It's always the same story. I grow comfortable with a new
medium, and another one pops up, ruining the affair and leading to
further polygamic writing.
If you don’t know me, my
name MOT means ‘word’ in French, and I define writing as my most
embarrassing bodily function. I spare you the early www days but
basically, there was a first shift from internet fora to personal sites
(I opted for Geocities). Then I fell for another format, perfect for my
short bursts: the blog. Vaccinated by the Geocities collapse, I picked a
mainstream plaftorm, Blogger, and started spilling my ‘blogules’ all
over the place, and soon spun off half a dozen active verticals in two
languages on culture, on tech, or on Korea (enter SeoulVillage in 2007).
I
really enjoyed posting on topics I loved, from culture and urbanism to
politics and sports. In my hayday, I would commit several posts every
day and reach millions of pages viewed every month. I even accepted to
make a special blog on soccer and tech during the 2006 FIFA World Cup
for CNET, who noticed that I had one of the most popular blogs on the
game in French (the offbeat ‘footlog’), and a more serious one on
innovation in English (‘mot-bile’).
I resisted SNS
as long as I could before falling for the usual suspects. Facebook and
Twitter were time consuming, but the ideal complement to the blog: the
former to anchor it, the latter to pile up / browse through memos that
didn’t deserve full posts. Of course, serving Zuck and later Elon became
a moral hazard, and I tried alternatives that never picked up.
So
far, I’d been resisting Substack because as much as I respected the
vision, I’d maintained newsletters and I knew how demanding they can be,
particularly for a guy who’d already all but abandoned most of his
blogs and platforms, and dreams of devoting more time for his miserable
fiction.
Yet. Following Blogger, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram*, Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads, and probably others I forgot, I have to make sure that’s there’s a legit SeoulVillage on key platforms.
So
this SeoulVillage Substack will be, as the name suggests, yet another
stack, but also, who knows, a sub who could make the ineluctable end of
the game a bit more fun.
Seoul Village on Substack: substack.com/@seoulvillage
Welcome to my Korean Errlines.
Stephane
Seoul Village 2025
Welcome to our Korean Errlines! Follow Seoul Village on Facebook, Bluesky, Threads, Substack, and X/Twitter, follow me on Instagram.
Download 'Seoul VillageS', the free ebook.
* yup that’s the personal Insta, but because Zuck’s UI sucks, I seldom post on the SeoulVillage one.
