Eternal nights hunched over a laptop…
Endless reinventions of the wheel…
Infinite easier options ignored…
It took a lot to get here, but we’ve finally made it. It’s the magical moment we’ve all been waiting for:
The 0th Birthday of the Blog!
At this point, some of you might be thinking:
0th birthday? Wtf?
You (maybe)
Does she mean 1st?
If this is you… congratulations! You are probably the type of person who does not share etymology facts about the origin of the word “aardvark” with the waiter in a restaurant, and who is probably literally fun at parties (instead of whatever waiters mean when they say that after you tell them “aardvark” means “earth pig” in Afrikaans.)
But no, dear readers, I mean zeroth: a two syllable word that takes three syllables in my brain.
And yes, that’s a real word. If you were counting down from third place, you would say “third, second, first, zeroth.”
Well. Maybe you wouldn’t. But I did. And that’s how we got into this whole mess in the first place.
Confession Time:
I’d actually written “first” first.
Like a nice, normal, reasonable person.
And then I had a realization.
In April, when I begin my 32nd year of life, we’ll all call it my 31st birthday. Just like we called the start of my 31st year my 30th birthday!
No, I’m not lying about my age, or anything like that. We just count like this! If you’re 10 right now, you’re already in your 11th year of life; if you’re 99, you’re already living your 100th!
What does this mean? (And why am I instilling a healthy dose of existential dread into an otherwise happy blog post?)
It Means We Count Age from 0!
…so?
Some of you are probably very familiar with counting from 0. (The same some of you who will probably be muttering and shaking your heads at me soon. Stay tuned!)
For the rest of my dear readers: counting from 0 is a computer thing! It makes sense for reasons… but it’s also super annoying when you forget that fact and count things in your code beginning at 1. Which. Ya know.
Habits learned before kindergarten die hard.
But the point is, not only do we count birthdays starting with 0… my website also likes to count from 0!
So, I’ll say again:
Happy 0th Birthday, Blog!
Me
Of course,
not all cultures count age this way.
Many East Asian cultures use or traditionally used an age counting system where “1” refers to the first year of a child’s life — not the year after their first birthday.
Many also used the Lunar or Gregorian New Year to mark children’s advancement to the next age, instead of their individual dates of birth. This leads to some pretty neat stuff, where a baby born on December 31st can turn 2 in Korea a day later, while they’d still be 0 in the west!
But that two year difference could cause some problems if people disagree about who’s legally old enough to drive, or drink, or fight in a war… and the West isn’t big on compromise. So the West just kept counting their way, and it was up to East Asian countries to decide how to respond to the pressure to change.
You can read all about it in this totally ominous sounding, yet totally innocuous, Wikipedia entry: East Asian Age Reckoning.
Which Has What to Do With Anything?
Other than (poorly) explaining the weird post title and why I’m calling this the site’s 0th birthday, there are a couple points here.
The first is that the word “reckoning” has multiple meanings, not just the ominous “day of reckoning” one I jumped to.
But you see, I’m the sort of person who sees a word defined as:
- A settling of accounts
- A summing up
…and whose mind imagines the most disastrous possible meaning that would never exist outside a dystopian YA novel.
(I was also the sort of kid who wished for a bomb shelter under her house for her seventh birthday, not a pony or a Playstation. Thanks, Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes.)
Just wanted to set expectations straight about the sort of brain you’re exploring here.
The other point relates to why I spent forever on this site in the first place.
You may think it’s because we live in a miracle age where an infinite amount of information lives in our pockets, where we have endless opportunities to spend an hour researching age numbering systems around the world without leaving our sofas.
Which. I mean. Valid.
But if the problem here was a pizza, my (admitted) impulse for inquiry would only be a teeny, tiny slice. Too small for a single pepperoni, even. Because, as much as I love a good wiki rabbit hole, when I’m focused on some goal or dream or challenge, I save the wiki’ing for when I should be sleeping, not when I should be working!
So that brings us to the other part.
The bigger part.
The part staring you in the face in all its glittery, rainbowy glory, like a unicorn who’s practicing making eye contact.
The Website.
As some of you may have already noticed, this site looks a little… how do we say… different?
A little rainbowier, maybe?
A skosh more stickery?
Almost as if it was made in the 90s by some millennial tween whose only web design experience was on Neopets and MySpace?
(See? Why would I lie about my age and then go and date myself like this?!)
It may surprise you, then, to learn that the glory days of Neopets Guilds and MySpace mp3s weren’t my only web design experience.
When I went to college, I majored in philosophy… and worked for the school as a web programmer. Every time I opened my school’s website for a class, or showed a new student where to go on the interactive map, I saw my work. It was a brand new level of challenge, and thanks to some amazing mentors, I learned a lot.
Then I left the field for a decade.
And forgot basically everything I knew.
And that’s how we got to where we are now:
Instead of behaving like a reasonable human being and using one of the free, easy options to build a website in seconds, I behaved like… me!
And what ME does is learn.
I especially learn when I’m trying to recover lost knowledge. My facts are my favorite collection, and I get pouty when time takes one away from me.
So I retaught myself all the HTML and CSS and PHP I used to know. I read as much as I could about what’s changed in the field in the last 10 years. I researched all the author’s websites as I could find.
And then I threw all reason and rationality out like I was pooper scooping the unicorn stables. And built myself a custom WordPress theme, based on the mission statement:
Make it Sparkle!
Is my code pretty? No!
Does it follow best practices? Also no!
Does it function half as well as what I could have had for free in 30 seconds? Still no!
But was it a learning experience?
Yes!
And that’s the message I want to leave you with today, dear readers: doing the easier thing, doing the expected thing, doing the efficient thing… is never as fun as doing the exciting thing.
If you’re excited to dream with me, say hello in Readers Reply below! I can’t wait to get to know you!
Zero-Indexically,
Lover of Learning. Queen of Quirky.
Wordsmith of Wonderlands.
PS: Make sure to grab a piece of 0th birthday cake before the unicorns eat it all!
