I watched the Blue Origin flight yesterday, in which William Shatner joined three others in the very short up-and-back-again space shot yesterday in Jeff Bezos’s interestingly-shaped spacecraft. I have to admit to a certain amount of cynicism as I’ve watched the breathless reactions in recent years to the achievements of a tiny handful of ultra-wealthy white men who have apparently decided that the best thing to do with their vast sums of money, sums that it seems to me a sane society would make it impossible to accumulate in the first place, is to replicate things that the United States government did sixty years ago.
I don’t even mind, really, that this is the way it’s shaping up. The really ground-breaking stuff, the envelope-pushing stuff, needs to be done at the government level, because that’s still the level that can operate in the amounts of capital needed to do the experimental work. If the rich then want to test the waters that have already been explored, that’s great. And that’s what’s been happening…only with a sense of worship about what the Bezoses and the Elon Musks of the world have been accomplishing. I’ve even heard it suggested that maybe now we can just do without NASA entirely, get government out of the space game, and let “Private enterprise” or “the Free Market” or “capitalism” get about the work of really making space exploration happen.
As always, to this I say, “Bollocks.”
But…but!
On the other hand…a spaceship launched yesterday, and it blasted a capsule into space. Then the launching craft didn’t just tumble back to earth to be swallowed by the sea; it fired its thrusters again, extended four landing legs, and landed right where it started. Meanwhile the capsule completed its trajectory, entered space, arced back down, and parachuted back to earth.
The passengers (I trouble to call them “astronauts”, in all honesty) climbed out then. Three of them hugged and high-fived and cheered and hooted and hollered and sprayed each other with champagne. But the fourth? He, Mr. Shatner of Star Trek (and others) fame, stood off to one side, as if gathering his emotions. This flight had moved him deeply; you could see it in the way he stood. Then he started talking, and said, among other things:
“I mean, the little things, the weightlessness, and to see the blue color whip by and now you’re staring into blackness. That’s the thing. This covering of blue is this sheet, this blanket, this comforter of blue around that we have around us. We think ‘oh, that’s blue sky’ and suddenly you shoot through it all of a sudden, like you whip a sheet off you when you’re asleep, and you’re looking into blackness – into black ugliness. And you look down, there’s the blue down there, and the black up there, and there is Mother Earth and comfort and – is there death? Is that the way death is?”
Look, I can be as cynical as anyone about rich people and them treating space like it’s their playground and ignoring the problems of the world and the fact that they profit greatly on some pretty nasty labor practices. But…there’s still space! My heart will never not thrill to a rocket ship blasting away from Earth, or to space passengers disembarking their spacecraft after returning to Earth. And I will never not be moved to hear those returning to Earth talking about the planet’s blue blanket.
Great human achievements are never just so…but they are still great.
Oh yeah, this is supposed to have some music, isn’t it? It’s a Something for Thursday post. Here’s a suite from Bill Conti’s score to The Right Stuff.
Here are two photos of the Buffalo Niagara region, taken from atop Chestnut Ridge! The first is clearer, but the second is obviously a wider shot, in which can be seen in the distance the skyline of Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada. (Note that Niagara Falls, NY has no visible skyline from this distance, which is a statement in itself.)
A fall morning overlooking Buffalo, NY
Here’s the wider shot! I took both of these with my still-new-enough-to-me-to-call-it-new new phone. I have to say, I really love that waiting three or four years to get a new phone allows enough improvements to make me say, “Holy crap, my phone can do that?!”
Wider view of Buffalo and Niagara Falls, ON from Chestnut Ridge
If you’re wondering where Niagara Falls, NY is, see the Seneca One tower there? It’s the reddish building that’s the tallest in Buffalo. Go along the horizon to the left until you see a faint boxy-looking building. That’s the Seneca Niagara Resort and Casino, the only building in that city tall enough to have a horizon-topping presence from this distance. This angle also makes it look like it’s a much farther distance separating the two Niagara Falls cities; the Seneca Casino on the American side actually lies at the far end of the city, well away from the Falls and the gorge themselves. The American side, at least right up to the river, falls, and gorge, emphasizes nature parks and the like; the Canadians have built their side’s touristy stuff and giant resort skyscrapers almost right up to the brink of the gorge itself.
Anyway, on a fall morning, that’s what a big chunk of the 716 looks like!
No doubt all of you* have been asking, “Look, dude, all this music writing and book stuff and all is great, but what’s new with your bib overalls collection?!” And I am always one to give the public what it wants**, so here’s something new!
Well, naturally, if you buy a pair of striped overalls in a new label and style, you’ll be happy…for a while. But then the nagging voice will start whispering in your ear, late at night, when you’re trying to decide which overalls-and-shirt pairing you’re going to wear tomorrow****:
“Sure, the striped pair is great, but you know, you really really REALLY need a pair of the same overalls in the classic blue denim. You NEED them. It’s science!”*****
So, off to eBay I went, whereupon I created a new Saved Search for Washington Dee Cee overalls. There are almost always a few pairs available, because Dee Cee was a popular and common brand back in the “glory days” of bib overalls, but as they are always vintage by definition, they tend to be expensive. But…persistence pays off! I finally scored a pair for a price that wasn’t enough to make you look at me like I’m insane.******
Washington Dee Cee overalls, frontWashington Dee Cee overalls, rear
I actually acquired these in July, which is the time of year when I don’t wear overalls much at all, because it’s just too warm. Aside from trying them on when they arrived, I have really only worn them one day, and that was on our annual Ithaca trip a couple of weeks ago. I paired them with another new acquisition, a “Renfest” style shirt. I realize that wearing a shirt like this may put me a bit too close to “Jerry Seinfeld in the pirate shirt” territory, but I figure that now that I’m fifty, I’ve long since reached the point of being able to wear what the hell I want and give zero f*cks about it.
Washington Dee Cee overalls, with blue “renfest” shirtSame, just…sitting down
I have to admit, I genuinely like this look. It’s my version of the “cottagecore” thing that’s been popular of late. There’s something, well, me about a Renfest shirt worn under a pair of nicely-worn vintage denim overalls, isn’t there?
Anyway, if it ever gets reliably and seasonably cool around here (as I write this we’re entering a several-day stretch of possible record highs for mid-October, which is not ideal), I look forward to pairing these overalls with some of the new flannel shirts I have around…and I can’t rule out ordering another of these Renfest shirts, maybe in white this time.
And of course, the highest praise has already come. Carla approves of these overalls!
Sleepy doggo!
* None of you have been asking this.
** Yeah, this is just a lie.
*** You do not remember this. I do not hold this against you. (OK, I do. A little.)
**** Not kidding! I really do put thought into this. I don’t just roll out of bed, grab a shirt and some overalls, and go about my day. Come on, folks. I’m weird, but I’m not some heathen.
***** Why am I dragging poor science into this? Science has nothing to do with overalls. Sheesh!
****** “Har har, we already look at you like–” Yeah, yeah, I know. You don’t have to say it.
A few weeks ago we finally introduced Richard Strauss to this ongoing feature, and now we continue! When I wrote about Eine Alpensinfonie, I noted that I came to Strauss at the end of his tone-poem career: though he composed a great deal of music after that work in the thirty years or so he had left, he never wrote another tone poem. Now we’re rolling things back to the beginning of Strauss’s tone-poem career, with a work that, like Eine Alpensinfonie, is generally not ranked among his great masterpieces of the genre. But unlike that work, this one is seen as showing the promise of a young composer just entering his prime. The work is Aus Italien, or, From Italy.
Aus Italien is a four-movement work that seems somewhere between a proper abstract traditional symphony and a purely descriptive work. In terms of form, one can sense the influence of Hector Berlioz, but Strauss goes even farther than Berlioz did; Berlioz may have incorporated descriptive elements into his first two symphonies, but they are still primarily symphonies. Strauss, on the other hand, eschews the traditional forms of the classical symphony for a sequence of four movements of descriptive, programmatic music tied together by stated theme. The movements are:
Auf der Campagna (On the Roman Campagna)
In Roms Ruinen (In the Ruins of Rome)
Am Strande von Sorrent (On the Sorrento Beach)
Neapolitanisches Volksleben (Neapolitan Folk Life)
The work is lyrical and colorful throughout, and if it lacks the profound insight that marks Strauss’s finest tone poems, it still abounds with orchestral flash and pictorial color. In the fourth movement one will note the familiar strains of the song “Funiculi, Funicula”, which Strauss used thinking it was a folk song and not a composed work that was under copyright. This ended up costing Strauss a legal judgment, which must have annoyed the composer greatly. Strauss was always aware of his finances, and there is a story, possibly apocryphal, in which Strauss was greeted by his son upon returning home from a conducting engagement. When his son asked, “Did they pay you, Father?” Strauss wrapped his son in an embrace and said, “Now I know you are my son.”
The moral is, make sure your folk material is actually folk material!
It’s been my experience that any baseball fan will hate at least one of New York City’s two teams, either the Yankees or the Mets. I’ve never really hated either, which makes me an outlier, I suppose. I just like New York City too much to hate on its teams (though that can’t be the only factor, as I adore Boston the city and yet I’d like to see all of its teams fired into the sun*). Back when there were only four divisions in Major League Baseball, the Mets were in the same division as my team, the Pirates, and for a couple years there, the Mets were a thorn in the side of the Pirates as they strove to win three division titles in 1990, 1991, and 1992. Since then they’re all in different divisions, though, so the Mets don’t figure too much. And the Pirates are usually terrible, so what’s to root against? Fifth place?
One of my best friends is a Mets fan, which might seem a bit odd living in Buffalo, where all baseball fandoms basically boil down to a whole lot of Yankee fans, some Red Sox fans, and then a fan or two of everybody else. My friend came by his Mets fandom honestly: he grew up in the days of 1980s cable television, when every local provider had a couple of indie stations from NYC (WOR and…another one), and on one of those stations resided the Mets. Since they were what my friend saw most often, that’s what he came to love, and to this day he roots as hard for the Mets as he ever has, though I’ve noted over the years a certain jaded amusement at the Mets fortunes (which are more often misfortunes) and a general feeling of “Hey, what did you expect” when the Mets flirt with something wonderful only to end up losing.
I’ve seen this same attitude from other Mets fans I’ve known: a certain even-keeled acceptance of their likely fate, which oddly allows them to have more fun in the face of their team losing than other fandoms out there. In all honesty, it’s my sense that a lot of sports fans could learn from Mets fans. They get as deliriously happy when their Mets win, obviously, but they avoid the soul-crushing despair and rage that comes of losing. (Mostly. I mean, it’s still sports, and when you lose the NLCS four games to two because your pitcher walks in the winning run in the bottom of the ninth in Game Six, well, no amount of baseball zen is going to keep you from wanting to take a chef’s knife to every teddy bear you can find.)
The Mets are that odd duck of a sports franchise: they haven’t won a ton (two World Series titles, and five total National League pennants), but still, they’ve won enough in their nearly 60 years of existence to make them rank just a bit above the “lovable losers” thing that the Cubs once managed to hold down for over a century. Mets fans aren’t long-time sufferers the way, say, Bills fans are. Because they’ve won, and because Mets fans seem to choose not to suffer in the first place.
When we traveled to New York City for Thanksgiving in 2015, I thought I’d grab my friend a Mets souvenir when we went into this big NYC gift store in Times Square. Place was huge, loaded with every NYC-related gewgaw and tchotchke you could want, including stuff for the Yankees, the Rangers, and the Knicks. And there wasn’t a single Mets-related item to be found anywhere in that store. Which was really weird, because the Mets are still a NYC team, they have some lore, and they had just won the NL pennant that year. Just six weeks before our visit, the Mets had hosted World Series games in New York City, and this gift shop didn’t have anything. Not a single pennant, shot glass, poster, snow-globe with Citi Field in it, nothing.
In America’s biggest and most important city, one of two resident Major League Baseball teams is a beloved institution of American sports history, and the other is a niche interest, like indie comic books. Weird.
Anyway, a new book came out earlier this year called So Many Ways to Lose: The Amazin’ True Story of the New York Mets, the Best Worst Team In Sports, by Devin Gordon. That’s a great title that sets up the tone of the book to follow: Gordon’s walk through Mets history is (mostly) warm and humorous. It’s Mets history not as a scholar would relate it, or a sportswriter striving for “objectivity”; this is the history of the Mets that you would hear from a Mets fan, and that’s what makes the book special.
Gordon, like my friend, adopted the Mets as his favorite team from an early age, and he’s been with them since their rise to late-80s powerhouse and beyond. Gordon is also an experienced writer, and not just about sports, so he knows his way around telling stories with flare and a good viewpoint. Gordon writes like what he is: an erudite fan who can spend a couple of pages breaking down just why Willie Mays’s “Catch” is as great a baseball play (for many, it’s the greatest baseball play) as it is, while at the same time using chapter titles like “Fuck the Yankees”.
Buffalo’s own sportswriting market is awash in talented writers and journalists who undermine their own work by beating everyone over the head with their heated insistences on their own “objectivism”, so it’s frankly a relief to find a book like this where fandom is admitted and embraced and allowed to shine.
I honestly had a great deal of trouble selecting a passage to quote from So Many Ways To Lose, because it’s packed with great passages. I thought about his lengthy breakdown of the Willie Mays catch, which he uses to prelude what he considers an even greater outfield catch (by Endy Chavez). I considered some of the passages in which Gordon speculates on why discussion of Darryl Strawberry and Doc Gooden tended to focus on drug use when the topic of other players’ drug use never seems to come up much (you don’t really need to think too long to figure that one out), and there’s a passage about the design and construction of Shea Stadium that is helpful because it’s frankly always helpful to remind ourselves what an asshole Robert Moses was.
Instead, I’ll go with this, from early in the book, when Gordon is making the case why the Mets are “the best worst team in sports”, even though they have done something at least twice that a lot of other perennially losing teams have not, i.e., actually win.
Now, there may be some fans of trash teams out there who have read this far and who think I’ve been too cavalier in dismissing their body of work. They’re wrong, but I suppose they deserve a fair hearing, so let’s go through the top contenders, if only to condemn them to yet another defeat.
The Detroit Lions might be the worst team in sports, which is to say: they’re not even good at being bad. They’ve never won a Super Bowl, never been to a Super Bowl. They’ve played (lost) in a conference title game once, and that was before we all had cell phones. I don’t have to consult the Internet to know that the Lions have never had a memorable postseason moment, because if they had, I’d remember it. It’s been nothing but decades of cold, slushy, uninterrupted losing. Even their uniforms, bluish-gray and grayish-blue, are colorless. Playing for the Lions is such a demoralizing experience that the two most gifted players in team history, running back Barry Sanders and wide receiver Calvin Johnson, both retired in their primes rather than spend another season with Detroit. They didn’t just quit the Lions, they quit football.They ghosted. After Johnson walked away in 2016, at age 30, the Lions’ front office demanded that he return a $3.2 million roster bonus, which is sort of petty for a team owned by the Ford family. It also means the Lions now have a frosty relationship with at least 50 percent of their franchise icons.
The Cleveland Browns have a better claim to the “best worst” throne, because unlike the Lions, they are easy to like, and unlike the Lions, their postseason defeats are so infamously excruciating that they have names like The Fumble and The Drive. The Browns have only made the playoffs once this century, despite starting 29 different quarterbacks over the course of 20 years. For three years in the 1990s, the Browns ceased to exist because their greedy, heartless owner, Art Modell, may he rest in peace, hated it so much in Cleveland that he tried to move the team to Baltimore. Nest he fired his head coach, Bill Belichick. Now that’s some first-rate ineptitude. The problem with the Browns’ case may be Cleveland itself. It’s too grim. The 21st century hasn’t been good to the city, and every unlikely defeat, every clumsy failure is cut with rust and resignation. You can laugh at the Mets all you want. If you take pleasure in the Browns’ misfortune, you’re a dick.
Same goes for all of Minnesota’s crappy teams, the Vikings in particular, who have been waiting decades for the chance to lose another Super Bowl. In 2020, the Minneapolis-based sportswriter Steve Marsh compared the NBA Timerwolves’ Mets-ian flair for comic incompetence to a night of experimental dining–“Maitre d’, surprise us!”–but even he admits that in a city famous for its losers (the Vikes, Walter Mondale), the Wolves can’t get no respect. Their losing, while admirable, is just too small-time. Ditto for the Cincinnati Bengals, another small-batch loser, whose principal resume for “best worst” champion is the Icky Shuffle.* In order for the Bengals to be the Mets, Cincinnati would have to be New York. This is yet another case of small-market franchises getting overshadowed and disrespected, to which I can only say boo-hoo. To win at this level of losing, you need a big canvas.
Gordon goes on a bit, discussing why several other prominent never-winners in American sports can’t beat out the Mets for “best worst team ever” status, but curiously, he doesn’t mention a few other franchises known for their relentless losing. Surely the fact that the Chicago Cubs won a single World Series a few years ago doesn’t blot out their entire century of losing from our collective memory, does it? Or how about the Arizona Cardinals, a team that until its single Super Bowl appearance (which they lost in heartbreaking fashion despite a superhuman effort by their Hall of Fame quarterback and one of the greatest receivers ever in that very game) had to admit that its greatest moment in franchise history was a fictional moment that happened in the movie Jerry Maguire? And how about the Buffalo Bills, whose four consecutive Super Bowl losses from 1990 to 1993 still boggle the mind of sports fans to this day?
The Mets have done a lot of losing, sure–but they’ve done some winning, too. I’m not ready to grant the Mets the title of “best worst team” just yet, but Gordon does make a compelling case for his team, and that’s what it’s all about, anyway. And really, one of the great subgenres in sports writing is when gifted writers take on bad teams.
In the last year, I’ve read two great baseball books. First was Roger Angell’s iconic The Boys of Summer. Now I have So Many Ways to Lose.
I wonder if it’s time to start watching baseball again.
Compilation-arrangements that gather selections from Broadway musicals are a long-time staple of “pops” concerts everywhere, and for good reason: when they are done well, there’s a certain kind of charm to these compilations in their own right.
Robert Russell Bennett wrote a number of these arrangements, and his were some of the very best. This is because Bennett was a fine composer on his own, and it’s also because Bennett worked closely with many of the great Broadway composers in the first place. He wasn’t a composer who decided to try his hand at arranging these songs; he was the original arranger, and he was steeped in all that music. Bennett had his finger on the pulse of Broadway for decades, and that‘s why his concert arrangements make for such wonderful listening.
In my orchestra performing days, I only got to play one of Robert Russell Bennett’s compilation arrangements. I’m glad it was this one. The particular show it’s from has its problems, but the songs certainly aren’t one of them. Here is Robert Russell Bennett’s Selections from Camelot.
I used this piece as part of my 2020 exploration of Beethoven over on Byzantium’s Shores, but it’s a cracking good piece and it even feels appropriate, given my shift to this space as my primary blogging home now. Beethoven wrote this piece on commission for the opening of a new theater in Vienna, a theater that is still operating and is in fact the current oldest operating theater in that city! I would hope that a theater that opened to the strains of a new concert overture by Ludwig van Beethoven would still be a going concern. He was Beethoven, after all!
So here is Beethoven’s Consecration of the House Overture.
Nothing really to say here! I’m just trying out WordPress’s mobile app, for those moments when I am away from the computer but am also just DYING to post something.
Also, here’s a photo of my street, taken using the Night mode on my Galaxy S21. I liked the mood of it! LED streetlights make a lovely noir-esque pool of light, don’t they?
(Tone Poem Tuesday will appear as usual, but later.)
“Did they just paint the old bridge silver and white?” “SHHHH!”
Well, here we are! As noted the other day, I’ve been thinking about permanently moving my blogging operations to this site, and retiring Byzantium’s Shores after nearly twenty years of service. As you might surmise…I’m generally the type of person who, when I get around to stating openly that “I’m thinking about doing [something]”, is just about ninety-five percent of the way to actually proceeding with the [something] in mind. Now, this is something I’ve been kicking around for quite a while–it has, honestly, never made much sense for me to have what amounted to two “Official Sites”–but the idea has been growing, and a particular recent impetus was when Jim Wright, the brilliant mind behind Stonekettle.com, decided to do much the same thing:
I can’t work this way.
It’s just not possible. Literally. Even if I wanted to, Facebook won’t let me.
So here’s what we’re going to do:
I’m going to move political commentary back to my own website, here.
No. No. Stop screaming. This is a good thing for me and for you.
Why me? I’m hoping that becomes self evident by and by.
Why for you? Well, for starters, you keep telling me how much you miss long form. Okay. Here it is.
So, starting today, ForgottenStars.net will host all of my new blogging content. Yes, I could have waited until February to make Byzantium’s Shores a cool twenty-year blog, but…well, that’s all pretty arbitrary, and as Hugh Laurie has said:
It’s a terrible thing, I think, in life to wait until you’re ready. I have this feeling now that actually no one is ever ready to do anything. There is almost no such thing as ready. There is only now.
I am not deleting Byzantium’s Shores, because even though I’ve imported all of its content here, I know that there will be broken links and busted images a-plenty in all those archives, and there is no way that I have time to go through and fix all of that. Plus, Byzantium’s Shores has all that long-established search-engine mojo, which I am loathe to lose. What I’m going to do with the old digs is pin a post explaining what’s going on, and then I will post a weekly or bi-weekly “digest” of links to the new content here.
When importing the Byzantium Shores content, it did so under a different “author” name for each post, and while it did not create new categories the way the Blogger site did, it imported the categories as tags, so you can see a lot of those posts via the ‘tag cloud’ over there in the sidebar. Yes, that’s kind of a mess. A “kludge”, in computer geek and engineering terms.
Blogger and BlogSpot suited my needs for a long time, and I’m grateful to all the people who have been running things over there all this time, even back before they were a part of the Google-plex. I’m such an old hand with blogging that I remember when Blogger was pretty much the only game in town unless you knew HTML on your own. Other blogging platforms have come and gone–Movable Type was an early one to compete with Blogger (and I believe it’s still going strong), and there was LiveJournal and Tumblr in its heyday (it’s still kicking too) and I remember the brief run of AOL Journals.
Blogging was at its height in the last half of the Aughts, but that’s when social media began its inexorable rise, and the likes of Facebook and Twitter peeled off bloggers left and right with ease of use, content in short punches, and utility geared toward the concurrent rise in mobile devices. Let’s be honest, blogging is not something you really want to do much on a cell phone. But after a decade of social media dominance, the deficiencies of those services are getting more and more obvious, and now many are returning to long-form content creation, either through newsletter services, or essay hosts like Medium and Substack, or…by blogs.
I never came close to stopping blogging, even though my frequency dropped to an all-time low a couple years ago. I’ve been keeping those fires burning though, and I don’t expect to stop any time soon, even if I never get back to those levels of 2003 when I’d post five or six times a day. Oh, those were fun times! And vexing times. The best of times, the worst of times…well, somebody might have said something like that.
There will probably be some more tinkering “under the hood” over the next while as I regain my WordPress sea-legs. I’m told, for one thing, that this site as currently designed is not well optimized for mobile devices, and that may be an issue. (Or I may decide it’s not and y’all can just lump it. I’m quixotic, I am.) Also, types of content that I have previously striven to keep off ForgottenStars will start appearing here. In the past I’ve kept this site’s infrequent posts focused pretty much exclusively on updates about my writing, and thoughts about writing and storytelling in general, and that’s it. Now? Well, my occasional political thoughts will show up here. Geeky meanderings. My music-related posts…photo posts from my daily existence…it’ll all be here.
Including, dare I say it…pies. It’s all fair game, now!
So, here we go! I’m hoping to have fun with this. I hope you’ll join in!
And now, as John Oliver would say, this.
In this ever-changing world, a pie in the face remains a wonderful thing!
So, as social media companies exercise more and more control over the content users post, and as those companies employ algorithms that are more and more quixotic in their moderation (I’ve seen people put into Facebook jail for using normal words that are homonyms of other words that may or may not be less normal, given the context), it’s more and more advisable that people with the intent of making at least some portion of their livings on content creation (like, writers!) own their own outpost online where there is no moderation save that which one applies themselves.
I already have such a space: my personal site, ForgottenStars.net, which I launched with the idea of using it as my base of operations for my “writing life”, while I’ve kept this blog going for all of my content that is not specifically writing-related.
The problem is that I don’t use the space I pay for enough, and that I’ve got what seems to me too many outposts online. Also, I don’t own this space: Google does, via their ownership of BlogSpot. So what I’m very strongly considering is migrating Byzantium’s Shores to Forgotten Stars. I’m not entirely sure what would look like, as I’m a wee bit nervous about pulling the trigger, but I’m told it’s not super hard to do. The problem is going to be that there is almost twenty years of content here, and I’m not sure how well the migrating will work.
The more I consider this move, the more likely I think it’s going to happen. I’m not sure when exactly I’ll pull the trigger, but it will likely be sooner rather than later, because I tend to be a “rip the bandaid off” kind of person. Ultimately I’d like to set up an automatic redirect here, but I’m not sure if that will work. We’ll see. It’s not as if I expect to lose a ton of traffic if I move, since this blog doesn’t get a ton of traffic these days; not many blogs do, in all honesty. But blogging does seem to be making a comeback, whether it’s on individual sites that people own themselves or on Substack or Medium or Patreon. So…be ready for things to randomly look very different here, pretty soon!
I have to admit to feeling a bit odd about such a move! As noted, I’ve got almost twenty years invested here at Byzantium’s Shores, but the arguments for consolidating and migrating elsewhere honestly do seem to outweigh staying on BlogSpot and keeping multiple content management systems going.
More to come!
Share This Post
ForgottenStars.net
The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
