"Just enough for a macrobiotic Big Mac." As we've occasionally shared, maintaining Hey Dullblog isn't cheap. Nancy and I spend at least $1000 per year on this magnificently creaky edifice and well, 2023 is the site's fifteenth anniversary. More than once I've considered declaring Total Victory over all Blue Meanies Everywhere, and running down the curtain. But every time I do, readers chime in privately to say that they would miss it, that they and others find Dullblog to be entertaining and useful. And who among us doesn't want to be entertaining and useful? So to help with our ongoing [...]

I call this one, "Prellies and Eyemakeup." In August 2016, a whole lifetime ago, Devin, Nancy and I looked at the vast pile of writing on this site and asked each other, “Which posts still hold up? Which ones do we like best?” So we read back and back and back, and put together a list, which I'm going to append to the end of this post. The pile has only grown larger since then. To be honest, I've never really been satisfied with how we surface old material on Hey Dullblog; the posts at the bottom are simply an algorithm—does anybody [...]

Private Gripweed indulges his sweet tooth. I am attempting, with only partial success, to stay off my computer. I find, like so many of us, that frequent exposure to Facebook and Twitter makes my mind feel like the bottom of a birdcage; and on top of that, I was in production for Bystander pretty much every day since July 1. So my tanks were low, and this was necessary. Slowly, very slowly, my personality is coming back, and as it reemerges I find myself entertaining happy obsessions like The Beatles and the Sixties that surrounded them. (In the last 24 hours I [...]

After writing this post on how to defray some of the costs of running Dullblog (keep lobbing over your preferences in the comments!), I've started very tentatively adding Amazon Affiliate links to songs, LPs, and movies. I mean, we all probably have every Beatles song and movie in several permutations, but... [Another way I could do this is have every post sport a little kicker at the end, something like "Media mentioned in this post." The benefit of this is that it doesn't distract the reader in the middle of the text. Better? Worse?] I'm also occasionally linking to older Dullblog posts; [...]

When the site came back to life recently, several readers mentioned that they've really enjoyed it over the years, and—being the top-notch humans Dullblog readers are—asked for ways they could help support its continuation. This is greatly appreciated. Hosting and such costs about $500 annually, and so over the years, I've dropped over five grand, and Nancy has paid in, too. (Devin graciously offered a while back, but I told him "don't worry about it" because I was feeling flush. I am...not brilliant.) If only our ISP took Beatlebux. Actually, that wasn't total stupidity on my part. Dullblog is fun for me [...]

Do you know exactly what you think? Green. OK for trees, but generally nah.Scissors. Necessary, but I don't trust 'em.Tom Jones. My mom would totally sleep with him, and not just because he's Welsh. As you can see, I usually do. So for me the primary joy of this site has always been reading our comments, escaping for awhile into what someone else thinks. And for the first several years, we had a community that was (so people said) almost unique on the internet. New users would remark on how our site—posts and comments—was both genial and passionate, good-natured and informative, rigorous [...]