blogging

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In the fall of 1994, I dialed into a friend’s bulletin board system for the first time.  If you’re wondering what that is, or was, a bulletin board system – BBS for short – was a computer system that you could phone into with a modem and share messages, download files, play games… it was a taste of the Internet way before most people had any access at all to the “information superhighway”.  They were something like CompuServe, America Online, and other commercial services of the Eighties and Nineties, but they tended to be much more local.

BBSes were almost always the projects of hobbyists.  My friend Mark’s BBS, which he named NEXUS, eventually had five phone lines.  That’s five different people who could be dialed-in at a time, conversing or playing games with each other.  It was something that blew my mind and it made me wonder what things ...

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Tomorrow is Ash Wednesday: the beginning of the Lenten season.

There have been some years when I have observed Lent on this blog.  The first time, in 2006, I refrained from posting at all.  This blog was two years old then and it was a commitment to keep the content fresh and poppin’.  So no blogging for seven weeks presented a dire temptation to write something, to write anything.  But I believe that I came through it a better person, and a better writer at that.

Then two years ago I felt the need to participate in Lent again.  But this time I went in the dire opposite direction.  After leaving Reidsville in 2016 I let this site lapse a bit (for over a year and a half!) while I was getting things in my personal life taken care of.  I like to think that I came back to ...

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 Twenty years ago today, on January 2nd 2004:

“Here we go, fast and furious…”

I’ll be honest: I really never thought this blog would make it past the first year or so,  It would be something for me to play around with and then I’d get bored and abandon it.

This has not happened yet.

I think The Knight Shift fulfilled a need in my life.  To actively chronicle the human condition of this one very peculiar individual.  That has been a thing of evolution, that I can’t but be impressed by as I look at many of the thousands of posts I’ve made over the years.  Especially those early ones.  I was much more writing about politics then, for one thing.  Today, not so much.  I can put it no plainer than this: politics is one thing that I have grown bored with.  I’m more of an ideas man, ...

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This line from the 1983 movie WarGames has come to mind in the past couple of days:

Except right now it’s Elon Musk instead of Dabney Coleman.  And instead of the WOPR computer the problem is that Twitter is, at the moment, complete junk.

A few years ago I embedded the timeline of my most recent tweets on this blog, in the right-hand column toward the top of the page.  It gradually came to be a great complement to the blog proper.  Instead of making a post about anything that I found interesting enough to share, I simply tweeted it and it would also come up on the blog.  It had become a “secondary spinal cord” of my humble website.

Well, as you can see, the timeline is gone.  There is just a link to my individual Twitter page and you can see some of my tweets there. I say ...

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Am looking at making a few edits and additions to this blog.  Nothing too drastic though.  I used to change up The Knight Shift’s appearance about once a year or so.  But it’s had this template for five years now and it really does seem to be the best it’s looked.

And I’m going to make sure it stays looking good, up until the very end.

A long time ago I heard about something that, it was kind of a legend.  That somewhere in the bowels of the CNN headquarters in Atlanta, there was a videotape.  And it was explicitly noted that it would not be used until the end of the world had been confirmed.  CNN founder Ted Turner had declared when the channel first started up that it would be on the air until the absolutely final moments of Planet Earth.  There would be no signing-off of CNN ...

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In trying to return to writing on a regular basis, I’m looking to broaden my reach.  So it is that I’ve just joined Substack, at christopherknight.substack.com.  Expect more serious commentary than what I usually have on this blog.  Like, the first post is about an ethical issue that has been on my mind the past several days.  Substack has the feature of letting authors charge a monthly subscription for their work.  I’m not going to  go that far.  I doubt my own humble page will get more than a hundred views a month.  But the idea is there, at least.  Anyhoo, see y’all on Substack!...

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So… the blog has a new look.

Not all thanks to me, no doubt.  I had help.  Thanks/blame Brian Fesperman, “Weird” Ed Woody, Stephen Shumate and maybe a few others for encouraging me to keep my sanity during this process, especially just today as some serious kinks were worked out of the new template.

Please note that the redesign doesn’t have the post’s full text on the front page.  You have to click the “Read More” button on the right of each entry.  If I had known it would look this pretty, I would have done it like that a long time ago.

There’s a responsive menu at the top of the page.  Play around with it, see what you find!

The sidebar is tabbed.  Which if you remember the previous sidebar, this one is also much easier to navigate around.

And certainly most obvious is the photo slideshow.  I’m ...

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Like Michael Corleone said: “Just when I thought I was out… they pull me back in.”

Last week I posted that it might be goodbye for good for my blogging.  Lots of things went into that.  I have wound up extremely busy with work-related stuff lately (speaking of which, I’m soon going to be advertising freelance writing services on this blog, and if you want to go ahead and solicit my services e-mail me at theknightshift@gmail.com and I’ll be happy to discuss it with you!).

And then, from my perspective, some… very lousy things happened on this end.  My spirit wound up darn nearly broken.  Friends counseled me to not be discouraged, to keep going.  That this blog has given them hope when they needed it, even if at times I myself feel little or no hope at all.

Huh.  Imagine that.  Getting hope from the hopeless.  I suppose anything ...

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Last week I brought two blogs to your attention: Once Upon A Time In My Head by Doug Smith and Life Lessons in Hope, Faith, & Love by Vanessa Tachenko. Well, it’s been brought to my attention that another friend also has a blog and I think y’all will be mighty entertained by it!

From the twisted mind of Aaron Goins, Jr. (I mean that in a good way) comes The Highlight Reel, and as it turns out Aaron has been working on this one for going on three years now! But it’s never too late to discover a good blog. On his, you’ll find Aaron’s musings, rants and ravings about everything from the state of professional wrestling and other sports, to his thoughts on movies and television and other happenings in our culture. Aaron and Doug are good friends and reading their blogs, I can’t help but ...

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In the last few days two blogs have come to my attention that I’m no doubt going to be visiting a lot from now on, and all two of The Knight Shift’s readers might want to check them out too!

First, having its world premiere this week is Once Upon A Time In My Thoughts, presented by good friend Doug Smith! It’s brand-spankin’ new but already shows heaps of promise. For its initial set of posts Doug is focusing on movies he likes that many others hate, and conversely movies he hates but that other people think are classic! I agree with him: The Godfather, Part III and Gods and Generals are much better than a lot of folks give them credit for… but I can’t figure out how anyone can not like It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World! I mean, just Jerry Lewis’ very fleeting ...

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