It’s 2021 and we are in the middle of a pandemic, so why not revamp an almost 20-year-old blog?
Before we begin
A couple of small requests, in the interests of trying to retain whatever privacy still remains online.
1. Please refrain from using other people’s real names (especially mine) in the comments, unless they are public figures. This is my effort to preserve as much as possible privacy and anonymity. You may, of course, feel free to use your own name as you see fit.
2. Please do not distribute this blog’s URL or link to this blog. I appreciate your wanting to, but I’m trying to keep it off the search engine radar, and being popularized is not – for me, anyway – desirable.
The evolution of this blog
I created my first website in 1997, a “homepage” using a packaged Geocities template, part of my efforts to build my own identity. It was, frankly, awful. I seem to recall some neon green in there and shudder at the memory. For a time, I kept switching servers, layouts, and content without really finding a way to express myself until I discovered blogging. I experimented with Blogger for a while, but eventually switched over to a stand-alone client called Blog in 2002, which I used well past its expiration date. I kept everything on my local machine and uploaded it to host servers as needed.
Over the years, I made some small attempts to migrate the blog over onto a server-based system, but could never get things to look or work how I wanted. I wasn’t invested enough in the migration process to learn everything I needed to get it right. Thank goodness for cevets, webmaster extraordinaire, who has hosted this blog since 2003, and who did all the hard work of getting everything off my outdated client and onto WordPress to kick off 2021.
So here we are. I’d like to think I’ve matured considerably over the past twenty years, not just as a blogger but also as a person. I was in college when I started blogging, just poking my head out from under my little shell, and I blogged a lot of very trivial things – and some important ones – without really thinking. Very few of those early posts are worth reading, but they serve as a reminder of the folly of youth.
As a young adult, I was a bit more thoughtful about my posts, but still quite entitled. I shared the techno-utopian view that the internet provided a soapbox on which everyone was free to say whatever they wanted to say. Life has since taught me otherwise. Now that I have hit middle age, I spend less time navel-gazing, and more time considering the world. I’m still trying to figure out how to exercise agency amidst the structural constraints of the society I live in.
But while this blog is self-indulgent, it’s not meant to be self-important. I try to maintain a balance between expressing myself freely, even if that upsets some people, and being self-aware enough to know when I’m just being self-absorbed. I recognize that I no longer agree with some things I wrote before, which can be a good thing – a sign of maturity. My goal (since about 2007) has been to be unashamed of what I’ve written – ignorance is acceptable, but intolerance is not.
So this blog continues to be a hodgepodge of things I find interesting, which are likely to be of interest to very few other people. I post way less often now, but I hope to maintain a schedule of at least one post per month. Stay tuned, and drop me a line in the comments from time to time!
This page was last updated on 20210131.