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June 1, 2016
well hi there
How you found yourself here I have no idea! Really! Unless you're a bot, in which case hello there former SSR!This is a placeholder goodbye. Time for times to be changing.
There was a weird consolidation that happened when I wasn't paying attention. The Awl, where I've done the bulk of my work, migrated to Medium — kind of like a WeWork but for websites. I also had been putting some stuff up there because, frankly, it was easier than arguing with an editor, and I was in a space where avoiding arguing with an editor came at a premium. But boom, there it is, so basically all the stuff that I've written in the past ten years, and care to hold out to the world as stuff that I've written, is now available in the same place: this place.
This raises a question! If all the stuff that I've written in ten years that I care about is over there, then what does that make the twelve years and four thousand something posts that appeared here? Well, that makes this a blog, and those blog posts. Some of them were long and well-considered. Not many of them. Most of them were written in a familiar and authoritative voice, as if addressing a specific and loyal audience, with running jokes and asides and assumptions of casual knowledge of topics that appeared before. That was fun to do, but it was a fiction. I monitored the stats. There was occasionally some traffic, but the only times that the traffic was statistically significant it was because some actual source of content linked up something from here. If there was ever a measurable audience, and I'm going back to the age of blogs, when we all had links in the sidebars of our similarly ridiculously named compadres in blogging (Oh hey there, look at that, to the right), it was about a hundred people. And I was honored to have that then, and I'm honored to look back on it. But things change! And so do I. Reluctantly.
What happened was that the need for me to share my thoughts in this particular medium finally diminished below the need for any potential reader to ever come here. This version of this blog started in September of 2004. That's more than three years ago! I have friends and colleagues that were not yet in high school then! Needless to say there was no Facebook and no Twitter and hell the ashes of MySpace were not yet cool then. Even if I were to only publish in this space, the interconnectedness of everything (to Facebook, that is) would make it so difficult that it would almost like writing something on a typewriter, xeroxing it and waiting for someone to ask to read it. (Also: been there.)
So, for the time being, I am freezing this thing in amber. No need to kill it dead, as I wouldn't want to kill 4,000 something little bits of what I wrote, so I have from now until when Movable Type stops working to find a way to archive safely. And frankly, I want to keep the real estate, just in case.
But it being 2016 and all, if you really want to hit me up, Twitter is a good place. I'm always there.
Thanks for everything! See you later.
Posted by mrbrent at 4:52 PM