Hello Again, World

I have a habit of starting lots of blogs, tumblrs, and newsletters, writing enthusiastically in them for a few years, and then letting them fade away. For a while, I’ve had it in my head to pull all of my old forgotten posts together into a central place, but the effort seemed insurmountable. I wasn’t sure I even remembered what all my old blogs were.

(Spoiler: I didn’t. In fact, I’d completely forgotten about my first blog, the one with the most total posts, which I wrote from 2010-2014.)

Enter AI. I have a ton of thoughts about AI, many of which I’ll be sharing as I blog more, but for now let’s just say it made pulling this archive together so much more achievable. From helping me find the various archives via the Wayback Machine or on my old hard drives, flagging the existence of my oldest and biggest blog, writing import scripts to parse posts into markdown, iterating quickly through design options, etc., I just wouldn’t have gotten this done without AI - at least not anytime soon.

It’s been fun reading through the old archives, browsing posts I’d completely forgotten about. My favorite find so far? This post about a puzzle hunt I ran at Parts & Crafts in 2011, which again, I’d completely forgotten about:

Pancakes were a running theme in all of the letters - as I mentioned in a previous entry, Dr. Dangerous was ostensibly at a hunt in Lichtenstein where all the puzzles were made of pancakes. We all made the batter together, then I shooed the hunters out of the kitchen while I made them a series of pancakes in patterns of numbers, such as {3,.,1,4,1,5} and {1,1,2,3,5,8} and {1,2,3,5,7,11}. Once they figured out a pattern, they made me the next puzzle piece.

What a delight to remember. I should do this with my niece and nephew now - they’re old enough.

Anyway. Some posts read like I could’ve written them yesterday. Others feel like a snapshot of a person I no longer am. Each time you say Hello, World, you’re a new and different person saying it to a new and different world. Feels especially true this time.

Regardless - hello again, world.