Requium on Blogging

Berthold today had a post on blogging. He was responding to Lydia and Audrey who also wrote posts about it. They made me nostalgic for the days of Blogging before Myspace and fb truncated communication. I don't bother with twitter or Instagram ad nauseum.
Bruce, my brother, introduced me to blogging either in 2000 or 2001. He is hyper political in both secular and religious circles. He had a long list of fellow bloggers. I was writing Optimus: Praetorian Guard at the time, but a few of friends and family that I was sharing the work with mentioned my female characters were weak. I wrote a short story entitled Human Sacrifices about a female teacher trying to save her students from gangs by teaching them to read and think for themselves. It was purely an exercise in getting into the female mentality to make the ones in Optimus more real.
When I created my first blog it was called Captain's Log. It was personal journal of what my day or week was like. Then I created my writing blog, Tiglathpilezerx, where I serialized Human Sacrifices turning it into the novel it is today. I then created this blog for my family and the friends I've picked up along the way.
I enjoyed posting comments on Bruce's blog. He'd get lots of trolls and I had fun arguing with them over being in Iraq and Afghanistan. There were the fundamentalists that he infuriated and it was fun arguing with them over premillennial dispensationalism verses amillennialism. I love a good spirited debate. Bruce got tired of the trolls and blocked them. He's always bee a bit of a spoil sport.
I can't remember the name of the assistant principal of a middle school in Oklahoma that had a great blog. He had a large following and every week he would provide links to his faithful commenters and it was fun to hit the links and have my link included. When I published Optimus he bought a copy and I mailed it to him. He did an excellent job of reviewing the book. The best one of all time. Amazon took it down for some reason along with about a dozen others. They set a policy that they won't publish a review if it includes that the writer is a "friend." Grr. He became a head principal and didn't have time to devote to the blog. I've really missed him. It's been so many years I can't remember his name of his blog.
There's one blogger I picked up from Bruce that I still blog with. For a number of years we lost track of each other, but recently we're blogging buddies again. Yogi lives in Tulsa and he loves to geocache. He has lots of pictures of all kinds of things. Recently he got a drone and it's adding to his pictures.
On my writing blog a woman started commenting about how much she liked the story and I started following her Kimdergarten blog. She lives in Mississippi and blogged about trying to live through Katrina which made what was happening in that part of the world more real that just the news. That storm disrupted the lives of people in five states, but all that was reported was about New Orleans. Her son went into the military and was deployed in Iraq, that also brought home the reality of war. She stopped posting and shut down the blog at that point. She's been greatly missed.
On my Captain's Log blog I made friends with two guys in Colorado and the brother-in-law of a fellow teacher who taught next door to me. Butch told me about Russ, saying he was a radical liberal like me. I also encountered Woody. We became the Curmudgeons. Our posts and comments were lively, funny and made for great comradery. The two from Colorado decided that we should all meet. They drove down and the five of us met for a night of beer, gourmet hamburgers and lively talk. Woody, Russ and I decided we'd keep meeting about once a month.
Russ was a professor at UNM, Woody was a retired professor from Oklahoma and LSU. This was about the time I retired. We had lively discussions. Woody is an avid poster on fb, but his health is giving him problems.
Our meeting stopped when Russ's wife was dying. He dropped off the map after her funeral for a time and found another love. In 2012 right after Obama's reelection he announced he was running for president in 2016. I became his campaign manager and we had a press conference announcing his run. He considered this as political comedy. He made up buttons and I posted on this blog and it was great fun. Here's a link to that post. Berthold and Russ were both Gilbert and Sullivan fans and got along.
Russ dropped from sight and only comes out every so often now. He's missed.
Another blogger I miss is Michael Manning. He had a great blog with every year a Steve McQueen festival. He wrote reviews of his movies, interviewed a number of his co-stars and knew all kinds of trivia. He talked on all kinds of different topics. He finally shut down and is greatly missed.
Scott Horton was and is my all time favorite. He's on fb now, but his blog was amazing. He had legal information and posted about the hatchet job that was done to the democratic governor of Alabama. He posted artwork and wrote detailed descriptions of the artist and interpretations of the piece. He's still at it on a much smaller scale today. He recently moved to New Mexico and has started posting pictures of the state.
In 2006 Playboy magazine had an inteview with Anne Huffington of the Huffington Post. I wrote a post on my blog making a few comments on what she said. About a week afterwards I got a call from Playboy. They wanted permission to put part of my post in their letters to the editor page. I agreed and that's how I got a "letter" in Playboy.
That's enough of memory lane for today.