Out With the Old, In With the New

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Something to kick this off. It's hard to justify yet another personal blog, but I'm content to see if this evolves. If I'm honest, this is the same species of thing as the home pages which littered the World Wide Web in the early days. It may turn out that the only difference here is that I won't be talking about my pet cat.

I did use to have a website, created in Dreamweaver no less, which will have its life support switched off some time in the next year. (Update: Here up on the right is what it looked like at the end) After a gap of several years I've just written another front page post; but I won't be adding to the content, which is mainly about music and random eccentric interests of mine. You can see it here if you want, at Mark's Lists. (Update: No you can't, it is now well and truly lost from view) For now. Having set up a couple of blogs on Blogspot this year, it seems to me this is entirely sufficient for what I want, which is mainly an outlet for writing. I'll say more about writing another time, and maybe more about the other blogs. At the moment I only want to say that they're subject specific, while here I'd like to cover diverse interests.

This won't get very personal. I'd never criticise someone who wants to use a blog like that, but most such blogs are only really for the writer themselves to read, to use as a sounding board I guess. I'm too British and not young enough to be that open. On the downside, I predict that there'll be a lot of pop culture talked about, even if the actual pop culture I talk about is pretty obscure. There are some things I miss from that old Mark's Lists web site, and one is writing an essay about a film now and again. Never fear, I won't do this very often, but now and again I see a film which I so badly want to engage with in writing. Whether or not I've done the usual thing of arguing the toss about it with friends afterwards. Books, too. I developed poor reading habits a while ago - skimming, jumping to the end, just not reading proper books - and this blog might encourage me to get more out of reading.

That's almost it. If you wondered about the name of that previous website, it was a kind of a dig at the way the content of the Web seemed entirely taken up with lists, of Top Tens and such. I would still say that Lists are the dominant native writing form of the Internet. However, I did produce a few Lists on that site, mostly very peculiar and obscurely ironic. Some lists may appear on this blog, for which I apologise in advance.


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