Ah, this feels good.

If you’re reading this post around the time of publication, you may wonder, why in the world would you create a new blog when you have a perfectly good one already? A publication that’s been around for more than twenty years?!

Airbag is a brand and a blog that many folks from the old web know well. I feel I can say that because I hear it from people all the time who tell me so. I cherish what I’ve made and I love the brand dearly, but what I write about doesn’t always fall in line with what I’d like Airbag to be—what it once was before—and what I’d like it to become. Oh, hello, foreshadowing.

No, I felt it was time to move on with another name I’ve had attached to my online sleeve for almost as long. Anyone who follows me on anything remotely social should be familiar with the handle Brilliantcrank. It’s a word I came up with in 2003 after reading an article about contemporary cranky leaders. Cranky is the keyword here, a type of persona I know very well and tend to put on when I come across anything that doesn’t seem right. This name is me and I am it. And until now I’ve used this AOL alias for everything I do, except for my blog.

You may have noticed the platform. Weirdly enough, this will be my third blog on Ghost Pro in the last three months. I have one each for Same Team Partners and Jump Ship which are in different stages of development. I’ve had my eye on this Ghost since version 1.0 and, for whatever reason, held back from switching. After kicking the tires for a few months, I’m impressed by the quality of the experience. There are limitations to what you can do with Ghost but I also hope that means it will block any future enshittification of the platform ala WordPress and the like. It’s squarely for publishing content through the web, email, and RSS. And, I love it for what it is. I’ve also come to love their community and the astonishingly great resources including their weekly newsletter.

I do have finished designs for what I want this site to look like, but for now, it was more important to move my blog over to this domain instead of putting in the time and effort to create a bespoke design. While Ghost has an okay catalog of themes readily available, I think there’s room to make publications look even better. Especially without having to attach an image to everything. 

I earnestly hope that putting publishing first will inspire some of you to do the same. It’s more important than ever that stand-up sites like these, practice our constitutional rights, and exchange our ideas personally (manually?) and not through algorithms and evil platforms.

In the meantime, consider subscribing and adding this site to your feed reader. If you don’t have a feed reader, get one, and then add this site to your new feed reader. Then subscribe to the newsletter, because—Just because. And then if you really want to go all in, follow along on either Mastodon or Threads or both.

Thanks for reading throughout the years. I hope you’ll continue doing so on this new blog.