Welcome to my Micro.Blog Website! This website is my attempt to offer to people who know me the opportunity to stay in touch. I gave up all social media in 2017 immediately upon retiring. My only regret upon giving up social media was that I had to sacrifice staying in touch with family and colleagues, the one aspect of social media I enjoyed. In principle, I think social media is a fine idea, but in reality, it’s a toxic cesspool I do not wish to swim in. Moreover, the corporate oligarchs who own, control, and run the commercial social media sites (Suckerberg, Pres. Musk), are people whose efforts I do not wish to support in any way. When you post to their sites, you no longer own your own information - they do.

In November 2024, I came across this platform - Micro.blog. In looking at its features, it seemed to me that this platform has the possibility of serving as an alternative to social media. Microblogging is a term that refers to short internet posts. X, Mastodon, Bluesky et.al. are all now considered microblog platforms. Micro.blog, however, also offers the option to write long-form posts, the equivalent of something like SubStack, Medium, or a Wordpress site. It can also handle photos, podcasts, and short video clips. In my research, I ran across this description of Micro.blog from another user:

no ads and no algorithms. No spam, no trolls, no likes, no push for followers, no sensational posts designed to go viral. Nothing goes viral on Micro.blog, so there’s no need to push fake news—just honest thoughts, pictures, and videos amidst a community of like-minded creators.

In short, a “Twitter/Facebook” experience without the stench of ads, fake news, etc., and where you own and control your information. So I have decided to give this a try and see if I can re-establish a social media presence.

Micro.blog has its limitations, to be sure. It is mostly a one-way platform: I write, you read. There is no way you can interact with me by design, unless you create a Micro.blog account as well. There are no free accounts on Micro.blog. This serves mostly to eliminate bot and other AI accounts from spamming the platform. The cheapest plan is $1/month at micro.one. As I understand it, you might be able to follow me via other social media platforms that participate in the Web3 open-source Fediverse (Mastodon, Blue Sky, and others), so if you have an account on one of those platforms, my Fediverse ID is @poorplayer@micro.blog.

What I have created is an integrated site containing three independent but connected blogs. a poor player is the remnant of my original theatre blog begun in 2005. My personal website www.tomloughlin.com now points to this blog. By the time you read this or soon after, the Wordpress site that was www.tomloughlin.com will direct you here. This blog is designed to be a “long form” blog, containing essay-style posts on theatre, the arts in general, and any other issues I choose to write about. Any haiku will also appear here. I no longer consider this blog to be theatre-centric, but rather an outlet for creative writing. Microposts on current events and issues will also appear here.

The River Tao is a personal blog consisting of everyday life events. Think of it as Facebook or X or Instagram, but without the toxicity of those sites. It will contain microposts (think “tweets”) of things I am up to at the moment, or longer Facebook-size posts, or perhaps complete journal-style entries of an entire day’s activities. Pictures, short personal podcasts, or even quick videos may all show up.

Baseball Is Life is my baseball blog. I watch a lot of baseball during the summer, and I thought I’d give a shot at creating a blog about my interest in the sport. It will be pretty Yankee-centric, since that’s the team I follow, but will also try to keep you up with goings on around Major League Baseball, as well as how my fantasy team is doing.

Too much to follow? Fortunately, Micro.blog offers a newsletter subscription feature! To save you the hassle of navigating through all three web sites to check up on my goings-on, you can simply subscribe to the weekly newsletter and receive a recap of all the blog entries for that week in one email. Each web site has a “Subscribe” button at the top. You can subscribe by clicking on the “Subscribe” button, entering your email address on the “Subscribe” page, and if you do that, you will get an email with a weekly update of the posts and tweets on that site. You can subscribe to one, two, or all three blogs as you wish. Regrettably, there isn’t a way to get one email for all three blogs.

You can also follow me via an RSS News reader such as Feedly or NetNewsWire. The sidebar shows an RSS link for each blog. All you need to do is click on the link, copy the URL in the address bar, and paste it into your news aggregator. Then my posts will appear just like any other news item in your feed.

If you’re sick of Facebook et.al. I advise you to check into Micro.blog. I find it an intriguing place to be on the web. If you would like to read about the founder Manton Reece’s philosophy and mission behind creating this platform, click this link to get a quick taste.

Thanks for joining me here, thanks for reading, and feel free to shoot me an email to say hi! -twl

-Personal Website | Biographical Data | Email: therivertao@duck.com
-Notes from the Aisle Seat, a podcast I produce for the 1891 Fredonia Opera House
-Material on this site is covered under the Creative Commons BY-NC 4.0 license