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.

Only two years ago this month, I registered my very first internet domain name: Acceity. It was acceity.com back then. I made a website there, just for laughs. I meant it to parody the corporate websites of various media conglomerates: Time Warner, NBC Universal, Viacom, that sort of thing. To be funny. I sent all my friends a link to the site. One of them liked it! Most of the others never responded. One said, "I don't get it. It just seems to be a site with a bunch of random things."

Well, two years have now passed. Over that time I've launched three new websites, including the one I'm beginning with this post tonight. Among the changes, my site has moved from www.acceity.com to www.acceity.org. But some things never change. Although this website has a brand new design, new content, and even a new focus, it will still only be "a site with a bunch of random things."

You might still wonder, what is this site about? I think that's a silly question. It's like asking your friend, "what is CBS about?" I don't regularly watch CBS, but I know enough to tell you that its about all sorts of things. It shows news, drama, comedy, sports, documentaries, programs of all kinds. Each of these programs is generally about something. But CBS, as a whole, isn't about anything in particular. In effect, it's just a TV channel with a bunch of random things.

Why shouldn't this website be the same? Each post I write will surely be about something. There will be many one-offs, and perhaps a recurring series or two. As a whole, however, Acceity isn't about any one thing at all, except perhaps the interests of its author, myself. Why should I narrow my writings to one topic, when my interests are far broader?

I admit, it does seem that narrow offerings are the trend today. Lots of narrow offerings. Each and every subject is strained out from the others and served à la carte, in a magazine, channel, or website dedicated solely to it. Thus we can pick and choose just those topics we like, and not bother with the rest. We subscribe to magazines about fashion or cars or computers, we flip between TV channels dealing in history or science fiction, comedy or news. We bookmark the websites that focus on what interest us each the most. It makes sense, I suppose. So why a website like this, with a little of everything? It has to be about something.

I admit, perhaps I am going backwards to make a blog like this. Maybe it is stupid to follow the decrepit old network television model used by ABC, NBC and CBS. They offer a bit of something for everyone, but it is only because they are remnants of an early, limited time before technology let each person choose exactly what channels and genres and topics she or he wanted. What is to stop you from doing that now, online? What is to keep you from simply clicking away to the websites that consistently interest you, and leaving this one behind in the metaphorical dust?

Nothing. The doors are always open. Go, if you like. It's your choice.

Maybe, though, this endless choice isn't all its cracked up to be. It's true, I can skip to just the websites that interest me, and set the DVR to record only the shows and channels I already know I like. All the other stuff, I could ignore. I have the power to choose what I do with each moment of my free time. I can make my world conform to my own personality. But if I limit my experience only to that which I already know and appreciate, how will I ever discover anything new? How will my personality grow? How will I learn?

Think of your favorite food as a young child. Imagine if that was the only food you ever ate, if you never dared to try anything else. Think of all the other foods you love today that you never would have tasted! You wouldn't limit your menu to one or two dishes, so why limit yourself to a one or two genres, one or two topics, one or two ideas? What good is abundant, overwhelming choice, a billion websites for a billion topics, when you've never experienced most of what you have to choose from? There is nothing wrong with turning on the television and catching a glimpse of something new. At worst, you'll find that it is a terrible show—but on the other hand, perhaps you'll love it. So, by extension, why not load up this page every few days and read a new post, just a "random thing," which might on occasion be quite boring to you, but which on the other hand might just as easily spark a new interest?

That's my goal for this site. I will write about all manner of things, as they come to me. Some will interest you, and some in all likelihood will not. Hopefully, however, some of the topics will be new to you, and although I doubt you'll learn something that changes your life, you might find yourself with an interest you didn't have before. If my writing can manage that for anyone, then this website has been a success.

I hope you enjoy what the days ahead bring forth.

As always, comments are welcome and encouraged. I will read them all, and perhaps you can introduce me to some new interests too.

If you have a good feeling about this site, please tell your friends.