Echoes in the aether

I’ve had this blog for over 20 years.

Again.

I’ve had this blog for over TWENTY YEARS!

It would be more impressive if I’d made entries every day instead of letting months (years?) go by without checking in; the achievement instead being more the financial stability to keep the $8/month going for so long. I don’t want to calculate how much this site has cost me over it’s life, or do the calculus of whether or not it’s been worth it. I think it has. I think it’s been worth it.

Back in long ago days, when this was an original Blogger blog, sincerely one of the first on the fledgling platform (I’m sure there were already thousands of blogs by the time I got into it in January of 2001 [Blogger started in August of 1999], but it wasn’t really popular after it’s first year and I was getting in on the ground floor), I had a few readers. My girlfriend at the time, Meg of Mightgirl.com fame, a couple of real life friends, more internet friends that I met through chat rooms (I think… the memory fades), and then some random people here and there. I probably had dozens or maybe up to a hundred visitors daily. Very very minor league numbers but they were actual people, actually reading what I pinged out into the great open expanse of the internet.

I used to make self-deprecating statements about how no one reads my blog and I just do it for my own amusement… which was partially true, but not really accurate, was it? People did actually read it. Not a lot of them. Not enough to make any appreciable difference in my content… but there were live eyeballs taking in data that I was creating.

Now, though, it really is no one. At least I think so. The last comment (from an internet friend I’ve never actually met) was from 2013. My updates have been few and far between, and more often than not they’re much like this one. “Can you believe how long I’ve had this blog?” “I should post more” “Crazy how this is still here, amIright??”. You know the drill.

So now that it really IS no one it feels very much like talking to myself without knowing what I’m going to say. It’s a weird feeling. I’m going to hit post on this and send this message in a bottle out into the still empty internet (for the internet is so vast, it shall always be empty regardless of how much we throw into it), and that will fill me with…what? Accomplishment? Resignation? A little dopamine hit thinking that osmeone might read it? I don’t know. It’s all just echoes in the aether…