The Pursuit of Happy (Lorelai) Gilmore

Let's play a game. Supposing I was bi-polar, manic, whatever you call it, here's the names of my (public) blogs over the past seven years, in order: Yellow Brick Road, Inner Life, Anachronic, and Diorama. The next one will be Afterbang; for reasons to be explained later.

Typically, I just selected the names of my blogs for some (seemingly, to me) random reason. And then I just ran with a theme. For example, Yellow Brick Road was always written from a two person perspective; it was "The Wizard" and "The Tin Man." The Wizard was me; the Tin Man was me minus the heart.

I've always loved Wizard of Oz (movie, books, lore, etc) but I never really knew why. Anyway, the blog was at first read by three people. Me, Scandalynn, and GJN. That's it, three readers. I was just playing around with it because Jmz introduced me to blogging -- through his own blog and gomakross.org. I thought it was a great tool and much easier to update than the "thoughts" page of my rinky dink homepage from college (original versions dont' exist sadly).

The prime time for anyone to start reading/writing blogs is post-college. You're still curious about what your friends are doing, you're in a low paying administration job (if you're lucky) and you have time to surf the day away. Everyone I've started blogging has pretty much been working and bored out of their mind. Anyway, since I wrote YBR with two voices; people assumed it was two people. Most of my friends assumed it was Pan and I trading off. I let them believe it as long as they wanted. I had five readers anyway.

Here's the review it got (9/9/2001):
"Yellow Brick Road does not carry a yellow colour scheme. It does not mention Dorothy (though the writers are called 'The Wizard' and 'Tin Man'), and there is certainly no mention of any Elton John music. The design of the site is, frankly, poor. A lot of the download time is taken up a a pretty rubbish graphic on the side of the page, and instead of any internal navigation to speak of (archives, about, contact) there are only links off-site and a long, long series of posts dating back to the year 2000.

But the site redeems itself. It's strange, and unexpected; if I wasn't reviewing this site then I would leave it immediately without reading anything simply because the design is so uninspiring. It redeems itself by being different. There are two writers, and for every post they carry a conversation, each taking a different viewpoint, carrying a different opinion. It works very well (not always, but more often than not). The site would score higher if it was more a site and less a page; the design needs work but thankfully the content is just right."

Here's the link for all the header images for YBR. The site used to feature only a weirdly shrunken version of Dali's Hallucinogenic Toreador; my favorite painting ever.

I recall Transcended Joyce commenting on it, saying that it was a blog with (paraphrased) "the most posts on one page she'd ever seen."