George R.R. Martin, LiveJournal’s last notable member, finally leaves

Blogging is a lot like exercising: Chances are, if you go on a hiatus, you’re not going to return.

Taking time away from LiveJournal blogging is a serious decision, and one that Game of Thrones creator George R.R. Martin made in early March. He said at the time that he wasn’t going to abandon blogging forever, giving those seven remaining LiveJournal users hope their favorite blogger would some day return. Now, however, Martin is announcing his departure from LiveJournal for the rest of time.

“Minion Raya here to let you know that we’re moving the Not A Blog to a whole new location,” one of his community managers wrote. “So if you’re looking for the latest news from GRRM hop on over to the website and check out the new Not a Blog.”

Although Martin will continue to blog, he’ll do it like everyone did in the mid-aughts: by purchasing his own website domain name to convince everyone around them that he’s professional. (I bought my own domain name for, like, 80 bucks a year and convinced all my friends at the record store chain I worked in that I was a professional blogger.)

Anyway, Martin is moving on to bigger pastures, but don’t worry — his new blog still very much feels like a LiveJournal.

The color scheme on the new Not a Blog is still purple and grey; each new blog post lives above the previous one, making it easy to scroll down; even the emojis still have a LiveJournal vibe. My guess is that Martin doesn’t want to give up LiveJournal completely, but needs to embrace that he has a fancy website where he can host his own blog. There’s no reason to drive people to multiple different websites, and it seems like Martin is beginning to understand that.

I feel for the guy, though. It was rough giving up my Wordpress blog, bad CMS and all, because I used it for so long. Martin found both his blogging home on LiveJournal and a community, which I’m sure dwindled down to practically nothing in the dawn of Facebook, Twitter and Medium springing up, but a community nonetheless. It’s hard to give up something you’ve put so much time into and become comfortable with. But at least Martin’s new blog, still called Not A Blog, will forever retain a little bit of LiveJournal’s soul.

Rest in peace, Martin’s LiveJournal blog, and may we always treasure LiveJournal for what it was: one of the reasons why we still don’t have a new book in the A Song of Ice and Fire series.