20th blogiversary!

No special fanfare—just a post in prose to commemorate this moment: my blog's twentieth blogiversary. Amazing how time sneaks up on you. One moment, you're in a PC room on the Korea University campus on July 4th, 2003, and the next moment, you're an old fart in 2023 with a healing toe wound, a ton of pills to take, a tiny studio apartment, a lot more money in the bank, and not much to show for your existence except the blog itself and a few little-known, self-published books.

I'd like to think that the blog and I have both grown (and not just physically), but I'm not the most objective judge. I think my prose has gotten a bit better although I'm still a prolix bastard. Teaching at that tutoring center in Centreville, Virginia, turned me into even more of a raging grammar Nazi than I'd been: I now go back to old posts and see myself—my old self—making the errors that I now know to correct. My original focus on religious matters went away right around the time my mom got brain cancer. I still think religion-related thoughts, but religion isn't exactly my top priority these days (I'm not sure what is, frankly). I've delved a lot more into politics than I'd ever intended, having become more politically aware since 2003, and having figured out (with frequent help from the Political Compass), where I more or less stand on some given political spectrum. I know I get lazy and slap up way too many "images" posts; readers are divided on whether they love those posts or hate them. I'm always horrified to learn that those posts generate a good bit of traffic, but I guess people like easy things, and looking at pictures is pretty easy.

Over the years, I've seen blogs come and go, and my own blog has had to change with the times, especially after Blogger got taken over by Google—a takeover that was largely a good thing because Blogger tended not to crash as often under Google's management. My sidebar, which no one pays attention to, used to feature hand-designed images representing the blogs on my blogroll, but that went away once Google's own blogroll feature got trotted out. I recently took down the "Followers" feature, which I'm sure no one noticed, because it was starting to go wonky, with some of the thumbnail images no longer loading, turning the normally orderly Followers list into a chaotic mess. Back to the issue of blogs gone by: I remember ones I liked, such as Enjoy Every Sandwich, Anticipatory Retaliation, The Marmot's Hole, and the great Incestuous Amplification. I'd give a shout-out to Lost Nomad, but Frank's no longer talking to me.* Most of these blogs popped up and did gangbusters in terms of readership, probably because they all had narrow focuses, whereas my blog has always been a bit meandering as I've sniffed at this or that topic, following whims and fancies as I've indulged my curiosity about the world. Learning how to embed tweets and YouTube videos certainly changed the look of the blog (and offered more opportunities to be lazy by slapping up the thoughts of others who expressed their thoughts better than I could express mine).

As I became more explicitly political, to the point of turning around in my view of Donald Trump, I lost other friends as well. Funny how it's almost always the left-liberals who cut you off. I don't talk to my buddy Steve D. anymore; my old college roommate Joe and his wife Kelly (we all went to Georgetown together) cut me off back when I was on Twitter (which I quit in 2016); others have dissociated themselves from me as well. I still have some left-liberal friends with whom I remain on friendly terms, but their number grows ever smaller as the prospects for either civil discussion or simply the polite avoidance of sensitive topics continue to dim. What a shame. But what can you do?

Through it all, I blog, putting out several entries a day because, as a single guy with a relatively low-stress job (most of the time), I have free time. I vacillate between worrying about readership and not caring, but I haven't engaged in the signal habit that would catapult my numbers: focusing on a single topic/issue and putting out several entries per day only on that subject. I guess I'm not particularly hungry for fame.

Back in the early days, I received one "Instalanche" from Instapundit, and another from the surly Steven Den Beste. It was astounding to watch my numbers shoot into the high thousands on those days, but inevitably, 24 hours later, I was back to being the obscure prole that I am.

The blog has been a good place for me to think out loud. A dedicated reader (who probably doesn't exist) could trace my thoughts over the years and see how I've changed in some ways and not changed in others. The blog has also served as a resource for book projects: I can "data scrape" (to use that new term) material and put together books, which I did with Water from a Skull in 2006, back when I taught at Sookmyung Women's University. If I ever get back on the ball, I've got a movie-review book in the works, and you probably already know about my little booklet on homeschooling, available on Amazon as an e-book, and available as a hard-copy book directly from me.

One subtle thing you might not have noticed was a slight change in style after my stroke in 2021. Something about typing two spaces after a period (the classic style dating back to the typewriter era) became tiresome post-stroke, so I stopped doing that and gave in to the standard "electronic" style of using only a single space after a period. When I go back and look at posts from before 2021, I grin because I notice the change. This is, by the way, something I'm mindful of as I put together my movie-review manuscript: the final ms will be done in the modern style. Luckily, changing spacing in a document is just a matter of using the find-replace function, so this isn't a huge burden. Oh yes: movie titles in my book will also be italicized—another thing I have to go back and fix with every single review. Technically, italics are what you're supposed to use with movie titles (rule: italicize titles of completed works**), but there are plenty of journalistic conventions allowing one to use quotation marks instead of italics. I don't remember why anymore, but I slipped into the quotation-mark style early on, and on the blog, I use italics only when referring to a movie franchise as a whole, e.g, "the Matrix films" or "the Harry Potter movies."

The blog is a place for me to vent about work and private life. It makes certain aspects of my life public, but there's plenty that I don't write about—sometimes to protect others' privacy, and sometimes just to protect my own. I can be pretty confessional about my bathroom habits and other gross things, but other aspects of my life stay nicely under wraps. I think I've achieved a decent balance overall, and I hope I haven't inadvertently betrayed anyone.

While this blog has turned twenty, I have, as you know, other blogs. My tutoring blog Time, Effort, and Focus still exists even though I abandoned it (can't bear to delete), and I have a growing list of blogs chronicling my distance walks—the 2008 walk in the Pacific Northwest and five walks in Korea, with a sixth happening this year. See the list of walk blogs on that sidebar that you never check. They're right at the top. The walk blogs are specific to each walk; they stand as a record of what I like to think of as my achievements. I haven't done much with my life, but walking long distances across Korea has been one of the most meaningful and fulfilling aspects of my later years. I'm so glad I took that first walk in 2017. It's no exaggeration to say that that ramble changed my life and showed me a Korea I never knew. Now, it's like an addiction, and there's still so much else to see. When I go on my distance walks, I generally stop blogging on the main blog. This year, I might try scheduling a month's worth of posts on the main blog, but since much of what I do these days is linked to current events, there's no way to know the future, and thus no way to blog meaningfully about the news. I don't think that's tragic, though: most of you have your own news sources, anyway, so if I schedule blog posts about non-news-related topics, that shouldn't be a big problem. Right?

Otherwise, eleven months out of twelve, I'm blogging right here, and I'll continue to do so for the foreseeable future. The blog is like a years-long snapshot of what my mind is focusing on at any given moment, and as you can tell from its scattershot nature, I'm still like an excited puppy sniffing around. I've dabbled with platforms like Substack, but until I finally make the move over to Squarespace (where I can do subscriptions and member benefits), I'll be most comfortable continuing to blog right here. I'm lucky, thus far, that the woke staffers at Google haven't seen fit to cancel my entire un-woke blog (one or two posts got hidden from the public), but you never know when the party might come to a crashing end. So let's have fun with the time we've got. Thank you for your readership—and that goes as well for you fucking lurkers who never contribute comments or try to bolster a sense of community. Christ, you guys frustrate me. Oh, well... I guess some people just like to lurk. Perverts.

At some point, I'll have to think about what to do should I die. Death comes for everyone, after all. Someone else will need to have access to my blog to be able to report my death, post updates about my ashes being stirred with heavy cream and poured all over sexy, naked women, etc. Yeah... that's something to think about.

Thanks for joining me on this journey. I'm probably going to end up dead in a ditch somewhere, but up until that moment, things are going to be awesome. At least for me.

__________

*He was wrong about COVID's deadliness: caught up in the hysteria, he thought it had a way higher mortality rate at the beginning of the pandemic, and he thought I wasn't taking that seriously (he was right), so... bye-bye, I guess! Turns out COVID has a global mortality rate of around 1%, give or take some decimal points, and it was deadly only for three narrow demographics—the extremely young, the extremely old, and those with lots of comorbidities. Very few people from the fat part of the bell curve died from COVID.

**The full rule is to italicize titles of completed works and to use quotation marks for things like chapter titles and poem titles when the poems are in a collection. The notable exception to this is when dealing with the books of the Bible. Technically, the books of the Bible (and the word "Bible" itself) are merely capitalized—no quotes or italics. "The book of Esther," "as we see in the book of Job," "when we compare Matthew and Luke," etc.