Decide it's time to reinvent yourself

Self-reinvention is overstating the point but I've decided to start a blog of my own.  I'm not exactly a stranger to online wordage, being something of a message board veteran.  I've also dabbled with LiveJournal in the past, mainly as a way of keeping in touch with old friends.  LJ's well and good but for various reasons, everything I write there is Friends Only and I miss the randomness of unfiltered bloggery: sending one's bottled witterings out into the gulf of cyberspace (does anyone still call it that?) where Googletides wash them up unexpectedly on foreign shores.

I'm also coming to the conclusion that, having been a stalwart of the Duckie axis for a few years now, I ought to get over my shyness when it comes to saying hello to familiar faces.  Me and The Spectacled Bear have a bad habit of settling into a sort of faintly coupley insularity (partly because we both have trouble hearing people over music) which I suspect can come across as self-contained to the point of stand-offishness. Until the power of strong lager kicks in, that is, at which point we become Mr & Mr Chatty McChat from Chatsville, Chatizona (we've both previously cornered poor Amy and subjected her to our earnest, boozy blatherings) but subsequently can't quiiite remember the details.

Lately, I've realised that a few of those familiar faces have blogs of their own.  This shouldn't surprise me and it doesn't, really, but it is a bit of a novelty - like reading Geoff Ryman's 253 for the first time.

So... I'm joining 'em!