I think I finished editing and republishing old entries yesterday. The grand total is that I have 1,362 posts, with a word count of 1,059,000 or so words. I’m finding that this is big enough that it cripples either of the main SEO plugins for WordPress. That would be a problem if I was trying to make money on real estate or vitamin sales, but I’m not, so I disabled it.

I still need to figure out this theme - it feels like the headings are too big and inefficient, and I do miss having the widgets on the side for the archives and such. And I need to have better integration with this and Facebook and/or Twitter. I would like to just blog here and spend a lot less time on social media sites.

Another thing I need to do is there are a ton of posts that have no title, which doesn’t work well with the various widgets at the bottom of the page. But the idea of going through a few hundred posts and adding dumb titles like “ate lunch” is a bit exhausting. I just did a big run of them, and I think I still have a few hundred more to go.

Now that this stuff is almost settled, I need to figure out what I’m doing with this thing. My only real goal is the same one I have every January 1: a new post every day. But I don’t know what to post about. After reading every post over the last week, I feel like I’ve already strip-mined any old stories of memories and nostalgia. There definitely won’t be any trip reports in the near future, and not a lot of day-to-day news except “sat in my home office for twelve hours and then watched four hours of Married at First Sight.” I guess I need to step up the reading and should do something more constructive with my boob tube time.

Definitely no current events or politics. The upside of all of this tedium is I spent a lot less time looking at the news. So there’s that. I should probably go back into my list of starred Wikipedia articles and write about each of them. I have a bad habit of falling down k-holes, starring articles, and then wondering why the hell I bookmarked comparative religion scholar Frithjof Schuon years ago. (Still trying to figure this out - only thing I can think of is he died in Bloomington. Maybe I helped him with his VAX mail at some point.)

Not a lot to report otherwise. It was a typical NYE, and I was asleep by about ten. We rented The King of Staten Island and I was very mixed on it. I should write a longer post on it, but it’s lunch time.

I mentioned a few days ago that I’d pulled every entry on here and was slowly adding them back. That’s basically all I’ve been doing for the last several days. I had close to 1600 entries before starting this crusade. I’m down to about 100 in the queue, although I wouldn’t mind doing some more general cleanup. I also need to do more work to get this site completely modernized. I am not entirely happy with this theme, and there’s some plugin changes that could be made to speed things up.

It’s really weird reading through 23 years of entries in one clip. A few observations:

• I really like the first few years, when I was in Seattle and the word “blog” hadn’t been invented yet, and this was more of a diary than anything else. It’s fun to read the old entries where I’m talking about what I ate for lunch or what happened that day on the drive to work. It was a lot easier to belt out short updates like that when there were no expectations and there was nothing else to compare this site with.
• In the years before I published my first two books, all of my writing about writing is extremely cringe-worthy. I’m glad I got past that.
• I always forget how bad my early system was for running this site. I reluctantly switched to Wordpress pretty late in the game. When I started, I had this crazy system where I had to telnet to the server machine, type everything in emacs, then run a C program to generate the table of contents on the left. The program broke every new year’s day, and required manual surgery to reset everything to January. I later half-fixed this with PHP, but it was still ugly for a long time.
• I also forget about how I had my own garbage system for hosting photos on this site. I would put all of the image files in a directory on the server, then run a shell script that used mogrify to resize them to web and thumbnail sizes, then build the index.html file. Brutal stuff.
• I think I owe a general apology or amends to anyone who read this journal from about 2002 to 2005. I was a real contrarian asshole about all things political. I’ve been scrubbing that stuff, because it’s so cringe and horrible.
• I don’t know how I got as far as I did in my writing career without knowing that commas and periods go inside the quotes. I can probably blame this on learning to program in C before I really got into writing.
• Speaking of punctuation, I sure did like using the f word as a piece of it. I should stop doing that.
• I was seriously on fire in the early 2010s. I think I’ve written 200 entries in the last six years, but I easily wrote 200 in just 2010-2011.
• I have a lot of stories that were on this blog and later collected into books. I’ve removed them from here. I think if you didn’t read it in a free book that came out in 2003, you aren’t going to read it.
• I also pared back a ton of posts announcing “see my story in…” that had a URL that points to a Chinese gambling site now.
• I don’t know how I ever survived seven years in New York. Reading the stories of my trials and tribulations back then are hilarious. I’ve unfortunately had to trim a few of them back for career-limiting-behavior reasons. But living in Astoria with no AC really can drive you to drink, eh?
• I think about 40% of the 1500-some entries here have to do with dental trauma or being sick. I am really glad I stopped drinking a case of full-sugar Coke every day, because that’s calmed down both problems somewhat.
• I used to have a separate section of the site with a bunch of long-form trip journals. Some of those got collected into my Vegas book, but may more were pulled from the site out of general apathy. I often wonder if I should put those back, or clean them up and put them in a book that nobody will buy. Something to think about later, I guess.
• Music reviews are a real waste of my time. Luckily nobody reads them anymore.
• I took all the links off the side (now bottom) of the page. I will probably put those back as I find more blogs worth following.
• I really need to pick up the blogging more. It’s a much better time-waster than Candy Crush or reading the news.

I really do think I need to spend more time here next year, and a lot less time on Facebook. I need better integration or whatever to drive people from FB to here, but of course all of that is a crapshoot, and when I post a link from here on there, only three people see it. I don’t know if a mailing list or the return of RSS feeds or something else will make this any better.

In that vein, I’ve reluctantly turned back on comments. They are all in “strict” mode and you need a login to use them. It uses Disqus, so it also uses Facebook, Twitter, or Google logins. I moderate all comments. Feel free to add to the discussion, but don’t be an ass.

Hopefully I’ll finish this quest by the end of the year, although that’s tomorrow, so I better hurry.

Pretty low-key Christmas here. Three different Zoom calls, which were okay, but when you spend ten hours a day in Zoom calls, that can be problematic. No presents or anything. Sarah made this gigantic chunk of prime rib, and we watched the original movie Fargo. The giant chunk of meat may be my final coda on being an omnivore, as per a discussion with my cardiologist, but we’ll cover that when the New Year New Me crap starts up next week.

Forgot to mention, but The Koncast is officially dead. Hasn’t been updated in years, so that’s kind of obvious, but I got sick of paying LibSyn every month for hosting something that nobody listened to in the first place. Maybe someday I’ll give it another run, especially since I have a few hundred bucks of podcasting gear in a box in the closet now. It was fun while it lasted, though. The in-person podcasts were the best, but there’s the rub, especially now.

In a fit of depression/stupidity/paranoia, I deleted this entire blog yesterday. Then I realized what a dumb idea that was, and I started restoring it. Problem is, I have about 1500 posts, and I need to go through them one by one and re-add them. There is a way to bulk add everything, but I really need to vet and edit everything. I’m roughly halfway through it, and it is incredibly time-consuming. Word count-wise, that’s roughly three times the size of the bible. So this may take a bit.

But, it’s also fun. I forget how much great writing I’ve put on this thing in the last twenty-three years. This thing started with daily updates about nothing, and reading that stuff really makes me miss Seattle. There’s a lot of cringe in my early days as a writer, and all of this was happening before self-publishing was a thing, aside from going to Kinko’s and xeroxing the stuff by hand. (Back when there was a Kinko’s.) I think I had the assumption I was going to write these books and… find an agent? I don’t know. But it’s somewhat humorous to see how naive I was back then.

I also keep thinking maybe I should self-pub another book compilation of this stuff. It would be great to read it on paper, and it would be somewhat impressive/amusing/masturbatory to see a curated collection of these as a 1200-page slab of dead trees. I did a book for the 1997-1999 entries, and it looked great, but I think it sold maybe eleven copies, with half of those being me and the other half being people who thought it was JA Konrath murder mystery. So, maybe not a good waste of my time.

I can’t believe I still have another week off of work. I’ve completely lost track of days. It’s wonderful.

Anyway, blogging - I am not happy with this WordPress theme, so I may screw with that after I get these posts added. Many thoughts of what else I should do here, especially in the new year, but I feel like I should take all of the energy I wasted this year in doom-scrolling and Facebook and apply it into writing posts here, even if nobody reads them.

So here’s how behind I am: this site has been running the Wordpress Twenty Eleven theme since 2012 or so. Now that the Twenty Twenty-One theme has just shipped, I decided to upgrade to the Twenty Twenty theme.

A few features and differences:

• A lot more space and readability, with better typography (I think)
• Much easier to read and navigate on a mobile device.
• The stuff that used to be in the sidebar has moved to the bottom of the page. Look below to see things like archives, links, recent posts, and all that jazz.
• I nuked the little “share to social media” stuff because nobody ever used it.
• There is a privacy policy. This is stupid and useless, but at some point Google will probably ding me points because I don’t have one. Bottom line, I don’t collect data, and don’t sue me.

I think that’s it. Let me know if you see anything obviously broken.

At the start of every year, I have the grand idea of writing every day for the next 365 (or in the case of this year 366) days. This year’s excuse is that I brought back acute bronchitis from Wisconsin, and I’ve been fighting that since Christmas. It’s the kind of thing where I can sit down for five seconds and be deep asleep, and even getting ten, twelve, fifteen hours a day doesn’t help. I went to the doc last week, got antibiotics and instead of my beloved Permeth, she gave me some garbage cough pills that didn’t work. I’m mostly okay now.

You probably can’t tell, but I’ve covertly been going back into old entries and cleaning things up, adding tags and fixing broken links and boneheaded spelling mistakes. I’m always surprised by the amount of writing on this site, and I always like when I stumble upon an old entry and read it and have totally forgotten about it or the events that transpired that caused me to write it. I never know what I should be writing here on a daily basis, and that critical thinking, obsession over what is my “brand” causes a horrible self-censorship that stops any writing. But I look back at various eras when I was writing every day about nothing, about killing time or various thoughts and obsessions, and that stuff is always gold to me.

(It opens the obvious questions about “why don’t you write books like that” or “why don’t you turn those posts into articles” or whatever the hell. I did an anthology of early posts from this site, and it sold close to zero copies. And what I do here is exercise, not writing. It’s like telling a person who jogs five miles a day that they should really look into being an NFL running back. No.)

I forgot to write about this, but when I was gone over Thanksgiving, the studio monitors on my desk died. They were an old M-Audio model that had a known issue with the amp, where it was a bit of a perishable item and the capacitors would eventually blow. I got six or seven years out of them, but I’d been looking to buy something else for a while. And that’s a huge wormhole, shopping for audio equipment. I get to the point where I can almost justify buying some expensive tube amp and bespoke speakers, then remember I have no room in this office. But I also don’t want to buy the $20 speakers you usually get for free when you fill out a credit card application at Best Buy.

Anyway, I bought a pair of Vanatoo Transparent Zero speakers. They’re actually slightly smaller than the old M-Audio ones, even though they have a bigger woofer (four versus three inches), and it’s made of aluminum. The case is wood instead of plastic, and has neat magnetic grilles that are easily removed to see the goods. There’s also this passive radiator which is supposed to add better bass response. It has its own DSP, so I can plug it straight into the computer via USB. It has a variety of neat options like a subwoofer output and various limiter and sleep and crossover options I will never figure out. It also has a bluetooth receiver in it, which I will probably never use. Same with the wireless remote. Nice to have them, though. The sound is very transparent and clear and nice at volume. They are near-field monitors, so not great for filling a room, but perfect for sitting at the computer. There’s no goofy “voicing” to them, just straight-up reproduction of what’s on the track. My only complaints are there’s no headphone pass-through jack (but I can just plug into the computer, I guess) and they could probably use a subwoofer. I actually have one sitting in the next room that’s not hooked up to anything, but I have no space in the office for it. Anyway, they are perfect for that price point, and a great solution between the cheapie $20 speakers and blowing a few grand on an audiophile set of bookshelf speakers and amp.

Not much else going on. I took some time off writing during the holidays, which I never do, and it took some effort to get back going. I have two big books that are on the vine and need some serious work to get going in the right direction. One of them is essentially a sequel to Rumored to Exist. It’s currently about 350 pages and totally directionless, with no real through line or “rails” to it. And based on the sales of December’s book, it’s hard to get enthused about packaging up a book that’s about four times as big and trying to get people to read it.

But it’s fun to dabble with it. The big secret is I enjoy the process of writing, the actual meditative action of getting lost for a few hours putting words on the page. I hate everything else, the sequencing, editing, packaging, marketing, production. I’ve been going back and trying to figure out how the original Rumored happened, what kept me going on it. It took almost seven years to write, and it was essentially completely rewritten seven times. I recently went back and skimmed the annotated version (which like only four people have read) and it has a lot about it was written. Always fun to look back at that, but my writing process is completely different now. And you can never reproduce how things like that happened.

Birthday in a week. It lands on a Monday, but we have the day off of work for MLK day. I’m doing another superfloat in the isolation tank. I’d go to Denny’s, but Denny’s is so horrible now. I vaguely thought about leaving town for a three-day, but prices are probably jacked up, and I just want a weekend without anything.

I’m still sitting on my reading list from last year. I rated everything, reviewed nothing, so I’m not sure if it’s worthwhile to share it, but maybe I will later this week.