It’s been a rocky year kids for reasons I can’t even begin to explain to you. But one of the final adversities this fall was the slow crashing of our dear webhost Typepad over the last three weeks, starting with their inability to display images on the site. Fortunately I was able to backup all (or most of) the many words but it’s been made clear by the downtime (and Typepad’s own homepage missive that they’re no longer taking new customers) that it’s time to move all the sites to more stable and supported pastures. That will take quite a bit of time and effort (and that’s after researching where we can even go). I don’t know if I’ll even be able to restore everything, but if not we can revisit old posts from time to time.

Brave new start.

So anyway I’ll be gone for a while which is kind of bummer considering I was within a shot put of finishing both the Cher TV shows and the Essay Project and was in the middle of a new set of Grammar poems.

The big irony here is that I had taken some time off blogging this fall (and off social media too, although I didn’t do as well with that). I had decided to just stop talking for a minute and start listening (but mostly just stop talking already). And when the weather changed last week I crafted some new posts about poets and madness, Cher's new Decades collection and a few other things that won’t see the light of day for a while.

Honestly, I’m one of the lucky ones in this hosting meltdown because at least I had most of my backups from 2007 and I’m not depending upon any of my words to eat. They’re provided free of charge. Since I’ve never felt this current life’s mission has been to make money or get ahead, I’m not suffering quite as much as some others at this time. (For anyone on Typepad who doesn’t have backups, try visiting archive.org, the Wayback Machine, and you can grab stuff there.) And Typepad most likely will stabilize again (fingers crossed) but this is a big wakeup call for us old-timers over there. And this whole experience just highlights how fragile an internet life can be and how it can all become destabilized and disappear overnight, just like Vint Cerf indicated all those many years ago when he warned us in a speech that a generation of intellectual property will probably be lost. Web companies come and go. The supports you take for granted can lose their way. It’s all part of the digital lifecycle.

It could be worse…always.

Which brings me back to my little goal of shutting up for five minutes. It might be longer than that. I will be taking this opportunity to watch one of my favorite movies, Into Great Silence. I will pretend to be a monk for a while until my little Chatty Cathy comes out again, which is inevitable.

In better news, ICANN has called everyone back into the office for the first time since they shut down in April of 2020. So oddly 2023 is feeling like what I expected 2020 was going to be. And that includes trips into the LA office starting January, during which I’ll see the Joan Didion exhibit at The Hammer Museum and will report back on that when the sites are all moved. This also means there will probably be no NaPoWriMo 2023 for me next year as I won’t likely be up and running by that time.

But there’s plenty of work for me offline and I hope to catch up with everyone down the line. I hope the rest of everyone’s year goes well and next year we can pick up with new books and fun Cher stuff.