At one point last winter, I had seven blogs on the go. Admittedly, three were in their infancy, having maybe a dozen posts between them, but still, seven blogs. All of these blogs were about biological science, my favourite university department ever. It would work like this: I'd come across something cool, say how a mould called Aspergillus niger singlehandedly decimated the Italian citrus industry in the 1920s by providing a more efficient (less expensive) means of citric acid production, and then suddenly I'd have a blog called "Manufacturing Microbes" (now deceased). So it has gone, time and time again.
Unfortunately, writing about science, at least for me, takes a hell of a lot of effort. I don't like dumbing things down too much, but I still like to reach people outside of the scientific community. I've spent countless hours at my laptop, reading the literature and writing posts. I've learned to love the challenge of explaining something highly technical, while attempting to point out what is so neat about it and mix in a tiny bit of humour. Being an inherently lazy Master's student, seven blogs was way too much. It got to the point that I started to actually feel bad for them, starting me down on my Blogger dashboard with their single-digit post counts, forgotten on some Google server in a lonely office basement.
I'll admit it, when I started my first blog, Drugs and Poisons, almost two years ago (hot damn!), I was in it equally for the chance to share my strange and wonderful love for pharmaceuticals and toxins and the chance to make some extra cash. I've managed to do both, I think. To be able to look back over almost 200 posts, most of them of decent length and quality, and know that I can cover my monthly internet and phone bills with what I make from advertisements, is a neat feeling. I've totally sold out, but I'm poor, so that's how it works.
Unlike Drugs and Poisons, and my other big blogging accomplishment, A Good Poop, my blogs tend to fizzle out, as they inevitably devolve into my best attempts at paraphrasing the most intriguing parts of Wikipedia articles. Heck, just last week I deleted "Roots of Scientific Terminology" and the aforementioned "Manufacturing Microbes". Thank God I'm a cheap-ass Blogger john capable of resisting the glistening charms of a .com domain name.
Which brings me to the crux of this post, the inaugural one for this blog. Sporocarp began as an means of showing off my nascent photography skills and writing about how dang cool mushrooms are. I've since hit the reset button and given it a new purpose: It shall be a catch-all for all of these blog ideas that seem to strike me with some regularity. No more shall I plant the seed of a new blog only to pluck out a wilted seedling, denied of nourishment. I suppose, after all of these blogs, I'm finally writing one about myself. I hope you don't mind it.
