Yes, I have another blog.
Wow. I typed this months ago, edited and saved it, and pre-set it to automatically publish now. But even back in the depths of the past, I heard you groaning. I can even read your thoughts! See: “Another blog? Why? What are you doing, becoming one of those social media geeks who tries EVERYTHING for about six months but never FINISHES anything?”
Well, actually, it’s not a blog.
Okay, okay, let me explain.
One day I was cleaning up my virtual desktop and I noticed I had a lot of random odds and ends there, mostly in the form of URL shortcuts. These ranged from virtual maps of Oakland, California to Hopper paintings I had never seen before, and all sorts of things in between. One could almost call these links to random cool things. What they had in common? They were all in some way influencing me, my thoughts at the time, or projects I was working on. There were also random files of quotes I have kept over the years which I found interesting. What to do with all this stuff?
One option, of course, would be to share them with others, using an existing social network. For example, I could post them as links on my Facebook account. Or I could share them on my off-again, on-again Twitter stream. Neither of these, however, is convenient for using like an archive, so although they would be easily shared with others, they’d be a pain for me to go looking through if I wanted to see them again. The blog here at The Addendum might work well, as it is easily archivable, tag-able, and searchable. Many other bloggers share random links with their readers too. The Addendum, however, isn’t like that. It’s a blog built around my thoughts and my writing, content that by-and-large I create. While I do sometimes point elsewhere — like when I Promoted Zeb Andrew’s bridge photography, overall I try and keep to the bargain of putting quality written content here first. Stuffing a bunch of short posts of links just doesn’t fit that pattern.
Thus was born my virtual notebook, which lives on Tumblr. (I credit Lincoln Barber for inspiring this idea.) End result? I now have a light and simple place to dump pictures, quotes, and links to things that inspire me or influence me. What won’t be found here are my photos, updates about my work or projects, nor my original writing. Those will continue to live here on The Addendum. I also make no promises about frequency or updates. This is purely my own virtual notebook (almost a scrapbook). However, since it is publicly available, if you’d like to see what I’m reading, looking at, or absorbing, it might be of interest.