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(Just Like) Starting Over

(Hmm, I’m sure I used this title the last time this happened.)

Another Ticket

Here we go, all over again, all afresh, all anew, all so familiar. It’s the second time I’ve moved out my journal, and a time to renovate and revamp a little. With some commitment and some luck, this place will be my comfy new home very soon.

The funny thing about introductory posts is that it’s all a little awkward. This is a bit of a problem too because of how I’ve to address new folks and old folks alike. It’s compounded by the fact that this shift will involve a bit of reorganisation as well. And speaking of new folks, I’ll have to do that introduction thingee here. Grr, I’m not good at these things.

In any case, I’m Daryl (which you no doubt already know from both my user name and the sub-heading on the top left), Engineering student, aspiring writer, hobbyist photographer, half-hearted music conoisseur, book-lover, and generally a geek. Or a nerd. I think nerd fits better. Oh, and I watch plenty of football. I don’t drink much coffee. Passing interest in the sciences that are not in my field of study.

If I had a tag cloud, I imagine that these are some words you might see: Dylan, noir, Beckett, Joyce (as in James Joyce), Beatles, Kubrick, Feynman, The Sandman, Grant Morrison, swing (and actually, just jazz in general), Allman, blues, Radiohead, Murakami (of the Haruki variety), Miles Davis, zombies, Larkin, Kurosawa, cats, Heinlein, Doctor Who, splatter flicks, Lovecraft, T.S. Eliot, Cormac McCarthy, Scorsese, Kojima (and keeping you waiting), Nikon, Ezra Pound… and, well, you know, these things, can’t be impressed upon people immediately, but just to give a vague, cloud-like idea of my interests. I guess this really needs time. But just to get started.

Oh, and I’m in Singapore. And about that writing thing, it’s been an interest for a long time, but now it’s really more of a job. I think I’ve accepted it as my work, in some sense. I write mainly prose, though I’m looking to pick up the other branches as I develop. My current project is in first draft, and I’ll probably be talking about that quite a bit in the future.

Great, I suppose that works as a sort of awkward-handshake introduction. Well, it’s better than nothing.

Just Like Old Times

Things will look basically the same if you’re a regular. For a start at least. I’ll be looking to keep some things in place, such as the bulletin style that I was using most of the time back at the old blog. For the most part, it’s been figuring it out from the experience that I’ve gained the two years and some months since I started blogging.

Change It

That said, things will be changing quite a bit too. For one thing, I expect to actually have a reduced blogging volume, which isn’t actually such a bad thing considering how much of the old blog was filler material and really an exercise in discipline more than anything else. I intend to go at a post a day, with breaks on the weekends, possibly Sunday, and there will be a reduction of photo features. The temporary set-up goes in the way of a Monday-Wednesday-Friday thing, with Tuesdays and Thursdays being photo features. Saturdays will probably involve a different type of content, though I haven’t exactly got that figured out yet.

The focus will also be changing. I’ll be concentrating more on my work (that is, the writing and literature in general), and a couple of my interests, for a start (such as photography, technology and music). Whatever it is, though, it’s still a journal at heart, not a business venture, so it’ll wear the personal element on its sleeve. Still, fewer random distractions. There might not be discussion on football, for instance, or anything too in-depth with regards to music. Not as many links to random science or technology. In some sense, it’s a funnelling of the content and a concentration on a few areas that I feel I ought to be focussing on. My work from a personal perspective, with a few side orders. I suppose that might be a good way to think about it.

Over Time

And–this will take some working out–the idea is that this might be something more than just my journal in the future. Things will evolve. It might incorporate news, or something on my personal library, or my (currently primitive) book club, some random writing content, or, well, there could be anything here. The concept is to grow it from a journal into a personal site.

Finally…

So, over the next few days (and weeks, and months), I’ll be setting up the place little by little. Everything’s sort of sketchy right now, so it’s all a bit experimental in nature, a sort of one-step-at-a-time thing. It doesn’t help that running my old blog was nothing like what I hope this will be in the foreseeable future.

So, here we are at the end of my introduction. If you’re new here, just hang in there as I start filling out the content so that you get a better feel for things. In the meantime, you might want to drop by at my flickr page [via flickr] or my Shelfari shelf [via Shelfari].

If you’re a regular, then rest assured that normal service will be resumed soon, and I hope the new place will be even better than the old one.

In any case, make yourself comfy. Things are, well, just beginning.

And that’s that. Phew. I was never good at intros. I’m glad I got that over with. Without embarrassing myself. Too badly, anyway.

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© 2008 a modest odyssey.