It seems like I should address this pretty big anniversary for this blog. Lameazoid.com, is twenty years old, more or less, today. I honestly don’t have the exact date for sure, but I do have an old copy of the original site that suggests it was created on 10/09/1998. More accurately, it’s predecessor, The Chaos Xone, was created on 10/09/1998. Back then it was just a random Geocities website. It didn’t really use a “Blog Engine” but it did use a “Blog format” of sorts, in the form of manually updated HTML webpages and a copy/paste archive of old posts.
Funny enough, it’s pretty much still the same thing… ish. I really haven’t cared about Anime in ages and the market for “Cool Waves” and “MIDI Files” hasn’t quite been the same in a long while. The Geocities Pokemon Center was a separate site I ran that was pretty successful at the time. This original website went through quite a few iterations, all sort of keeping the core idea of writing random “reviews” on “random crap”. It moved hosts a few times, from Geocities to Lameazoid the Livejournal, then ramenjunkie.wordpress.com, some stints on Blogger, self hosted at my house on a Linux box, to actually using real paid hosting. Somewhere around the time I left College and lost that free college hosting, and moving to WordPress I think is when I bought a domain and transformed The Chaos Xone, with it’s Edgy Cool 90s X (the X is for XTREEEEEEM), into Lameazoid.com.
Why Lameazoid?
I think at the time it was supposed to sort of be a sort of buzzword sounding name. Like Freakazoid, the show. Only Lame. I have to admit, back then I was way way more cynical about everything, so I sort of had the idea of focusing on Lame things. It also sounds kind of retro, which was also more of my shtick at the time. I do still like the name, it was a pretty good choice honestly.
Over the years though my overall ability and interest in actually writing has come and gone. If I’m being honest, lately it just feels like no one cares. And they really probably don’t. There was a time back in the mid 2000s when Blogging was huge and the site pulled in 1000 visits per day. That felt pretty awesome. These days, I’m lucky if I am getting 1000 visits a month, less so since I have not even been updating lately.
I’ve also purged things out completely a few times, for better or for worse. I have everything though, in an archive. I have a big ass local WordPress instance that has pretty much everything I’ve ever written in my life stuffed into it in one big ball of mind vomit. Good and bad. Not just Lameazoid and the Chaos Xone, I’ve scanned or transcribed old paper journals and writings into it. Digital space is cheap, it can be backed up safely and easily. Why ever delete anything?
I’ve also tried to actually reboot and spin off a few times. The most ambitious was Ready Set Geek, which essentially was a separation of Toys and Video Games. This leads to a bit of a conundrum on my part of where to stick the middle ground things like movies and comics. The most successful is probably BloggingIntensifies.com, though that’s more of a spin off of my “Personal Blogging”. I post there entirely because I want to, not to try to be some sort of New Games Journalism writer. I’ve tried pushing more into the “new hotness” that killed blogging, like Tumblr and Youtube, but I guess I’m just not into that sort of thing. I’ve considered trying to recruit people I know to also write here, there was a brief time (during that 1000 visits period) when I did have friends also writing reviews.
Running this site has been pretty great for a lot of indirect reasons though. I’ve gotten pretty good at working Linux, for example, through the need to run a web server. Its given me excuses to play with Photoshop and to take photos. I used to use it as an excuse to be an early adopter of a lot of social media sites. Knowing your way around the Social web is pretty useful.
Anyway, I mostly just wanted to acknowledge this little event. Here’s to 20 more years I guess.
