Today marks the thirteenth year since I first started throwing my thoughts, misspellings, and run-on sentences out into the digital world. I have to update several pieces of the “about me” section on here, but before I did that I wanted to take a look back on all the versions that have been on the various scrapes I began, and abandoned, before.
That abandoning part is not entirely true, though. I did move everything from all three previous sites over to this one when it became a proper dot com. They’re just so buried that they hardly ever get any cache time. Plus I wanted to capture them as they appeared when new. The design options were the closest thing we had left to play with after myspace left us.
It began with a free blogger account and the urging of a friend to join along on their particular version of this madness as well. He was delving into his seemingly limitless knowledge of sartorial requiescat and attempts to reanimate style more or less to slay all the fast fashion avatars. I, on the other hand, was driven by my seemingly limitless knowledge of general useless trivia about everything in the entire world. You can see why one of us had difficulty following a theme.
Regardless of where it started, where it is now, and where it might be going, the one thing I noticed was the variations of author bio that I have used and I wanted to collect them here for simple comparison without really drawing any psychological profiles.
The first, from the Platypus and the Dodo, was a simple premise and nobly driven. The page itself was led by the underlying idea that here is an animal that shouldn’t exist, but does and the other animal should exist and doesn’t. I still like the pairing.
Then I had the idea that I should keep this blog focusing on the subject of natural history. To do that I would need a different place to dump my ideas, thoughts, and ramblings. So, I created a marginal space to do so. Life’s Marginalia is still a good title and it immediately began filling up with varying content beginning with a post by post track of the real people who inspired the character Indiana Jones, through my visit to the Cowboy Museum in OKC and ending with a tribute to Joe Cocker following his death. See? None of this would have been very platypus or dodo-y. Though I did notice that on both the first blog post on pigeons (January, 2011) and the Joe Cocker post (December, 2014) I used a still image from Animaniacs. The Goodfeathers for the pigeons and the Joe Cocker at Woodstock. Slappy creams him with a tomato before going into the whole Who’s on stage? bit.
In midst of all of this I had another brilliant idea. These covered extant or recently extinct animals, modern/current natural history and all the stuff that wasn’t. But I could create a place to talk about all my paleontological work both research and outreach. It also marked the beginning of crowdfunding to build my outreach program The Paleo Porch Mini Mobile Museum. The blog was a way to update all those who were interested and/or supporting the project, and was the theme I eventually stayed with when I rolled everything over to this address.
This one ran a whole nine posts up to the first year anniversary of the Mini Mobile Museum project. The highlights were presenting about the project at an international (Germany) conference, the show and tell in the park for the nieces and nephews of one of the most generous backers, a few private in home events for others, presenting at my alma mater, and a full on paid gig at a jr high school in Texas. This is something I really hope to get back into more fully now that I have finished my dissertation, but we’ll see how that falls. Especially since we no longer have the one vehicle that will hold all the cases.
The PaleoPorch theme was the one that stuck, even though it mostly gets confused by bots as being diet related. Even though the bulk of the content here, now running to 131 posts across 13 pages (but only one website, whew), has little to do with actual paleo, I haven’t given much through to what else it could be, It’s an easy to remember dot com. And here I took more time to think about the process and how it all came together. Something I need to do again in the coming months and update the information on this particular iteration.
There are several things that run through all of these, and you can see they sort of swivel around each other like a holographic Venn Diagram. I’ll be updating it to include finished degrees, new job titles, where the focusing is now, but I wanted to at least save this/these versions so I can do this again in another thirteen years. And I won’t leave you (or future me) hanging when I try to find the Ghostbusters page in the featured image. It is from IDW’s absolutely amazing run of Ghosbusters comics. This one from Volume 2, issue 16.
By the by, this has reminded me of two somethings I want to collect here so I don’t have to go back looking for them later. Both may be of interest. One is an essay on “my so-called digital life” that I wrote for a Digital Humanities graduate course here. The other is a time that I feel very much like approaching again as a Digital Robinson Crusoe
