A New Beginning

Welcome to Random Catastrophe Version 3.0. If you are a previous follower of my blog, then you already know that it has been a long time since I have posted anything. In fact, it has been so long that you probably forgot you were even still subscribed. If this is your first visit, then I welcome you and hope you will come back for more. I am going to use the rest of this post to talk about where I have been and what is to come in the future. I chose to use an image from Welcome Back, Kotter because it is one of my favorite TV shows of all time and because just like Gabe Kotter returned to teach the Sweathogs, I have returned to RandomCatastrophe.net.

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Before I get started with anything else, I want to reintroduce myself. Fortunately, I have written A Brief Biography as well as a page documenting my history of Internet projects. If you don’t know anything about me or have forgotten those pages are quick overviews of my past and they also give a glimpse in to the types of things I could be writing about in the future.

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If you are not visiting this page for the first time then you may have noticed that all of my old posts have disappeared. I decided in late January of this year that I was going to relaunch my website. I decided that I wanted a completely fresh start and so I went about the process of deleting all of my old posts. I do have them archived in case I decide to bring them back at some point in the future. But I decided to just start from the ground up simply because I feel that I have changed so much over the past few years that I’m not really the same person that wrote any of those posts. Basically, I decided that a clean slate would be fun and so here I am and this is the first post of the version 3.0 era of RandomCatastrophe.net.

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I call this version 3.0 because as I describe in the History section, the original version of the site was for my friend and I to post about anything we wanted. The second version was when I just combined all of my Internet projects on one website and just made Random Catastrophe my new personal blog. So with this relaunch, I felt like we were upgrading to version 3.0 which is still a personal blog but will hopefully be updated more regularly. Also, I won’t rule out the possibility of bringing on other contributors at some point. However, at this point in time the only voice on this site is mine.

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So what will I be writing about on this new version of RandomCatastrophe.net? Well, one reason I have always liked this name is that it affords me the ability to cover any subject that strikes my fancy. I can talk about sports, the books I am listening to, the TV or movies that I am watching, the things happening or not happening in my personal life or any random thought that comes to my mind. If I want to write about the time my friend Art had a dispute with a WWE hall-of-famer I can do so. If I want to write about where I think The Simpsons went wrong then I can do that. If I want to talk about how I went from a huge Star Wars fan to a disinterested observer I can cover that. And I can talk about dating, blindness, my friends and family, old stories about my dog or why I don’t subscribe to any streaming services like Netflix. I can practically guarantee at least one post explaining why I gave up Twitter and cut back my use of other social media platforms.
Right now, I feel very motivated to write. I have a lot of post ideas. Some are brand new and some are just updated versions of previous posts. Of course, there is a difference between having an idea and actually sitting down to write the post. So I will make no promises as to how often I will write though I would be happy to post something new at least once a week. I don’t know that I will ever have enough things to say that I am posting daily but I can dream.

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Aside from writing a biography and Internet project history page I have made some other changes to the site. I have added a section to my sidebar which contains links to websites of my friends. I also have links to my social media accounts and amazon wish list. You can also view the eulogy I gave at my father’s funeral back in 2016.
As for what I hope to gain from all of this, I have several motivations. The biggest is to improve my own writing. I would describe my writing as being very mechanical. What I mean by that is that I can explain what has happened but don’t always explore how I felt about what has happened. In shorter terms, I want to make myself both more descriptive and expressive. Also, as many people have told me over the years that I should write a book I felt like perhaps a better avenue would be to just write a more regular blog.

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I want to apologize for the fact that this website isn’t the most visually stimulating thing you are going to see. As I am completely blind at this stage in my life, I struggle with that aspect of a website presentation. However, I am going to take some steps to change that over time. For now I hope you are interested enough in the content that I will provide to keep coming back.

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So what can you expect next? I think my next post will be an overview of some of the things that happened that brought me to that point in late January where I decided that I actually did want to return to writing a blog. As I say that, it occurs to me to make that a series of posts instead of one long one. So I hope you come back for that because I actually think it is an interesting story to share. Until then, I wish all of you well and hope you are curious as to what is to come in the future.

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Just in case nobody welcome’s me back, I will do so myself with the help of John Sebastian.