Past the halfway point now, and only eight days until the anniversary. Highlights and favorites from 2007 (the year I started grad school and actually started working toward having a real career) follow. I have to admit very little of it is especially entertaining or inspiring.
Back to one year per day as we move toward the big anniversary on 13 January. 2005 was another pivotal year as it brought my departure from San Francisco and return to the East Coast. Highlights and favorites follow.
January:
Febtuary:
March:
April:
May:
June:
July:
August:
September:
October:
November:
December:
I’m almost caught up from my vacation break and so I can return to one year a day soon The anniversary happens on 13 January.
In 2004, the trend toward daily updates with no substantial essays continued, making the site more of a journal than a reflective space. Thus it’s harder to pick “highlights” as such and the ones I chose don’t really show what was on my mind quite so well as in earlier years. Anyway, here are the ones I chose, such as they are.
January:
February:
March:
May:
July:
August:
October:
November:
Twelve days till the big anniversary, and fourteen years to cover because I missed a couple of days.
2002 was all about love and mushiness, until September, when it became all about love and cohabitation. But I occasionally managed to write about other things, too. In retrospect, I’m not wild about some of it, but most of it holds up OK.
January:
February:
March:
April:
May:
June:
July:
August:
September:
October:
November:
Sorry for that delay. I didn’t create enough of these before I left on vacation, thinking I’d catch up on the road, but the “cut and paste” nature of these particular posts made that a major pain on the iPad. Twelve days till the anniversary.
So 2001 was the year in which I lost one of my oldest friends, had major health issues, and met the love of my life, among other things. And a surprisingly latge number of things still managed to annoy me. A pretty intense year, all in all.
Some highlights:
January:
February:
March:
April:
May:
June:
July:
August:
September:
October:
November:
December:
Anniversary soon. Today? Y2K, when I apparently hated everything, especially San Francisco. OK, I still don’t care much for san Francisco.
Favorites and milestones from the textual diarrhea that was 2000:
The big twentieth anniversary is 13 January 2016. Today, it’s all about 1999, when I lost a roommate, pissed off a lot of people talking about gentrification, and started obsessively documenting old supermarkets. I think this was my favorite year of the website (so more links than the other “retrospectives” today) though in retrospect it comes across as a trifle whiny at times.
Looking back at twenty years on the web in prepration for my anniversary on 13 January. Today’s focus is 1998, the year I began doing web work professionally and realy began to question whether I wanted to spend the rest of my life in San Francisco.
The Idiot Factor: Pilot for a new series that never quite took off except as a running theme.
As a self-indulgent tribute to twenty years on the web, I’m looking back at one year a day leading to the actual anniversary on 13 January 2016. 1997 was all about free time, road trips, building a new website, and the occasional bit of debauchery. It was also the year I started questioning my relationship with San Francisco.
13 January 2016 will be the twentieth anniversary of the site that became Otherstream. In a rather egotistical observance of that anniverasry, I’m focusing on one year per day in the twenty days leading up to the anniversary, linking to some favorite and important (or just inane and disposable) posts from each year. Today, we start with 1996.
Otherstream did not start as a journal/blog site–or even one named “Otherstream.” Planet SOMA was more of a static site with information about San Francisco neighborhoods, some dirty pictures, rants about annoying aspects of faggotry, and some biographical info about me. It was the early days of the web and frankly, any presence at all was was still much more than 99% of people had in that pre-Wordpress, pre-Facebook era when most people didn’t even know what a website was. i didn’t start doing personal updates till several months in.
Aside from the birth of the website, 1996 was pretty pivotal in other ways as well. It marked the end of traditional full-time employment for the next six years, the end of the car I moved to San Francisco with, and several interesting road trips. It was really the beginning of a new era for me.
