Not to brag, or give away my age, but you can go on the Internet Archive and witness firsthand that I’ve been a really shitty blogger since before they even called them blogs. My first “website” was uploaded to CompuServe’s Ourworld via a cutting-edge 14.4K baud modem. It was mostly pages of me ranting about things that bugged me, just in case someone at HBO would stumble across it, hire me to write for Dennis Miller Live, and whisk me away from the fluorescent hell of help desk duties.
Naturally, I had the obligatory guestbook, a few webring links, a tiled damask wallpaper in colors that could induce nausea, and an animated hit counter that proudly announced: “You are the 204th visitor to this page since March 2, 1996.” Oh, and let’s not forget my own kick-ass MIDI version of “Court of the Crimson King” that played automatically, because my 20-something self believed you couldn’t truly absorb my genius without a tinny prog rock anthem playing in the background on a loop.
For nerdy, know-it-all, I remember in detail because I was there, context: John Barger didn’t coin “weblog” for another year and a half, Peter Merholz wouldn’t jokingly shorten it to “blog” until ’99, and platforms for the average egomaniac to unleash their opinions and pretend to be experts wouldn’t exist until five years after I started unleashing mine. I was an angry young man. Now I’m just … well … an angry old man with better bandwidth.
After tinkering around and writing my own blogging platform, which worked well if I do say so myself, I realized I wasn’t the kind of web developer who grokked CSS and adaptive design. I was a full-stack developer in the 90s, but the stack eventually got so tall I got a nosebleed just looking at it. So, I packed it up my frontier log cabin in the woods and moved into the web equivalent of one of those nice prefab condos in the burbs. I think I was on LiveJournal, Blogger, Tumblr, and a few others I’ve mentally blocked for my own well-being before settling down here on WordPress, mostly because we used it at work and I had access to a room full of brainiacs who could bend it to their will and make it do cool things that looked like anything but a WordPress site. Obviously, I don’t work there anymore, please enjoy this free layout template.
Most of the content survived, meaning you could, if you truly hated yourself, dig through over a decade of my schizophrenic left brain/right brain arguments. At various points, this site has been a tech gadget blog, an indie music blog, a cooking-for-bachelors blog, a bad movie review blog, and a dumping ground for other passions I’ve tried to kill off but keep popping up like the dandelions and clover in my yard.
After ten years, I could count my subscribers on my fingers, and I’d bought them all beers at least once. This is probably for the best, because there are a couple of running gags in those archives that, if anyone from my current employer had found, would have kept me from getting the job I’ve had for the past seven years. On most days, that would make me sad.
So, it’s time to pick a lane. For now, since I’ve already said everything I want to say about everything else, or somebody else out there is saying it better, so I’m turning this into my writing blog, where I’ll either offer my personal insights on why everyone else’s writing blog is wrong, or I’ll promote my friends’ work when it’s so good it makes me irrationally angry I’m not better at this. If things go well, I’ll build an insightful archive for the hordes of fans I’ll definitely have one day. If things go poorly, I’ll be documenting my slow descent into mediocrity and madness, probably culminating in a much less dramatic ending than I’m currently imagining.
Don’t panic if you’re here for my old nonsense. All the hundreds of archived posts will remain, and I might still slip in the occasional recipe, personal anecdote, or cool radio station I found while spinning the garden in the middle of the night. All the other musical musings will continue to live over on the mostly-defunct Indy In-Tune site, which is linked in the top menu. Unless you’re reading this on your phone, in which case I have no idea where the menu is. You’re on your own.
Now, I know the same hateful crowd that hides behind internet anonymity, catalogs my typos in the comments, and suggests I be covered in strawberry jam and fed to ants because I didn’t hate Star Trek: Discovery is already limbering up their typing fingers. Yes, I’m aware I’m lame, unoriginal, and not a good enough writer to tell other people about writing. Take a deep breath. Get yourself some emotional support tacos. Hydrate. Watch your blood sugar. It’s just a blog, but thanks for reading.
