Category: Blogging

(I still have a bunch of “wrapping up 2007” posts sitting in my to-be-written queue. Er. The world still needs to know the story of Losing My Heart To A Starship Trooper: The RPG!)
Bye bye 2008. You were a good year. A hard year, but good.
I handed in a thesis for a Master of Science, which dominated things somewhat; I spent most of the year shedding responsibilities and activities to create space in which to work. It was, in fact, bloody hard work, more than I had expected. But the good news is, it was tremendously educational. I learned more than expected in exact proportion to how much I worked harded than expected. It was a really good experience. And handing in ten years after I completed previous significant chunk of uni work was also a nice touch.
So that was the “hard” bit; for the “good” bit, I started last year by proposing to my Caroline. This happened in the first minutes after midnight on new year’s day but we kept the news under our hats for almost a week. It has been marvellous to be engaged, I highly recommend it. I understand that what comes next is also rather good. Anyway, we’re being civilly united in three weeks, so if you want to see me in a kilt and Cal in a dress, drop me an email soon.
Those were the two big forces in my year. There was much else of interest, but nothing on the scale of those two. In my online life, well, this blog reached its fifth anniversary, and I thoroughly enjoyed sharing abundant Friday linky to clear my bookmarks each week. More significantly, with much good help I started a campaign that got a lot of people writing letters and may possibly have had some impact on government decision-making. And I joined HoffSpace, the social networking system for David Hasslehoff. I have non-bot HoffFriends!
Finally: turns out this didn’t make it to the Dr Horrible video selection, but you can still catch my cameo in Jon’s excellent Evil League of Evil application, the Embezzler. See it, and also the sweet Baby Hurricane application, here.
Laters, 2008.

Kinda incredibly, today marks five years of blogging. My blog can pull on its big backpack and go off to school for the first time.
939 entries, over 250K words, and I still haven’t internalised this blogging thing. I still see myself as “person who blogs” rather than “blogger”. Maybe that’s because I don’t have a niche? If my blog was a definite sort of thing, then I can imagine starting to identify as the person or does that thing. But I’m still not sure, after five years, what I’m doing with this blog, and maybe that stops me calling myself “blogger”.
I think I know why I do it though. Well, there are lots of reasons – its nice to write stuff and know people read it, of course. Its even nicer when people talk back to you, in comments (4250 of those so far) or in person. It supports my vanity and my humility both; vanity because people read at all, humility because stupid things I say get thrown back at me in comments scant minutes later.
It’s a good way to feel like I’m staying in touch with a lot of people I wouldn’t otherwise stay in touch with. In part, this blog fills the role of the old SCFBBS that was a big part of my university social life – I feel like the posts on this blog form part of a bigger conversation with many people I like and even some I don’t know at all.
Most of all, I have realised that I blog because it makes me think. It prompts me to engage with things I’m reading, with issues of the day, with odd events that happen to me, and apply my brain to them. Transforming thoughts into words is a fascinating process and this blog nudges me go through that process for all kinds of things that might go unexamined otherwise. It helps me figure out what I want to think about something. It lets me try out ideas. It often reveals thoughts I didn’t know that I had; more frequently still, it makes me generate thoughts I certainly wouldn’t reach any other way.
So thanks to Iona, who first sowed the idea of blogging in my head. Thanks to David, who actually dragged me in and whose generous hosting of the additiverich collective has continued without pause. Thanks to all of you who read and comment and linky. I still don’t know exactly what sort of blog this is, but I hope it is some kind of interesting.
And as a small reward of sorts for those who’ve made it through my navel-gazing, I give you:
every From The Morgue post on one loooong page.

For those not subscribed to my travel email list, morgue at large, here are links to posts about my recent two-week trip to the UK:
London: “..wandering towards the west end from Liverpool Street station on my first morning back – here I’m in a Bangladeshi street market, now I’m surrounded by families come to London to photograph the sights, now around the corner I’m in the square mile with pin-striped twenty-somethings discarding cigarettes, now edging back out of the City and I’m surrounded by white van men scoffing bacon butties and reading the Daily Sport…”
Winchester for the wedding: “It’s a beautiful town, with ancient buildings, King Arthur’s Round Table (built in the 13th century or so), Jane Austen’s house, and a meadow walk that inspired Keats ode “To Autumn” – but how could any of those attractions possibly compare to the sheer joy to be had at that wedding?”
Edinburgh: “I admit it – when the train came rolling into Edinburgh and I looked up and saw the Salisbury Crags and Calton Hill and the Jacob’s Ladder stair – my heart was beating faster”
[morgueatlarge is where my travel stories go. You can scan the full archives here – they cover Europe, North America, the Middle East, and a few other points of interest. Subscribe with a blank email to morgueatlarge-subscribe@topica.com if you are so inclined…]