My personal brand is dead, long live my personal brand!

As I mentioned in a previous blog post, I failed 2025. Completely. I can tell now that I didn't even try. And it's not like I had huge goals, but I just got overwhelmed and couldn't do anything about it. So, this is the year I decided things are going to be different.

This year I made peace with the idea that, in order for things to change in multiple and different areas of my life, I needed to stop thinking and start doing. You see, I'm always cautious. I take things slowly and plan for them, check and recheck, test and retest. I'm your measure five hundred times, cut once type of guy. In doing so, things usually escape from me. Don't get me wrong, when everything is planned and accounted for I perform flawlessly, of course, but I do take time. Like, lots of time. That was not going to happen this year.

My goals this year are not clear cut. I want more or less the same things as last year, but my main goal is to see results, see progress, feel changes, I want to move quickly—even at the cost of precision.

Ripping the band-aid off

One thing I have been doing—on and off, but constantly on and off—is blogging. I've always had somewhere to write. I started way, way back, in MySpace and then moving to Tumblr, then to Blogspot, then back to Tumblr... I could keep going, but that's besides the point. One day, I decided to purchase my first domain, acentoenlao.com. And that's when things changed. I felt attached to a brand. I had a domain. I wanted to do something with it. So, naturally, I started a blog and used that branding. And it's been a thing people close to me know about—though I don't think many read it—, like a second identity. I became a synonym of Acento en la O.

Well, it had been a thing. It stopped being a thing a couple of months ago.

Following this impulse of moving quickly and making things happen... I let go of the domain I had since 2014. It wasn't easy. It felt like moving out of the house your grew in. It felt like a break up. Suddenly, I wasn't the thing I had been for 12 years now. But, then, after the initial shock, I was free. I could be whatever I wanted to be.

So, I became what I had always been, too.

Not a blog, but someone

My first identity in the internet had the same humbling beginning that many of us, early users and the ones who can still remember the noise of connecting via dial-up had... My sister made me an email account and I needed it to be called something. It was a Hotmail account and I was young, like, 10 or 11 years old, so I will, of course, not share it. It's horrible—present tense, as in still active. Few years later, when the silly name I chose started to feel inappropriate and immature—also, GMail became a thing—I decided to start again, from zero. I left everything behind and picked a new username. It was easier then because I had nothing attached to my email account, I didn't use it much and, in all honesty, it was useless.

I decided for my next identity I was going to be more grown up, but still rebellious to a degree. I always had a personal issue with my name. You see, when I was born, in Mexico governamental documentation, accents—common in Spanish—couldn't be used. So, my official name is "Oscar", instead of "Óscar". I never liked that. It didn't help that, a few years after I was born, Mexico made everything digital and using accents in the registry became possible. Anyways, I cleverly removed the annoying "O" and tried with scarG, adding the first letter of my last name. Of course, that username was already taken—I kinda hate you, scarG, you ruined everything. Back to the drawing board. Again, very cleverly, I decided to add a letter so I could trick the system and give me my username. I, obviously, wasn't going to add a consonant because that would be pretty stupid. Imagine "sccarG", "sscarG" or "scarrG". No, no, no. NO. So, I made the only thing that made sense: I went with scaarG. Man, was I genius. I don't know what happened to me.

Anyways, I've been scaarG since I've been mature enough to make better decisions—later moving to the more stylistic choice of scaarg, because the internet used to not care about uppercases—and I've used that username for every single new website, new app, new social network that's come up. The only total exception to this rule is blogging. For blogging I was Acento en la O. And, of course, any other app where MY username was taken.

Now that I was free from my old domain acentoenlao.com, the natural thing to me was becoming myself. I bought scaarg.com from marque.at, changed my Bluesky handle and added the blog subdomain and redirected it to this pckt.blog using their flawless integration—great work, by the way—and I haven't looked back.

I'm Oscar Garcia, scaarg for my internet friends, and I just happen to have a blog.

What changed?

Honestly? Nothing. I just felt bad leaving behind something that had been with me for so long. Like someone died and I didn't even mourn the loss.

There's one thing I still need to fix, though, and that's figuring out how to call this blog. Again, since I'm super creative and talented at naming things, I went with "The Blog." I mean, "The Blog" works. I just wish it was cooler. Like me. And this need doesn't have anything to do with an identity. I just had an Instagram for Acento en la O and I want to be more active on that front. Part of me doing new things and moving quickly is putting myself out there since I've never maintained a social network or have I been upfront with having a blog, promoting it and having people actually reading it.

I'm thinking of changing the blog's Instagram account to blog.scaarg, in that way it will kinda match with the subdomain. But, if you have a better idea, please let me know. I'm desperate.

Closure

Now, I just wanted to write about the move from Acento en la O to blog.scaarg.com in case someone asks in the future, so I can just redirect them to this post. And, I guess, in a way or another, this is me announcing the change and moving on. Like a goodbye to the old domain. Thank you. You served me well.

Now, as a personal reflection... It's scary, for sure. Leaving things behind is hard. And even harder is moving on. But when one door closes, another one opens, and it's never too late to try new things. Just think that, maybe, the thing you're holding on to is actually an anchor holding you back. Also, remember, most of the times you can go back if it doesn't work out.

Except me, because someone already bought acentoenlao.com and is using it to host an illegal anime streaming website.

Yeah, I tried to buy it back.

I guess moving on is actually pretty hard.

Until the next one!