As far back as I can remember I always wanted to be a blogger

I did not grow up on Vanity Fair, or Esquire, or any of those lurid, mostly fabricated 9,000 word Playboy interviews with, like, James Caan. My parents only started reading The New Yorker after I left for college — a salutatory embrace of their eldest's journalism degree, akin to how dads become field hockey experts overnight — and I myself didn't pay for a New York Times subscription until I was over 30 and pitted deep within the social ferment of people who would do such a thing, (read: settled down with a partner who is maintaining a months-long crossword streak.) The point is that I bypassed all of the orthodox material that is supposed to get someone dreaming about a life in the media; the adjacency to fame, the intoxicating command over cultural dictates, the chance to square down daunting literary ambitions into the much safer and low-stakes confines of, say, a Bottoms review. No, when I try to remember why I wanted to be a journalist, I think about the time Caity Weaver spent 14 hours in a TGI Friday's.

It's a classic. Probably my favorite Gawker story. Everyone was familiar with the framework of a good old-fashioned blog stunt by 2014, and a bygone seasonal promotion at an eminently dunkable American enclave — a TGI Friday's offering supposedly "endless" appetizers, of the spinach artichoke dip and southwestern egg roll variety, for however long someone dared to occupy a table — was perfect material for the form. Weaver arrives at the restaurant at 11:20am with the journalistic intention of feasting on mozzarella sticks and taking in the grisly scenes of the Sheepshead Bay location until closing time, and she somehow manages to find a trove of transcendent, once-in-a-lifetime jokes within that sedentary stupor. (It concludes, at 1:21am, with one of the greatest sentences ever written: "I arrive home and throw up a little bit, but not as much as I expected.") The whole post is a bit of a dinosaur, really — already slightly out of step with late-prime 2010s digital media market fluctuations, which is really when the worm started to turn for us all. Here was an article written for the expressed purpose of being a fun blog, with no specters of access, or SEO directives, or, most importantly, magazine-sized self-consciousness getting in the way. Reading it now might bring a tear to your eye.

Weaver, of course, is a maestro of that sort of writing, and as her star grew, she was more than capable of delivering the exact same airy effervescence to assignments of a considerably more intimidating scale. (See, for instance, her taking on the chicken strips ordered by Justin Bieber at a much fancier restaurant.) This is ostensibly the sort of self-actualizing level up in scope that every media professional yearns for; paying dues with 14 hours at TGI Fridays, before being rewarded with 14 hours at the Met Gala. But personally, I never considered something like a euphoric mozzarella stick blog to be low art, or even more cynically, a flailing stab at lurid virality to be someday parlayed into staff-job respectability. No, the entirety of my ambition — at least as an 18-year old in 2009 who wanted to write for a living — was to make fun posts on cool websites. I am, and always will be, a blogger at heart.

If you're a veteran subscriber to On Posting, then you might know that my career began in earnest when I started freelancing for VICE at the cresting zenith of its empire — which is to say, when it was paying most of its senior editorial staff something like $28,000 a year in the 2010-13 period. At school, my professors were outlining libel law fundamentals and the rigorous principles of local reporting, and I carried exactly zero of those lessons to the inaugural entries of my portfolio. (Noisey published my recap of the boxer-briefs I wore to South-by-Southwest, and a short story where I imagined a scenario where Paul Simon ate Art Garfunkel alive, both of which I remember being extremely proud of.) The VICE rubric asked its contributors to debase themselves with wondrous aplomb, and I was more than happy to oblige. A few years later, the same website would ask me to review a device called the "Clone-A-Willy," a gooey silicone tube that creates an inferior vibrator using the shape of the user's penis. It was the apex of my life's work to that point; a chance to ratchet up the wild extremes of what a fun blog could be. (I turned in a draft that predicted, savored, and stoked every potential humiliation and outrage, the perennial Blogger's High, a job well done.) My earliest professional interactions with the media were absent of newsworthiness, introspection, and, if I'm being honest, any reporting whatsoever. The HTML that bore my byline was exclusively first-person and solipsistic, and I'm sure the desperate neediness for attention reeked off the page. But those posts were fun, and at the time, that's all digital media needed to be.

VICE is currently in the midst of a profoundly demoralizing selloff. The company filed for bankruptcy in March, before being acquired by one of those identically vampiric capital management firms. (If you're curious, this one is called Fortress Investment Group.) The new owners will almost certainly render the site into a sallow-eyed husk of its former self; ejecting all of its hubris and zeal — a incredible staff of tech reporters, the linear television venture that hilariously broke ground in 2016, the faded skateboarding edge, the poverty-fetishizing documentaries that were alternatively eye-opening and offensive, and, of course, a mammoth backlog of fun blogs — into the void. Before long, VICE will be just another content-lite ghostship bobbing around the blackened seas of digital media; a graveyard occupied by the A.I.-reanimated BuzzFeed, the mothy archives of The Awl and The Hairpin, and of course the corpses of both Old and New Gawker, buried, ritualistically, side by side. There is no longer a landing space for the fun blog, nor is there nearly the necessary commercial incentive to create a fresh one. Readers simply don't go to websites to look at articles anymore, which has long been the elephant in the room. I, like almost everyone else in this business, have become a Content First Individual; forever attempting to inject a figment of that ancestral charismatic verve — the TGI Friday's flair —into the daily pegs. It’s a reality that’s required us all to fall in line, which, depending on your feelings about my Clone-A-Willy post, might not have been the worst thing in the world.

So I adapted. I found new ways to pay my rent. As the sector became more oriented around basic journalistic scruples — as the sun set on the personal essay boom, as the tacky stunts lost their vivid tang, as VICE suddenly suddenly had leery investors to appease — I turned myself into a competent interviewer, feature writer, and reporter, which is an ambidextrousness mandated on all of the nation's freelancers. I know how to blend three sources into a narrative, and despite the nature of this newsletter, I am no longer young enough to believe that whatever I'm currently interested in is also the most important thing in the world. Today, I'm someone who works at a website, which would've never happened if I was committed to the Clone-A-Willy publishing model to the bitter end. The ceiling has shattered open for me; for the first time in my career, everything seems possible. And yet, and yet, and yet, I'm still of the belief that the fun blog is the ideal form of internet writing, and, quite frankly, the only coherent argument for the internet’s virtues in the first place. That makes us all a dying breed.

It's telling that most of the fun blog pioneers are either out of the media entirely, or, (in Weaver's case,) applying the sacred tenets to mind-blowingly psychedelic New York Times epics — which, unfortunately, only arrive about twice a year. The financialization of the digital media industry taught us exactly one thing: There's no money here. Fun blogs, it seems, must be authored by those who are committed to the love of the game, and that's a tough sell when you're negotiating a lease renewal. But every once in a while, a hot one still manages to slip through the cracks. You know it when you see it; unblemished by any editorial optimizations, peg-free, otherworldly in its confidence that good writing alone can justify its own existence, something you get excited to read while eating a sandwich. A total gift. Why do we waste our time with anything else?