Half-Hearted Fanatic is Back (and Extra-Hyphenated)!

You know when you move your physical stuff to a new home; you end up touching a lot of your old junk and you ask yourself, What was I thinking? How did I acquire this? Why have I kept it?

I recently finished migrating this blog to a new platform (from Blogger to WordPress), and it was a lot like that.

It’s kind of like a time machine going back only 11 years. I reviewed more than 100 of my old post. I deleted a bunch of posts, and made minor edits to a bunch of others.

People don’t use the Internet like they used to, do they?

Many of my older posts are the kind of thing I would just post on social media now.

• Funny license plates I saw on the road: BRPNFRT (September 2009) and BCIVL (September 2009)
• Music videos that delight: Are Friends Electric? on Ukuleles (May 2008)
• Music videos that embarrass: Elvis’ band: Jimmy Page, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder. Keith Moon, and others (March 2009)
• Unexpectedly finding a photo of myself on a poster for a community event: Tonedeafaroo (June 2006)

Remember Email?

There were a few old posts that were really meant for close friends and family. I probably shared the URLs to these posts by email.

• My Condo, Pimped (April 2008)
• Alas poor cabinet door, I knew him well (April 2008)
• Bedtime in Flagstaff (April 2008)

(I now have an Unlisted category, for things that nobody wants to see, unless you are a close friend or family member—and even then you may find them boring.)

I wrote a few political editorials hoping people would “Forward this to everyone you know.” Remember that?

• It’s (Still) the Derision, Stupid (October 2008)
• The Grudge that Keeps on Giving (March 2008)

Actually, I think “Forward this to everyone you know” by email is alive and well among older folks. My mom, before she died recently, used to forward me things from right-wing and/or gullible friends in her age cohort. I made many trips to Snopes.com hoping to set her straight.

Around 2008 must have been a turning point. She forwarded me an anti-Obama email she had received from someone and asked me what I thought. Rather than reply by email, I replied with a blog post: Bracing for the race baiting (June 2008)

New and/or Improved Featured Images

I also created a bunch of new featured images for old posts. They are meant to (a) look pretty in a list of posts, and (b) be the optimal size for when the posts are shared on social media (because the world’s priorities are terribly wrong).

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

I’m particularly fond of the image I found for Dechromium Cob, and the one I created for Jellypig.

Why the lapse?

“Whatever happened to your blog,” almost nobody has asked me over the past year. Since I’m the kind of person who boldly tackles the questions nobody wants to ask, here’s what happened:

• I got apathetic about updating it
• Life was happening
• I lost my internet domains
• Shit! (See the Cautionary Tale below)

So here we are.

I feel like blogging again

I’m going to try to keep things short and sweet. The three main categories here, as before are derived from the Edward Abbey quote that gave this blog its name:

• Pleasures: Sketches and Music mostly
• Adventures: Life in Madagascar and other trips outside my comfort zone.
• Crusades: Things that make my blood boil (such as You Know Who), and things that would make the world better if only everyone would listen to me (i.e. Bikes).

Cautionary Tale: Renew your Domains

I somehow did not see, or ignored the warnings that the un-hyphenated version of the domain (halfheartedfanatic.com) was about to expire. It expired and someone else grabbed it. It’s currently being put to no good use pumping affiliate links in Japanese to a store selling skin-care snake oil.

In other words: The person who snatched up the domain after it expired barely gives a shit that they have it, and I can probably get it back if I can ask the right person, nicely, in Japanese, and offer them a little money.

(I also lost tedjohnson.us, but I managed to get it back without having to ask in Japanese. That site is currently being revamped.)

In the meantime, I grabbed the hyphenated version of the domain (half-heartedfanatic.com), because it was available and because compound adjectives are supposed to be hyphenated anyway.

We’ll see how it goes

This has not been my first long lapse in blogging. Not that anyone noticed.