The first post on this site is dated December 9, 1999. That means it passed its 25th anniversary a few days ago.
I meant to post something on the anniversary, but, well, my dog died and it's been a pretty rough few days! (Maybe I'll post some more about her coming up. I've got a lot of stories and some of them have photos.)
So yeah, I may have missed the actual date by a few days, but here we are now. Twenty-five fuckin' years, huh? Ain't that somethin'. Lord knows this blog's had wildly variable levels of activity over those years, but still. I've had this blog for twenty-five years. How many people can say that?
It's not my first website — I had websites on Prodigy, GeoCities, and Dragonfire back in the '90s — but it's the one I eventually started calling a blog, once people started calling them that.
They used to say "The Internet is forever." Now we know that's bullshit. Maybe if you're famous. Or if you say something career-endingly stupid. But for most of us normies? The Internet is ephemeral as fuck.
Prodigy's gone. GeoCities is gone. My old favorite messageboard is gone. Flash is deprecated. Some of that stuff's still archived in the Wayback Machine, but the record and publishing industries are currently doing their very best to put a stop to that. Users have moved from silo to silo to silo — AOL, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter — and the websites that were really useful 20 years ago have gone to shit.
And here sits my blog. Sure, the layout and the domain have changed a few times, and a bunch of the links and videos don't work anymore. But all the shit from 1999 (and some I've added from even earlier) is still there. A record of the last 25 years of my life. Not a complete one, by any means, but kinda like one of those movies that goes through the main character's life, occasionally makes a time jump, with some periods getting filled in a lot more than others.
High school. (I made a silly little Flash animation when I graduated, but of course it doesn't work anymore.) Moving away to college. Buying a PS2. Motherfucking 9/11. My first breakup. Graduating and leaving Flagstaff. My first car, my first apartment (you know, I really didn't have my own place for very long), my shitty job in north Phoenix followed by my years as a temp. My first trip to Hawaii. That time I watched a bunch of Dracula movies. I got married and we got a puppy and we spent eleven wonderful years with her. My grandma died and I became a father. I had a lot of opinions on subjects like Jack Kirby, Ken Penders, and Final Fantasy, and for awhile there I posted a hell of a lot about Frank Zappa. I'm leaving some stuff out.
When I started this site I was a 17-year-old kid. I look back on some of my old posts with embarrassment, most with some amount of affection. I'm not that kid anymore, thank Christ, but you know what, he had his moments.
Here's to 25 more? Sure, why the fuck not. It's nice to have the occasional constant in life.