21 April 2007

I have been tagged...

And not in the urban way (with spraypaint). My old friend, Evil Bender, has bought into the meme, and so, I suppose, must I.

Why Do I Blog?

Not surprisingly (if you know me, anyway), that's not a question with a short answer (very few are). I have therefore divided this into a few different subsections for easier comprehension.


The Sites

I began blogging before it was awesome to do so: 1999, to be exact. At first, my blog was just a regularly updated, old-fashioned HTML page on my university personal site. I would sometimes link to stuff from Something Awful, where I used to be a goon before memberships cost money. After a while, I added The Onion and Fark to my list of frequently linked sites. This was when I had spare time.

As I became busier with singing, working, writing, and other pursuits, I moved my online persona to a series of forums where I was also a moderator (the one for The Collegian, for example). I was a beta user on Blogger during my junior year, but I quickly gave it up with the addition of more duties in the college honors program and at the newspaper.

I found more time again when I served a stint at a small mission school in Arizona, but my roommate hooked me up with a subdomain of his site. After I moved, I ran out of time again upon beginning grad school, and I didn't begin blogging again until just last year.


Why I Started Again

I got another job in journalism, and that made me start thinking about national and world news items. My natural response was to add my own opinions. This was helped along by my learning that Evil Bender had begun a blog. I shared many of his views, but not others, and I thought my blog might make a nice counterpoint to his sometimes. A few other old friends, Marshwiggle, little.hoot.owl, and Gye Nyame, also had blogs, so the medium served the dual purpose of letting me catch up with them again, at least in some very limited manner. As an added bonus, I've gotten to meet some really cool new virtual friends like The Lizard Queen in the process.


My Subject Matter

Not an easy thing to describe. I'm sometimes political, but more often just ridiculous. I've made attempts at a more-or-less creative blog, with limited success. At the moment, I'm in a state of flux in my life; I'm about to graduate, and with that comes much instability. I really don't know if I'll continue after moving past school or not. Part of me wants to, but another part wants to cut the online cord completely. Already, I've added somethingawful.com, fark.com, and theonion.com to my list of blocked sites in my Hosts file on my home computer, and I can honestly say I haven't missed them at all. So maybe I'll eventually add Blogger to the list? I really don't know.

Above all, my online philosophy is that I really don't have anything to say that hasn't been said a hundred times by clearer and more eloquent writers, so what I write doesn't especially matter. I don't know how true that is, but it seems like a pretty logical and realistic approach. It helps me not to have dashed hopes, anyway.

If I must tag someone new, I guess I'll tag Marshwiggle, little.hoot.owl, and Gye Nyame.

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