Flowers in the Woods to celebrate 50 posts.

It has been a little more than two years since I started the Acceity.org blog. This marks my 50th post. I know, it took long enough. Acceity is like a tree (the site logo should be a clue), and it is growing at about that pace. I strive to keep the site rooted in Southwest Wisconsin, where I live, but I also work to send out branches to other places on whatever topics strike my interest. I make no effort to stay on topic. I know that many blogs work to give their readers what they come looking for. I try, instead, to give you knowledge and ideas you would never have otherwise thought to think.

I hope I am sometimes successful in my goal. I was very glad to hear the reactions to my September 5 post. Eric commented "There is so much out there of which I have never heard," and another reader emailed me saying "I had no idea." Thanks for your comments! I am glad to introduce people to things they didn't know, and I hope that you can do the same service for me with your blogs and your comments here.

The World Wide Web is wonderful tool for organizing and rapidly finding information on a topic. It is a marvelous environment for building communities around shared interests and common knowledge. Those things are amazing — I adore them passionately. The WWW, however, holds the potential for much more. The true beauty of the Internet is its ability to connect people and ideas that are not related: to challenge our predispositions, to expose us to new things and other ways of looking at familiar sights. That is how we as individuals can grow, can learn, can become more than we already are. It does not happen automatically. The web is what we make it: we can use it to retrench ourselves in our preordained cliques, beliefs, and interests, or we can use it to expand horizons and connect to things that would otherwise be out of reach. I am a firm practitioner of the latter, and while the depth of connections I've found to things that are utterly different from me can sometimes be overwhelming and even terrifying, I have no doubt that they have made me a deeper, more intelligent, and more creative person than I would otherwise be. Let's work together to fuse our diverse ideas and bits of knowledge for a smarter, savvier, more sensitive community.

Enough rambling. Thank you to everyone who reads Acceity! If you enjoy what you find here, remember to share this site with your friends and introduce them to something new. You can also (now) follow me on Twitter (http://twitter.com/jWachuta) for shorter, slightly more frequent updates — I'm really just trying it out now, so there's no telling how long I might stay. Finally, feel free to leave your own reflections on Acceity, or any other new topic, by commenting on this post. Thanks again!

My Christmas Tree

It has been a few days since my last post. When I wrote before, we were still savoring the last weeks of a cool Wisconsin summer. Now we're wading through a December mix of rain and snow, which has turned our White Christmas into a slushy, icy mess. The Christmas Tree in the front yard seems to be surviving all the same — and that's good, because it still has a lot of growing to do. I feel the same way about this blog.

Acceity lives, despite my lack of attention to it. Indeed, visitors have been trickling in daily from search engines, and there were even one or two new comments while I was away. It is good to know that my work is useful to a few people, occasionally. That is enough reason to press on, and now that I have an entire month free from school and other tedious obligations, I plan to post quite a lot in the coming weeks. There is a whole world to talk about, so I hope you'll join me here for the impending discussions. In the meantime, have a Merry Christmas!

It's been far too long since my last update—but I've been busy. Since my last post, I've finished semester finals, started a summer internship, traveled to Virginia and back, and knocked a few more books off my ever-growing reading list. Unfortunately, blogging slipped by the colloquial wayside. Now I have a little more time to put into Acceity, though, so updates will be more frequent for the remainder of the summer.

There have been a few changes here since my last post. First, behind the scenes, I've switched servers, from Bluehost to Inmotion Hosting. In doing so, I've both saved myself a little money and gotten a higher-capacity hosting account. The move has been pretty smooth, but I can never be sure if I've transfered every little thing properly from one host to the other, so it's possible there are a few glitches remaining to be smoothed out here in the next couple days. If you find one, let me know.

More visibly, you'll also notice that I've given Acceity an entirely new look. The updated design has its pros and cons, but I was aiming for something simpler, brighter, bolder, and altogether more suited to immersive reading. After all, this is a website where you can still find good, hearty servings of prose—an increasing rarity among the flashes and bangs of the multimedia-enhanced but attention-deficit web—and I think Acceity is now optimized to make reading long passages of text here almost as comfortable as reading long passages of text out of a magazine. We're talking serifs, bigger fonts, more whitespace, fewer distractions. You can just sit back, relax, and read.

This time next week, there will actually be something here to read.

Time to Get Reading...

My long winter break has come to an end, and school has begun again. I fear this means I won't be making regular posts here for a while. Altogether, my professors have assigned more than two-dozen textbooks this semester. It's a good thing that I like to read.

Despite the excessive classwork, I hope to continue writing here occasionally over the next several weeks. There are plenty of leftover topics buzzing about in my head from last month that haven't been written up, and if I don't have time to pursue things unrelated to school, I may try to adapt a few of my class projects this semester into posts here—provided that I can make them reasonably interesting. At the very least, you're bound to see a few samples of what I do in my new creative writing course. All updates, however, will be rather few and far between.

If you haven't already, you might want to subscribe to the Acceity RSS feed with your favorite aggregator (Google Reader, Bloglines, My Yahoo!, or whatever) so that you are sure to get updates soon after they're made. That way, you won't have to check this site day after weary day wondering when the next post will come. In the meantime, thanks for reading, and hopefully I'll be back with something new to think about before too long.

It seems that over a month has elapsed since my last meager update. I've had plenty else to do, but there can be no excuse for such a vast temporal chasm — especially not here in the high-flying virtual amusement park we call the World Wide Web. It's an odd thing, really. A delay of a few seconds in loading a web site makes people cringe, and the sites that go without an update for more than a few weeks are usually forgotten. Offline, though, we subscribe eagerly to our monthly magazines and trod patiently through the week waiting for our favorite sitcom every Thursday night. The pace of the Internet, by comparison, is breathtaking. I fear Acceity has lately been left behind.

Of course, this was never meant to be an hourly or even daily blog. Plenty of sites already specialize in continuously pumping content into a trough for mass-consumption. We all put up with it, myself included, and we can't seem to help pressing our mouths to the RSS-feeder and slurping up thirty second YouTube videos and rehashed AP stories, worthless top ten lists and mundane Flash games. Our brains are fed with dog food.

I mean for Acceity to be place aside from all that, a quiet stop along the Internet's equivalent of a winding country lane. Though perhaps this can't be a web journal where every posting is lovingly hand-crafted by a team of expert wordsmiths, I do hope that it can be a smart, thought-provoking, and refreshing place for you to stop and ponder. The pace should be slower here. Still, I realize that my visitors will need something to ponder about. That's why the delay since the last update was so inexcusable. Now, though, with the holiday break providing ample time to think, I'm certain that I can post a little more often. In fact, I'll make a promise: there will be updates twice a week from now until the end of January. It's up to you to keep me to my word.

Best wishes until next time.