A new blog in 2020?

Why launching a new blog in 2020? Well, because… why not?!

We’ve reached a point in evolution where video content is much more comfortable, simple and direct than an old blog. It is equally true that if on the one hand this path has led to innovation in the field of information and spread of knowledge, on the other hand people read less and less, write less and, consequently, speak less (and if we want, even in a worse way).

This is because we are so used to assimilating everything that interests us through TV, Youtube and related services, that old-fashioned magazines, newspapers and blogs are considered almost anachronistic. We are surrounded by TV programs that want to show ordinary people’s real life through reality shows about cooking, carpentry, mechanics, tourism. We are invaded by Youtubers and Influencers who also explain us how to breathe, through long video tutorials that are often useless and repetitive.

What prompted me to start a blog?

The idea of starting a blog has always fascinated me, basically for 2 main reasons:

• the possibility of having a personal outlet channel where I can collect thoughts, experiences, travels, moments of my life that I would like to print in black and white. To be able to re-read these stories from my past in a few years and see how I have changed and grown.
• sharing these experiences, these thoughts, with those who follow me or discover me through the internet, perhaps finding a common point of interest and having external opinions, or having a comparison with people who have experiences similar to mine, but at the same time totally different.

“Social networks are exactly for this purpose” and it is also true as a concept!

The only little but fundamental difference lies in the very nature of social media, to convey user content in the way the platform is structured. Instagram is great for photos and videos, but if you have something to write you are still forced to post at least an image. Let’s move on to Twitter, micro-blog by definition. Exactly .. micro! Then it happens that I have so much to say on a certain topic, I write my nice tweet, it’s too long, it drives me crazy, I delete everything and I don’t publish anymore.

Facebook has the possibility to upload multimedia and textual contents without distinction, with much larger limits of characters and video duration, etc. but.. do we really want to start talking about what Facebook is today?
If I wanted to let off steam like that, I would go to the pub downstairs in the evening to fight with some pensioners disappointed in the daily poker tournament.. (Seriously.. Facebook? Nope..)

How did the idea of a blog come about?

This idea has been bouncing in my head for 10 years now, but I’ve never found the right time, the right topic, the right push to start. I tried to start several blogs, but I always stopped after a few irregular articles that turned out to be more of a kind of “public notebook” that did not convince me in the first place, so they could never involve a real audience. I was never convinced of the way I wrote, of the real interest of those who visited my blog given the quality of content, but above all I was not convinced by the topics covered. I went from DIY to cooking, from movies to music, but I never saw anything that could create interest and ended up closing that blog and postponing everything to an undefined future.

Thanks to the long quarantine that hit us all for good or bad, I decided to freshen up the old ChaoticBench website, renovating the structure, updating portfolio and services to what ChaoticBench is today and I ended up rebuilding the entire site completely from scratch. The old version no longer reflected me, it was too “institutional” compared to what is my today’s vision as a professional. In the last few years, many things have changed professionally and personally, so the best choice was to demolish the building and rebuild it.

It was more or less in mid-May that, just as I was developing the new ChaoticBench, the idea of starting a blog came back to my mind, but the first reaction was the same as many other times: “Yeah, come on, Dansh! you open it, you’ll write 4 articles that no one is interested in and then close it again. Just a waste of time!”. Nevertheless the more I spent my days closed in the studio working on new content, the more this idea became insistent and present, until, spending an evening talking with friends about what my working life was like on tour, we ended up talking about how it has been upset by the restrictions of the lockdown, by the obligation to stay at home 24/7 for months and months with no certainty about the future of live music. At that point I thought that, unlike the other times, this time I had something to say!

The next morning, as my first thing (obviously after coffee, but I consider that “step zero” of the day) I added the “Blog” menu item to my new website. I didn’t even write an article, I didn’t even pay attention to the layout. I just needed a little note that reminds me that new site would have a blog inside.

Yeah, ok, very nice! But what am I going to talk about in this blog?

Mainly, the topics that I will deal with on this space can be summarized in 5 macro categories:

• Tourlife: everything that involves me in terms of travels, concerts, places, experiences and anecdotes about of live music. In fact, I will write some noteworthy travel reports, advice for those who are perhaps beginners in this world both as a technician and as artists, etc.
• Photography: born as a minor passion, one of those things you like to do but don’t spend too much time on it because in the end you will never do anything with it. During this quarantine I picked up my DLSR and I started to love this art again, which I started studying 10 years ago. I will write about personal and professional experiences, successful and unsuccessful experiments, techniques and products I own and how to get the best out of them with a small budget. I will also write in-depth articles about my @chaoticlenses project.
• Graphics: that’s one of the creative aspects that has accompanied me for more than 15 years. I will talk about photo editing, graphic design, methods and tools useful for “getting by” in small graphic operations for social media and similar and many other things about this category.
• Video: I will talk about video projects that see me personally involved such as music videos, tour reports, techniques and equipment to optimize video production “on the road” where space for huge equipment and post-production studios is totally absent and, of course, how I approached this environment.
• Random Talk: the classic container where you throw everything that you have to say that is more or less interesting, but which makes no sense to enclose in one of the mentioned categories.

Brief historical note

99% of those who read this post and, more generally, this blog, will think that the presence of a blog on ChaoticBench is an absolute new thing. Nothing comparable to the past of this name.

Quite the opposite!

ChaoticBench was born in 2011, just as a blog. The first version of the site, in fact, was a very simple WordPress with a fairly standard theme for a blog. Within that space my partner and I wrote DIY articles, home hacking and more or less ingenious solutions with objects present in every home, with particular attention to the recovery and recycling of old or damaged objects (see example in the picture).

The name ChaoticBench, in fact, symbolizes the typical condition of my studio: a chaotic desk (workbench), full of things, from photographic equipment to electronic components to notes for future or never-born projects and ideas. The idea of giving this name to my blog at that time, which over the years has become the name of my professional activity, came to me just looking at my studio, while I was thinking about which domain to register in order to start the project. It was then reinforced by a wonderful quote that I consider a bit the slogan of this activity:

if a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?

A. Einstein

I therefore hope that my contents are interesting and can be a reason for comparison and discussion with those who are more prepared than me in certain aspects and, above all, with those who are approaching these topics, want to learn and want an exchange of experiences and ideas.

I don’t have the presumption of wanting to teach something, I created this blog for an equal comparison, for an exchange of knowledge and I hope to make it grow and give my small positive contribution to an internet network that tends more and more to uselessness, scarcity of content and uniformity of mechanisms and arguments.

Thanks for reading up to here, if you are interested and curious to discover the new articles, follow me on my social networks, share this post and leave me a like.