What is this project called?

It wasn’t until I was in a bar in Pontiac with my best friend Olivia, drunkenly listing all of the URLs I had accumulated over the years that I thought, “Huh. This might be fucking ridiculous.”

They weren’t random domains, but I didn’t buy them to sell them. I bought them because I had dreamt up some random project and wanted to create a space to house it. Usually this was a website hosted on Tumblr because it was free. I would create a logo and the social media platforms to go with, and then my excitement about the whole thing died as soon as I pressed “publish”. The project didn’t grow much, if at all, after that.

And that’s even if I got to the building-the-whole-brand-but-not-the-actual-project phase. Sometimes I just bought the URL and that was that.

It was when I was combing over my budget that I knew it was fucking ridiculous. I was spending hundreds (hundreds!!) of dollars a year on projects I wasn’t working on and all it did was make me feel worse about not working on them. I’d guiltily renew the domains, thinking “I’ll totally get to this one day”.

Spoiler alert: I never did.

I still didn’t want to completely give up on the ideas—because I still thought they were good ideas—but I couldn’t justify the actual cost of keeping them alive until the day I finally decided to work on them. And really, once I did work on them, building an entire platform for them was overkill. It was a form of procrastinating actually doing the work—something I am very, very good at.

I wanted something that was bigger than myself, but not too big—specific, but not too specific. I thought back to that night in the bar with Olivia: I’d start each introduction of my idea with “It’s this project called—” and then go into whatever half-baked idea my monkey brain had come up with.

At least, that’s how I remember it and that’s the story I’m sticking with for branding purposes, okay? Business names are hard. As a bonus, I liked how the project page URLs would look: “thisprojectcalled.com/songofthedayish”, “thisprojectcalled.com/trshjrnl”. It almost looks like you’re reading a sentence. Or someone is drunkly telling you their idea in a bar.

So I bought the domain. And thisproject.link for a short domain, because you can’t cut a junkie off cold turkey like that. You just can’t.

Even after making the decision to let everything go and focus on this one mega-conglomeration of all my projects, it still took me a year to dive into it. To really decide to commit to my creativity. To get vulnerable enough to make again. It’s a scary thing to put yourself out there… but it’s something I finally feel ready for.