Category Archives: blog birthday

20 years of blogging! 🎊

another milestone this week (this month, this year…) is that, as of today, i have been blogging for 20 years. i first started out at LiveJournal — my first “real” post at LJ, duplicated here for those of you who don’t want to use a LJ link (and i don’t blame you. 😉). i had a couple of posts on the same day, but they’re just tests, to see if the thing actually worked the way it was supposed to… and, oddly enough, i didn’t actually go to burning man that year, because i had a brain injury instead, which caused the people i told about it, later, to say that “now you don’t have to go to burning man, because you’ve already had a brain injury!”, which only made me want to go even more, to find out whether they were right or not… and, as it turned out, they were right. i can state, with authority, that burning man is a lot like having a brain injury: they’re both bizarre, unexpected, surrealistic, larger than life, and something i would wish to have happen only once in my lifetime. ultimately, the only major difference i can see is that fewer people die at burning man.

after my brain injury, i decided that blogging would be a good way to supplement my already failing memory, and so i started doing it more regularly… and, indeed, for better or for worse, it has been a good way to remember things that i definitely would have forgotten otherwise.

i gave up livejournal on 071130, after the “strikethrough”, other various shenanigans, and the final decision to sell to СУП in russia (and transferred all of the entries, so that there would be no reason to use LJ as a source), and moved to my own domain, which has changed homes several times, since then, but has always remained at przxqgl.hybridelephant.com.

both blirgday &c.

on this day, in 2007, i started this blog, as a response to livejournal selling out to the russians, which means that this blog has been in existence for 15 years, in more-or-less the same place. i wonder if it will last another 15 years. 😏 as a result of getting closer and closer to leaving “twit-turd”, i have established a presence at linktr.ee, where i put ALL the links to EVERYWHERE that i might be contacted… which is a little strange, because, as far as i know, it is the first time i have EVER posted, in the same place, links to personalities that i have endeavoured to keep separate, prior to this. it is also a bit strange, because i actually switched my harmonic flute video to “public” from “you can’t see it unless i gave you the link”, because i didn’t want “salamandir” and “rev. deluxe” obviously associated with each other. now, i’m not as concerned, i don’t think anyone of consequence will notice, and, even if someone of consequence DOES notice, it simply doesn’t bother me as much as it did 15 or 20 years ago.

“twit-turd” has become a seething morass of white supremacists, nazis, fascists, MAGAts, drumpf-lovers, vaccine denial, and hatred, ALL OF WHICH is more-or-less unmoderated, because (among other stupid things he’s done), when “ELONgated MUSKrat” bought it (under duress), the first thing he did was to re-instate a whole bunch of people who had been kicked off the service, for violating rules that “ELONgated MUSKrat” disagreed with… which, at this point, includes “Fartgorie Taylor-Greene” (who was booted for spreading vaccine misinformation), and Donald J. Drumpf, himself (who was booted for spreading lies about the 2020 election). how long i stay there is still up in the air, but it’s a matter of days, weeks, or months, and certainly not more than a year, unless some massive change happens. 😒

the first show of 2022 fell yesterday. it wasn’t very much, but it’s enough that i am re-thinking my plans to go to the panto rehearsal this evening, despite the fact that we only have three more rehearsals until the show starts.

221129 - 0930 am
221129 – 0930 am

this was yesterday, at approximately 9:30 in the morning. i PROBABLY could have driven my car in this amount of snow, but unfortunately…

221130 - 0745 am
221130 – 0745 am

this was today, at approximately 7:45 in the morning… i definitely COULD NOT drive my car with this amount of snow… moe says that, outside of our neighbourhood, the roads are plowed, clear, and passable, but… from where i sit, it looks like a skating rink, and i have to get up a hill (which moe said is a skating rink) in order to get out of the neighbourhood… and the only reason moe knows this is because she took the truck, loaded with concrete blocks to work today, because her car needs new tires (which she just discovered yesterday, after having slid around on various streets on her way home from work, yesterday).

borg blithday

hi, today is the blog birthday. it’s not actually the blog birthday now, because i am writing this in advance, and scheduling it for the blirg bothday, but you don’t know that.

this is the 14th anniversary of this blog in this location, in spite of the fact that “this location” has actually changed at least three times since then. the location has changed, but the URL has remained the same. for the record, the bog is now physically located in florida, under the auspices of WebHost Python, which has been my host provider for around 5 years now. rather strange, as i am physically located in the seattle, washington area, completely on the other side of the continent from the location of the blig.

internet is awesome, sometimes…

the blithday of the borg in it’s original form is actually 030415, but that was back when it was on LiveJournal, and brad was still in charge. these days i’ve tended a lot more towards the Bacchus’ First Rule of Internet philosophy: “Anything worth doing on the internet is worth doing at your own domain that you control.”

it’s true.

blog birthday

oh yeah… this is my blog-birthday. on this day, twelve years ago, i retired from LiveJournal and began my tenure on my own, personal server:

The Last Post on LiveJournal
The First Post on my own server

now would also be a good time to mention the reason behind my blog, on my own server, Bacchus’ First Law Of Internet, which is “Anything worth doing on internet, is worth doing at your own domain, on your own server, which you control.”

the date is up

hipy papytoday is the fifth anniversary of my starting this blog. for the record, i’m still SO GLAD i got away from LiveJournal, despite the fact that i have a lot of friends who still use it.

i haven’t switched out the system on my computer yet, primarily because, after flipping out yesterday, it has settled down again, and isn’t producing the kind of errors that were making me think about switching distributions… but i’ve still got the debian live disk, and i’m just waiting for an excuse to wipe the whole system and try another one.

i’ve spent the past couple of days cleaning up my workshop. i have a lot of empty glass bottles waiting to be made into bongs on my main workbench, and a whole bunch of painting stuff left over from the summertime on my jewelry-making workbench, which i cleaned up to the point where i can actually work on both workbenches. i’ve got a whole bunch of things that could be made into earrings or pendants, but no real motivation to make anything out of them, despite the fact that the holidays are rapidly approaching.

BBWP patches

also, after having a number of difficulties getting emails to and from the lady who actually did the work, i now have 10 Big Boys With Poise jacket patches which i’m going to distribute to the other Big Boys (and other people) at monday’s rehearsal.

Hipy papy bthuthdth thuthda bthuthdy!

hipy papyon this day, 30th november, 2007 – three years ago – i officially moved this blog to its current location and gave it a new name, which is Scab of a nation, driven insane – i’ve debated about whether or not to have a contest to see how many people who read this blog actually know where that phrase came from, but i haven’t been motivated to do so, yet. prior to 30th november, 2007, it was called non plaudite, modo pecuniam jacite (don’t applaud, just throw money) and it was located at LiveJournal, which had just been consumed by SixApart. i was fed up with the shenannigans that 6A had been up to, and the fact that LJ was implementing all of these changes that they had told me when i signed up that they would never do (advertising on livejournal, for example*), combined with the fact that i had recently changed host providers and was feeling good about my newly aquired web abilities, i dumped LJ and adopted wordpress on my own server, thus conveniently eliminating all of the things i absolutely hated about livejournal, while enhancing the things that i liked about it. RSS is a good example of that: when i was on LJ, i had a “friends” page, which displayed my friends’ LJs, but if they didn’t have an LJ, the technology made it impossible to display their blogs on my LJ friends page. RSS changed all that. now i use an aggregator (i use Akregator, a part of the Kontact suite of applications), which includes all of my LJ friends, but also has feeds from blogspot, and tumblr, and typepad, and wordpress, and things like metafilter, and disinformation, and alternet, and raw story and every other list, blog and news source in existence! it’s what the LJ “friends” page was probably originally intended to be, before someone discovered that they could use it to line their pockets… and at this point, wordpress mostly takes care of itself, and i don’t have to worry about things dramatically changing (with a few minor exceptions) without my having a say in the matter.

i originally started blogging… well, i’m not exactly sure why. it was a technology thing, and i was working in a print shop at the time, which wasn’t exactly satisfying my desire for technology. but, as now, i was somewhat suspicious of getting involved in a technology that was resident on other peoples’ computers, so i didn’t use it for much. then i had my brain injury, and everything started to change. still, i didn’t have more than one entry per month until june of 2004.

i remember when i lived in bellingham, in 1993 or 1994, and i was riding my bike somewhere and i saw an advertisement on the side of the bus that included what i now know was a URI (Uniform Resource Indicator, also mistakenly called a Unform Resource Locator, or URL), and wishing that they wouldn’t put such confusing things on advertisements, when nobody knew what they were anyway.

it was not long after that that i connected my computer to a LAN (Local Area Network) for the first time. before then, in spite of the fact that i had been working with computers for almost 20 years, i had never connected to another computer. if there were files that had to be shared, as the files were that made up the many real estate and used car magazines that i was a part of creating during that period, that was accomplished via what i now would call a “sneaker net”, which was a 3½" floppy disk that was passed from one computer operator to another.

i had heard about networking, but didn’t think i would like it: i found it way too invasive… at the same time, by 1994 i was very much in to the “BBS” scene, where a number of users could log into a server, browse files, leave and respond to messages, and so forth.

in 1995 i moved from bellingham to seattle, and very quickly discovered that there was an entirely different world of networked computers that i couldn’t even imagine. i signed up with CompuServe and didn’t even last 6 months with them before i was on to greater things. i got a job at microsoft, as a technical support engineer about a year before the word concept virus was first discovered.

again, i had known about viri, but i also knew that there was no way of transmitting a virus: it had to be deliberately installed on a computer. the “word concept virus” changed all that. all you had to do to infect a computer was to open a MSWord document, and that could come from anywhere.

about the same time, i first encountered what, at the time, was a very strange web site indeed. it didn’t have a name that i can remember, but it appeared to be a list of rants by this guy, who updated it fairly frequently. i figured there was an “about” page, or something like that, that would tell me about the author, but there wasn’t (which is why i try very hard to put the bare essentials about me in a public place that you don’t have to login to in order to see, on my own blog). i tried to “login”, but it didn’t know my password (which isn’t surprising), and all of the rants were obscure enough that i couldn’t quite understand the purpose of such a site: it seemed to be more of an online diary than anything else. about the same time, i first heard the word “blog” (a portmanteau of the words “Web Log”), which was described to me as a sort of online diary. i was very familiar with “journalling”, but my impression is that journals are to be kept more or less private, and even then i was aware of the fact that if you want to keep something to yourself, putting it on internet is not the way to do it. i was actually repelled by the idea of keeping a blog, in the same way that i kept my sketchbook/journals – the artwork is the public part, the journal parts are still for the most part private and not available anywhere on internet.

i discovered livejournal on 030414, but i didn’t start to use it more than once in a while until 0407 or 0408, after my brain injury.

at this point, i use this blog as a way to remember stuff, like fishtown, that i probably wouldn’t remember any other way. i use it primarily as memory, the connections for which were screwed up in my brain when they were poking around in my skull. i realise that a few people (and maybe more than that, but that could also be my paranoia talking) use this blog as a way to keep up with what i’m doing, but my guess is that i’d keep blogging even if there was nobody there to read it… that’s the way i started. 🙂

* i realise that it’s pretty pointless for me to expect that a “community resource” like livejournal would remain without advertisement indefinitely, but if that was the case from the beginning, then they should NOT have said “WE WILL NEVER HAVE ADVERTISEMENTS ON LIVEJOURNAL” when i signed up… and they definitely did say that. so i feel somewhat justified in my righteous indignation.