I've migrated to another server. This is at least the fourth host for Wriphe.com. I doubt it will be the last.

It's funny, when you stop to think about it, how the Internet has changed since I launched this site in 2003. It wasn't exactly new then. By the early 21st century, it had already outgrown its dial-up modem origins. The web 2.0 bubble had come and gone, and interactive Macromedia Flash websites were the rage. Amazon.com only sold books. Facebook didn't exist. My how things have changed.

Sigh.

Anwyay. I've poked around the new host a bit, and everything seems put together correctly. I've even made a few small improvements to the back end! As always, if you find anything out of sorts, please let me know. Assuming the contact and comment forms still work.

Thanks for sticking around.

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It has been brought to my attention that some of my readers have had difficulty with the new Google "I am not a robot" Captcha swallowing your comments. That problem may be especially common for users of the Chrome browser. (I've experienced it myself on other sites.)

If this has happened to you, please try using Chrome's incognito mode, deleting your cookies, or changing to a different browser before commenting. If none of these solutions resolves the problem for you, please contact me directly and let me know. (You all have my email address, right?)

Sorry for the trouble. If the problem continues or proves to be especially widespread, I'll see what I can do to build a better bot trap. (Again.)

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If you post on the Internet enough, you'll eventually attract the occasional negative comment. Check out these gems left here on Wriphe.com in the past week:

RE: 2012-12-26 Posted Jun. 20, 2017 at 09:22:59 PM
"Just Mom and me" speaks volumes about your existence.

RE: 2012-12-08 Posted Jun. 20, 2017 at 09:35:29 PM
Re-read this post and ask yourself why Trey, and I, am no longer a part of your Mom's life. What 42 year old man says to his mother, upon hearing she is going to be married, "I guess you are choosing him over me." Maybe a 10 year old. You said essentially the same thing about Trey's fiancé, "I resented her taking my time away from my brother." In neither case was there any expression of happiness and joy for your mother or your brother. For you, it was all about you. Sad. Really sad. Grow up.

RE: 2015-08-29 Posted Jun. 20, 2017 at 10:10:42 PM
You say that "Mom and I" attended a Newnan High School football game, accompanied by " her friend Bill." In fact, Nevelle and I made plans to attend the game, and, as we were leaving the house, she asked if you wanted to go WITH US. Again, it's all about you and your needy relationship with your mother. Grow up. Be an adult. Look in the mirror. Do you like what you see?

You'll see from the timestamp that those were all posted on one night. I was inclined to write the whole thing off as someone going on a bender, but then this showed up a week later:

RE: 2017-06-22 Posted Jun. 27, 2017 at 09:05:11 PM
Nice restorative n project. Good work. But "your" garage? "Your" mud room? Dream on....

So it seems this is going to be a thing now.

Obviously, these weren't posted by a random stranger. It seems my mother has been dating an Internet troll.

While the best thing to do with trolls is ignore them, he does make a few great points that deserve repetition. I've never claimed to be anything other than an over-sized child. I have always been overly attached to my mother — my father blames me for destroying their marriage. And I am keenly aware that my me-first behavior is responsible for driving my only brother, formerly my best friend, out of my life. (Really, you don't know the half of what I've done to deserve that.) I'm a shitty person and most of my behavior is indefensible.

He's right about all that. But he's wrong about one thing:

RE: 2012-10-23 Posted Jun. 21, 2017 at 01:23:24 AM
There's a hundred bucks I'll never see again..

You never contributed $100 towards the Dungeon Delver project in 2012, Bill. That Kickstarter was cancelled about 2 days after we started it. You meant to complain about this 2015 Kickstarter project. And you're not the only one who lost money over that thing. I still haven't seen a penny return on it, either, and I assure you I spent way more than $100.

We're both losers, I guess.

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Not so long ago, Cam suggested that there should be an official Wriphe.com Seal of Approval. I approved of her suggestion.

And now I approve of this.

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Technically, there should have been a post today, as I try very hard to post at least once every other day. This counts.

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After several years of tracking the "new-to-me" movies I've been watching, I decided it was finally time to try and compile a list of every movie I've ever seen.

You can see that list — currently at 2,742 movies and counting — here.

I'm sure it's not a complete list of everything I've ever sat through. For example, I remembered I'd seen Side Out just yesterday when a friend and I discussed rewatching The Hitcher (the original, not the remake). There must be a bunch of movies I've seen over time that made little to no impression on me. I suspect I'll be updating that list for a while to come.

In the meantime, if you don't see your favorite film, let me know. There's a good chance I haven't seen it, and I'm always on the lookout for something new worth watching.

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We have finally, mercifully, almost reached the end of 2016.

It seems every other website is taking a look back at what you, the reading public, must want to read. Far be it for me to deny the public what it wants, so let's look at the most-read posts at Wriphe.com in each month of the past year (per Google Analytics).

• January 19: Poodle cartoons are always popular, especially when I'm making jokes about amputated toes.
• February 24: I gushed like a school girl over my love affair with Fallout 4. I have since beaten the game, so we've gone our separate ways. However, I'll always cherish our time together.
• March 16: I retired one blog tag and created a new, more appropriate one. (You're welcome, Dan.)
• April 18: I ridiculed Georgia fans who attended a glorified UGA football practice session for free. Joke's on me. The entire 2016 season was essentially a practice for future years, and I was dumb enough to pay to watch it.
• May 12: Victoria died.
• June 15: The conclusion to my 2016 Health Insurance Saga. In summary, I lost.
• July 16: I rambled at length about junk telephone calls. My solution was that we should all pay more for phone service. Remember, if telephones were illegal, only criminals would have telephones.
• August 11: Chewie died. (2016 was a terrible year for dogs, too.)
• September 23: Hmm. September 23? I don't recall anything happening on that day. Nope. Nothing comes to mind. Let's move along.
• October 23: An addendum to my 2016 Health Insurance Saga. In summary, I lost even worse.
• November 9: I expressed my, er, dissatisfaction at the outcome of the presidential election.
• December 2: I reminded you that deer are the enemy. I trust that you didn't need that reminder. How many did you kill this season?

Dead dogs, no health insurance, Trump... what a great year!

I promise I'll try to be more entertaining in 2017. I think we're going to need it.

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Power's out. No post today. (Hard to type in the dark.) Thanks, President Trump.

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From time to time, I receive spam emails offering some modest compensation in exchange for posting an advertisement disguised as a blog post. Usually, this is to promote someone's brand of shoes or food or drugs. The latest one I received was particularly unusual.

My name is Mike, and my company (www.TrampolineParkDepot.com) has put together a really comprehensive site on how to start a trampoline park from A to Z.

I have an article idea that I think would appeal to your audience. It's about how to start your own super profitable trampoline business.

Is a "trampoline business" really a thing? Is reading about trampoline park construction the sort of thing any audience is into? Honestly, the older I get, the stranger this world becomes.

Anyway. You're welcome, Mike. I gave you that one for free.

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It's 2016. Nobody still blogs. So why do I?

When I started in 2002 — my earliest posts were uploaded via ftp as a flat file that would be parsed and output via Flash — I believed that I was blogging as a way to keep in touch, bulletin-board style, with my friends and family who all lived an hour or more away from me. Fourteen years later, that function has been aggregated and monetized by Facebook and Twitter (and Instagram and Pintrest, et cetera, et cetera). So why do I keep going?

Do I have an innate need to externalize my internal dialogue? If you look at my body of work, you'll see that's not the case. Generally speaking, my posts aim to be entertaining as opposed to introspective. I have no interest in boring anyone by unwinding and exploring the bundle of routine doubts and worries at the core of every human being. So "Discovering Walter" can't be the reason.

I don't think I really blog to keep in touch, either. Maybe that was true once, but in the past decade, the world and its eyeballs have already migrated to one of those other, aforementioned sites and left me behind. Very few of the people in my life have ever bothered to read what I post. Why should they? If anyone wanted to hear my opinion on something, they know where I live.

So I don't have an answer to why I keep blogging. I guess I do it because it satisfies some urge I have to be creative. I'll probably keep doing it until that urge is satisfied. I wonder how long that will take.

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