on its face with its outrageous portrayal of wealth, this one actually felt like a vehicle for something. Call it contrived, a stretch, whatever, but I think this movie’s message can be summed up in a conversation that Miranda briefly has (with one of Carrie Bradshaw’s ex boyfriends!).

What is art worth in the face of digitization and optimization?

Whether or not you consider designer brands art is a debate that I think should be entirely separate from whether or not it’s worth what they charge for it. The question of its cultural value is the key issue here. Beyond that, Andy and Miranda are also pieces of an ever evolving, and some might say dying, industry of journalism and extension of the publishing industry that has not been doing so hot ever since the Internet took off. Why pay for a print subscription to a newspaper or magazine when you can read it for free online?

They handled this issue in the movie well, in my opinion, without being overbearing about it. I really, really loved it, and I can see this being a comfort watch just like the first one became.

State of Opinion – Kelswitch & AI

It’s been almost a year since I posted a blog talking about how I do not like generative AI or how pervasive it’s becoming. Nothing has really changed there, but my feed is constantly doom and gloom about it and while I agree with the concerns and issues I’m seeing raised, I’m also hitting a wall of I can’t live in this state of spiraling about it anymore. It is awful, and I wish more people would refuse to use it, but I also can’t change the world. So I’m going to sum up my feelings on it here, and then let the issue rest until I feel it needs to be spoken on again.

There is part of me that always has a speech prepared in case someone ever does go “Hey Kel, why do you hate AI so much?” (Not that anyone ever does or will, but I’m prepared!)

Let me count the reasons…

1. Generative AI as we know it today, be it ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, or Meta, or any of the rest, most of it was trained on pirated work. Be it novels, music, whatever. It was not financially feasible to pay for licensing in most cases to train these models. So these billion dollar companies just decided not to, and most of them have gotten away with it, except for a few lawsuits here and there
2. The massive data centers needed to power these AI programs draw an excessive amount of water and power, to the detriment of their surrounding environment. The water, from my understanding, evaporates after it is used, and whatever harmful pollutants that were in that water are then released into the open air, not to mention just the general pollution these data centers create, and the light and noise pollution as well. There’s a reason a growing number of communities are pushing back against data centers being built in their neighborhoods. They’re awful to live near, not just for comfort but also general health.
3. Your brain is a muscle, one that frequent AI use can weaken. Relying on ChatGPT for everything has already been proven to make you dumber. I would say Google it, but…
4. The big tech companies are determined to shove AI down our throats, whether we want it or not. They’re making programs we’ve come to know and rely on worse in the name of “efficiency.” They are already cutting jobs in favor of letting AI do the work, whether or not it actually does it well. In short, the “enshittification” of everything that is being rapidly intensified by AI.
5. There are so many ethical considerations about using AI as a creative, and we’re seeing it happen in real time how places like the publishing and gaming industries are adapting it, and it’s a mess. There’s also the fact that I don’t think you can really call yourself a writer if you use AI to generate your story. You’re not a writer, you’re an AI user. I stand by that. The same applies to art and music.
6. The massive privacy concerns associated with using generative AI. To produce that fun comic of you, that machine has collected a lot of information about you, and that doesn’t sit right with me. Not to mention, nothing you enter into the machine is confidential.
7. Our government absolutely refuses to legislate it, either the building of data centers or the programs themselves. We’ve already seen more instances than I can count of one of the chat programs playing a role in someone trying to hurt themselves or others, and of it being used to generate explicit images of others without their consent, especially minors.
8. This last reason is pretty petty and comes from a place of pure stubbornness, but I absolutely hate the “get on board or get left behind” narrative. I just find it incredibly moronic. I don’t think refusing to use AI is going to get you “left behind,” whatever the hell that even means. It’s not the be all, end all technology, and in my opinion, as long as you are able to adapt to shifts in general technology, you’re fine. I think this line is propaganda from the tech companies who aren’t making money as fast as they’d hoped, and I hope it sinks with them.

As crazy as it may sound, AI is part of the reason I decided to pursue a masters in library and information science. Alongside all the book challenges that are just rampant in the United States these days, I just want to be a part of the solution and not the problem. I believe in information literacy and being free and able to think for yourself. I believe in creativity as a most basic trait of what makes us human. The deepest, darkest, most paranoid part of me fears we are heading towards a world where these things are no longer considered ideal. Why think? Why create? Let the machines do it for you, it’s more “efficient.” So this is where I plant my flag, and say not me, not today.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, since I’ve gotten that off my chest, I’m off to dive back into a world where the AI has a foot fetish. I’ve put hold requests at my local library for books three and four of Dungeon Crawler Carl, and I’m so excited!

Practical or Problematic? Putting Community Behind Paywalls

One thing about me is that I am not shy in discussing things I love. Ghost, One Piece, etc. So most people who know me at all know I love and adore JR Ward. I’ve been reading the Black Dagger Brotherhood since I was 17 years old without ever taking a break from the series. I’m turning 35 next month. That’s 18 years of following every release. This is the only series I can say that about. Even the Psy/Changeling series by Nalini Singh, which I have been reading since I was 16 years old, I’ve taken breaks from and gotten behind on releases. I don’t even always pick up Anne Bishop’s new releases, and the Black Jewels Trilogy is one of my all time favorites. The Warden holds a special place for me, and I’ve been to see her twice for her yearly big release events. Those were fun road trips with my husband and I loved it.

I’m sure you can imagine the way I’m starting this blog, that there’s a but coming…

It’s not really a “but.” It’s just…for the first time in 18 years, the Warden has done something that’s really made me stop and go “huh.” Which is not a bad track record, and god knows, there’s lots more problematic things authors do every day. Really, this is partly a me issue, and partly a price tag issue.

I’ve always gotten a weird feeling when authors or content creators in general put “community” behind a paywall. I understand why they do it, but it’s just always left me with a kind of icky feeling. They usually sweeten the deal with “exclusive merch” and “first access” to news and events. This is not a new thing. People do it all the time, especially with Patreon and the like, but usually with Patreon, there’s tiers. And it’s open to whoever wishes to subscribe. It’s not a lottery system and priced at $250 a year. $20 a month may not seem like a lot, but in this case, for something like this, it absolutely can be. It’s giving “glymera,” and if you know anything about the Black Dagger Brotherhood world, that’s not a compliment.

My husband says that fans being upset about this are just entitled, that they’re not obligated to do it and they can still enjoy the books and the tv adaptation without it. He’s partially right, but I disagree. I don’t think it’s entitlement (in most cases) that have fans a little upset by this. It’s the principle of the thing, because to be completely honest, this move feels like a money grab. It feels like the Warden is cashing in because the series is arguably more popular than it’s ever been. Sure, we can argue who can blame her? She’s worked hard on this series for 20 years, why shouldn’t she get to enjoy the fruits of her labor? This is true, but I think it gets even stickier when you look at the background Warden came from. She’s not an indie author launching a Patreon to keep her career afloat. She was a lawyer before she was an author, and you can tell from the way she dresses and what glimpses we’ve seen of her house, that she’s very well off. She doesn’t need this.

At the end of the day, the Warden really is entitled to do what she wants with her platform and her books. This isn’t enough to make me want to stop buying the books or to not watch the next season when it comes out on Passionflix. It’s just another reminder to not put anybody up on a pedestal, because we’re all human and we all do questionable shit from time to time. I’m disappointed, even though I suspected what this was as soon as they started teasing “The Order” last week. I’m disappointed because I personally find it iffy when people put a price on community, and create orders of exclusivity within fandom spaces, or online spaces in general. That may just be the world we live in, where everything is pay to play, but once upon a time, the Internet wasn’t as bad about it.

In a weird way, this situation makes me grateful that I’m not a published author, managing a community space and relying on my art to pay the bills.

Creativity, Entitlement, and Artificial Intelligence

The other night my husband and I were hanging out before bed, winding down and scrolling on our phones as we do, and he says to me “Oh, they’re moving the new Destiny expansion back to June,” disappointment dripping from his voice. I look up at his tone and go “Okay, so?” With a huff of annoyance (at Bungie, not me), he explains that the game hasn’t had any new content since September of 2025, and this update means waiting even longer. A thought started to tickle at the back of my brain. It’s just mid-February, that hasn’t even been six months ago. I say as much and, still annoyed (at Bungie!), he explains how players have been through the September content over and over again already, and that this delay means the player base is going to fall off in a drastic way. People are bored, so they’ll leave and they won’t come back. The gaming industry is a dumpster fire these days. If the player base on a 12 year old game declines enough, the suits at the top will pull the plug.

My favorite band has announced going on a “pause.” Even now that I’m no longer on TikTok, I can still hear the anguished cries of the fandom, crying out in agony that they’ll starve while Ghost takes a well earned break. I am a relatively new fan of Ghost’s. Their album Impera came out in 2022, and I fell in love with “Call Me Little Sunshine” in mid 2023. To sum up how busy this band has stayed, they released Impera in 2022, Phantomime (a collection of covers) in 2023, had the Impera and ReImperator tours, released a feature film in 2024, their album Skeleta in 2025, and have been doing the Skeletour since mid 2025. That’s a lot in a three year span for a band. Most of my favorite bands go at least three to five years between releases. And yet there are sections of the Ghost fandom that are saying that’s not enough. You can’t take a break. We need more content. In my opinion, that entitled section of the fandom are the ones who came in through the TikTok doorway when “Mary on a Cross” went viral over there, but I digress.

As a writer, even a hobby writer, existing in spaces online where my peers are working towards publication and building their platforms to make a career out of selling the books they wrote, one concern and fear I hear a lot is how fast publishing moves these days. Especially in the indie space, there has become an expectation that you publish multiple books a year to stay relevant. If you can’t meet that pace as a writer, you won’t do well with Amazon’s algorithm. Reader spaces online are fickle and will move on if you don’t release fast enough.

These three things have come together to make me wonder at how entitled we’ve grown as a society to entertainment. We need more, we need it bigger and better, and we need it now! If you can’t meet that demand and work at that pace, you will get left behind by the algorithm as people move on. Is this a symptom of our attention spans? Of everything being digital? A favorite book on a shelf is a physical reminder that it exists, and that you look forward to the next release. An ebook, however, gets pushed to the bottom of your kindle library, or returned if it’s a Kindle Unlimited title, and you forget it exists. Out of sight, out of mind. We can also see this with digital music and digital only games. The various entertainment industries in question here are absolutely saturated with competitors dying to claim your attention, and we end up moving from thing to thing at a pace that is almost unprecedented. Now, here is where my fear as an observer of this phenomenon comes in.

When creators, be it writers, musicians, game creators, artists, etc, cannot keep up with the pace of output that the algorithm demands to stay relevant, in increasingly difficult to survive industries, how long do they hold out before handing over their process to Artificial Intelligence to speed things along? Maybe at first, it’s just a quick aid here and there for formatting a book, or to find another word to use in that one line of the song that’s proving difficult. How long until that snowballs though? We are already seeing it happen in video games, with the suits insisting coding be done by AI, replacing human hands that in theory, don’t move as fast. It may still make errors now, but they say AI is improving by leaps and bounds so that will not last forever. Where do we draw the line on a cultural scale? Where do we stop and say, no. This is human creativity, it takes what it takes to get done; and human creativity is not a machine, it needs rest and recovery.

I was recently served an ad on YouTube where this bright eyed woman told me that romance novels are on fire right now and an easy way to make money, and that she can help you publish books and establish your platform as an author within weeks, no writing experience needed. The ad never explicitly comes out and says it, but you know it’s AI generated books. I normally skip ads as soon as possible, but this one stunned me so much that I sat and watched the whole thing. I grew furious. This is what’s being normalized now, a perversion of something I consider a piece of my soul in the name of profit. As a writer AND a reader, I am absolutely furious that this is happening, and it is part of why I will not shut up about being anti-AI.

As things move along with AI, I’m starting to come to the opinion that optimization and efficiency aren’t always the most important thing. We are not robots. Whatever it is inside of us that allows us to create is not a machine. Unfortunately, in a capitalist society where profit is always the prime directive, that’s not always favored. I don’t know what these spaces will look like in 10 or 20 years, but I do know this. Ghost’s albums will still cycle through the player in my car, even if they don’t put out another thing for the next ten years. I’ll always go back to my favorite authors, especially the ones I’ve been following for almost twenty years. I can’t speak to video games though. With the way games are stored on servers now and once they pull the plug, that game is just gone? I have no answers there.

I like to think human creativity will always persist, no matter how much society demands of us or where we are. It’s what makes us US, and that deserves to be protected and honor, come what may.

Showing Up On The Internet in 2026

Picture it, Facebook in the fall of 2009. Millennials were slowly abandoning their personalized MySpace profiles for the more uniform pages under that single blue F logo. We were starting college and everyone was posting album after album of dorm move in days, first parties of the year, and the people we’d just met who we thought were going to be our new best friends for the next four years. We posted lyrics as our statuses, asked if anyone wanted to go to Walmart at 11 o’clock at night, and who was going to be in the caf at 4:30. We were living the life with our digital cameras, shiny new laptops, and whatever phone was hot before smartphones took over in the next few years. Newly available tech coupled with the beginning of an exciting new chapter of chasing our dreams, we had it all.

Just like those college days that felt like they could never end, that era of social media slowly went away when we weren’t looking. It didn’t happen overnight. In 2016, we were all beginning to question the fairness of what the algorithm showed us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and how that was being manipulated to benefit certain people. It’s been downhill ever since. These days, it’s a question of data mining, corporate interests, and what’s being fed to the AI machine. Facebook is a shell of its former self, and Instagram tries so hard to be TikTok, it’s embarrassing. We’re not even going to talk about what happened to poor Twitter.

Like others my age, I joined social media when it was just beginning to get hot. I remember the era of putting every detail of my life on Facebook, which horrifies me to think about now. A lot of the people I know in real life have either cycled off of social media entirely, or they’re still around but they mostly lurk. My feed is mostly influencers and randos I’ve followed on Instagram that I cycle through myself every so often. You can always tell when an account has hit it big, because the content changes and it’s just not quite the same. That’s usually when they fall prey to one of my semi-regular cleanouts of my following list. Social media is just one big advertisement these days, a water hose that’s been left on full blast shooting constant images and videos and links to my feed to entice me to spend money, but I do have some control over the water pressure.

Sometimes I think I should just leave social media entirely. What good is it doing my life? I have a lot of memories stored on Facebook and Instagram, true, but in the long term, what difference does it really make? Those photos are backed up on external hard drives. The statuses that make me laugh when they pop up in my memories aren’t that critical to hold on to. I’ve got other ways to access the latest news (yes, I’m one of those), and if I want to keep up with someone, I can text them. Right? So, why am I still here?

Because I do still enjoy it. The guard rails I’ve put on myself have changed so much since I first joined back in the day, but I do still enjoy posting and looking back on what I’ve posted. Even on Facebook, I do still enjoy posting statuses and pictures. I enjoy the digital scrapbook that is Instagram. Even with the limited number of people I talk to, I enjoy our interactions for the most part. That’s why I’m still here, why I’m probably one of the last millennials still on Facebook and why I’m still treating Instagram like it’s 2018, posting pictures and running my mouth in stories.

Being a millennial on Facebook is interesting these days. So many people in other corners of the Internet always talk about Facebook like it’s just a boomer haven and they never go there, and honestly now that I’m thinking about it, that gives the same vibe as when Target shoppers talk about why they never go in Walmart, if you know what I mean. Yeah, it’s kind of a shit show at times, but it’s convenient. I still shop at Walmart, and I still post on Facebook.

With the “enshittification” of the Internet and AI being thrown into everything, I don’t know how much longer it will last for me, personally. I always feel like Meta is one shitty decision away from me hitting the self-destruct button on my accounts. I deleted my TikTok account after it became clear it was going to be handed over to a US company, and with the rumors I’m hearing about the new terms of service, that wasn’t a bad decision. I deleted my Twitter accounts after it became X. I’m mentally preparing myself to delete my Pinterest account if the rumors prove true and it gets sold off to OpenAI.

It’s strange, but looking back, I don’t think I expected Facebook to last this long anyway, and at the same time, it would be a surprise to see it go away entirely. There’s so much money tied up in it now, it could probably become a ghost town and the servers would still hum right along like nothing had changed, with the bots in a feedback loop generating income for themselves in a never ending cycle.

What a strange, strange world we live in.

Let NaNo Stay Dead

Back in 1999, Chris Baty challenged some friends to write a novel, 50,000 words, in thirty days. Over the course of the next twenty years, that challenge grew into an international phenomenon that inspired thousands of writers all over the world to WRITE. There’s several well known examples of successful, published novels that started during National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo. Some writers say they might’ve never started without NaNoWriMo’s spirit and community.

Earlier this year, the non-profit behind NaNoWriMo shut down. The main reason they cited was financial, donations and participation were down and maintaining staff and a website can be expensive. That’s not the only reason though. In a nutshell, mismanagement of a young writers’ program that included piss poor handling of grooming allegations, poor website management, and a very, very misguided AI statement that was probably fueled by catering to what sponsors they did have left after the young writers’ mess all came together to tear NaNoWriMo’s reputation to pieces and the organization fell apart. It’s been months since the shutdown and there are still young writers finding their way to the unofficial NaNo subreddit to share their surprise that it’s just gone. The website doesn’t exist anymore. Any work they had stored there is gone, and there was little to no warning for people who have not been following this mess very closely.

There’s more to this mess that I cannot even begin to go into, including a Google doc somewhere that lists out details with receipts, if I’m not mistaken. You can find it if you dig hard enough. Even though the organization did not officially close until April of this year, last November saw the rise of multiple “NaNo replacements,” some more legitimate than others. A lot of people saw NaNo was a sinking ship, and they wanted to establish their own communities, which is a whole thing all on its own. The sad thing about it though is the fact that there is no longer a large, central community that we all can come to. Some people seem to think that the magic of NaNo, that magic that allowed so many to write a novel for perhaps the first time, is dead without it.

Which explains why, with NaNo barely six months in the ground, there’s already a group trying to revive it. They’ve recruited original founders of the “real” NaNoWriMo and they’re calling it NaNo2.0. Surely that means that all can go back to the way it was and we can keep doing NaNoWriMo as we always have, right?

Personally? I do not think so. I think we need to let NaNoWriMo as it was stay dead.

Y’all, it was bad. The AI statement, the lack of safety protocols for young writers online, and there were even some questionable sponsorships before everything really went to shit. Maybe it was just a case of NaNo grew too much, too fast, but that feels like a hollow excuse. Nothing from the new NaNo has given me any confidence that they won’t go down the exact same path. To me, the effort feels entirely driven by ego and nostalgia.

I loved NaNoWriMo. Even as someone who always writes by hand and I count pages instead of words, the challenge in November and “camps” in April and July inspired me to write more and immerse myself in words more than I usually did. I am grateful for that, I really am. But I think in the year 2025, with everything that has happened, it’s time to let the challenge go and move on to other things. If you still want to do something like NaNoWriMo, there are plenty of communities out there that are hosting challenges, Rogue Writers’ RAWR and Heart Breathings’ Rough Draft Challenge being the chief ones I’m aware of.

One thing that has always, ALWAYS annoyed me about NaNoWriMo is the very misguided idea so many writers seem to develop that they just cannot write unless it’s a NaNo month. Whether it’s the challenge itself or the community to chat with and cheer each other on, there’s a lot of people out there who I have noticed either will not or cannot write without NaNo. To me, that’s when you know that NaNo has become a crutch.

Creativity is a very subjective thing, and how we all achieve it can vary so much, but as someone who has been writing a long time, sometimes you just gotta do the thing. And if you can’t do it without the backing of a community to encourage you, maybe you need to sit with that for a bit before rushing out to find a NaNoWriMo replacement, regardless if it’s the walking corpse that is NaNo2.0 or one of the other replacements.

All that to say, Carolina Kel’s opinion is that NaNoWriMo needs to stay dead. I will not be doing NaNo2.0 at any point in the future, but what I am doing right now is a half ass 90 day challenge to try to finish this story I’m writing before the end of the year. As of the writing of this blog post, I’m at 84 pages and it feels doable. I’ve only missed writing one day this month so far, and that feels pretty good.

To quote the fabulous JR Ward, “Do not participate in the chaos that swirls around you.” Just keep writing, damn it.

People Are Dumb

My lovely husband has been dragging me through the literal epic that is One Piece. Marineford, aka War of the Best, left a mark on me that will probably translate into a tattoo at some point. Dressrosa dragged on and on, and I hated the people of Dressrosa by the time Doflamingo finally went down and stayed down. I hated them for turning their backs on their king in one night. I hated them for their stupidity of following Doflamingo blindly for so many years, and then their cowardice when revolution finally came to their door in the form of the Strawhat pirates.

We’re now on the Wano arc, one of the longest in the series to date. We join the Strawhat pirates in the land of Wano, yet another country under the control of another dark ruler and the pirate emperor backing him. At first, I admired the people of Wano. Revolution was quietly bubbling under the surface, led by the retainers of the former shogun. People were surviving and trying to fight back until they could mount a full assault on the shogun and the power behind him, Kaido. Then we did the flashback episodes of the former shogun, and I realized the people of Wano are not really any different than the people of Dressrosa. They turned on their shogun quickly too, blindly following the new ruler. It put some things in perspective.

In the real world, our current political climate is a mess. For the last nine years, the political divide has grown ever wider until we’re all looking at our fellow countrymen who do not vote the way we do like they are scourge upon the earth. Hearing this discourse from both sides has always created an emotional struggle within me. One side says the other is evil, but I know them. I know that they’re good people at heart, they just don’t see the world the way their opponents do. I struggle with the knowledge that we’re all just people trying to survive in the best way we can, and our own biases and beliefs split us apart when we really have so much in common, and if we ever hope to renew and rebuild over the divide between us, we have to realize that. I know that, but I get so frustrated with the discourse that never seems to end. “Have the day you voted for.”

There’s a quote from the first Men in Black movie that comes to mind. “A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals, and you know it.” It makes it easy to understand how…certain people come to power. It makes it easier to understand when people will fall in line and follow blindly, believing propaganda and whatever their chosen savior decides to tell them is truth. People are just dumb.

I say this not to make excuses, but to verbalize a conflict that has weighed heavy on my heart for the last decade. “How can they believe this? How can they vote for it?” It’s human nature, especially in large numbers that eventually become an echo chamber. And all things come in cycles. Society will eventually swing back the other way. The question becomes whether it’s going to take a War of the Best level fight to make it happen, or if it can be done peacefully.

In a weird way, realizing the people of Wano are no better than Dressrosa made me hate the people of Dressrosa less. People make mistakes. People are easily influenced. Our world may not have a Strawhat Luffy to swoop in and make things right, but maybe the thing is we don’t need him. We can do it on our own. It just takes far longer and it’s far messier. Watching One Piece gives me hope. Luffy’s attitude about the world inspires me. Watching the rise and fall of shitty government situations gives me hope.

And I think I’ll close this out with a quote from a Ghost song.

“With these words at hand, the Future is a Foreign Land, so let us pray for more in 2034, we could grow old together, we could love one another, and there will from then be peace forevermore”

Always Selling the Method

I am starting to group Ryder Carroll into the same category as Dave Ramsey. By that I mean sure, he’s got something you could probably learn from, but it’s the kind of situation that you need to treat like Walmart, get your shit and get out.

To preface what I’m about to say, this is not another impending implosion like NaNoWriMo. I don’t think Carroll has done anything wrong, nor do I have much emotional attachment to him and what he does if he were to. I am attached to the system, not the man, and maybe that’s where he and I would clash. Unless he’s got a new layout idea for my system, I ain’t interested in what he’s selling, and he is selling something, make no mistake.

If you have no idea who Ryder Carroll is (as I realized not everyone does, two paragraphs in…), he is the original creator of the Bullet Journal method. He literally wrote the book The Bullet Journal Method, which I do own and have read twice at this point. I’m not much of a re-reader, so that’s saying something. I have been in a system that he created for six years now, and I have no intention of stopping anytime soon. Six years and nine volumes of notebooks and I still sing the praises of the system. So why is this man getting a somewhat standoffish blog post from me? Well…

He posted a video of what is NOT bullet journaling. Not that big of a deal from the man who created the system itself, because he would know right? In theory, yes. But I’ve got beef with two things. One: He used other creators’ content as examples of what not to do…without permission or even notice. Not illegal or a giant breech of trust in the grand scheme of things, but not exactly a cool thing to do. Second: He came after my cheap notebooks, stating blatantly that they will not hold up in the long run.

Dude, I have $1 composition notebooks that are older than your system and are fine.

Other than buying his book, I have never really followed Ryder Carroll that closely. I do not follow his YouTube channel and I never have. I do not buy his courses or pay any kind of subscription fee for any service he might think to offer, and I never will. Especially in light of this most recent video, I just found myself with the urge to point out that Ryder Carroll, in the end, is out to monetize the bullet journal system any and every way he can. Same as anyone else with any kind of thought or “plan” on the Internet that other people would be interested in following.

When he starts harping on not buying cheap notebooks, keep in mind this man has a licensed official notebook made by Leuchtturm that is in the $30 range. That is definitely not cheap. To add to that, if you scroll back ever so slightly on his YouTube page, he has a video about “using four notebooks a year will change your life.” Four times $30. You can do the math, and if you buy his notebooks, that’s a chunk of change directly in his pocket.

I am not saying do not support this man. By all means, buy his book and watch his videos if you’re trying to learn how to use the system. If you like the official Bullet Journal notebook, buy it! Use it! I just think that there’s only so much you can learn and anything beyond that is just him holding on to you to get at your wallet. Not to mention, I think there comes a point where his system has grown beyond just him. He’s very bare bones, black and white on a page, which I do appreciate. But for a lot of people, bullet journaling has become artistic expression, and that doesn’t mean it’s any less of a bullet journal for being so.

This is just a piece of what I find so exhausting about social media these days. Everyone is trying to sell something. Everyone is trying to convince you they have the answers for whatever problem you have, and if you want those answers, you will pay dearly for them and whatever sense of “community” the creator has curated. I miss the days when we were all just out here sharing our weird little hobbies, and not trying to teach anyone “how to” anything. If someone picked up an idea from what you were doing, cool, awesome, but it didn’t mean you were suddenly a teacher who could charge $500 for a course. I miss those days.

I’m not sure this blog makes much sense. It feels a little like word vomit, but if you understand what I mean, let me know. I am just tired of being sold to, especially when it comes to things I really love. A huge turn off for me on YouTube these days is “How to” videos. I just wanna see you write in your notebook or planner, I can figure out the rest thanks.