Some things have to change

Hey there, everyone.

It looks like we're officially moving here, and Blogger is our new home.  For those of you who are just joining now, the home for this blog up until now has always been http://ddrkirbyisq.xanga.com/.  Actually, before that, it was http://www.xanga.com/ddrkirbyisq, which now just gives you a redirect.

My first post on Xanga was made on Wednesday, September 15, 2004, and was titled "Starcraft bogus rant 1: Overmind Broodlings".  That was just a copy-paste dump of a completely random conversation I had on AIM with a friend of me spewing out nonsense that I made up about non-existant Starcraft units.  That was about 9 years ago.  Nine =years=!  I've been blogging for this entire time, pretty regularly (though my frequency has slipped a little bit in recent days).  I've been writing, writing, just typing out my thoughts on anything and everything, all throughout high school and college.  They always say those are the most transformative years of your life, don't they?  I certainly changed a lot...

If I had things my way, I would probably just stay there on Xanga.  Why?  Because I don't really care about being hipster or whether I'm behind the times, or anything.  Xanga has always done what I've needed it to, and there's no reason for me to move, no reason for me to leave all of my past and history behind.  I don't like change, and more than that, I value consistency.  I take pride in being the one that stayed behind and kept on writing about my life.  Because I don't do things that I don't see value in.  I wouldn't have gotten into blogging in the first place if all it was was "something cool that other people were doing".  What was the problem with AIM that caused people to move to gchat?  Nothing, really.  I still use my AIM account.  Why would I leave something behind when I can keep it going?  Isn't it sad to see all of those blogs that your friends make that have 3 or 4 posts on them?  Isn't it sad to always see that most recent post, titled "I'm still here", ensuring everyone that no, I'm going to keep posting, there's no way this will be the last post, yet...it ends up being that way anyways?

I've made 3,758 posts over there at my Xanga site.  Impressive, isn't it?  But at the end of May, my friend notified me that the Xanga team had made this post, which is essentially the "okay guys...this is it...we're sinking unless we can scrape together something new".  Of course, they seem hopeful about relaunching on Wordpress and everything, but moving to a paid blogging model, combined with the fact that Xanga is already so much of a dinosaur...I think this is the time when everyone's going to abandon ship.

At that point it was up to me to decide what to do for my blog.  It seemed pretty clear that I shouldn't hope for Xanga to pull its act together, so it was time to migrate elsewhere.  I considered Wordpress (dot com), but a lot of the customizability is paid, so I couldn't even find a nice monospaced font layout, etc.  I actually considered moving over to LiveJournal, since that seemed like the closest thing to what I already had.  Community-based blogging, with a sort of...I don't know...just, the "feel" of it is really similar.  I've always had a soft spot in my heart for LJ.  But I don't know what the health of LJ is--who's to say that it won't meet the same end as Xanga did?  For all the LJ users out there, I sincerely hope it doesn't.  I like LJ a lot, from what I've seen.  Xanga has added a lot of cruft (think MySpace), so I can understand why it's not as appealing to new users, but it seems like LJ is still what LJ has always been, which I think is great.

Anyways, I remembered about Blogger/Blogspot and decided that this was actually the solution that I've been looking for.  It hits all the criteria--has comments, I like the style and interface, the customization is what I want, and I can crosspost to FB and Twitter with Twitterfeed.  I could actually crosspost to G+ if I wanted to, but that requires me to use my G+ profile name instead of DDRKirby(ISQ), which I don't like, and...okay, let's face it, G+ isn't really too important nowadays (has it ever been?).  So that's okay.

Yes, I'm losing the community-based blogging that Xanga had, but...to be honest, that's been gone for such a long time now, because my blogging community was made up of my friends from high school, and -that- whole phase only lasted a short while...maybe a year, maybe two years?  Something like that.

So this is my new home.  As much as I cling onto the past, sometimes we have to move on.  Just like I had to say goodbye to my high school, and just like I had to say goodbye to college.  In some ways, I still feel like my premium studio room back at Munger is my real home.  I miss it a lot.  But I'm not there anymore, I'm at a new place.  Some things have to change.

I've been changing a lot.  I've always said that I changed a lot in high school.  I changed significantly in college too, just more "subtly", if that makes sense.  I think the change now is different--more rapid, more intense.  It makes sense, when I think about it.  I've always believed I'm a water-type, and I think the change this time is more like splashes, more like ripples from something, rather than the natural ebb-and-flow waves that are normally here.

But the change is still good, still welcome.  Even though I wasn't intending on moving this blog, I'm sure it'll be a good move.  Things already look cleaner, don't they?  How do you feel about it?

I think my biggest fear is that I'd stop posting.  I'm already worried about that.  Is that silly?  I think it's just because I've seen it happen again and again, and I know that I'm posting a bit less nowadays too.  It's still supposed to be the same blog, really, but because it's a new home, it just feels like I'm starting something anew, and in that sense, it doesn't feel like it's "proven".  I haven't shown to myself that this is something that I'm going to keep up with.  And I'm scared of that.

It might seem silly...I mean, if I don't want to keep posting, why should I force it?  I don't know...I think that's just a value that I hold very strongly--to stick to what I start, to keep going.  That's always been my way.

I guess the reason that my posting has been slowing down is both because of a lack of "free lazy time" (which bothers me), but also just that I have things that I simply don't want to say to everyone anymore.  It makes me sad, because I've always been such an open book, but I know that there are some things that are better left unsaid.  Perhaps it just seems a little bit less "tactful" to me now, to talk aloud about these things now.  Weird...why have I always been so vocal in the first place, when I'm such a quiet person?  I remember that it made perfect sense, that I needed to express myself in this way because I don't express myself with my voice, but somehow, that doesn't seem as relevant as it used to.

Maybe it's because I'm finding more in my actual life?  Maybe it's because I have less to be bitter about, less to rant about, less to vent about...maybe it's because I'm simply less lonely?  I'm not sure.

But let's forget about all of that for a second, and just be happy to be here.  It's our new home.  We don't know what the future may hold, but that's okay.  It's all gonna be okay.

And of course, we can take a moment to remember all of the memories and thoughts that I poured into the old blog.  Of course, I'm archiving it all, so I still have it, but it won't be in the same form, it won't be in the same place...in a way, it'll be "gone", even though I'll still have the records around.  It's a shame that even the links in this post itself may someday be defunct.

Even if I didn't have all of the records, though, it would still be meaningful.  It wouldn't be a waste, would it?  Of course not.  To be honest, I probably won't look through the archives very much at all--it just helps me feel less sad to have them there...makes it feel like I haven't lost anything.  So it wouldn't make much practical difference, if the whole site was just -gone- (though I'm so, so thankful that it isn't that way).  Each one of those 3,758 posts that I made might not have much significance now, but they all carried significance at that time.

Ahh, it looks like I'm still writing long and drawn-out posts sometimes, huh?  It's a great feeling, to know that some things haven't changed...