Six blogs

I finally pulled the plug on my previous domains. I would have preferred to let them be for the sake of posterity; I hate to contribute to link rot. Maybe more importantly, they were proof of my existence. I did all those things! That was a lot of work, and I'm proud of it!

But I can't justify paying $200 a year for hosting I barely use. It's dead weight, a numb guilt that prods me every time I see the recurring subscription charge on my bank account. A persistent reminder of disappointment - of essays not written, of stories not shared, of countless broken promises to myself. No, it's time to move on.

First, however, let's take a victory lap around the cemetery of my blogs.

1. And The Lack Thereof (2003 - 2021): 788 posts, over 500,000 words detailing my coming-of-age from high school to adulthood. It's incredible how freely I would share, back in those days. The internet felt so much smaller. ATLT is most of the reason I have a job; I poured thousands of hours into designing the site and maintaining a server out of my bedroom. But of more significance, it was my birth as a writer and probably saved my life from the depression of extreme isolation.
2. Bloglomerate (2013-2014): 20 some-odd essays of maximum nerditude about video games. One post about Dota 2 nearly launched me into a career in eSports. I got paid by a company in China to write statsy articles.
3. outer ][ space (2018-2020): 48 essays chronicling my journey into raving, and maybe the only time I've ever held myself to a weekly publishing cadence for a whole year. Then I made it into a book! At the time, this was the crowning achievement of my life. I wrote a whole goddamn book! Holding it now, I still feel some pride but it's old news.
4. midnight garden club (2020 - 2023): A covid lockdown project that never really flourished. A very pretty hodgepodge of 10 essays on music, games, and artwork that never felt like a good place to share. It was a museum from the start.
5. the comedown (2023): Three smoking hot essays were my parting gift to the rave community. I'm proud of these far more than any of my outer ][ space writing. I wish I'd had more time to finish some of the other drafts - god, they were gonna smash - but the ship has sailed. I'm not raving anymore and I'm not interested in the discourse.

21 years of writing. A thousand essays, a million words, ceaselessly vomited out across the world to a handful of readers. Whew. Anyways!

We have now reached the sixth blog. This is gonna be a lot more informal than my more recent work. I don't have a dozen hours to fine-tune every essay, and I've got a lot of thoughts that need to get sorted out. Every day I'm sprinting into new and hazardous territory with parenting, mentorship, home ownership, car culture, tech bullshit, suburbia, and all the other fucking things that adulthood is trying to shove up my ass these days.

The goal, right now, is just to fucking write. We'll see what happens next.