this blog's final blogiversary

Well, this is it—this blog's final blogiversary. The Hairy Chasms on Blogspot will be stopping this month. It was started in a Korea University on-campus PC-bang the evening of July 4, 2003, partly in response to the US-Iraq war, which I was against. While the blog never amounted to much despite decades of writing in obscurity, it became a storehouse for publishable material: my philosophy/religion book Water from a Skull is mostly a collection of essays from this blog (it also has a couple research papers in it); other projects, still in the works, will be based on yet more blog material: (1) a second book of humor will be a quasi-sequel to the self-published Scary Spasms in Hairy Chasms (whence the title of this blog), which contains a lot of outdated jokes (but which I hope to resurrect on a different print-on-demand platform); (2) a filthy book with the tentative title of Dirty Grammar will eventually come out—a nasty exploration of English grammar for college ages and above; (3) a possible compendium of political insights, reflecting my evolution from a more neutral "moral equivalentist" to a quasi-rightie, might be in the works; (4) a book with further thoughts on teaching techniques and education in general is in the planning stages; (5) a book (or several books) of movie reviews I've written since about 2009; and there'll so much more.

This isn't the end of my online presence, to be sure: the past is prologue. Once I have a new address thanks to Squarespace (later this month), I'll be migrating to that platform where I'll have a new, more sophisticated, monetized website that will include its share of blogging but be more exploratory and, I hope, interactive in nature.

As for this blog and the walk blogs I also manage... if possible, I will attempt to migrate everything over to Squarespace. If I do successfully manage that, I'll likely delete the blogs from here (Blogger/Blogspot) so they can avoid the ignoble fate of being "squattered," as often happens to abandoned sites that evince no activity for a long time. If I'm unable to migrate those blogs over, then I'll maintain them by issuing periodic, perfunctory posts designed merely to keep them alive for as long as I am.

So it's not the end of me and my online writing. The future is monetized. I've given a lot over the years, and I think a lot of people (or maybe just my five readers) have taken for granted that all of this effort has been for free. So how much are my efforts worth? I grant that all of the unoriginal content—and there's been a lot of that since 2016—doesn't belong to me and thus can't be monetized. The new website might have one small corner dedicated to the reposting of memes and videos, but that corner of the site will be free. The garbage corner.

The Hairy Chasms, here on Blogspot, will continue to show posts through July, and possibly through part of August. After that, I'll have a new address that I'll point my handful of readers to, and we'll all find out together how the new, more complex site fares as I embark on a new phase as a web designer, vlogger, and content creator, but always still at heart a teacher and, to some limited extent, an artist and performer. We'll see where the future leads us.

Meanwhile, enjoy the rest of this month.