Method is a Year Old
Loose Ends, Method May 2nd, 2008Well this website has survived for a whole year! That is longer than I expected. I almost gave up last autumn over the whole dialectics quagmire. I am glad I didn’t. I still have not finished that Babylon 5 series… Any comments El Sordo?
To give you an idea of our readership, in the last 3 days we have had about 47 human readers (discounting the authors!) from Ukraine, Poland, Turkey, Sweden, United States, UK, China, Latvia, Germany, Russia, Jamaica, Japan, Slovakia, Colombia, Vietnam and Finland. That is pretty diverse!
To invert Spider-Mans motto: “With great power comes no responsibility!”
har har har AC1

May 3rd, 2008 at 1:36 pm
I’m glad we have stuck to this “project”.
It has been in many ways a quite remarkable year and an exercise in longevity and diplomacy. I’m similarly amazed at the diversity of reader and wish to say “Hi” to them all.
For me this blog has been cathartic, informative, innovative, professional (in an amateur sense), and of course above all interesting.
Its catharsis has been evident by this being a realm for the safe venting of spleens, of in-depth consideration of controversial topics.
It has been informative because despite our recent entente cordiale most readers may notice certain differences between me and AC-1. And these differences to use the cliche are the “spice of life” and in the sense of academic thought it is always valuable to be confronted and challenged, even if it serves only to clarify your own prejudices!
It has been innovative in that we have both sought to test out “new” hypotheses against each other and similarly have sought at times to play around with “deep” topics in a pop-culture setting. Complex ideas need not be stale or boring in presentation.
It has been professional in the sense that we have both had to sort out our own methodologies (or lack of), both had to acknowledge the little quirks and foibles particular to each others style of writing, way of thinking, or favourite authors. And out of this has been born the seeds of respect even in difference. But ultimately it has been professional (in the amateur sense) in that although neither of us are submitting these posts for academic scrutiny we are nonetheless constantly kept in check with each other that the information we present is accurate, fair and balanced. And where either of us may tend to drift towards dogmatism we have been quick to challenge that drift. And that ultimately is a healthy symptom of critical thinking at its best.
And finally of course it has been interesting. Not only because we have had this forum to develop our “correct ideas on everything” but because it has been a year of developmental thinking. I am quite sure that if one year ago either of us had read some of our more recent posts (by virtue of some sort of clairvoyent time shift) we would have had difficulty recognising each others thoughts.
Anyway self-congratulatory back-slapping over, Happy 1st Birthday YtiMii and ad multos annos vivat! Many years!