Way back in 1999, I registered pre2k.com. I had this idea that at some point, people would be split into groups of pre2k and post2k. "You were born in the 1900s?" a 20-year-old would marvel to a 21-year-old. A year different but a century apart.
That really hasn't happened, but lately I've been reminiscing about the 1990s. The usual belief is that the music and things you experience in high school and maybe college become the things that you stick with for life. I was a big fan of prog rock when I was in high school in 1980s. I still have a soft spot for that music, but it's kind of hard to take Yes seriously.
Instead, I find myself listening to lots of music I fell in love with in the 1990s: Britpop, alternative/college rock (the '90s kind, not the '80s kind), electronica. I'll attempt to talk music with someone in their 20s or 30s today and occasionally they like electronica. They've never even heard of Underworld, Moby or Fatboy Slim. Sure they know the music, but today it's all DJs. Even my edgy music is 30 years old.
So I don't know where this will all go, but the first step was relaunching a blog that I first launched way back in the year 2001. I reserved the name before the end of the century, but it took me a while to discover Blogger (somehow still kicking after all these years) and start publishing. It never really went anywhere; it was primarily meant for me and my friends to share our favorite links. That's kind of how blogs started, I guess.
Of course it's all newsletters and podcasts today. I'm not doing a podcast, and I feel I need to work the writing muscles for a while before I commit to anything like a newsletter. Like many people, I've been playing around with AI. I read a great piece by a technology journalist who said using AI to build little projects for himself was the most fun he'd had with a computer in decades. I agree. I've built this site, an archive of my college newspaper and a few other projects knowing that maybe five other people will ever even look at, let alone use, any of them.
And I don't care! I'm not building a business here. I'm hearkening back to the glories of the early Internet, when it was just amazing to think you could send e-mail for free to someone else on the globe. There is a lot of pleasure in that simplicity. I hope to reawaken it and if you somehow found yourself here, you are most welcome to join my on the journey.
