New blog!

It’s been a long time since I blogged. Once upon a time I used LiveJournal, but the platform is a faded and tattered remnant of what it once was; everyone has moved to Facebook or Tumblr, text-light, image-happy platforms for people who like taking pictures.

I hate taking pictures.

Words. Words are what I do. I’m long-winded, I’m prosy, I’m a creature composed of words. Pictures are the things you write words about. I need a place where I can spoot interminable strings of words, without interruption, without limit, without barriers.

And without having to type in one file, then cut and paste into another, upload, manually update seven menu files, upload, test, fix, and reupload. The upside to a static HTML site: control. The downside: hours of manual work. My main site looks a bit bloggish, and visitors keep referring to it as a blog, but it’s not. It’s a static site with insufficiently cunning use of SSI. I have to update every menu by hand, and every single menu is formatted a little differently; and the site uses live fonts, a technology that’s been around for only a decade or more, so my top-notch updated-to-the-second copy of Dreamweaver can’t handle them, and I have to work in a file without live fonts and then transfer my work over to a live file for upload. It’s exactly as awesome as it sounds.

It discourages me from putting pages up until they’re perfect, or at least perfectly complete, and of course there’s always more to research… so I never get around to posting any of the reams of data I’ve gathered over the past few years. But dumping it on LiveJournal felt pointless because no one reads there, and visitors to my regular site are unlikely to go there, and it’s a pain to integrate a third-party site into my own site, and in any case the Russians might take it over completely at any moment and flush it down the toilet, and basically, I dun wanna.

Thus this blog. A staging ground for future pages and a dumping ground for all the research I don’t have time to whip into final shape. I hope you enjoy it.