I would like to welcome you to the next chapter in Verities and Vagaries history.
We were a web log founded in the twilight years of the web log golden era (circa 2010). We were founded to have fun with the medium, while also staying true to our probably too-earnest sensibilities as probably too-earnest political thinkers and actors.
We also wrote a ton about booze.
But as we aged, our jobs got more demanding, and the web blogosphere started fading (so did we). The bastards killed Google Reader. As such, the effort just wasn’t at-hand to keep the train (web log) moving, so we shuttered it. Well, “shuttered” it: Moved it to a free host, posted extremely rarely, and basically let it all die out with no funeral.
But now you are probably wondering:
Why are you back?
Well, the world needs blogs, and we need to write again. I will start by making a bold assertion: Blogging goes hand in hand with keeping the worst people out of power. Let me explain.
You may not remember the halcyon days of the mid-2000s, but lefty blogs were everywhere. You couldn’t take a walk around the internet without hitting some weird blog written by some weirdo with maybe the worst takes about the best policy ideas. Blogs created the online infrastructure for little-noticed candidates to get traction. It was a fun time. Blogs probably led the way for a guy from Vermont to run a competitive presidential campaign; and if so, definitely led the way for somebody to take that infrastructure in the social media era and win the presidency. Who knows, maybe that happened. I have no idea. I’m not an internet political historian.
But then blogs died. Social media was its murderer. So was the death of Google Reader (RIP). So was the crash of the online advertising industry. Also everybody grew up and got jobs and had kids. But—but—once those blogs died out, the only thing left was shitty online publications produced by the worst people in the world. And that, at least partially, led to the rise of whatever fucking era this is.
So we need to bring back blogs. We need to bring back this blog. Sure, nobody’s counting of Verities and Vagaries, a blog that maybe had 12 visits a day in its heyday, to change anything, but as the saying goes: be what you want to see in the world. And we want to see more blogs.
The information diet in this country, hell, this world, is absolutely toxic. You have to pay to read the real news, but absolute intolerable and racist lies are just out there for free. Or you can check out some Shrimp Jesus pictures on the Zuckerberg Express. Or you can check in on a website owned by a nazi and full of other nazis posting nazi memes (which is also generally broken). Or you can read some AI slop on a website that used to be good but fired all its writers after a PE purchase. We have to counteract that. While the Democrats (lol) are looking for the Joe Rogan of the Left (lol), we can just get back to basics and type some words into a CMS and hope it helps.
I believe people want to read words written by real people. About real things that maybe don’t affect them personally but are important nonetheless. Or real things by real people about things that are absolutely not important but if not funny at least entertaining. It’s called Verities and Vagaries for a reason.
So that’s why we are back.
What’s next?
The aim is to get back to basics. One thing I learned from the first (and second lol) era of this blog is the link-blogging was a little bit much. It seemed important, and was a great exercise, to be honest. Putting out what seemed to the most important stories of the day really honed our thoughts and allowed us to see trends before they were caught by writers at other publications (I still think we caught that something was wrong with Ginny Thomas and something was going to happen in Ukraine about two years before anybody started paying attention). But it was really time-consuming and probably had less reward for the reader than for the writer. So link-blogging will be on the back burner for now.
We’re going to focus more on the actual writing bit. Just putting words on the screen and hoping it helps us figure out what we think and helping you figure out what you think. We’ll throw some cool and fun things up too, don’t worry. We’ll still write about booze. We’ll still write about food.
On a personal note: I just really need to remember how to write again. Sure, I write everyday at my job, but that’s writing for The Man, not an exercise in how I am thinking or how I want to communicate my thoughts. It’s been a long time, and decades (jesus, really?) of posting on and reading social media has really warped how I approach the written word, and I want to get back to being better at actually putting some thought into a real five paragraph essay web log post.
So, in short: Hopefully less superfluous posts, probably no link posts (maybe a few — I have to do something with all these tabs), probably a bunch of “what we are thinking about this particular news story” posts, and hopefully a bunch of actually thoughtful posts. But don’t expect a lot of posts (for now); we will be trading quantity for (hopefully) “quality.”
The old posts from the blog are still here, but note that there are some issues. The whole export>import>export>import process really borked them all up. We’re working on them, but it will either take a long time or never actually get fixed. Truth be told, our ratio of good old posts to pointless old posts is pretty whacky, so we are prioritizing the good old posts. I don’t think anybody really cares about a Morning Constitutional from 2011 (we were really into healthcare back then, fyi).
(I may actually kill all the old Morning Constitutional posts since they’re basically all old news and broken links at this point).
Known current issues with old posts, which I have spent hours working to fix and need to spend way more hours more:
- An absolute fuck ton of “/”s all throughout
- Basically every link is borked
- [extreme Grandmaster Flash voice] broken images, everywhere
But of course, somehow all 17 comments ever posted came out fine though.
Two lessons I learned from trying to revive a decades-old blog that was just let to die:
- I can’t believe how many random YouTube videos still exist
- I can’t believe how many Flickr photos are gone
- Jesus Christ we were such young babies
- A lot of our old posts are fun as hell
Posting will probably be more sporadic in this new era. I’d recommend adding us to your RSS reader of choice so you catch the new posts as they come out. You do have a RSS reader of choice, don’t you? If you don’t, I highly recommend it. Inoreader is my favorite if you need a suggestion.
We are happy to be back, and hopefully you are excited to see what we will do next in this new era. Again, welcome.
Recent Comments