10 years

I can’t remember now what I was thinking when I started this blog 10 years ago today. I mean, I do remember the specific exact reason why I started, posting that first post about inviting Dashan to our wedding. But I don’t think there was any more thought to it than recording the exchange.

However the blog quickly took on the characteristic that has sustained it for this last decade. What I like to think of as my ‘external memory palace’ – a place where I can keep a record of all the minutiae and internet detritus that comes across my screen on a daily basis, or other quirky footnotes from something I have read (usually in the LRB) that I want to preserve. For a long time I was frustrated that I would be able to half recall something I had seen some years before, but it was lost to time, never to be recovered.

In that sense, the blog has served fairly well as a resource to call back to when that half remembered thought emerges. Two inflection points in the blog that have made it is what it is. The first was in January 2014. Up to that point, I had been posting every weekday, but leaving out weekends and holidays. I was keeping close track of my metrics (I have tried to keep the views on the blog as low as possible, making sure it was hidden from search engines and not sharing the url. But I still noticed there was one view of the blog everyday. Now I do not know if that was an artifact of my own views, a random view from a bot (most probably) or a real person. But the thought there was one person checking the blog everyday inspired me to make a post every day. That is something that I have some small pride to have maintained for over seven years now, with 2 exceptions – the days my two daughters were born when I had other things on my mind.

The second major structural change to the blog arose because of the number of entries (now over 3,000). This brought its own problems that even though I knew I had made an entry, I could not find it again. This reached an impasse when I was trying to find the music video for Janelle Monáe - Q.U.E.E.N. (25 May 2013). That led to one of the major overhauls of the blog in around 2016, where I laboriously went back through the thousands of posts and manually added a tag to each one.

Otherwise the daily update has proceeded without much difficulty. The vast majority of entries are done every day on the day – usually in the morning. There are times when there will be a spate of things that I come across that I want to add, so there may be 4 or 5 days planned out in advance. Other days I will be absolutely lost and have no idea what to post – so I will wait and generally later in the day something will come up that I want to add.

Looking back over the years, there are definitely trends of interests that have risen and fallen. I haven’t done a crossword in years! Same with flash fiction. I was also much more prepared to go to lengths to embed weird music players in the past that I don’t do now. Chess has been picking up in popularity more recently, as has a new series of entries about the 100 Mountains of Japan. There are also a number of constants such as Art and Poetry that have remained the mainstays over the years.

My favourite posts are the ones where I get to bring together a number of different sources on a single topic – where I have also gone back and added to over the years as I discovery more information about it. The translation of Du Fu is one of these. The same with the one on Brecht and Benjamin playing chess together.

As to how often the blog actually serves it purpose and lets me search back for something half remembered – the answer is not that often! Although on the occasions when I have had something bugging me and gone back through the blog and found what I was thinking about – it has been very satisfying to be able to find it. But it is not infallible, there have been times I was surprised the thing I was looking for was never recorded – which at least gave me a new entry for the next day.

Personally, when this blog started I was on the cusp of getting married, still living in the small apartment in Ultimo. Now, 10 years later, we have moved twice – to each time to bigger houses to accommodate a growing family. There have been births and deaths in the family, the pandemic, innumerable work dramas and stresses. But the constancy and existence of this record is and remains a great source of comfort that I have been able to work on a project for a sustained period of time.

As to what things will look like 10 years hence, hopefully that will be the subject of the next entry.