Kilo

Well, this is wild: this is officially the 1,000th blog post on Timmy's House of Sprinkles! This obscure corner of the Internet has been chugging along for (gulp) a little over thirteen years now!

I started the blog immediately after moving to California, and you will not be shocked to learn that I had no particular plan or goal for it, then or now. It's kind of fascinating to dive back into the archives and see how stuff has changed. Those early posts were much more slice-of-life-y, recapping outings with friends and family or reacting to cultural differences on the West Coast. Over time posts grew gradually longer, then a little shorter, but still too long. I've gone through a lot of phases along the years: guides to personal finance, a developer's log for my video-game modding, and detailed backpacking travelogues. There are perennial topics I return to, like politics, but I've now accepted that this blog's bread and butter are my aimless but heartfelt reviews of books and video games.

Thirteen years feels really old for a personal web site. It seems like most people abandon their online outposts after a few years, or proactively nuke them. There's good reason for that! All of us are constantly changing, none of us are the same people we were thirteen years ago, and there's an accelerating trend of holding people accountable for the sins of their past selves (see: James Gunn). I know that I frequently cringe when I dive back into the aughts and read my old posts: I sound so pompous, so conceited, so sure that I'm right. The older I get, the more I realize how little I know, and I think the more humble tone of recent years is apt. But I'm also sure that I'll be just as embarrassed by this particular post in thirteen years as I am today about those first ones.

When I first started the blog I thought it'd be cool if it ran for a year. Will it live to see 2,000 posts? Almost certainly not! Even if I wanted to continue it, Google seems determined to kill off all of the services that I enjoy: after axing Reader and Picasa, I imagine that Blogger's days are numbered, and I'm no more likely to bother moving this blog to a new platform than I've been to rehost my hundreds of old photo albums. Still, it's admirably served my need to natter away about stuff that interests me. Occasionally it interests someone else, more often it disappears into the void, but I feel much better for having said it. It's my little patch of grass on the Internet, and I'm grateful to have it.