Somewhere, out there, one or two long abandoned blogs float around WordPress, passwords and content long forgotten. Thankfully, they did not serve meaningless lives, as I from them I gained experience on this platform.

Setting up the blog was fairly simple; a bit of careful clicking here and there got me the right ‘aesthetic’. Dark themes, deep greens, winter woods… then, I wasn’t so careful in my clicking and deleted it all. Oops! Thankfully, after going through the process all over again, I was able to recreate my masterpiece.

I used avatarmaker.com to make an avatar, which I do every few months as I inevitably update my look (my first avatar had purple hair, as I did too!). A quick Google search for “creepy winter forest” gave me a background image, and an article on Mental Floss about quirky Latin phrases provided me with “Caesar non supra grammaticos”, which means “The Emperor is not above grammarians”. This phrase originated when the Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund of Luxembourg made a grammatical error, then tried to change an actual grammatical rule to remove the error. The scenario seemed somewhat familiar to me, for whatever reason…

Setting up this blog, I thought about what I liked and didn’t like from websites I have seen. It’s probably foolish, but when I am looking into colleges to attend after RCTC, a badly designed college website turns me off of it instantly, as does a picture of a sport being the first thing displayed– not that there’s anything wrong with sport, of course! As Nelson Mandela said, “(Sport) has the power to unite people in a way that little else does.” Sport unites me with other people that are afraid of yelling and violence. I am who I am.

A majority of the writing I have done has been technical writing. One of my proudest possessions is a copy of an essay on the Vicuna I wrote in third grade! I think that, given the chance, I would love creative writing, but it simply hasn’t been a skill I have had much chance to practice. One of the best classes I have ever taken was an online class with the Lukeion Project about Shakespeare. Alongside the many technical essays I wrote for that class, I also got a chance to do some creative writing when I wrote Shakespeare FanFiction. DM me for a link, I’m pretty proud of it.

Creating this blog, in terms of thinking, was like using a magic tool belt. Anything can come out of a magic tool belt, but you have to know the exact thing want in order to have it. I knew my resources online, my preferences for design, and my experiences writing essays and entries. I knew that I can refuel at the Hill Theatre with the candy bowl Ben keeps backstage (shoutout to Ben). I knew about the oxford comma. Here’s to learning new tools!

http://mentalfloss.com/article/57898/20-latin-phrases-you-should-be-using