Well, it's been a decade already -- my, how time flies!
It's no secret that I started blogging way back in 2005. Or who knows, maybe my 2005 wanking doesn't properly constitute blogging, so then I should rather say that I started "actual" blogging sometime after 2005 but before 2013... or maybe sometime after that point, or indeed, maybe I never blogged and you're here reading endless rivers of wank-product, in which case the joke's entirely on you.
I'll spare you the usual retrospective filled with highlights of highs and lows in the history of my blog; if you're interested in history, then I'll have you know that it's right in front of you, so go ahead and dig in. In case it wasn't obvious, the highs and lows of The Tar Pit accurately reflect the ones in my own life, which makes the whole thing a deeply personal affair. From the travel journal to film and gaming reviews; from the historical-journalistic scornful commentary to code; from translations to transcriptions, both half-filled with plenty of side-notes, you'll find pieces which likely make very little sense if you don't know me personally, all the more since they're written in a peculiarly Romanian dialect of English. So more than personal, The Tar Pit is thus far a selfish attempt at building a public tree of knowledge that is by and large inaccessible to the public, which may sound lame, but either way it's much more than I can say about "large language models" or whatever fashionable numerical methods the markets may have on offer today. Sure, I have plenty of scripts and dashboards looking at various statistics on thetarpit.org, but these are completely besides the point.
Moreover, as I've hinted in the second paragraph, I'll immediately agree that this ten year milestone is quite arbitrary -- had humans had twelve fingers, I would have been doing this in the year 1209, expressed in base twelve, of course. There's however nothing arbitrary in the fact that I selected this date as an opportunity to reflect upon whatever it is that I'm doing here; and I will readily admit that I'm not doing much. I'm not documenting Lucian's Extraordinary Adventures in The Land of The Stupid, just as I've not set out to write some literary masterpiece. I'm not especially focused on documenting decay, although I've done it numerous times, just as am I'm not dead set on triggering the more sensitive souls living under the spells of ideology AKA metaphysicsopium for the masses. Once you take away all these things that I'm not doing, what remains is what I'm not not doing, which maps approximately to what I am doing. I hope this satisfies the more curious among the readers.
As for the future -- as far as The Tar Pit is concerned, the first priority is to continue writing. I do have more concrete plans on both the short and long term, and I will share each of them when the time comes. I am still interested in technical matters, albeit not from the same perspective as I was a few years ago; and I still hold dear history viewed through a philosophical lens, as well as I do metaphysics along with the unending thirst to understand the world as it actually is, opposite to what some of y'all wish it were.
I have no idea whether they'll decide to close the interwebs anytime soon, but if they do, my goal is for The Tar Pit to still be here that day. Otherwise all I can hope is that it lives just about as much as I do.
Yay!
And you may rest assured that both me and the assorted glowies that they assigned to your blog (as punishment?), are looking forward to yet more decades of unwise self-exfiltration :D
Cheers!