About

So, about me and this blog. I'm me, and the blog is a blog. I'm not actually a big fan of that word, I think if you're going to cut weblog down to four letters by removing two letters from one end webl would have been better. But no one asked me and so the word is blog.

I should probably go into somewhat more detail than that. I'm Chris, whether that's capital or lowercase depends on whether it's accompanied by my last name or used as part of my online name which is chris the cynic.  (And sometimes even Chris the Cynic is capital.)  It has been pointed out that I often do not match that name. It's my name, has been for years, I'm sticking with it. For me, to do otherwise would be like someone saying, “I haven't done any metal working lately, I guess I'll change my name from Smith.”

I'm from South Portland, which is a small city in Maine that is south of Portland. (Maine is a state in the northeastern United States of America, it's the one farthest to the northeast.)

I've been dealing with depression for what feels like forever, at least ten years but I really don't know how long. It could be twenty for all I know. Definitely my entire adult life but, given that I'm 26 years old at the time of this writing, that's not actually saying that much.

For quite some time I've wanted to be a novelist (I've also considered the possibility of being a math teacher.) I've never written a novel, I once got as far as, I think, 90 thousand words into one but it wasn't very good and I stalled anyway. What I'm better at is writing small isolated bits. This blog exists, mostly, to archive those bits. So far it's mostly limited to what I've written on disqus, but at some point I plan to try to pull the other stuff together.

As for the name, I meant for my second or third post to explain it, haven't gotten to it yet. It has to do with Vergil and Oscar Wilde and a poorly thought out criticism of the movie Avatar. I'll get to writing a full post on it at some point.

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Navigation

I've tried to set things up to make finding your way around easy. Most of what is here is fiction, for which I've made indexes in addition to various tags, what isn't fiction is tagged either “meta” if it's about the business of the blog or if it actually resembles an ordinary blog post, “I have a blog.”

Generally speaking the tags are more up to date than the indexes because I add the tags to posts when I make them where I update the indexes when I get around to it, which often involves dragging my feet. I probably shouldn't do that because it wears down my shoes.

The three main indexes are the Rapture Index, the Twilight Index, and the Original Work Index. The Rapture Index has stuff that involves stories relating to the Rapture of premillennial dispensationalist theology, the Twilight Index has stuff inspired by the novel Twilight by Stephenie Meyer, and the Original Work index has original stories that aren't Rapture related (since the Rapture related ones are in the Rapture Index.)

If a subcategory has enough posts in it I'll give it it's own index. That's why, for example, stories inspired by Left Behind get their own index, and why Edith and Ben, an ongoing Twilight inspired story, gets its own index.

]And now, as of late August 2012, there is a page that links to all such indexes, subindexes, indexes to things that didn't exist when this page was made, and indexes that group content by month.]

For tags it's honestly a case of tagging things with whatever I feel like at the time. The reason I have a tag for extremely short is not that I think someone will read the 47 word long wedding I wrote and say, “That was awesome, I should read other extremely short things,” but because for some reason I felt better about posting extremely short things if I acknowledged that they were extremely short.

Also, I don't really keep track of the tags all that well and sometimes forget that one exists. For example when I tagged the physics version of the van scene as "silly" it made perfect sense, if you like that you might like other things that are silly and so why not make them easy to find? It looks like I forgot about it after about a week, and then didn't remember it existed for about three months. In fact, I think I thought I was creating a new tag when I discovered it already existed. So the silly tag is incomplete. I doubt it's the only one.