This is my buddy icon:

It turns out that I missed blogging too much, so here is my great return.

After taking a six-or-so month break, I realized how much I missed using my blog as a place to throw out ideas, get feedback on those ideas, and jot down random thoughts.

This version of the blog, however, is going to be a bit different than the previous incarnation. Instead of coming at this blog as if it were a total brain dump/diary/journal/etc., I’m going to be more focused and less random… I know that the randomness makes blogs sorta fun, but the dangers are: 1. you write about stuff that you later regret; 2. it’s hard to develop an audience outside of your friends (who don’t mind randomness) because every time someone visits there is something different; 3. you feel overwhelmed by the need to write about everything and the blog becomes more of a burden than something fun.

So with that in mind, I am going to try to set the scope of my blog to cover the following topics: politics (my rants against the cosnervative Christian right and their frightening growing power in the United States), movies (mini-reviews of films I watch), music, and cultural studies-type stuff (my thoughts on books I’m reading and whatnot). Note: absent from that list is stuff like: what I did last night, what I’m making for dinner, which Lord of the Rings character am I, etc. So yeah, less personal stuff is the ultimate goal.

Also, I am using a program called WordPress to manage the site. Although it was hella fun to write my own blog engine last time, it became annoying when I wanted to add things but didn’t want to spend all the time figuring out how to code them and then finding the time to do the actual coding. I hope to do some modifications to WordPress to make it more my own (since it uses PHP also), so it’ll still be unique (hopefully).

That said, welcome back everyone (if there is an “everyone” reading this now), and give as much feedback as possible — that’s the most fun part of a blog.