Twenty Years of CJCS.COM

It’s been twenty years since I started the cjcs.com domain. Wow. You can read the history and stuff from the previous post I did five years ago (Happy 15th Anniversary to CJCS.COM) so I won’t repeat that here. Instead, I’ll talk about the state of the domain.

First off, the two main sites — CJ’s Creative Studio and TIB — are very much alive. Not very active in recent times, but alive. Old time readers will note that new content has dropped off a lot in recent years. I used to post at least once pretty much every day. Now, it’s mostly been seasonal reviews of Christmas movies (and not even that this past winter) and a scattering of other posts. What happened?

The primary reason is that I didn’t want to repeat myself. Just like in any long-term relationship, I had tons of stuff to say when I started but, as the years of posts went by, I came to the point when I felt I pretty much said what I wanted to say. Sure, there was one arena I could post on constantly: news and politics; but after dipping my toe in that pool for a few years I found that it darkened my mood.

For several election cycles now, American politics has irked me no end. I had some choices to make regarding that in terms of TIB posts. First: do I want to go down that rabbit hole? Second: do I want to publicly invite a flood of the sort of comments that the stridently trollish like to spend their time penning? Third: if my passions become heated, do I want to risk national agencies opening up my government jacket? Fourth: how many friends and family was I willing to piss off (to be fair, that’s become increasingly moot due to the past election and social networking)? I concluded that it wasn’t worth it for my peace of mind to commit to these sort of fertile posts.

So, that hasn’t left much. I don’t want to post just to post; I want to feel like I’m contributing to the larger conversation and knowledge base. I don’t pretend to be more informed or skilled than those from whom I’m still learning in print and video. Intellectually, I know that I must share knowledge gained for that’s what you do with it, but my perfectionism doesn’t compel me to want to go on the record with anything I haven’t earned some degree of mastery or at least competence — and given all the things I do, it takes a while to get skilled in it all.

And speaking of video — I actually do still have plans to publish videos more regularly on either or both the active sites. When I commit art, sometimes I do like to show the process. Unfortunately, I haven’t had a lot of contiguous time to do more than practice a little. I’ve also recently caught the 3-d printing bug and the designing that comes with that. That seems like an area I might start exploring to share as well. Not sure how, though. I’m still thinking on that as I’m working on becoming skilled at the non-beginner aspects of this tech’s art and craft.

Needless to say, my lack of activity does hurt my bottom line. I garner a fraction of the visits and views than when I was posting regularly. Seeing folks able to make money with videos, as I once was with blogging, I’d like to join in — my needs are modest, it won’t take much. As of this writing I have over 5,600 subscribers on YouTube (wait…what?  Seriously?). And my short video on improving handwriting has…over 950,000 views(!) (holy freakin’ OMG); so I have at least a tiny track record in that forum, now. But I’m a writer. That’s my thing. I’m not a video person. Maybe I need to be. Stay tuned with that.

I’m very willing to entertain ideas of what you’d like to see in either print, video, podcast, or whatever. Please, post in the comments here or wherever this gets shared. (Just remember, I do moderate comments when necessary, so keep it clean :-) ) If I think I can provide the content, I’m willing to give the second 20 years of cjcs.com a renewed purpose.