A Brief History

In 1998, I started blogging as a junior-going-on-senior in high school. I don't believe the term "blog" was in our collective lexicon yet back then. I called it Rice World, "rice" being an anagram of my name Eric and stuck as a nickname for a reason unbeknown to me, and authored some embarrassingly bad writing forthwith.

I've blogged on and off since then. Rice World shimmied up to v5.0 and a full-blown, if scantily visited, general interest site with multiple contributors, pop culture reviews, et cetera. Hard to believe it's been over twelve years.

In hindsight, it's no surprise that the volume of my writing diminished over time. Rice World ceased operations in 2003, the same year I tricked UCLA into giving me a degree in Computer Science given I attended (no exaggeration) roughly 25% of all classes. On a side note, I mildly regret sleepwalking through college--I ignorantly passed up some life experiences that I will never have another crack at. Real Life began, and endless free time doing whatever I wanted in front of a computer ended.

I still blogged occasionally, just under the guise of simply myself. The median lapse between posts is somewhere around a month, although I always intend to write more often and often compose half-baked entries that get scrapped. Ostensibly, my excuse is I've become a better writer, so I can't just put anything up. Realistically, I'm just lazy.

From 2005 until several days ago, I hosted my own blog. I ran an Apache server on my PC and powered the backend with Perl-based Blosxom. This machination managed to survive longer than any other incarnation (mostly due to the aforementioned inertia), including a move from my parent's house to my own condo, and then my condo to an apartment in New York. It's not as impressive as I'm trying to make it sound. Readership probably fit on the fingers of one hand, so the occasional downtime was unimportant. All I had to do from place to place was punch a few ports open in my router and voila.

But no more. You see, my PC finally ate it. I'm back at home in L.A. for Christmas, and my box just bricked out in New York, as informed by my roommate Leo. And considering I won't be back to the city until late January (absurd business school breaks--another topic for another time), I've decided it's time for yet another change. Hello, Blogger.

***

The blogosphere has changed so much. Going the way of the Dodo is long-form writing, it being replaced by 140 character Tweets and Facebook updates. This, at the risk of sounding curmudgeonly, is a damn shame. Damn shame. As mentioned earlier, my writing at the beginning of Rice World was putrid sewage. But within a few years, I got much better, and I believe it is solely due to the volume of writing I did in that span. The more I wrote, the more I began to understand it, and the more I began to pick up tricks of the trade from reading other good writers. It's a nice, compounding snowball effect, and I believe this effect is withering in the face of the Twitter assault. Whereas before one had to slave over essays, carefully structuring sentences and staying aware of flow, now one can simply blurb one-liners, non sequitur. What a damn shame.

This blog will take a stand against that. I hereby pledge to blog thoughtfully, to respect the craft of writing, to confine snarky one-liners to Facebook. So welcome, dear Reader. If you've made it down this far, I hope you come back in the future for more.

P.S. Merry Christmas (a complete coincidence)

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