“The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. In one Age, called the Third Age by some, an Age yet to come, an Age long past, a wind rose above the great mountainous island of Tremalking. The wind was not the beginning. There are neither beginnings nor endings to the Wheel of Time. But it was a beginning.” –Robert Jordan, The Path of Daggers

I started reading The Wheel of Time series back in 2008, in my early heady days of joining Amazon as a college hire. I was spurred on by colleagues who seemed to care a lot about these books. More than an interest in fantasy fiction¹, I think it was my desire to keep up with them that convinced me to slog through all eleven books available at the time. That was just in time for Brandon Sanderson to take over writing the remaining three books in the series. I was happy to see that the plot picked up pace, and soon it was all over.

I don’t think I was thrilled by the ending; it didn’t offer quite the release and satisfaction I was expecting after its final crescendo. But Sanderson managed to complete the ginormous feat of making the story move and guiding it to its destination despite the hundreds of plot threads weighing it down, and one must thank him for that.

I don’t recall much of the actual plotlines or characters (except for the few that turn up in the last three books of the series, which I’ve re-read a few times since). It’s funny how memory works like that — I recall the idea of reading the books, but the very concrete experience I must have had then has somehow morphed into an abstract concept in my memory. I don’t think it’s shelved away; I think all the juice that could be extracted from it has been consumed, and the pomace has been discarded. All that is left is a lingering flavor.

Blogging was of great interest to me until the year 2007, after which my interest waned, never quite enough to shut it all down, but also leaving me without much of anything to say. I “restarted” my blog every year or two with a promise of writing more about something. I realize now that the problem wasn’t that I didn’t have anything interesting to say, but that I worried about who my readers were and what they would think of it…and I found this situation unmotivating. Later, I had the idea of creating a blog focused on technical matters, called technoYak. This didn’t go anywhere, but then I created another blog with a similar focus called optimix which was great fun for a while. The big idea here was to write about anything, big or small, that I had personally built or experimented with, like a working implementation of an algorithm or a problem whose solution I had figured out. But the problem of motivation never quite went away, and content on the blog grew at a glacial pace.

But no more. For reasons I don’t understand — perhaps it has to do with my recent binge-watching of Andor — I feel energized once again by the idea of writing down my thoughts, ideas and most important of all, experiences. In essence, it is our experiences that give meaning to our consciousness, and it seems apt for them to be shared with the universe.

In a sense, I am back where I started, and that’s fantastic. I’ve decided to start blogging here again, merging my optimix blog into this one as well. I haven’t ported anything over from earlier though, nor do I intend to…except for my reading list. I now use a static website built using Zola, but the theme is very retro — it has much of the same look that my blog used to have back in 2007!

So welcome back once again, and happy reading & sharing! 🤓