r.i.p. tinyblog 2001-2010
I wrote here in the tinyblog for about seven years starting back when having a personal blog was a pretty novel thing. I wrote some stuff that not even my mother would be interested, but I did write some pretty good stories at times, both fictional and non-fictional. So, I thought I'd put together a "best-of" so anyone who's interested can see some of my favorite stuff without needing to comb through hundreds of old entries.
tinyblog history
Sadly I did not archive the first blogger version of the tinyblog design, but it featured a photo of Buddhist teacher Thrangu Rinpoche.
Then, for a long time I used this "cowboy looking at a rainbow" design.
This is what it looked like for most of its natural history, before I got all simple and XHTML on it. I took the photos of young Aidan with a real film camera, and he became the tinyblog logo for many years.
Some people wonder why I call it the tinyblog. Because it's tiny.
true stories
A couple of stories from when I lived with a young boy named Sam and a young girl named Rowan. One where Rowan explains how to be grown up, and another where Sam explains how I should determine his preferences.
A heartbreaking story about my one-time neighbor and his mentally ill wife.
A three part story about how I saw the movie What's New Pussycat with some porn actors, and then had a couple of strange experiences afterwards wandering around Seattle late at night. (Part II) (Part III)
A story about how a guy found redemption.
An amazing true story about how my Buddhist teacher exposed a CIA plot to infiltrate student groups in the mid 60's.
Another Buddhist story, a longer photo article that I gave its own page on tinyplace, about when my little sister went into a three year Buddhist retreat. I still love this story myself.
The first year I went to burning man I photodocumented my experience. Boring right? Well, some of the photos and stories are actually really spectacular!
Also photodocumented the process of making honey with my mom in 2005... go through the pictures one by one and they tell the story in captions.
And the last of the true stories and one of my all-time favorites about a time I drank with homeless kids in Freeway park and heard some words of wisdom.
fictional stories
I loved writing little microfiction, or sudden fiction on the tinyblog and wrote stories about:
A guy who chuckles at a childhood memory after being shot.
A skinny kid, told in three acts with dialog only.
And last, but not least, a modern fairytale about two beans.
poems
This is a "found", aka. "ripped off" poem I wrote interviewing Aidan, the original tinyblog boy, at about the time the masthead photo was taken. I love it.
This is where most of the pieces I used to do at poetry slams live, including actual mp3's of me performing them.
Then (thankfully very short) poems, respectively, about apostrophes, the end, autumn haikus, sledding, limes, and the very next moment.
Also, a tabular poem my sister wrote about abandoning all the girls' names she had now that she was going to become a nun.
And last, in 2004 I made a cool Christmas card with little sketches, and some of my favorite poems I've ever written. (Note: it's a 400k pdf, it's pretty!)
wierd stuff, surveys, parties and abandoned things
Before evite and facebook, it was super cool to make a custom web page for your party. I did this several times and the invites are pretty cool. Ben's Invention Party, a kissing party that never happened, an early bonfire party where I introduced my overexplaining FAQ style,
I made a fan page for a girl who said she really wanted a fan page. Jessetastic, you are still awesome! I will always maintain your fan page!
A blog that a friend and I were going to do where people finish a story exquisite corpse style called The Launching Point.
Back in the early aughts, when people were sending all these email surveys like "What kind of ice cream do you like, etc. etc." so I made a survey with the questions that I really wanted to know about people (at the time) and posted a page with the questions and some of my favorite responses. Feel free to email me the survey if you'd like to do it! If you have some funny answers I'll even add them to the page.