This post is 18 posts too early–I’d planned to do it at the thirty month anniversary–but this blog dominated a good portion of my day.

My head hurts because of this.

I spent part of the day sorting the posts on this blog. It took longer than I thought and I only got through about twenty percent of them. (The whole time I was asking myself “why didn’t you do this as you went along?) (Answer: because.)

The sorting involved going back through all 529 posts, starting with the earliest, and assigning each a category or two. This seems simple, but it’s a time consuming process that often involves rereading a portion of the post. In a couple cases, I assigned a category based on the title and the lede. Then, just in case, I reread the post only to discover it was in the wrong category.

I also kept having to add categories, including a category (random) that is more a cop out than an actual category. (I might as well have stayed with “unassigned” the default category.)

The goal is to sort out the Japan related posts so that I can start cross-posting them at my once and future old website and to assemble the best ones as a book to give away when I relaunch the old website.

I’ve also taken the opportunity to edit a couple typos and clarify a few bits.

Along the way I’ve discovered a couple moments where I sort of, almost repeated sections (I think of those “call backs” and not as mistakes or self-plagiarism) and I also found a few passages that I didn’t remember writing. Luckily I enjoyed them.

One of the problems with looking back at your old work is there are only a few possible reactions:

1) Man, I really sucked at this but I’m getting better.
2) Man, I used to be good at this but now I suck.
3) Man, I really suck at this.
4) Remind me again: why am I doing this?

Mostly I’ve noticed the way the tone has changed. I’ve had recurring jokes that I eventually dropped (something like that) and jokes that changed (“something like that” started as in-line text and then became parenthetical). There were also themes that seemed to dominate the blog for a while and then disappeared.

I still have a stack of possible topics that I’ve been putting off and a list of photos I plan to take “some day” in order to add them to reviews. First I need to sort the posts. After that, the goal is to modernize the other site.

The problem then becomes do I do two posts each day or recruit guest bloggers for the other site?

Knowing me, I’ll fret about that so long I won’t actually update the old site. Problem solved, except for the worry.