Sunday, August 01, 2010

A History of Mostly Harmless

It's been two months of posting three times a week, and before I start one more grueling set of 12 posts, I figured it would be an appropriate time to take stock of the five years I've been writing this blog. For those of you that have just stumbled upon Mostly Harmless, this probably isn't a bad place to start.

The first post of Sam's Blog was written on December 13, 2005. It was the second effort at starting a blog that day, as the first post on the first blog I started insulted my math teacher and was therefore vetoed by my parents. I was 13 and in 8th grade at the time, and, evidently, I had far too much time on my hands - there were only 19 days left in that first month, and I wrote 29 entries. The posts were rambling and mostly about the process of writing the blog, and by far the most interesting ones were by my sister Rachel. For this reason, the blog quickly became something of a team effort and was renamed Four Years Apart. This development lasted for five months pretty successfully due mostly to the constant commenting of my friends, who were apparently as bored as I was. I regularly received as many as 20 or 30 comments per post, which was obviously justified when you considered the awe-inspiring quality of my posts. Take, for example, this artful haiku from the post after post 115:

Anticipation
It seems as though it won't come
But I know it will

I assume the Pulitzer was lost in the mail.

May 2006, though, and, somewhere between deciding she wanted to go to Johns Hopkins and actually picking out the best egg-crate foam for her mattress, my sister decided to give up posting. I changed the name of my blog to "I HEART IRONY" because I'm just that cool. Every post featured a daily irony, a facet of my blog I enjoyed writing substantially more than my readers enjoyed reading. Those were dark days.

This sad time in everyone's life lasted for a little over a month until my post on June 18, 2006. When I checked the comments the next day, I found I had received a particularly one from Sri, a friend I had before I read his hateful, hateful comment:

This is why your LAST layout was better. Your posts are beginning to suck. No offense.

Can I just say very briefly that 100 percent of my blog back then was just rambling? I sat down at the computer and typed random shit, and somehow that shit had become shittier because I changed the already shitty name of my blog to another (and apparently shittier) one? What the shit.

This obviously poorly-conceived comment, though, precipitated what would be a defining moment in this wonderful experiment. On June 20, I gave up on irony and changed my blog's name to Mostly Harmless. Though that was a foggy time for me, I vaguely recall a choir of angels. We were off to the races, and, though we didn't know it back then, our whole lives would something something something something.

****

This history will be continued in Part 2, to arrive TOMORROW, AUGUST 2nd. I apologize for the lateness of this post.

2 comments:

Sri (is super-sorry for being a dumbass) said...

Awww, now I feel bad. Sorry! :( To be fair, though, I was far more of a little shit back then than I am today. Oh well. I apologize profusely for any mental distress I may have caused you. **bows in regret and obeisance**

Anonymous said...

a truly noble venture.