While surveying the state of the Internet today, I decided that what the online world really needed was another blog. Luckily I have never been short of opinions to share. And so I proceeded to do some research into the best approach to my new endeavor. Several sites told me that if I hoped to acquire actual readers I should choose a narrow niche and hew to it rigidly. Others told me that with a bit of planning I could actually make a living off this blogging thing. One helpful fellow said I should review as much music as possible as quickly as possible, linking in each review to the Amazon.com product listing to make some money off every happy consumer I sent Amazon’s way. I needn´t waste a lot of time actually listening to the music I reviewed, he informed me; I need only use the snippets of songs on the Amazon site to get a “good impression” of an album, and so could I be on my way to riches with a minimum of critical effort. I thought about combining these two pieces of seemingly excellent advice, but quickly realized I would have a problem almost immediately: if I built a blog about, say, flugelhorn players who recorded during the 1970s, and reviewed as many flugelhorn albums from the era as possible as quickly as possible, I would soon be out of material. So I decided to throw out all this advice.
Instead, I’m going to use this blog to write about an eclectic mix of things that actually interest me. I may be commiting a sort of Internet-traffic suicide, but maybe one or two of us can have some fun while it lasts. So, you can expect updates on my various projects here along with lots of opinions on music, books, games, and who knows what else. And you can expect a bit of theory, and perhaps some cultural observations, and perhaps even a personal anecdote or two. Or maybe I won’t get to all of that. Who knows?
Defensive self-effacement aside, I have no idea where this blog will go. I tell myself that, as a writer by at least one of my trades, it’s good practice for me to write someplace like this frequently, to keep the old chops sharp, as it were. That’s true enough, and it’s also true that plenty of people before me have kept diaries and journals just for their own satisfaction. But I won’t lie; I’d like it if a few people actually started to read and comment as well. So, whether this is the start of a big thing or a failed experiment or a literary masterpiece whose importance will be understood (a la Samuel Pepys) only a century from now, it’s definitely the start of something. Wish me luck, and thanks for reading!
Michael
March 7, 2011 at 7:16 pm
Good Luck! I’ll be following your blog. I’ve always enjoyed your SPAG editorials. Now, let’s hope for a Great Plague or a Great Fire which you can chronicle; then your fame is practically guaranteed ;-).
matt w
March 8, 2011 at 12:53 am
Well, if you are interested in seventies flugelhorn, I’d definitely recommend Kenny Wheeler’s Gnu High — you can hear one track (“Smatter”) on his myspace. Maybe not the best decade for the instrument, though, at least in jazz.
Felix Pleșoianu
March 9, 2011 at 7:56 am
Welcome to the blogosphere, and good luck! You’ll need to find a voice all right, but you don’t need to do it right now. And there’s nothing wrong with a low-traffic, purely personal website. Just keep at it — that point is rather important, I’m afraid. :)
Andrew
February 18, 2013 at 8:32 pm
I’m totally hooked on this blog now. I’ve read the second 50% or so of it. All it’s missing is a quick way to come back to this post and start from the start. Maybe there’s a link but I couldn’t find it. I had to click backwards, month by month on the calendar. Maybe there’s a better way…?
Phaxda
November 8, 2013 at 12:23 am
This blog is great–a fellow forum member posted a link on AtariAge:
http://atariage.com/forums/topic/218391-russian-embassy-had-atari-8-bits/
I too am starting at the beginning and posted the link there for this post.
Brandon Campbell
November 30, 2014 at 3:25 am
Hi, I found this blog while doing an unrelated search about the Apple II, and it looks like I’ve finally gotten to the beginning. It has been very educational as well as nostalgic, and I look forward to reading your continued journey through gaming history as well as your site about the Amiga.
Borys Jagielski
March 24, 2017 at 4:19 pm
Hello Jimmy! I got here through a post on Facebook praising your articles on “Loom” and “Monkey Island”. I read them, got enthralled, scrolled back in time and started to read your blog from the very beginning on Kindle (thanks for the ebooks that you’ve very conveniently put out). You have an absolutely wonderful knack for writing about these topics. My adventure with computer games started around 1990 and I consider everything that had happened before as a pretty dull prehistory. But you got me completely hooked with your posts about “The Oregon Trail”, “Adventure” etc., and this is no small feat, because no one before had managed to get me into reading anything on these pre-PC games. Thank you for writing and for all your efforts.
Jacob Bauer
October 2, 2017 at 7:25 am
Next to last sentence:
“whose important will be understood”
“whose importance will be understood”
Jimmy Maher
October 2, 2017 at 9:18 am
Thanks!
Kasper Ingdahl Andkjær
May 24, 2020 at 6:18 pm
My turn to dive in from the very start.
Looking forward to it :)
Leo Vellès
February 3, 2021 at 2:54 pm
After, i don´t know, almost two years reading every single post and every single comment, i finally catch up with both The Digital and Analog Antiquarian. Your writing is so enjoyable and the topics so interesting that now that i have to wait for every friday for a new post (by the way, last friday it seems you didn’t add an entry on either blog. I hope everything is ok) i decided to start over again from the very first entry.
And it’s amusing to read what your first expectations were for this blog and how it did evolve to being the most interesting of all i`ve seen in the net.
“But I won’t lie; I’d like it if a few people actually started to read and comment as well”.
Well Jimmy, you’ve come a long way, and very well deserved.
Keep on the good job!!!!
arthurdawg
March 23, 2021 at 5:40 pm
Whoah… just decided to look at the TOC for the first time in a while and noticed that you just hit the ten year anniversary!
Awesome! Looking forward to the next decade!
Jimmy Maher
March 24, 2021 at 7:51 am
I’m generally not one to care all that much about arbitrary anniversaries — much to my wife’s chagrin — but thanks! I hope I’m just getting started… ;)