10 years of blerging.

Happy birfday tooo meeeeee…i

Thanks to everyone who’s read, shared, and commented on any or all of the 848 previous posts over the last ten years.ii It’s been a hell of a journey thus far, spanning three domain names, a couple of careers and degrees, dozens of cars, close to a hundred different visited cities, some love, some (whisper it) hate, and who even knows how chapters in my personal story.iii

While personal blogging continues to wax and wane in terms of its broader popularity,iv its impact is as undeniable as ever. Here, there are no algorithms telling you what’s hot and what’s not, what’s trending and what’s passé, nor what’s too gauche or “uninteresting” for you. Here, there are no “like” buttons, no left swipes nor right swipes, just words on a page for you to digest as best you can, but always here for you to come back to. Easily searchable, cleanly archived, and owner-operated, a blog like Contravex might be a needle in the web’s quadrillion page haystack, but it’s worth keeping up, even when there have never been more external demands on my time.

What continues to fuel me as much as anything, and hard to believe though it may be, is that we’re still at the very beginning of the self-publishing revolution. There will certainly be many more twists and turns on the road ahead, but as social media platforms increasingly turn to algorithms to sort out the lemme from the palea, I have every confidence that high signal-to-noise ratio blogs run by one individual (or a select few) will continue to carry evermore weight and importance in the increasingly interconnected world to come. As ever, you never know what kind of doors will be opened when you open up your heart and mind to the world, and there’s really no more avant-gardev platform than a blog with your own name on the masthead. So thank you for making this platform as powerful and enjoyable as it is. I look forward to sharing much more of this wonderful journey in the years ahead.

Now if you’ll raise a glass of vişinată or țuică and sing along with me in my mother’s mother tongue :

Multi Ani Traiasca, Multi Ani Traiasca, La Multi Ani!
___ ___ ___

  1. And yes, to Satoshi’s white paper, which turned 10 last week. Never forget the white paper!!
  2. That’s one post every 4.3 days, even factoring in the hiatus from December 2012 to February 2014. Without the hiatus, that’d be one post every 3.8 days, or 293 words per active day, just on these pages! Never mind all the comments, tweets, IRC, and everything else besides…
  3. How does one even count chapters in a life ? I’ll know on my deathbed and probably not before!
  4. I’m still on the fence about whether the highly popular medium platform counts as personal blogging. I’m inclined to say that it does, much like blogspot before it, even if the articles posted thereon will eventually and inevitably link rot without their author’s even knowing until it’s too late
  5. To quote Sir Peter Cook :

    Whatever happened to the avant-garde ? It was a very useful term 100, 70, or maybe 40 years ago for it convered the notions of newness, wit, inspiration, originality — or at least work that was in the direct slipstream of the highly original. It also played, from time to time, with shock and bravado. Yet now we are hesitant to reinvent the term : are we thus feebly eschewing the value of the new, the witty, the original, the daring ?

4 thoughts on “10 years of blerging.

  1. shinohai says:

    Congratulations Pete, and I raise my glass to 10 more years of blogging! [~]D

  2. […] and awaiting restocking.ix My one criticism of the instantly iconic, or at least challengingly avant-garde, leather monogram cut-away vests is that the singular pocket is too small to fit an iPhone. You […]

  3. […] The decade mark feels like it a long time ago now… but maybe it’s just the time dilation of COVID playing tricks on my mid-memory! ↩ […]

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