It was 20 years ago today

 

It was 20 years ago today
Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play
They've been going in and out of style
But they're guaranteed to raise a smile
So may I introduce to you
The act you've known for all these years
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band

Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, the Beatles

It was 20 years ago today that I started my blog with my first post being "No, I'm not a rabid Elvis Fan." According to Google there are more than 600 million blogs on the Internet today with 32 million in the U.S. alone. And there are 7.5 million blog posts a day. 

So you see why almost no one reads my blog. Shoot, even my own family doesn't read my blog. Nor do the people I work with or for that matter just about any of my acquaintances. It is the irony of writing one blog among 600 million. Although it is there for millions of people to read and is about as out there as you can get, it is almost as anonymous as you can get as well. As with my life, I am invisible in plain sight.

But of all of those 600 million blogs (and 50 percent they say are bloggers who are between the age of 21 and 35), I seriously doubt there are many who have lasted 20 years.  Granted I have not always been consistent in posting, but I hung in there. In the early years many people started out enthusiastically with the best of intentions to post regularly. Back then, you followed other blogs to get them to follow you with the mistaken idea that other bloggers would read your blog and help spread the word that you were Hemingway of bloggers and worth reading. We didn't really have any concept 20 years ago how big the Internet was or would become and what the odds were that someone would read your blog or keep reading your blog.

This was before social media had really become a thing. It wasn't like Tik Tok where a person can get millions of views just for posting a video of them lighting their farts on fire. But a vast number of bloggers had no clue as to what to write or what people would want to read. And there lies the problem. As the Internet expanded the attention spans of people contracted in the same proportion. There wasn't a lot that you could write that would keep people's attention and get them coming back regularly. Hell, I rarely read anyone else's blogs regularly. 

The thing that I thought separated my blog from others was that I was a professional writer and I had had experience in college writing a regular "humor" column. I also have always had a fascination with Photoshop and manipulating images. The thing is that I spent many years simply putting my own face on hundreds if not thousands of various things like classical paintings, animals, inanimate objects and other random things. I did it because I was an available model and I worked cheap. And I thought it was hugely funny.

Now this year I have discovered a new outlet for my creativity that allows me to continue to try and be clever with very little risk. Most of my posts this year have been about creating designs (primarily for t-shirts). I'm able to take my Photoshop obsession, collaborate with a rabidly expanding AI art world and turn bad puns into what I loosely think of as art. And very few have my face on them.  I post them on teepublic.com and write about them on my blog. I've created more than 1151 designs but only sold about 45 items. Still it is more attention than my blog or my writing ever got. And other than regular skirmishes with the intellectual property Nazis, there isn't any real downside.

Still, I don't get much affirmation that I am clever, funny, witty or have a sense of humor at all. Although I post my designs regularly on Facebook and Instagram for the most part I just hear crickets. But you know, I don't really care. My designs and puns amuse me. I am also proud of the sheer volume I produce. 

Every now an then I remind myself that Van Gogh's art wasn't appreciated in his lifetime.  I also remind myself that the world is a Narcissistic and a self-centered place. Much of that is because of the Internet and social media. So my response is to enjoy creating uncensored and very snarky t-shirt designs that make fun of just about everything.  

 And for the fun of it, I asked both Gemini (Google's AI ass...istant) and Ideogram's art AI ass...istant to create designs celebrating my 20th Blogiversary.

Ideogram's were okay. I still had to correct and add text. The one with the cake originally said "Party like it's 1999" (which made no sense). I do like the 20 years of madness.  

Gemini was a bit more formal. I also had to correct and add text but at least it spelled Dizgraceland right.

Anyway, here's to 20 years of writing whatever the hell I felt like. Who knows, by the time I hit my 40th Blogiversary maybe I will have been discovered (perhaps posthumously)