I have no idea how long I expected this thing to go on for when it was first started, but it's a bit of a special day in my online world - today marks this journal's tenth birthday. It was started in 2003 as a link in a circle of friends keeping in touch with each other after the first year of university - and after not being able to see the appeal of broadcasting thoughts about my life at first, ironically I'm now the only one of them still at it.

And in retrospect, I'm now very glad to have done it. I really enjoy exploring back through it sometimes, just to see memories - both of actual life events and just whatever I was thinking about at the time, vaguely remembering writing them and recalling the environment that I was living in. Through these pages, you can see an enormous stretch of my life, starting at one end with me being a complete idiot... and going all the way back to 2003.

Seriously, though, there's a massive amount of personal development visible by flicking through the history (although naturally I'd rather you didn't). The contrast is clear by looking back to the very first entry, which was one of those stupid quiz things where you put in some values and it told you what flavour of yoghurt you were or that in a previous life you were a depressed goldfish. I stopped doing those fairly quickly as I realized that they were hugely irritating, but unfortunately didn't realize the same about my own writing. The first couple of years are very introspective and more than a little repellent, talking about personal late teenage thoughts and crises of little interest to its small intended audience and of even less interest to anybody else.

Gradually, I would like to feel that I got my act together a bit, and started to realize that I had a platform to make myself seem like an interesting and funny person instead of a pitiable and despondent one - a turning point that you can recognize around the time that I stopped using lyric fragments as entry titles on the basis that it was bloody stupid. I started writing more about things that I thought were interesting rather than tacking up the day to day events of my life, and started producing things like this. Dreadfully written as it seems now, this was actually the first - and to date, only - thing I've written that seems to have been widely linked outside Livejournal itself (based on me finding a couple of people on other sites asking if anyone remembered the article that rated all the Prince of Persia games with turbans out of ten.)

Life events still naturally formed the basis of what I wrote about, and the focus of my writing (as much as there was one) shifted over the journal's lifetime - from university-related talk to work to moving to America, which has proved to be an inexhaustible supply of things to rant about and is probably the main reason for the journal's longevity. These posts could be anything from large essays on the suspiciously frequent bizarre events in my day to day life to just simple photographs of this insane thing I saw on the subway. Recently, things seem to have come full circle on the subject of it being aimed towards a very specific audience, as 2012-2013 was definitely the Year of the Pigeon, a period that saw most other posts (and other things I did with my life) disappearing in favour of updates to an improbably successful and largely accidental venture.

What now? Well, I'm going to carry on. I had been thinking of hanging on to the tenth anniversary and then just stopping, but I honestly have no idea what I'd do otherwise when I wanted to broadcast something worth sharing - I've met hundreds of people on the Internet through this, and I really value the twelve or so of them who aren't complete idiots. It's striking that there is nowhere that offers the same thing that it does, apart from the skeletally identical Dreamwidth - the number of people writing interestingly is declining in favour of streams of rapid-fire information.

With that in mind, thank you for staying around, for letting me share these fragments of my life and for sharing yours in return.