Tabula rasa

The midlife crisis manifests itself in many different ways, or so it is said. Over a sleepless Easter weekend back in early April 2026, I decided to relaunch this site. I felt a sudden and violent urge to destroy something in order to create anew, as if I had discovered Bakunin for the first time, and perhaps this urge was a symptom of my midlife crisis. The preceding sentences are written mostly in jest, but there may be something in this midlife crisis theory. In any case, I intend to blame every fumble, foible, and foolery that I commit on the midlife crisis. How very convenient.

The main reason for this tabula rasa approach, wiping the slate clean, for updating this site is simple and mundane: it has become way too unwieldy. As with many personal websites and blogs, this site has grown organically, crookedly, with offshoots here and there, and turned into a right old gnarled mess. There does not seem to be an easy way to maintain it or cut it back into shape. The best option is to uproot it.

This domain (wasaweb.net) had been registered back in November 2006, almost twenty years ago, and this very simply-constructed website has been in this form since 2010 or thereabouts. Since then, I had been creating and adding new categories as I considered sensible, complicating the sorting and categorizing processes, and leading me to ask myself constantly, ‘Which category or subcategory does this belong to?’

The KISS principle, keep it simple, stupid, is very sound, and something I should have heeded from the beginning. After all this is just a personal site, akin to a blog or online diary, and it should not pretend otherwise. I should not take things too seriously. As such, I am simply dividing the site into four categories to begin with: articles, vertical photographs, square photographs, and horizontal photographs. Each page will be numbered sequentially, and I am not going to attempt to categorize and catalogue the articles and photographs into themes or be strictly chronological in approach.

This new approach of numbering content sequentially goes very much against my nature, as I like to keep things neatly compartmentalized and logically in order, however disorderly and disorganized it looks from the outside. It is likely that part of me will regret and rebel against this decision, and I may have to rely on some of the techniques I have learnt in cognitive behaviour theory to prevent me from falling into a state of paralysis.

While I am not going to delete the files on my computer, all the pages from the previous version of this site will be hidden. I could have archived the pages and kept them online, but my destructive urge would not allow such. Over the next few days and weeks, some of the old articles will be edited and uploaded again.