Twenty years ago I first set up a web site that you could call a “blog”, or “weblog” as I liked to say back then, in January of 2004. It’s here.
The first post there is dated January 18, 2004, but it’s just a link to another thing I had put on my personal web site in November 2003. That piece was an article about digital cameras and is recognizably in the overall style that I’d end up adopting for all of my bloggy stuff. I hesitate to use as pretentious and self-important a term as “style” or “voice” for the rudimentary writing that I do here. “Persona” might be more accurate although over the years even that bitter little man has toned down a bit (I hope).
Anyway, if I had been paying more attention I’d have done the “Hey I’ve been posting dumb things on the Internet for 20 years” post in November of 2023 instead of January of 2024. But I must have been busy with something else that day, so this page will be the 20 year marker instead.
The “Mixed Logs” site lasted about five months, after which I noticed that my buddy Pete had started his own site and then we jointly decided to merge the two places into one. About half the stuff I have written since 2004 started out on tleaves, which has had various homes and is now mostly dormant, but still a point of reference. I copied a lot of my favorite stuff from there to here, but not all of it. I have left some of the shorter fill pieces that we used to write just to keep up the cadence over there. In addition, I have not moved some of the more pointless ruminations about video games. Of course there are a few notable exceptions to the video game rule, but overall I am not as personally connected to that material as I used to be, so I can’t tell if I just think it’s pointless or if it’s actually really pointless. Either way it’s fine where it is.
Of course I moved my new stuff off of tleaves and to this site just over 10 years ago. The marker for that change started out as a fairly recent divider between the large pile of old stuff and the relatively shallow collection of new stuff. Now it sits almost exactly halfway between the two piles, which is wild.
The new pile has more ruminations about music, software and progamming, mathematics, physics, and some weird mashups of everything at once. And of course when I play the one sort of video game that I play, you are doomed to read about it here.
I think, but I’m not sure (because I don’t collect the data), that I’ve been going at a higher pace since 2020 than I had been in the few years before. I guess I’ve had more on my mind since the great stupidity.
A back of the command line shell estimate indicates that this site contains between three and four hundred thousand words of material, give or take a few tens of thousands. On some absolute scale that’s not all that much. On the other hand, I’m just sort of an introverted nerd, and this is a lot more writing than I ever thought I’d put into the world. This stuff has now been around long enough to maybe worry about what to do with it when I finally stop paying the hosting fees for the web site. On the other hand everything is backed up on my personal computing devices, and in github. So who knows.
On our recent trip to Vancouver I told the person serving us food at Vij’s that the last time we were in their place in 2014 it was at their previous location. She sighed and said something like “wow that was forever ago” then paused and added “see you in 2034 I guess!” With any luck maybe I’ll be doing another one of these in 2044. But I would probably not bet on it.