I ran across some old backups of the first site I ever had, on Tripod, and it’s been humbling, amusing, and interesting. Mostly all at the same time. In the excerpt below, likely the only part of these works to ever see the light of day again, you can observe how quickly it morphed from a site updates page to a proto-journal-blog-thing.

7-19-1999 Get this: tomorrow I have to go and voluntarily have a needle shoved through the protective coating that nature has provided me with, or else I won’t be allowed take classes at a college 15 miles from my house. May tribbles knaw the balls of whoever made that policy. Or ovaries, we’re equal-opportunity stupidity-haters here. Which reminds me, there is again news on the job front. Well, sort of. There is roandabout scuttlebut of a job that will not only pay $9 an hour, but reimburse me for my education… Somebody drool for me, I ran out of spit an hour ago.

7-18-1999 I have returned. Six Flags was fun. Walking-around-in-wet-socks-for-8-hours fun, but still fun. I really haven’t processed the whole experience yet, but I think maybe I should just chalk it up to vacation and move on. Not all of my life can be mined for material for a web page. I’m not on the clock all the time. Not that I get paid for this, which is a whole other barrel of ichyforms…

6-6-1999 I know, it’s been forever, I’ve probably driven most anybody who does look at this site away, and that wasn’t a whole lotta people anyway. Now let me tell you why. I was busy gettin’ that high school diploma. I am now on my way to getting my degree, getting a job, and commencing to build my evil empire! Hehehe.
Oh, how naïve I was those many, many two years ago. It’s takes so much more effort to build an evil empire than I thought.

Geocities’ FTP server randomly rejects perfectly valid files as invalid. And now Yahoo Mail’s SMPT server randomly rejects certain emails with no explanation. Not to mention that trying to use the web interface to same invariably leads to a server timeout at some point during use these days. Which, to be fair, bests Hotmail’s consistent server timeout on login. I’m beginning to suspect my (not an) ISP. How on earth could so many web services just suddenly stop working all at once? Oh, right.

Tangent: ohright.org appears to be available. Hmm… perhaps it is time for some re-branding. Once the balance sheet no longer bleeds like a stuck wild boar, of course.

Inspired by all this talk of NaNoWriMo, I decided I could at the very least write a short story, unpadded. Understand, now, that my previous forays into fiction of any kind are all long behind me for very good reasons. My method basically consists of just diving in and writing, making up characters as I go along, making up the story scene by scene. This does not work. I seem cursed to always end up with characters I like, dialogue I like, and absolutely no frickin’ plot to put them in. I set the memory of these past agonies aside, however, keeping in mind that “aiming low is the best way to succeed.” (Genius, I tell you.) And the strangest damn thing is that it seems to be working. I’ve written almost 2,000 words since Wednesday (I’m also very slow) and the thing hasn’t yet managed to derail itself. Remarkably, I seem to actually have some idea where it’s going, but not too much. Just enough.

I had forgotten just how amazingly life-affirmingly joyous a thing it is to write something longer than two over-parenthesized sentences.

Tangentially related: Participants in NaNoWriMo from the local metropolitan area: Three. In the entire state of South Carolina: Two. (And he had to move to Charleston…)