500th Post: Crossroads (Facebook Edition)

It is I, the warrior bard.

For the 500th post of my blog, I was undecided for a long time how to approach it. I had set a precedent to try to top myself with every centennial post, but I felt exhausted at the prospect of trying to out-do the 400th.

Instead, I'll just forward you to the 400th if you're interested in a compendium of self-referential humor. For this one, I'm doing something different.

I'm making worlds collide. I'm posting this on Facebook and Google+, to reach out to all friends and acquaintances in a final effort to stoke the dying fires of social connectedness.

You see, lately I've realized that my blog has felt like something of a ghost town. Its noble origins had long been lost, instead filtering the readership and its own scope by gradually handing the reins to an elite team of inside jokes that gladly decided to steer it towards a cliff. For a while, that was great. It was fun. But when even those select few commentators who had stayed with the blog and made it an enjoyable venue lost interest, what was left was an empty husk. Too long has this blog felt (to me, anyway) like it was simply past its prime. Like its day had come and gone.

And so, with the 500th post, I am attempting something of a reboot. I am posting a link to this entry on Facebook and Google+. Whether I make it a routine to link every blog entry remains to be seen. Where the blog goes from here remains to be seen. Whether or not I end this blog and divide its essence into more carefully categorized blogs (one for music, one for personal life updates, one for philosophical musings, one for runaway jokes, etc.) remains to be seen. This is the crossroads; which path the blog takes is undetermined.

Now, the obvious down side to this act is that it might make me mildly uncomfortable knowing that some non-friend acquaintances could be reading anything I have published or will publish. But, then again, if you don't care enough you wouldn't be here at all, much less go spelunking through 499 back posts. Yeah, there's dark stuff once in a while. And some really, really, really juvenile stuff. You've been warned. But I shouldn't "hide" the blog out of self-censorship; you should read under the mindset that "we're all friends here."

All this time, there has been a link to the blog on my Facebook profile anyway, but nobody is proactive enough to seek out anyone else's personal news or thoughts. That, after all, is why Facebook is what it is. It is the laziest possible means of sharing information. Maybe by bringing my blog posts to everyone's Facebook news feed I can actually keep communication alive. Remember, the reason I even got a blog in the first place was because people abandoned the time-consuming habit of emailing! When all your friends are long-distance, Facebook is a necessary evil.

"He loves and hates the Facebook... as he loves and hates himself."

For the past several months, I can only name for certain six people who check up on this blog regularly. Six. This blog will either once again flourish as a sounding board... or it will die.

This is my blog. There are many like it, but this one is mine.