'Hey, this chick's whole written life is up here'

Feb 4, 2005

“MY GOOD GOD I LOVE NOT HAVING A JOB. My brain keeps finding interesting things to do with my time—I have plans and am busy and involved with my environment because everything I’m spending my time doing is enriching and fulfilling. I just might have found my way out.”

“Aye, I just had the most fabulous idea. It came from my qualm with computers (hating them) and my quandary of loving handwriting on paper but wanting my work to be accessible to larger numbers of people than zine culture can foster. Something I can capitalize on is the mainstream acceptance of ‘blogging’ (actually I don’t even need the quotations because the word has been coined). The idea: scanning the individual pages of a journal of mine and having it up on the internet for wider viewing.”

It so happens that on my birthday in 2023, in which I happened to open and read the above pages at random, later that day online I randomly came upon the work of some guy named Ben Stokes and his project of Tiny Projects. Actually, I came across his Daily Blog and not knowing anything about him I randomly clicked on a post with the date of my birthday. And there he talked about one of his tiny projects, which he called Paper Website. It is a service where you can take a photo of a page of handwriting and it will not just turn it into clean typed text, but also put it up on the web, thereby turning your paper page into a little webpage. Which is exactly what I’d just read myself write about wanting nearly twenty years before. And I read it on some guy’s blog just after reading myself use the word “blog” for the first time, putting it in quotes because the term was so new. I laughed out loud to myself for probably a minute straight.

I love holy-shit moments of laugh-alone-out-loud serendipity. I hadn’t had that in such a long time. It was reason enough to start my own little tiny project of sticking old journal pages up on the internet after all. A blog! Is my version as useful and cool as Ben Stokes’ tiny project? Of course not. But it delights me and if I wait to think it through and try to make something big of it, it’ll just never get done. So, here. Thanks for reading, and I wish you a big laugh-alone-out-loud moment of randomness, obviously when you least expect it.