{"id":41631,"date":"2014-02-05T12:15:31","date_gmt":"2014-02-05T18:15:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=41631"},"modified":"2014-02-05T12:53:46","modified_gmt":"2014-02-05T18:53:46","slug":"waypoint","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=41631","title":{"rendered":"Waypoint"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I was about to head to work this morning when I remembered; it&#8217;s February 5.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>My blog&#8217;s anniversary.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve been doing this for (counts fingers, removes shoe, continues counting) 12 years now.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>And I can honestly say two things:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>My motivations haven&#8217;t changed a whole lot since I started writing this blog.\u00a0 I&#8217;m shouting into the void &#8211; political, existential, social, whatever &#8211; more or less for the joy I feel just making the noise.\u00a0 When I started <em>Shot In The Dark<\/em>, I was a guy with a couple of kids and a job and a big gaping hole in my life.\u00a0 My kids are grown &#8211; sort of &#8211; and the big gaping hole has been filled with a big group of friends, crusades, and just a lot of purpose that I was searching for around this time 12 years ago.\u00a0 But underneath it all, there&#8217;s the sense that &#8220;I see things that need to be said.\u00a0 If I don&#8217;t say &#8217;em, who will?&#8221;\u00a0\u00a0 And I just plain enjoy it.<\/li>\n<li>The rewards, then as now, are all internal.\u00a0 Which is good, since this blog has never made more than enough to pay for its hosting, really &#8211; and that&#8217;s more than I ever expected out of it.\u00a0 I write because I love to write.\u00a0I started this blog before I\u00a0knew anyone else\u00a0in the Twin Cities was doing it,\u00a0to say\u00a0nothing of there being an audience.\u00a0 I get hundreds of readers a day; if I got half a dozen, I&#8217;d still love doing it.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I&#8217;m a conservative talking politics in a liberal metro area, so I&#8217;ve ruffled a feather or two &#8211; mostly the feathers of good people who can handle a little discussion.\u00a0 I&#8217;ve made a few enemies &#8211; without exception, stunted, risible little people who don&#8217;t have the balls to face me in a face-to-face discussion, and whom I laugh about until I switch back to ignoring them.<\/p>\n<p>Because they are overwhelmingly outnumbered by the friends I&#8217;ve made; other bloggers, readers, the other NARN guys and all the listeners that the show brought into my life, and all of the many, many people that all of this writing has brought me into contact with on the twelve-year journey that this blog has led me onto.<\/p>\n<p>So anyway &#8211; thanks, everyone!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I was about to head to work this morning when I remembered; it&#8217;s February 5.\u00a0 My blog&#8217;s anniversary. I&#8217;ve been doing this for (counts fingers, removes shoe, continues counting) 12 years now.\u00a0 And I can honestly say two things: My motivations haven&#8217;t changed a whole lot since I started writing this blog.\u00a0 I&#8217;m shouting into [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-41631","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mitch"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41631","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=41631"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41631\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41640,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41631\/revisions\/41640"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=41631"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=41631"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=41631"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}