Beginning in December of 2018 and continuing through last year and the first part of this year, I tried to make it a habit to update my personal site on a regular basis, sharing positive thoughts about books and movies and TV series that I enjoy. Back in January I wrote about the Disney+ documentary on Imagineering, and shared my excitement for our upcoming trip to Disneyland in February. I had intended to write about our trip when I got back, but then the world shut down in March and the time just never seemed right to rave about how much fun we’d had at the happiest place on Earth when there was so much… well, so much 2020 going on.

Now it’s October and 2020 just keeps on happening. This year has been stressful and scary and exhausting and it just… keeps… happening, but I’m still here. Still reading books and comics that I enjoy, and escaping into movies and TV series every night. I’m getting work done, too, as it gradually became a little easier to be productive when Everything Is Awful just became the New Normal.

I’m going to try to update this site on a more regular basis, in the defiant hopes that we’ll all get some good news in November and we’ll slowly start heading back to a better timeline. I’ve been watching a LOT of Star Trek the last few months (and reading a lot of Star Trek comics, and Star Trek novels, and playing some Star Trek video games…), so maybe I’ll share some thoughts about why I’m finding that franchise to be such a source of comfort and inspiration in our present difficulties. Or maybe I’ll just talk about my favorite episodes. But in any event, this post is intended to serve as a signal buoy, to mark that I’m still here, I’m still enjoying media despite all of the awfulness, and I’ll be around.

Hello, world. It’s me, that guy. I wrote that thing that time? It’s been a long while since I updated this blog (aside from a quick test post in October when I updated all of the backend stuff), and an even longer while since I updated it on anything like a regular basis. Like just about everyone else I gradually transitioned from blogging to microblogging with the rise of social media platforms like Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook, and then with the death of Google Reader pretty much stopped blogging altogether. And everything worked out great!

…

Well, obviously, not so great, after all. I’ve become increasingly dissatisfied with social media in recent years for the same reasons as everyone else, and have publicly longed for the longlost days when everyone had blogs and websites that they controlled themselves where conversations could flourish in carefully curated comments sections. The lack of a widely-adopted RSS reader has made a return to those days problematic (though I’ve been using Feedly for the last few months and have found it be satisfactory), and for a time I made a halfhearted attempt to use my Tumblr account for a similar purpose. But recent shenanigans have driven a lot of people I follow away from Tumblr and the future of the site is in question, and we’re left with the same mess we’ve been in.

So I’ve decided to stop waiting for some solution to present itself. I still have this space so I’m going to start using it again. There is still a functional RSS feed for those who have the means to use it, and I’m also going to do my best to share links on Twitter whenever a new post goes up, using the platform as a jury-rigged RSS reader.

The intention here is to use this site as a place to share the kinds of things that I’ve always shared online. If I read a book and liked it, or enjoyed a movie or TV show, or come across an interesting article online, I might share it here. Sometime I might even talk about a book or comic that I’m writing. I’m leaving up the old blog archives below, which for the last several years of the previous incarnation were largely announcements about signings and convention appearances, but farther back are very much this kind of stuff. (And the static archive of really old posts from the pre-WordPress days are still lurking back there, going all the way back to 2005.)

The comments section is open, so if you want to weigh in on anything that I share here, feel free. But the comments will be moderated, and this is my house, so remember to use your manners.