Bix Frankonis
This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Bix Frankonis, whose blog can be found at bix.blog . Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter . The People and Blogs series is supported by Brennan Kenneth Brown and the other 129 members of my "One a Month" club. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month. My name is Bix, and I’m a straight, white, middle-aged, cisgender man born in upstate New York who now lives in the St. Johns neighborhood of Portland, Oregon—my hometown since 1997 and the longest I’ve lived anywhere since becoming an adult. I’m actually-autistic and multiply otherwise disabled, and remain, as I’ve been for most of my life, financially dependent upon my remaining parent. (If that’s for some reason not enough, my homepage will tell you more than you possibly could want to know, and a previous birthday post serves as the first part of my, and my blog’s, manifesto.) “Bix” is a descendent and derivation of an online handle I’d once had that became my everyday name and then, in 2018, my legal one . To a large degree the modern era of my blogging is dedicated to posting through the above realities both present and future. I live alone except for a gray and white domestic shorthair cat named Meru after the protagonist of the comic book Mind MGMT. I’ve been online since a dialup gopher server run by public libraries in upstate New York allowed me to upload a file of Twin Peaks symbolism to an FTP server in Australia and telnet into an internet BBS based in New York City called MindVox . In the mid-90s, along with two other people I ran a large and cumbersome online petition effort against the Communications Decency Act which inspired a more rigorous one from the Center for Democracy and Technology, and which landed me in the pages of Rolling Stone . In the late-90s, I ran an Internet cafe , or more accurately ran it into the ground for reasons I now know to be the unaccommodated and unmitigated autism, since I wasn’t diagnosed until 2016. In the early-2000s, I blogged original political reporting (also at the time called “stand-alone journalism”) here in Portland that was widely-read in local government circles and got me profiled in The Oregonian and cited in two books. If you traveled in Firefly fandom circles, you probably at least once found yourself on one or another fansite I’d put together in my own decade or so. Finally, for a time in the mid-2010s, I project managed a nonprofit herd of urban goats here in Portland. These days, life mostly is just about listening to, reading, and watching things, and, of course, the blogging . As with most autistic people, habit and routine are foundational and self-regulating, and so every day I get in an hour of reading at a neighborhood coffeeshop; once a week I take myself for breakfast out (also in the neighborhood); and— fatigue willing —once a month I try to get across town to Oregon Zoo (where I’ll also indulge in my intermittent but long-standing photography hobby ) but over the past year this hasn’t happened all that often, much to my increasing chagrin. The current iteration of my blog goes back to 2019 when I received the bix.blog domain as part of Automattic’s “dotblogger” program (you can read my pitch for it), although I consider my actual modern blogging era to start the year before, in 2018 when I started blogging about my 2016 autism diagnosis on Medium. This current era includes earlier this year having had my twenty-fifth blogging anniversary (a post which also serves as the second part of my manifesto), since I’ve been blogging in some form since early in the year 2000—usually personal blogging but occasionally something subject-specific, using many different kinds of blogging software, hosting and self-hosted solutions, and domains. Since I cannot for certain remember what was my very first blogging, it’s not clear to me whether I was motivated to represent myself personally online or whether my first blog was project-specific—even though the latter undoubtedly still was infused by my personality. It’s unlikely that I’ve ever blogged in any kind of dry, “professional” tone and so, in that sense, it’s all personal blogging. As the late Christopher Locke once said, for better or worse, “Voice is what happens when you shitcan the cover-up.” These days, blogging also (at least in theory) includes the longterm project of working toward restoring as much of those two and a half decades as possible, using categories to designate a post’s original domain. It’s a positively gargantuan task —not least because I don’t have archives of everything and some things will need to be re-created post-by-post using the Wayback Machine. As I noted in my IndieWeb Carnival post on self-expression, blogging very much is a coping mechanism, without which I’d only be even more lost, despite the continually recurring mixed feelings I have about it because on the matter of ego (yet another reference to my manifesto post). One of the things that interests me about the restoration project is learning how that coping mechanism functioned for previous versions of me . Simply put: I blog when I cannot not blog. Depending on the post and how time-sensitive it is or isn’t, I might jot things down in Apple Notes (as I did with my initial pass at answers to these questions) before creating and saving a draft in Markdown on my laptop. Typically speaking, though, many if not most posts are written in one sitting, with a post now and then set aside for a second look later that day or the next morning before actually posting it. It’s not unusual for me to spot typos or remember something I forgot to add within hours after a post goes live, in which cases I will make edits. In most cases where I need to come back to post to add something days later, I include an Addenda section at the bottom where I include those updates. Any farther out than that, and mostly I just write a new post. It’s very rare for me to have posts “banked” for posting at a later date, like I know some other bloggers do, since publicly posting something is the final step to getting that thing out of my head where it’s been taking up space—and also because blogging for me is an ongoing process of self-narration (and self-belief ), which for me necessarily means it’s got to be happening in real-time. For that same reason of self-narration, many of my posts necessarily link previous posts somehow relevant to the post at hand. While writing, I’ll often have such posts in mind but don’t bother to do the work of actually adding the links to them until the post is substantively written. Those linked posts then carry a “referring posts” section. In this way, my blog partakes of a tiny bit of “digital garden” magic (the digital garden being the other popular way in which people who make personal websites organize them) by helping to tie together my thinking on specific matters over time. My blog, then, becomes (somewhat like my phone ) an external component of my autistic or otherwise-addled brain. As for what motivates me and the question of what I actually blog about : in the end anything and everything I write can’t help but be about myself—whether the specifics of what I’m writing about happen to be blogging itself, or a movie or television show I recently watched, or autism research, or the politics of solidarity. Over the past year or two, I’ve become especially interested in how important it is for us to spend time letting each other know that we are seen and we are heard. (There’s nothing quite like blogging a movie no one’s seen, one that’s emphatically about being seen and heard, and—this part, too, is in my manifesto post—having it make the filmmakers’ day.) All of this is subject to the whims of fatigue or, as has been the case lately, autistic burnout —which is why I’ve not been blogging as much as I usually do, and why, in fact, it took me nearly two months just to answer these questions. Never before have I felt such cognitive paralysis and claustrophobia when attempting to write, which as you can imagine is simply terrific when writing is one of your self-regulating activities. Only very rarely can I write outside of the house—say, at one of my neighborhood coffeeshops. As I’ve returned to again and again, my blogging is a sort of writing myself into existence and claiming the space I take up in the world, and this is a sensitive mindset that’s, perhaps ironically, best protected by being alone and home instead of up and about and subject to the stressors of being autistic and anxious out in the world. This in part is because the “spotlight effect” is real, and if I’m writing at a coffeeshop I can only do it with my back against the wall. (I mean that literally, not metaphorically.) It’s extremely rare, although not completely unheard of, for me to have anything else going on around me, like a television show or music, when I am writing. If I do feel the need for music, it’s generally going to be something instrumental like LoFi Girl playlists or the soundtracks to Station Eleven or The Fallout (of all things). It’s fairly common, at least when it comes to my longer posts, and almost surely when it comes to my more discursive ones, to fall into hyperfocus . If you’re autistic otherwise neurodivergent and know this state, this usually means looking up after an hour or two and realizing you’re light-headed from forgetting to eat lunch and with a very pressing need to go to the bathroom—themselves two things perhaps better realized at home than at a neighborhood coffeeshop. Early this year, I migrated to 11ty after several false starts looking at various static site generators and failing to come to terms with them—despite the fact that once upon a time in the mid-2000s I self-hosted MoveableType on an OpenBSD box over my home DSL, so it’s not like I’m incapable of understanding things. Right now, posts are written in Panda, the stand-alone editor from the makers of Bear (the Markdown notes app, not the blogging service), on my MacBook Air where I have my local 11ty install. Recently, I switched from manually uploading the built site directory to Netlify to using continuous deploy via pushing to GitHub, after a timezone snag with the latter process finally was resolved. For the rare post that includes an image or two, I currently host those on some.pics, a service of omg.lol, because my blog previously was on their weblog.lol service and it’s just easier to keep doing that for now. I’m still a Flickr Pro member, so at some point I might switch over to them, since that’s where all my photography is anyway, except that, even more rarely, sometimes I’m posting a graphic instead of a photo, and those I do not also have on Flickr. (This is one way in which I miss the ease of an actual blogging CMS, but there currently aren’t any such tools that don’t frustrate me past my point of patience. When I win the lottery, I will pay someone to build me one that does everything I need, and only what I need. Ironically, all these years decades later, Blogger and MoveableType still had the right idea: a CMS that publishes a static site.) There might have been some early iteration of my blogging which was done manually, but if so it’s lost to the severely deficient autobiographical memory and no archive exists. The earliest blogging software I would have used would have been Blogger, but (as noted) I spent many years self-hosting MoveableType over my home DSL, before moving on the WordPress for at least as long. Along the way I’ve tried many different things, from TypePad to Tumblr, micro.blog to weblog.lol, Proseful to (the other) Bear to Pika. I think I even very briefly used really simple a shell script on a VPS. (Full disclosure: I fully admit to an ethical conflict when it comes to “bullshit bots”, or generative so-called AI. I dislike their misuse of copyrights, I dislike their climate impact, I dislike removing cognitive friction from creation, and I dislike that ultimately these bots will just keep narrowing the breadth of human knowledge and expression and everything becomes increasingly self-referential. Nonetheless, I’ve used ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot when needing to solve specific technical challenges, especially when converting archived posts from previous blogs, or to create features such as my “on this day” and “recently read blogs” widgets. I am not a coder, and while I often can understand, for lack of a better way to say it, the story of a piece of code and make tiny, piecemeal adjustments to existing code because of that, I cannot myself code from scratch. My “excuse” in the end is inevitably a selfish one: the blog, in many ways, is all I have, and all that will be left of me when I am gone that said “I was here”, and I need it to function in a certain way. I’m up front about this, because people have a right to call me a hypocrite. That said, as I recently announced , it is my intention not to use these tools going forward, although any existing code will remain in use barring a clear route to replacement.) This is a pretty good example of the type of question I don’t know how to answer. I started blogging within a particular context and at a particular time, and that context and time, and their circumstances and people, are ancestors to who I am today. I don’t know how to blank out that past to imagine how I’d do it now absent that history. More generally, if we take this question as advice to others: there’s a saying (of a provenance I’m not even going to attempt to trace) that the best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago—but the second-best time is now. I think we are right now living in the second-best time to start a blog, because there’s a clear interest percolating in trying to re-center blogs in a way that hasn’t been seen since before the combined rise of content marketing and Twitter, as seen by the advent of sites such as ooh.directory and blogroll.org . Perhaps all we’re really lacking is something along the lines of Technorati and the other services that once existed to help us see not merely who is linking to what URLs but who is linking to whom . This unmet need, I feel, needs to be addressed if blogging truly is to become once again a blogosphere—or, more likely in this day and age, a whole, diverse, plural set of blogospheres . Two years ago, I ran with an idea Kevin Lawver had of blogging as the empathy engine of the web, and in today’s increasingly authoritarian environment we need more than ever as much public solidarity between and among whole persons as we feel we safely can put online. We have a real chance to reclaim an internet where we are people , not users. For anyone reading these interviews who isn’t themselves yet blogging: please start a blog. We need you here. (If someone is looking for some passionate motivation, I suggest watching Pump Up the Volume , the 1990 film that is the patron movie of blogging despite pre-dating blogging itself. “Talk hard.”) It currently does not cost me anything to run my blog beyond the domain which isn’t due for renewal until 2030, nor does it make any money. I’m technically part of One a Month Club , but I don’t really promote that beyond a site badge and in the footer of my RSS feed. However, I cap membership numbers because above a certain threshold it would affect my eligibility for SNAP and Medicaid benefits here in the U.S. without actually providing enough support to make up for those losses. (I’d never actually reach those kinds of membership numbers anyway, but I’d rather be safe than sorry.) More generally, people of course can do whatever they want with their personal blogs. That’s what makes them personal. I’d assume that I’m more inclined to expect personal blogs not to be behind outright paywalls, but your mileage may vary. I don’t have any inherent objection to blogging as a side-hustle, but blogs that specifically try to hustle readership behind paywalls or otherwise cumbersome hoops will tend to feel much less personal to me. That said, I’ll readily admit to an outright bias against anyone whose primary purpose is “content marketing” or growth hacking, or who obsesses over things like SEO, because I believe that the focus on these things is part of what helped push blogs to the edges of the internet and mainstream irrelevancy around the same time that Twitter not only consumed the subset idea of microblogging but also made it explicitly—and frictionlessly—social. Recommendations are always difficult for me because my brain dislikes ranking things or people. It’s why I don’t rate books on Goodreads and why I don’t rate movies on Letterboxd and simply mark the things I enjoyed. It’s also why I don’t maintain a blogroll, although I certainly did back in the OG blogging days. So, the first part of my answer here is going to be a bit of a cheat, if nonetheless a responsive one. At the bottom of the front page of my blog, above the four links to places to find more blogs, is what I’ve referred to as a “bloglog” (what others lately have taken to calling a “postroll”). In my case it lists the ten blog posts by other people that I’ve actually read most recently (or, at least, as of the last time my site was built)—and it’s also available as an RSS feed . It all runs off an Instapaper tag, and I’m sure there’s plenty of blogs there for people to discover. That said, I will offer a short list that splits the difference between some fellow OG bloggers, a couple of more recent finds, and some of the newer self-tagged “word vomit” bloggers on sites like Bear. This is less about placing any of these bloggers above any others in my estimation than about making some suggestions that help expand the types of bloggers represented in this series. Here I’ll just crib a couple of projects from the “sites” section of my homepage. Since late 2001, around the time that so-called “warblogging” became a thing, I’ve been hosting an ad- and cruft-free, minimalist presentation of Mark Twain’s The War Prayer which often finds itself shared with students by teachers. (It’s also on my longest-running domain.) Two years ago I returned to the internet the complete archive of a shipyard workers zine from World War II, updated my research into it, and this year I finally turned over the originals to Oregon Historical Society. Finally, although Joss Whedon became quite evidently problematic, I remain a fan of one of his unmade scripts , which I wrote about nearly a decade ago because I appreciate its (workable? impractical?) ideal that there are no expendable people. (If I can tack on a postscript of sorts: given my eternal struggle with my own ego , I thank Manu for inviting me to participate in People and Blogs.) Now that you're done reading the interview, go check the blog and subscribe to the RSS feed . If you're looking for more content, go read one of the previous 123 interviews . Make sure to also say thank you to Andrea Contino and the other 129 supporters for making this series possible. Absurd Pirate Elaine (my mom, who’s been blogging as long as I have) Jessamyn West Shelley Powers
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