Ten Years: The Aluminum Anniversary!

Hmm...I uh, I suppose with everything that's happening with the postal service, the card must have got lost in the mail. Right? Wait, what's that you say? What card? Why the "congratulations on this important anniversary" of course.

"How dare you question my sabotage of the post office's ability to handle the
increased volume due to the election just because I was appointed by and am an
 open supporter of the one candidate who stands to benefit from my malfeasance!"

-Postmaster General DeJoy, playing the "conservative feigning

indignity after being called out for something he did" card

I'm kidding, I would actually never do that.
Although if I do, it'd totally be your fault.
I hope you can live with that...

Because obviously you remembered that today is the ten year anniversary of this very blog which you are reading right now, and there's absolutely no reason for me to drop subtle hints about it. Nor is there any reason for me to feel hurt by your thoughtlessness, and to hang on to that feeling, bottling it up for years, only to have it erupt out unexpectedly and for no outwardly discernible reason. Probably at someone who had nothing to do with it, a driver who cuts me off in traffic or a server at a restaurant or something.

Like Batman's origin story, you didn't
ask for it, but here it is anyway.

But for real, can you believe that it's been ten years? Me neither, although the measuring of time doesn't require belief, just a calendar. Hey, want to hear the story about how I started this blog? Of course you don't, but again, this is a blog so I don't know if you've read it or not. So I'm going to go ahead and sum it up, because I feel like I should do something to mark the occasion. And you can read it, or you can just tell me you read it. Doesn't matter, there's not going to be a quiz.

Ok, ten years ago I'd just moved across country and was looking for work and had an unbelievable, like, pandemic amount of time on my hands. So I did what any rational person would do: I dedicated myself to the job search. I got my resumé together, went on LinkedIn, I called in favors-I adulted the shit out of it.

"It says here you have a bachelors in theatre? Is that...is that a real thing?"

-Every job interview I've ever gone to

Above: an excerpt from
my angry youth.

And when none of that worked, I devoted my ample free time to making a digital comic spoof of J. J. Abrams' Star Trek movie. I had very strong opinions about it and if the internet needs anything, it's strong opinions about Star Trek. I mean, here. It's amazing what one can do when one has an overly critical and probably toxic level of fandom and nothing else going on in one's life. I spent so much time on it, I figured I might as well put it on the internet where everyone can see my shame and so, blog. After that, I opted for the much less time-consuming tack of writing posts and inserting pictures with captions and here we are. It kind of became a hobby and here I am, ten years later. Oh, and the traditional gift for that is aluminum, in case you were wondering. Which you weren't.

"According to my calculations
you've basically wasted your life."

-Some jerk mathematician

You know, being stuck inside for most of the last four months, I've been thinking about this a lot, and say I spent on average an hour and a half on each one. If you add that up it comes to two-thousand, one hundred and six hours or eighty-seven point seven five days. So just under three months. And that might not sound like a lot over ten years, but I looked it up and in that same amount of time I could have become fluent in German (750 hours), learned to play guitar (720 hours), and still had five hundred hours left over to pick up a marketable skill, like coding or something.

Instead I have fourteen hundred and four blog posts about video games, sci-fi and how Republicans are basically the worst. Anyway thanks for sticking with me all these years, the best is yet to come! Huh? Yeah, I'm totally kidding. I mean, who talks like that? I've got maybe another month of two more of this in me and the quality will be kind of hit or miss. Maybe dive into the back catalogue? Around 2014-2017? Good stuff back there.

Pictured: basically what I've done two or three times a week for ten years.