It's been years since I tried to keep a blog. I had planned to write that for me this inevitably ends in failure, but now that I'm decently into my mid-thirties it's becoming more clear that everything ends. Since that describes all of my, and in fact everyone's projects, I'm going to reimagine that supposed failure as a property of the universe and try again.
The other reason my blog projects don't work out for the long haul is they're always so specific. I had a blog for martial arts stuff, I had a blog for programming stuff, I had a blog for creative writing. I had a blog for an auto restoration project, but before I got too far into it I realized I'd just end up moving on from that, too. Maybe I just don't like blogging, I thought.
But part of why I keep doing this is that as a child of the 90s, I have the idea that the Internet is great because it's made up of websites, and all the cool people I knew back then had multiple websites. I'm still not really over the slow-but-complete encroachment of platforms, of mega-sites that host, index, and curate the digital lives of millions of people. I miss those simpler times, when there was a site with a mostly-broken frameset which had instructions for fixing a Coleman stove, or that you could click an animated GIF in the header and be transported to a different website using an identical frameset where you could read about the author's adventures in making his own Diesel fuel out of vegetable oil using nothing but a power drill, a plastic 55-gallon drum, and the guts of a food processor.
It was a crazy time, is what I'm saying. At the bottom of that guy's website you could click another GIF to buy immortality from Alex Chiu, who would sell you magnets to do the job for about ten bucks. Back in those days, you really could be anybody! Nobody knew I wasn't a successful software businessman adult who owned a suit, instead of (for instance) twelve.
Yet, those days are gone. The blogs that came in droves have been drowned by the likes of Facebook, and Medium, and all the other parasites that take your content for free in order to lease it back to you (or, often, lease you to any company willing to pay a quarter cent for your aggregate data.) I'm starting to think that blogs are pretty great, and even if a blog is less incredible than a constellation of gloriously pure single-topic websites, it's substantially less work. And there's only one bill to pay.
Now I've got a place to post if I do a cool project in the shop, or paint a neat picture, or come up with a great recipe. I can write whatever I want, and you can read whatever you want. Sound good?
Let's agree you think that sounds good.
W.
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