The Stöckchen
Back when the German blogosphere was maybe a dozen weird social misfits sitting in front of computers on Saturday nights instead of actually going out, there was this little tradition nobody remembers now. You’d get tagged in a Stöckchen
—basically people asking you ten questions, you answer them, you come up with ten of your own, you tag ten other people. It sounds simple enough. Anna Frost threw one at me and I figured, why not?
The honest answer to what blogging’s done for me: it’s introduced me to people I never would have met otherwise. People across the world, in cities I’ve ended up moving to, people who fundamentally changed how I think about things. Berlin, Tokyo, New York—blogging dragged me to all of them. More than that, though, it’s let me turn the one thing I actually want to do—sitting around watching anime and cartoons and complaining about it online—into something that pays the bills. I can’t imagine many people get to do that. I’m not going to pretend I’m not grateful.
I can’t function without my MacBook Pro. If I could marry a piece of hardware, that’d be it. And yeah, I’m aware that says something depressing about my romantic prospects.
Running a blog is like running one of those simulation games—SimCity, Civilization—except it’s real and people actually care. You pick your topics, you push them out into the world, you watch the numbers, you talk to readers, you make agencies want to throw money at you, you stay on top of the trends. It gets addictive because the game has actual stakes. Your life becomes the game in a way that’s hard to explain if you haven’t experienced it.
I used to dump everything into the internet. Who I slept with, how much I hated certain teachers, why some girl wouldn’t date me. That was back when this blog had different names—TOKYOPUNK, then ANIBOY, then MARCELTV. Privacy wasn’t a concept that existed. Somewhere around my late twenties I started keeping things back. The blog isn’t just me anymore either, so there’s other people involved. But I try to put myself into everything I write, even if it’s quiet about it.
The sponsorship requests get genuinely insane. Couple hundred a day, and after a while you develop a sense for what’s actual money and what’s just someone hoping you’ll take pity on them. I’ve been pitched everything—wooden dildos, underwear for old people, guys who’d insult me in one sentence and try to get me to promote their hip-hop album in the next. It’s funny until it’s not.
If I could build an app with unlimited resources and time, some days I’d want something that could answer every question—what’s the point of any of this, is there a god, why can’t I just have nice things without everything being complicated. Other days I’m just horny and want something completely useless that won’t help anyone. Both impulses are real. Both feel equally important at the time.
I’m bad at keeping things consistent. I see something cool somewhere and I want to pull it into my own work immediately. German to English to German, crude one day and trying to be sophisticated the next, constant design changes. It drives readers away. People want consistency and I’m incapable of it. But those experiments are how you figure out what you actually like versus what you think you should like.
The internet needs people in charge who actually understand it. Fair use laws, net neutrality protection, affordable access for everyone. And German bloggers especially need to stop tearing each other down out of spite and jealousy and realize they’re stronger as a unit. That’s not some motivational poster insight—it’s just how power works.
I remember someone asking me what I’d wish for if I could only wish for other people. I said I’d want René to get his drinking under control. That’s still true. That’s the only wish that matters.