Crossing the Rubicon

I’ve packed up and dragged my dripping paraphernalia across the Rubicon last week, which is just my pretentious way of saying I’ve bought a domain for the new Skirmisher blog. I got tired of Blogger acting more and more like a petulant spinster landlady throwing her weight on me when all I’d want was some more breathing space and the freedom to splatter my sidebar with dancing naked chicks. What’s wrong with that?

Before anybody arrives at the fair-enough conclusion that I’m an ungrateful bastard (which I usually am, but not entirely in this case), I’m grateful for Blogger because, after all, it’s free. But in the past month or so, I’ve had growing needs that Blogger couldn’t anymore feed. I wanted to do this and that, but Blogger kept shaking its head and saying, “No, no, no, you silly twit, you can’t eat that!” So I stopped and meditated on the wisdom of setting up my own home and tweak some Php. Which I did, but only after much bloodshed.

The Skirmisher, at its heart, is also a “thought experiment in motion,” much like the old Skirmish of Dark and Light blog. But I’ve created it because I want to spread the idea’s wings a bit wider. A small bunch of “like-minded individuals” are also helping me out in the daily posts, which also means the blog will be “buzzing” every single day with nice, filthy things to crap about. There are just so many interesting things into which I’m sinking my fangs these days that you have to open the door a bit further to let more sunshine in. There’s so much garbage you have to haul. So much blood you have to spill. So many throats you want to open with your teeth. And exactly the reasons why life, despite all its crap, is so fucking beautiful.

Our transition from a Blogger blog into a full-blown “online disease” is best summed up in the Monty Python words: “We’re no longer the knights who say, ‘Ni!’ From now on, we’re the knights who say, ‘Ecky-ecky-ecky-ecky-p'tang-zoo-boing-goodem-zu-owly-zhiv.’”

I’m still trying to figure out a way to let other people who are not my cousins and friends to register and pitch in their stories and integrate everything into the whole framework. Yes, I hear it can be “easily” done (so say the geekier among us), but I want it done in “a beautiful way.” Currently, I’m tinkering with Scoop, while Wordpress is already sitting there like a queen and taking care of the blog’s smallest concerns. The Devil inside me says Scoop is The One, but I try to ignore it and listen to the other gremlins that my own host says are “equally cool,” like Drupal.

I don’t know, I still have yet to sink my fingers into these sandy, fuzzy things.

After all, it’s already a major feat for me to be able to kick the Skirmisher out of the door and into the world; you know, it’s not my only life, thank you very much. I still have to watch House MD [many thanks to Caloy], deal with people I work with from another part of the globe, do silly things like writing what my grandmother considers “an ugly version of Madame Bovary,” shoot the shit.

For the kind folks who’ve been stumbling in the darkness of this blog for the past few months, thank you. I’m playing my flute once again. Update your feeds and bookmarks and links and follow me to the new rabbit hole—the Skirmisher.

There's a world going on.