It was the second piece I'd read this morning from Matt Welch, a sort of hyper-religious guy who often puts me off because of it—the couching in so much personal moralism. On the other hand, he often has great arguments and insights (that do not require his religious beliefs).

The shit Hamish says in response to the questions Matt asked really resonated with me completely. I was a long time debater on the Internets going back to 1992 with Compuserve, Prodigy, and America Online accounts. In about 1994 I graduated to USENET, the real Wild West that will likely never be seen again. Fun fact: USENET was run pretty much entirely on the network of university computer department servers worldwide. Access to archives is spotty, but if you could see them, it would make all the woke universities today go apoplectic.

IT HAD EVERYTHING...including illegal activities and porn. But, it was damn well self-organized, so it was easy to stay on topic. You never had any of that stuff in your face. You had to seek it out.

In about 1998 I dropped most online social-debate activity to focus on business. That would persist for about 5 years until one day in 2003, I got wind of this blogging thing. It appealed to me. Within hours, I had my first blog and first post, November 2, 2003.

Well, It’s a start. For several years I have wanted to create a website to serve as the primary outlet for my ideas and commentary. So this is it, a weblog.

Will anything really become of it? Don’t know.

I’m not setting any goals or making any promises. I’d like to think I will spend some constructive time at this, but I guess we’ll see. I may also archive some of the other stuff I’ve written over the years.

Purpose. Well, it’s my outlet, and as such, I don’t think I’ll be opening up any of my posts to comments. I will be frank, as always. I’ll probably use some “naughty words” here and there, too. Good thing I have no plans on running for political office.

That’s good in another respect too. One of the things this blog will serve is a way to compile and organize my unconventional philosophic, religious, and political ideas.

Now, it’s time to go forth and look around for something to get all worked up about…

I put up 12 posts that month and sitting here today, early 2022, 19 years later, it's about 5,000 posts total. I'm satisfied with that.

In those early days, it was just a move from those other online outlets into reading various bloggers. Their takes. There was no means of really monetizing it for the 99% but it was quite a different thing. Mine got momentum in late December, 2009, when I published this post on foregoing soap and shampoo—water only showers. It got picked up by a couple of buzz sites and took down my ISPs servers on New Year's eve. My normal traffic increased 100s of times-fold in a single day. Some of those readers are still with me today, 12 years later.