Two Thousand, One Hundred and Fifty Fifth Post

Happy Birthday to this blog, Happy Birthday to this blog, Happy Birthday A Pixelated Mind, Happy Birthday to you!

My blog turns five today.  Yey?  … Yes.  Yey.  Here’s the first post, in case you weren’t astute enough an investigator to find it.  It’s called “First Post.”

By Pixel at November 6, 2004 at 7:41 pm. Filed in Uncategorized

If you had a blog, what would your first post be?

I’ve decided I know what mine is going to be: a thoughtful, hilarious, complex, well thought out doctoral dissertation on our society’s over concern with first posts.

Aahh.. welcome to the blog.

🙂  That was a nice first post.  At least I thought it was at the time.

Since then, I’ve written more than 1,200 posts totaling over 400,000 words.  I’ve had nearly 2,000 comments and made some fans, friends, and freaders.

Drew, “Eggo,” was my first freader.  I hopped around blogger commenting on blogs, trying to get people to pay attention to me.  He followed.  He was in high school at the time and had just found the Internet.  I became friends with a lot of his friends and even coblogged with them for a while.  Then he went off the deep end and stopped frequenting the Internet (two separate things).

Moofruot, or Mëznor, was my first long-term freader who I still talk to.  She’s my friend on Facebook and Twitter now and we’ve even met in person.  I send her socks from every new country I visit.  I have no idea how she found me, but I’m glad she did.

Breakerslion and Seth are next.  For a while there, most of my Internet activities had to do with godlessness.  I have no idea why.  It was just interesting to me for a long while.  I met Breakers and Seth that way and they’ve followed me ever since.

Real life has also influenced my blog sometimes.  I asked Ex_cal to write in my stead while life hit me with a 2 x 4.  And Alethea and Moira have been friends and readers since the beginning.  Trumpet Rob checks here randomly, as does Daniel and a few others I’ve met more recently.

Finally, I got into a lot of other social Web sites for a while there because a new reader kept referencing them.  That’s where I met Courtney.  We had a really cute back and forth for a while.  It was nice.  She’s a very talented musician.  That’s also where I met Ashley.  She sent me cookies a few years ago.  And she is awesome and wonderful and I am thankful I know her.

Why did I start a blog in the first place?  That’s a rather long answer.  The highlights are these:  I had a biweekly ‘viewspaper’ known as the Pix Capacitor that I wrote and produced for nearly seven years.  On year five, I left for Pennsylvania to attend the Indiana University of Pennsylvania.  I didn’t want to lose my audience, so I started sending them humorous weekly e-mails.  One of the guys who read them and often responded (‘Butt’) had a blog.  I considered getting one as that seemed a more appropriate medium for what I was already doing.  I wanted to wait until I finished a year of weekly e-mails, but I got impatient in November— five years ago to the day— and started a blog.

I debated between calling it A Pixelated Mind or A Pixelated Mindset.  I, for one, am glad I decided to avoid set theory.  🙂 Originally, my blog was on Blogger and was a subdomain of the main Pix Capacitor Web site, which was supposed to be an informational representation of my viewspaper.  But it was just a geocitiesesque nightmare.

Eventually I realized this and decided to turn the blog into the main attraction.  And I haven’t looked back since!

(Well, once or twice.)

So now the question is: what should I do to celebrate?  Should I quit blogging?  Should I upload the comics and podcasts I’ve been working on?  Should I write a month-long series of posts?  Or should I just do what I’ve been wanting to do for over a year and start a group blog dedicated to extremely short posts.

The idea comes from this wikipedia article.

So I registered a domain name and set up a blog there.  The idea is that it’ll constantly update with six-word stories, sentence-a-day longer works, haikus, limericks, other poems, microfiction, quotes, quips, or any other sort of interesting— short— post.  And I’m opening it up for everyone.  Anyone can register and have full authorship priviledges.  The only thing I ask is to respect other writers and to try to post at least once a week.

Egads!  This should be fun!

Happy Birthday!  Now check out www.constrainedwriting.com.  Or, if you want to take the plunge and join me as a co-blogger, go here.  This offer is open to anyone and everyone.  The more the merrier.

Happy Birthday to this blog, Happy Birthday to this blog, Happy Birthday A Pixelated Mind, Happy Birthday to you! My blog turns five today.  Yey?  … Yes.  Yey.  Here’s the first post, in case you weren’t astute enough an investigator to find it.  It’s called “First Post.” By Pixel at November 6, 2004 at 7:41…