Hello! New here? You probably are, since I’ve somewhat neglected this place for a while.
Let me tell you the story of “Here it is…”
This started as a personal blog when I was in college. Back in those bygone days of the early 2000’s, there was no Facebook or Twitter. If you wanted your own personal space on the internet to call your own, you needed a blog of some kind. Bloggers tended to be on dedicated sites for blogs like the appropriately named blogger or the oddly named Xanga. Some would use free web hosting like Angelfire or Geocities. Here it is… started as none of these, as I was able to use my university’s web space as my web host. Looking back, I probably violated a few TOS’s or made someone in IT angry for using the technology in a way they didn’t intend.
Here it is… existed as a blogspot and would get regular updates as I saw fit. I would write about the very important concerns of a 20-something suburban college student, like… student government affairs… what was being served in the dining halls… my feelings on classes, tests, and professors on campus… and how I’m bad at talking to girls…
A graphical representation of me producing a blog, circa 2001-2005
So yeah, there was literally no reason anyone outside of my social circle would find what I was writing and publishing worth reading and wasting time for. Hell, I’m not even sure my social circle found my ramblings entertaining. BUT ALL OF THAT CHANGED ONCE I GRADUATED. THEN I BECAME A REALLY INTERESTING AND FUNNY PERSON, WITH REAL AND INTERESTING OPINIONS ON THINGS THAT MATTER, I TELL YOU WHAT
… ok, maybe not.
I joined thefacebook.com in the fall of 2004. The functionality of the site was very limited at the time: the only updates you could make were to your profile attributes, your picture, your relationship status and what you were looking for, which included the options “dating”, “random play” and “whatever I can get”. (Just in case you didn’t know thefacebook was for college kids looking to bang anything in sight, this was your confirmation.) With status updates being a gleam in Mark Zuckerberg’s eye (or in Evan Williams, Noah Glass, Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone‘s eyes), real-time “status updates” were left to where they started: AOL Instant Messenger’s away messages.
But once Twitter and Facebook figured out how to make AIM obsolete… AIM became obsolete, and so did my blog, since every shit post that I’d want to give to the world could go on facebook and reach more people than my personal blog ever could.
For a while, Facebook allowed for an external site to import blog entries via RSS and have them turned into “Notes”, which is Facebook’s equivalent of a blog. But once that functionality ceased, so did any reason to keep Here it is… maintained in any way.
So why am I back here? Why am I prattling on about how this place is dead and why it sucked and became obsolete? Because, as you’ve probably surmised, Here it is… is no longer obsolete; no longer dead, and no longer sucks (he says with a completely straight face).
In the years between Facebook and Twitter taking over social media, I’ve changed a fair bit from the boring-ass 20-year-old who posted well-meaning garbage and expected a positive response. I’m now a 30-something who occasionally posts memes on his Facebook, but I also became a freelance writer and, as it turns out, became better at writing. Who knew?!
To that end, I’ve restarted this blog. It will fill a void that Facebook and Twitter are currently not satisfying for me: long-form posts. While Facebook does use Notes, its not terribly popular except for chain-letter-like lists. Putting my long posts here gives me more control over the presentation and the administration, which is important to me going forward.
My goal is to put a post up once a week. The topics will vary wildly. As my online handle implies, I love games of all kinds, so you can expect most of the content to be about games; video games, card games, board games, table top, role playing games, and so on. You could also expect random musing about life, observations on things and stuff, and sometimes you’ll get a picture of a dog shitting, of which I’ve filled my quota this week.
My name is Joe. Welcome to Here it is…