by Darius Kazemi, Feb 22, 2015
Ten years ago today I started Tiny Subversions, which lived at tinysubversions.blogspot.com. Tiny Subversions was not the repository of, uh, tiny subversions that it is today. Rather it was my video game industry blog. "My thoughts on games, the game industry, and game design" went the blog's tagline.
In February 2005 I was a college senior at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. I had been running my college game development club for a few years. I had all the anxieties of a graduating college student with no job lined up wanting desperately to find an inroad into an industry that was notoriously difficult to "break in" to.
Here is my best approximation of what my blog looked like when I made my first post:
I say "approximation" because I don't have a screenshot of my blog from precisely day one. The Internet Archive's earliest capture is from 13 months after it launched. I'm sure that when it launched it was halfway between the garish theme you see here and one of the default Blogspot themes.
The reason I don't have a real screenshot is that I was 21 years old and incredibly embarrassed and self-conscious about participating in "the blogosphere" as we called it then. It seemed like that part of the web was full of brilliant visionaries and that I was just some kid. I hid it well because I knew from the start that Tiny Subversions was going to be a professional, rather than confessional, style blog.
I started off on Blogspot because it seemed like the best solution available in early 2005. In November 2009 I migrated to WordPress on my own server because I was sick of not being able to control my own site. Soon after that I started posting far less often (down from about 10 posts a month to 4 posts a month). By 2012, the year I started prolifically making bots and other weird projects, I was barely blogging at all. In late 2014 I killed the blog, replacing it with a static backup.
What you're reading now is generated with a simple shell script I wrote and some HTML/CSS templates I made by hand. I like this format better, though I do need to publish an RSS feed again...
While my blog was a continuous source of technical and social anxiety (mostly around not posting enough), it also treated me pretty well over the years. I learned to write in public on my blog. Some of my good friends today are people who I met through the comments section or who read a blog post and reached out to me. It also gave me a place (and a reason) to constantly practice my CSS and JavaScript skills, whether I liked it or not.
I was going to post some of my favorite early posts from the blog but reading back through them I was surprised to note that they're mostly pretty short and inconsequential: two or three sentences and a link. Basically the kind of quick note you'd post on Facebook or Twitter. So uh, never mind. You can dig through the archive yourself--I especially recommend it if you're in the mood for some half-baked thoughts.