P&B: Xanthe Tynehorne

This is the 58th edition of People and Blogs, the series where I ask interesting people to talk about themselves and their blogs. Today we have Xanthe Tynehorne and their blog, satyrs.eu

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Let's start from the basics: can you introduce yourself?

Chære! I’m Xanthe Tynehorne — not my real name — and i am the humble keeper of The Satyrs’ Forest. I was born in the Netherlands but, at eight years old, moved to the north-east of England, a wonderful land where i’ve been camped out ever since.

My private life is unglamorous and secret, but that’s fine by me. It’s far more interesting to write anonymously as a wisened satyr mystic whose name starts with an X than as a burnt-out late-blooming stem student with mental problems. When not tending to my site, i go on walks through the woods, try and track down neat things to do in the area, and watch far too many science fiction films. (I’m starting to develop strong opinions on how they depict space. It’s not healthy.)

What's the story behind your blog?

My mam and papa met online, so the internet’s been in my blood since day one. I was born just early enough — just — to catch the very tail end of Geocities’ reign o’er the ’net, and for my parents to set up a list of fun bookmarks on a forgotten version of Internet Explorer. Parental controls be damned, i explored the web for all it was worth, be it clickbait articles about strange abodes (spherical treehouses!), fan sites about Calvin and Hobbes and Total Wipeout, or Flash games about elephants.

Some time later, having learnt the basics of HTML at school, i came across Neocities, a free web host with a conveniently rhyming name. I set up a site, occasionally checking back in with a sprinkle of style here or a new page there, until the pandemic kicked everything into overdrive. Trapped at home with nowt else to do, the internet became my chief creative outlet; after making all the static pages i could think of, the sound thing to do was to build a place for my more ephemeral thoughts, things that wouldn’t necessarily be as relevant in 2030 as they were in 2020. Enter The Garden.

I don’t browse that side of the web that much today — too much navel-gazing for my taste — but when i was setting The Garden up, i often lurked around the “indie web”, people who had spent a lot of time thinking about the whies of webmastery and hows of hypertext. The idea of a website as a digital garden was a common metaphor, and one that appealed to me greatly at a time when i was getting quite into horticulture. (It didn’t go brilliantly, but that’s a lament for another time.) The relaxed greens would eventually spread back to the rest of the site (whose front page at the time was overtaken by garish cyberpunk magentas)… and what would be the logical step up from a garden? A whole forest, of course. (I don’t 100% remember why i decided on satyrs as a gimmick. I blame Dionysos.)

What does your creative process look like when it comes to blogging?

I blog very irregularly; i’d say there are four main categories of posts, each of which has a different process. The easiest to “write” is the perennial link roundup, which is as simple as it gets: i browse the internet, and every time i find something interesting, i write down the link in my Obsidian notebook. (An aside on Obsidian: I absolutely do not use it the way i think you’re meant to use it, which is with hundreds of teeny little individual notes all linking back to one another. To me, it’s essentially a superpowered Notepad — i have a file full of random stuff for each topic, and that’s that.)

Every month or so i’ll do a recap of stuff i watched recently, which is only a wee bit more involved. Slightly humiliatingly, the only way i can keep track of it is by searching my Discord messages in the group chat for the word “watched”, which i make sure i include every time i see a film; when i’ve not done a roundup in a while, i’ll go back, make a list of everything that pops up, and briefly write my thoughts with a rating out of ten. (There are people who claim to rate things out of ten, but whose scale effectively stops at eight, because they think they’re too good to give out nines and tens like sweets on Hallowe’en. To them i say — live a little, and let yourself like things for once! If something’s actually as transcendently good as they claim it needs to be for a 10/10, i’ll improvise and give it an 11.)

Then there are posts where i go to a place and afterwards write about said place. These are my least favourite to write and my favourite to have written. If i’ve remembered that i have a journal that week, they’re easy enough, since i can just transcribe what i’ve jotted down there and edit out the private parts. If not, it’s about a week of iteratively hammering away at a draft and hoping my memory doesn’t fade before i reach the end.

The fourth category is one of those fake categories like Protista and Oceania, where you throw in everything you couldn’t fit elsewhere, like a post about why Diplodocus is the best dinosaur. These come to me either in the shower or after prompting from a friend and, depending on the topic, will take a length of time somewhere between that of a monthly film recap and that of a poorly-remembered visit someplace.

The more bells and whistles a piece of software has, the harder it is for me to get my thoughts down with it; after finding even something like Left too intricate, i set up a teeny minimalist notepad for myself with nothing but the text and a word counter. It’s heaven to write in — my only wish is that i could figure out how to turn off my backspace key.

Do you have an ideal creative environment? Also do you believe the physical space influences your creativity?

The most at peace i’ve ever felt was a rickety bridge over a wee stream on a country back road near my old house. Whenever i found my mind weighed down, i would take a deep breath, pick up my diary, and walk through gravel paths and worn dirt roads to get under the shadow of an old beech, with nothing to distract me but the soft rushing of water, the chirping of birds, and an occasional passer-through. And i could just write. Write my dear little heart out. About whatever was on my mind.

I don’t live there anymore, and i’ve never found a spot with the same effect on me. Last month i went back for a family reunion and found the way there overgrown with brambles on either way in.

For now, i write from my desktop — a sensible wooden case, not one of those garish iridescent monsters — and listen to music. BBC Radio 6 will put me in the mood if it’s at a rock-y timeslot; otherwise i’ll put on some Sigur Rós and let myself be swept away.

A question for the techie readers: can you run us through your tech stack?

The site is self-hosted on a beat-up old Dell laptop running Linux Mint. Under the bonnet it’s running Express.js with the static pages and templates written in Pug, a cosy syntactic sugar over HTML. Blog posts and comments are stored in an almighty Sqlite database; i write the posts in a hand-coded frontend using Rubric, a custom derivative of Markdown fixing some of my frustrations.

Given your experience, if you were to start a blog today, would you do anything differently?

I don’t know if i’d even make The Garden a distinct entity from the rest of the site in the first place now. I keep it around because it’s convenient and what people expect, but there’s a lot of ideas i’ve had kicking around that i never get around to because i don’t know whether they’re a “blog thing” or a “main site thing”, and i often find myself missing the ability to individually style posts depending on what the vibe is. The media recaps and link roundups especially might have gone on their own page, like Adam Cadre’s calendar, and wayyy, wayyy back in the pre-blog days, travel posts had a dedicated page with unique styles for each destination that i might have otherwise kept.

Financial question since the Web is obsessed with money: how much does it cost to run your blog? Is it just a cost, or does it generate some revenue? And what's your position on people monetising personal blogs?

Since i’m self-hosting, it’s nearly all factored into my preëxisting electricity and internet bills. I pay thirty quid a year for domain names and three quid a month for email, but that’s pretty much it. No revenue, although i do occasionally think about selling some of my maps.

I think monetising blogs is fine if you have something to say, but the people who are attracted to the idea of “monetising blogs” as a business are overwhelmingly half-wit spammers who couldn’t write down an original thought if their lives depended on it. That way lies madness, machine-learning sludge, and clickbait listicles. Near-universally, if someone’s monetising their blog and it’s actually interesting, they’ll instead call it a “newsletter”, even if the main interface has always been via the web. *cough*Substack*cough*

Time for some recommendations: any blog you think is worth checking out? And also, who do you think I should be interviewing next?

I have to give a shout-out to Diamond Geezer, a daily blog which has been running for twenty-two years and looks the part. “Blog” is probably the wrong word for Quanta and Works in Progress, whom i nevertheless find reliably interesting and educating. And though i’m more on the Hellenic end of Paganism myself, i like the quadrennial Dutch Wiccan Rede, as it’s interesting to get a non-Anglophone perspective on a faith whose roots are so strongly linked with these isles.

As for interviews… anybody whose day job doesn’t involve computers. Viva the hobbyist web, i say!

Final question: is there anything you want to share with us?

Anyone reading this should go watch The Hudsucker Proxy right this moment, a criminally underrated gentle-hearted comedy that’s like Willy Wonka for grown-ups. Since they doubtless follow a bunch of other blogs, they might also wish to check out Fraidycat, a feed-reading browser extension whose link-based interface i find much nicer than the traditional email client knockoff. And if you’re ever in Northumberland, you simply must visit Barter Books, a second-hand bookshop in a grandiose train station that may be my favourite place in the whole wide world. That’s all that comes to mind for now. Oh, and wear sunscreen.

This was the 58th edition of People and Blogs. Hope you enjoyed this interview with Xanthe. Make sure to follow their blog (RSS) and get in touch with them if you have any questions.

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