I wasn’t sure what to expect when I started blogging on WordPress about three years ago. I’ve always liked to write, and I guess like a lot of people, I’ve always had the sneaking (and almost always incorrect) suspicion that people might be interested in my opinions on things. So I started this blog, and then after a year and a half it just kind of, well, died.
There’s a few reasons for it. Foremost among them was the success of Achtung Panzercow. Amazingly, people did actually want to read what I thought about World of Warcraft in general, and protection warriors and tanking in particular. It’s not like I’m famous or anything, but I figure that getting several posts linked on WoW Insider, which is a fairly big fish in the WoW gaming Internet community, and picking up over 225,000 hits in not quite two years, means that I must be doing something a little bit right. In contrast, my humble little personal home here was averaging, oh, I don’t know, about five hits a day. Stuff that 5 people read versus stuff that 500 people read. Hmm, let me think where I should put my time and effort.
Secondly, I got burned out on politics. I didn’t mean for Moose Droppings to become a political blog, but with the 2008 election in full swing, and my side (conservatism) getting a Compton-style beatdown, there was a lot to talk about. Unfortunately, very few of my Internet-based friends other than my wife agree with me politically, and some days I just felt like a lone salmon trying to swim upstream, with no backup. So after we entered the era of Hope-n-Change, I took some time off away from caring about politics, and just never really bothered to come back here. But now it’s 2010, and things look a hell of a lot redder from where I sit than they did a year and a half ago. That doesn’t mean I’m going to be as political as I was in ’08. I know that, given my hardcore social and fiscal conservative beliefs, compared against the beliefs of people who will visit here, most will not agree with me. That’s fine, I’m not going to change what I think. But politics aren’t what I’m about. They’re just something I talk about from time to time.
Finally…I look back on some of the stuff I wrote in 2007 and 2008 and I cringe. Not that it was particularly awful or anything, but some of it was really whiny. There’s a reason for that, we were going through some pretty rough times back then. My wife and I ended up peeled away from both our families for reasons somewhat beyond our control, and found ourselves in a strange town neither of us wanted to be in, with little to no backup, right when we needed that backup the most. The multiple shocks of losing her mother, losing her grandmother, moving here to Durham, and other family issues inside of a year sent my wife into two years of clinical depression that she’s just pulled out of, now replaced by total exhaustion as we both fight to raise a smart, high-energy, headstrong child without any chance to catch our breath or get our mental energy back. We’re still broke. Our cars still barely run. We’re still shoveling money toward our debts as fast as we can and they never seem to go away. Every time something good happens, something bad seems to follow it and overshadow it. That’s a state of mind not exactly conducive to writing entertaining or funny (or even accurate) blog posts that people might actually give a damn about reading.
So why come back and start my non-WoW blog up again? Honestly, I really don’t know. I’ve got a couple of ideas about things that don’t really fit over at Achtung Panzercow, so where else am I going to put them, right? I thought about blowing every single post away and starting Moose Droppings over completely fresh, but in the end, I’ve decided to leave the old stuff up here. I don’t know how frequently I’ll update, or even what I’ll write about. You may find my views don’t agree with yours, and if that’s true, I hope you understand that nothing here is personal (if it ever is, trust me, it’ll be very obvious) and everyone is welcome.
So welcome to Moose Droppings 1.1. It’s not a whole new version…more of a graphical update.
Moose Droppings 