To those of you reading from the start (probably just people that I know personally in real life): welcome to the beginning of Anachronist! Thank you for believing in me.
To those of you scrolling back through the (hopefully long) post history to look for the earliest posts on this website: I hope this look at the mental state in which I started this site proves informative and historically intriguing.
It has been a long journey to actually put together a space where my writing can live on the net (still undone as I type this is domain name acquisition), after my many abortive attempts over the years to start a personal website that died when my studies got in the way of frivolous desires like “putting my shower thoughts down on a screen”. But I have always enjoyed writing papers and have frequently hijacked paper assignments to produce pages upon pages of drivel devoted to my personal interests, so I am excited to finally have the chance to do that without voiding the spirit of the assignment (even if that means I’m screaming into the void and only a couple of people are listening).
The name “Anachronist” is apparently shared with a band and a manufacturer of watch straps. I hope they enjoy my company in the search results. The name speaks to my interest in writing that melds technology and ideas the world considers “obsolete” with present reality. My main goal is to cover a mix of topics so eclectic that every post I make will introduce some of my readers to a new thing or a new idea. The general guiding theme I’m going to follow is media and technology, and the intersection thereof. I love retro hardware, overanalyzing the sociopolitical implications of works of fiction, attempting to critique design patterns, making computers do things they shouldn’t, and having strong opinions about video games. If any of the former sound like your cup of tea, I hope you find this site a nice place.
It’s more important now than ever, I feel, to have a space that you are fully in control of—whether it’s a public website like this or a folder full of text files. The more streamlined and easy-to-use technology and platforms become, the harder they lock you in. It was another deliberate goal of mine to not depend on any third party to publish this site; the site generator I use is completely custom1 and I can host the site wherever I want since my generator just outputs a folder full of html files. To ensure I can reach readers without having to go to one of the bigger platforms, I’m planning on writing my own mailing list software as well, though that will prove a greater challenge since iCloud is preemptively blocking email from my server. A further-term goal would be a comments section, though as of yet I have no idea how I would design or implement that. But it wouldn’t be a new project if there weren’t scary unknowns you hadn’t accounted for yet.
In any case, I’m happy to finally have a place to put all of this stuff. I think it’s a fairly popular sentiment that being on the computer used to be more fun than it is now, and I’m hoping I can bring back a little bit of that joy by contributing to the independent web in my own way. Thanks for being here, and I hope you keep reading.