It's astounding how much influence money has over what writers will or won't say.
In the 2020s we plod wearily around a World Wide Web in cultural crisis. If it's not trying to flog us something, it's trying to... well, flog us something else. Search results have become the digitised equivalent of Del Trotter's suitcase, and the silo-isation of content-distribution has stripped the identity from almost everything we encounter.
Ironically, the most considered non-commercial content is disappearing behind paywalls, which further limits the amount of incisive and impartial speech on the Open Web. And in the elite echelons of 'free knowledge', the agenda of the key donors dictates what we are or are not allowed to think.
Be it good, bad, calm, demented or temporarily inactive, Popzazzle will interrupt the migraine of cash-gagged inauthenticity to present points of view you didn't think existed. Popzazzle is what happens when you take the money out of publishing.
In an ideal world, this project would not be kicking its heels on a Google server. But the project's goal is to issue an entirely impartial and truthful statement on current digital affairs, free from affiliate plugs, donation nags (and that link points to a rant about donation nags - not an actual donation nag), paywalls, newsletter popups, listicalia-nauseam, and other such annoyances that have come to characterise the WWW's modern-day whirlpool of Hell. There are very, very few ways to achieve that goal without either spewing content onto a black-hole timeline, sacrificing copyright, or simply losing money.
I don't believe any content creator should go out of pocket to publish, I do want to retain full copyright, I'm not chucking hard work into a social media trash can, and I think it's vital that at least someone keeps inquisitive, properly researched and genuinely unbiased content openly accessible and devoid of nags. So Blogger it is. But if you know of any better publishing venues that facilitate the above criteria, I'm all ears.
Popzazzle is about breaking new ground, and it has an experimental aura. It's a project that will never be content to regurgitate existing commentary. Neither will it take a political side or pursue a long-term ideological theme. But it will change its mind from time to time, and it will frequently lose its shit over things that 99.5% of the public think are perfectly okay. It's important that someone disagrees with 99.5% of the public - if only for the sake of variety.
There's a small companion to this blog on Neocities, which will probably remain fairly small due to bandwidth limitations.