Thursday, April 13, 2006

I have decided to start a blog

Several people have asked me to start one, I've always said no. Maybe it's the aftereffects of a couple of days of high fever and extreme nausea this weekend, maybe it's the return of spring, but I'm actually starting one at last. And "at last" is about it, these days it seems everyone and their pet chihuahua "Sparky" has their own blog.

I certainly have the spare time for it. I finally seem to have the motivation. To judge by the many people who've told me, "You should write your own blog," I may even have the talent for it (not that a lack thereof ever stopped anyone before). But as someone who doesn't even check any real blogs on a regular basis...or at all, for that matter...I'm not sure where to begin.

After about 30 seconds of thought, I decided to put it here on Blogspot. It was simply the only free blog service I had heard of. I mean, aside from the obvious bottomless suckholes of vapidity known as MySpace, livejournal, and Xanga, of course. I'm neither a teenage girl nor an effeminate metrosexual.

Also, because I'm neither a teenage girl nor an effeminate metrosexual, I have no real clue when it comes to the visual design of websites. Oh, I've done a couple of my own websites, but they've all been to the same basic self-made template using bare-bones HTML written by hand in Notepad. And I've long been of the opinion that, if you have actual good informational content, the fonts and background images don't matter worth crap. But I'm sure Blogspot has a reasonably easy-to-use program to set your colorscheme and fonts, which I will undoubtedly figure out eventually.

One last thing...I needed a snappy name for the blog. As you have undoubtedly noticed (from this post alone, actually), brevity is not my strong suit. Wit, yes. Humor, yes. Amusing anecdotes, occasionally. But brevity? Not really my style of jokes. Wonkette was bound for glory once she picked that name. Drudge was born with the perfect name for a slimy muckraking blog. I can get away with using my real name on a private webforum, where most people are at least as sane and harmless as, well, Charles Whitman. Anyone on my favorite webforum who was likely to steal my identity and embezzle my checking account...is already serving time in Oklahoma. Any of them likely to show up on my doorstep weilding a fire ax and wearing nothing but lederhosen already did so (and boy wasn't that a fun weekend, eh, Lorpy?). But out here in the in blogosphere, I will run into...bloggers. Whiny teenagers with political opinions too insane for Fox News. Insane fangirls and fanboys who've already memorized daddy's Visa number and know the Greyhound ticket-ordering website by heart. Middle-aged men who pose as underage girls to have cybersex with other middle-aged men (and I'm just getting to the age where I'll be interesting to these perverts again). So, I think I'll need a catchy name...if not for an actual online alias, at least a title for the blog, something better than "Martin's Rant Page".

I'm occasionally known elsewhere online as BigBrother, due to my sister not wanting HER online friends to be able to track down her identity via mine. And of course, due to the fact that someday I want to be the dictatorial absolute ruler of at least a third of the world. Maybe half. But I'm sure there are at least a dozen "Big Brother Blogs" out there, ranging from reality tv fanboys to card-carrying members of the tinfoil hat brigade. So I'll need something better.

After several suggestions from family and friends, I decided upon CAPITE TERRAM. That's Latin for "Seize the Planet", analogous to the old saying of Carpe Diem, or "Seize the Day". It fits my personality: Militant and geeky at the same time, with an overtone of dark humor.

It will probably take a couple of weeks at least for me to get settled in here, familiarize myself with the blogspot software, write up a few rants into a format suitable for posting here, and figure out what sort of layout to use. So if you don't see any changes or updates for a while, have patience, stick the URL in your bookmarks list and check back in six months, just like any other one-person amateur website.

Hmmm...maybe it's not yet time for me to get my own blog, after all. "cutedogsparky.blogspot.com" still isn't taken, so apparently the blogosphere hasn't hit critical mass yet.

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1 Comments:

Blogger RancerDS said...

Nice "starting" post. Happy New Years for 2008 and hope you keep adding to it, regardless of the number of readers.

12:57 AM, January 05, 2008  

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