The State of the Blender

It's been a long while since I've written a proper "Ramble Regarding Romance." I wrote a wedding writeup before heading off to Mexico in July, but the last one before that was in April 2000, which was a navel-gaze about my first regularly scheduled ramble. Err, that's pitchwoo, not pass. But Yay Patriots! (...Sorry) There's a set of reasons for that...the most important have to do with having found romantic happiness with Mo. A lot of romance poetry is therapeutic. When you're content, you need less therapy. A lot of romance poetry is pitching woo. When you've got the relationship, you need less woo. There's another part of love poetry, describing how happy you are (which can sometimes be another form of pitching woo) but I'm not too good at it. And the same principles that apply to my creative works apply to my essays as well. But enough about that, I should try to make a Ramble that's about something more than the lack of Rambles. So I'll talk about the Blender, where it is now, where I think it's going. Recently, there's been some annoying stuff on the Board. People using way too many online identities (which has always struck me as a bit much of an indulgence,) other people "outting" those identities, and then people taking these feuds onto the new submissions section. Worse, people bugging me to go back and retroactively fix things: delete posts, shutdown accounts. But you know, there's always been annoying stuff on the board, it's part of the territory. The good news, or the bad news, is that I don't see the Blender changing too too much any time soon. It's at a place I'm pretty happy with, it seems more or less sustainable. One recent problem has been a recalculation of my diskspace usage. I think they changed the file system, so that even tiny little files (like this site has TONS of) each take up a certain (largish) minimum amount of diskspace. So at some point I may have to change my policy of having every work and conversation of the last 5 years online. Maybe I'll try to put them up in some kind of compressed form, or offline. We'll see. Right now I seem to have a respite from the evil disk quota, so I'll need to act before that goes away. I haven't been putting a lot of effort into publicizing the Blender. For a long time it seemed to grow on its own, though it's leveled off, and maybe even is having slightly smaller numbers, at least judging by the number of new works last month. (Though February with Valentine's Day tends to be a bit bigger, we'll have to wait and see.) I have mixed feelings about Blender shrinkage. There were a number of solid submissions last month (despite the more-or-less off-topic quote war that went on), and honestly, I don't always mind having a bit less to read at the end of the month. I'd be upset if the Blender community evaporated, but I've kind of determined the amount of effort I'm willing to put into it (along side other interests, like jobs, personal websites, freelance projects, and trying to keep up a reasonably rich reading life) and will live with the Blender that results. And so far, that strategy has worked out very well. So that's the State of the Blender. I think it we'll be around for a long time to come.