Burning Down the House

The pain of death is the joy of rebirth.

– End of Evangelion

I’ve been meaning to do something here for a long time, but I haven’t known what. I’d been using a static site generator that never made the jump to Python 3, and the hosting provider I’d used for years went horribly sideways. In a panic, I took the most recent build, uploaded it to Netlify, and trusted that eventually I would find enough motivation to do something with it.

Time, as it does, passed, and this place lay stagnant, un-updated and un-updateable, a lingering vestige of a different era, ghost of a web that used to be.

And then, one day, a very rich person decided to ruin the Bird Site. When I couldn’t take it any more, I resolved to retire my account there. I had mixed feelings about deleting everything I’d ever tweeted, but ultimately found some acceptance. And yet.

And yet. Doing that would mean wrecking some blog posts that embedded tweeted content, and that didn’t feel great either, and fixing them would mean migrating the site – with posts going back twenty years! That seemed like a lot of work, and frankly “do a lot of computer work for free” isn’t nearly as much fun as it used to be. Moreover, I strongly doubt that the stuff I posted on LiveJournal in 2002 is really adding all that much value to the world.

The hardest decision was also the easiest decision.

I burned down my blog so that I could burn down my Twitter account.

And now, here we are: a blank slate, tabula rasa. A new beginning.

I might eventually bring over a curated set of old posts. I might not, and just move forward.

I don’t know what this will be yet.

But at least now it can be something, and that’s not nothing.