Blog 2.0

This blog has been silent for a long while, embarrassingly so … whenever I end up ignoring it for a long time, I entertain the thought of retiring it. Perhaps it has served its purpose. After all, it began as a means of keeping family and friends apprised of the happenings in my life when I moved from Ontario to Newfoundland. But I’ve been here now for over seven and a half years, and it has been some time since I last posted anything to do with being an Ontarian in Newfoundland. Instead, this blog has evolved into a sort of catch-as-catch-can for my thoughts, rants, musings, editorializing, and trivia. I think this is what they call “mission creep” in the military.

Many times in the past few years I have considered starting a new blog, or a web site more generally that would be devoted more specifically to professional concerns. In a lot of ways, that is what this blog has become—considering that the balance of my posts have tended to involve discussions of books and film, television, the academy, or political questions. But there’s always been a slight dissonance with its original purpose.

Tomorrow (or possibly Wednesday), Nikki Stafford and I launch the first installment of our season three Game of Thrones co-blog. I think that after that is done, I will retire An Ontarian in Newfoundland; I will not take it down, as it is, in many ways, an archive of seven years of my life. But I’ve been feeling for a long time that I need to start fresh. At some point in the next few weeks I will start a new blog, one dedicated to issues of teaching and academia, to discussions of books and media, and hopefully a little more sophisticated than this one has been.

So stay tuned.