oh my! looks like a blast!

bwahahah whaaaaaat?! at a loss

It occurred to me recently that of late I’ve been going weeks without even thinking of looking at Booooooom, this after years of visiting daily and re-checking as frequently as I would re-check my email. The reason for this change, I think, is a change in the site itself, and this post seems to me a good example of that.

It seems to me that the site used to have a very simple and more pleasing approach, what I’d say set it apart from most other sites of a similar focus and what possibly made it popular in the first place, and that was you’d have just have a link to an artist’s site and then a selection of their work, and the next post would be the same, and the post after that would be the same. There was little to no commentary, you just saw a sample of an artist and a link to where you could see more if interested. There was the occasional departure from this but it seemed that such departures would always take a backseat to the artist posts, which were undeniably the chief concern of the site.

It was for this reason that I liked Booooooom over every one of the blogs in the ‘Friends’ link list to the side, and what I’d say set the site apart from so many other blogs concerns with similar art. Now, however, it feels like Booooooom has become interchangeable with many of those on that link list.

These days it feels like the posts sharing new artists have taken a backseat to what one might describe as “diary posts” (although not entirely fitting a description, it works enough), with the constant holiday snapshots and the giveaways and the events coverage and the news stories, etc. The artist posts still exist, yes, but they seem like an afterthought now.

The site has always been the work of one man (perhaps I’m mistaken on that point…) but it never felt like the work of one man until now. When I visit the site now it feels basically like one man’s journal – an art-concerned man, sure, but still a journal, along the lines of Kitsune Noir/The Fox is Black, I think that’s my basic point.

I really didn’t mean to type so much, and this comments section probably isn’t the right venue for such talk, but I really wonder if I’m not alone in these thoughts. It could very well just be me, I’m thinking…

Also, I don’t mean to come off as whiny and ungrateful either (though I think my wording surely has that tone), I’m not trying to put the site down at all. I’ve found Booooooom incredibly useful over the years and it’s really a wonderful site all in all. But things change, directions and approaches change over time, perhaps that’s natural, and I guess I’m just wondering if anyone else has felt a kind of change in focus with the site, perhaps away from what they originally came to love about the site, something like that… Has this ever been discussed before?

I kept doing this for ages once I learned how.