How we came to be here
May. 5th, 2009 10:25 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shinytoasterHello everyone,
I thought - partly because first blog posts are always tricky and embarrassing and I might as well give you something marginally interesting to read, and partly because it's my 27th birthday today and I have a shiny new Internet toy to play with - that I would start my new existence here at Dreamwidth with a little retrospective navel-gazing.
And while we're admiring the shiny, isn't it spacious in here? Don't you love what they did with the light? Views all the way down to the bay and not a dado rail in sight!
I was on Livejournal from December 2001 - and how different a place did the world seem then - that's nearly seven and a half years, or, at the time of writing, over a quarter of my life.
It's hard, of course, to leave behind such a huge chunk of time, even if I hadn't really been using it for some time. I'll probably download it all that content one day when I have the inclination and squirrel it away somewhere as testament to the more perplexing aspects of my mental state.
My LJ blog first saw the light of day, as most of you reading at this juncture will know and appreciate, as a fanboyish expression of appreciation for the Harry Potter books, with name and content reflecting that. This went on for a good while until I hung up my boots in what I now think may well have been a state of depression early in 2004.
At that point I discarded the outer trappings of fandom and went by the handle Titanic Days, after the Kirsty MacColl album, and although things continued much as before, as the decade wore on and I settled slowly down into a (not unsuccessful but neither especially fulfilling) career as a journalist writing about the IT trade, I lost the urge to update. I ran out of things to say. Oh, the Harry Potter obsession was long gone and replaced by others; new TV shows, new interests, my dual life as a gnome mage in World of Warcraft, but nothing to really connect with the friends I had made before.
I think in a way, this sort-of-a-birthday-present is me throwing my hands in the air and saying I dropped the ball and I will try and write and interact with you all in a more meaningful sense.
I hope I can keep it up; I write for a living now and sometimes the hardest thing to do is to come home after a hard day's writing and keep doing it for pleasure, but if I'm ever going to get anywhere with this lark then it's something I need to knuckle down to. I don't particularly want to be an IT trade journalist after all; the people who make computers are interesting and nerdy, but the people who sell them are bleach blond Tory sales boys in Audi TTs and wide pinstripes and they make me shiver. It's not a good environment to be me in and it's one I haven't been me in.
Anyway, I hope we will be seeing some career developments in the right direction soon.
So here we all are, here's to seven more years and you're very welcome to keep reading...
I thought - partly because first blog posts are always tricky and embarrassing and I might as well give you something marginally interesting to read, and partly because it's my 27th birthday today and I have a shiny new Internet toy to play with - that I would start my new existence here at Dreamwidth with a little retrospective navel-gazing.
And while we're admiring the shiny, isn't it spacious in here? Don't you love what they did with the light? Views all the way down to the bay and not a dado rail in sight!
I was on Livejournal from December 2001 - and how different a place did the world seem then - that's nearly seven and a half years, or, at the time of writing, over a quarter of my life.
It's hard, of course, to leave behind such a huge chunk of time, even if I hadn't really been using it for some time. I'll probably download it all that content one day when I have the inclination and squirrel it away somewhere as testament to the more perplexing aspects of my mental state.
My LJ blog first saw the light of day, as most of you reading at this juncture will know and appreciate, as a fanboyish expression of appreciation for the Harry Potter books, with name and content reflecting that. This went on for a good while until I hung up my boots in what I now think may well have been a state of depression early in 2004.
At that point I discarded the outer trappings of fandom and went by the handle Titanic Days, after the Kirsty MacColl album, and although things continued much as before, as the decade wore on and I settled slowly down into a (not unsuccessful but neither especially fulfilling) career as a journalist writing about the IT trade, I lost the urge to update. I ran out of things to say. Oh, the Harry Potter obsession was long gone and replaced by others; new TV shows, new interests, my dual life as a gnome mage in World of Warcraft, but nothing to really connect with the friends I had made before.
I think in a way, this sort-of-a-birthday-present is me throwing my hands in the air and saying I dropped the ball and I will try and write and interact with you all in a more meaningful sense.
I hope I can keep it up; I write for a living now and sometimes the hardest thing to do is to come home after a hard day's writing and keep doing it for pleasure, but if I'm ever going to get anywhere with this lark then it's something I need to knuckle down to. I don't particularly want to be an IT trade journalist after all; the people who make computers are interesting and nerdy, but the people who sell them are bleach blond Tory sales boys in Audi TTs and wide pinstripes and they make me shiver. It's not a good environment to be me in and it's one I haven't been me in.
Anyway, I hope we will be seeing some career developments in the right direction soon.
So here we all are, here's to seven more years and you're very welcome to keep reading...
