This post was originally shared on Medium.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that stress kills a boner.
Tag: “gosh I hope I can write more”
Throughout the month of August, I'm aiming to write 25 blog posts. This is post #19 of 25. Find them all in the "blogathon 2014" category.
With this post, I’m declaring the August 2014 blogathon over. I could probably try to squeeze in another hasty post, but you know what? It’s vacation, I’m in Moab, and it’s time to finish things up.
Naturally, I want to take a look at how this crazy experiment turned out.
I just went through my old archives and hid about 70 blog posts that I felt were either embarrassing or just not worth keeping up anymore. Most of them were posts from middle school and high school, so for a lot of my friends, from before they even knew me. This is part of an effort this summer to change the scope and audience of my blog, which is something I’d rather just do than talk much about.
Along the way, I also made a few changes to previous posts:
- For accessibility purposes, almost all images have been given alternative text.
- Some typos were corrected.
- A post from February 11, previously entitled “Astronomers got gypped,” has been renamed, “Astronomers got screwed,“ with an accompanying editor’s note at the bottom. While I generally don’t care to modify old content, I don’t feel comfortable using “gypped,” a racist term, in the title of a post.
The posts that are left are those that I would feel comfortable with anyone reading, although hopefully with the understanding that the earlier ones were written in the early days of both my own blogging and blogging as a medium in general, and thus I was still figuring out what I wanted to say. It should go without saying, but although they present a glimpse of who I was, they certainly don’t necessarily represent who I am now. Feel free to read and enjoy them (or cringe at them), but keep it in mind that a long time has passed between their publishing date and today.
Hopefully, this will pave the way for a more interesting blog in the future.
For a while, I’ve tried to keep my blog relatively family-friendly. I’ve hidden more vulgar or objectionable things behind “Read More” links, and I avoid swearing. I’ve also, in the past, decided not to post about some things I find really interesting because they deal with culturally taboo subjects, like sexuality.
While I appreciate not trying to offend others, I feel like my blog is my space, and if I feel hampered in what I can post because I’m afraid I’ll tick some people off or disturb their sensibilities, I think I’m ultimately dealing myself a disservice. A blog exists to be written in, and though there are many excuses as to why I haven’t posted much lately, one of them–the question of content–is easily dealt with.