It seems that things need titles and introductions.

Almost a decade ago–December 1, 2005–I posted something entitled I Was Not Going to Do This.  It was the first entry in a blog I launched at Gaming Outpost, and it explained its own title, Blogless Lepolt, as a kind of pun.  The last entry in that blog was February 24, 2014; not long thereafter the site crashed, and the site owners decided not to restore it.  I thus have an index to one thousand five hundred twenty-three blog entries that no longer exist, in which were reported progress on Multiverser, other books, web sites, my writing at TheExaminer, the bands 7dB and Collision, plus the personal day-to-day bits of my life that got in the way of all these creative efforts.

Now I am starting again.  I have less idea this time around about how it is going to progress; after all, I have social media (the links should be on the home page of M. J. Young Net) on which many of these things are announced, and particularly the Patreon page through which you are encouraged to support me to keep me online and working.  If you want to know about what is being published, connect with one of those and follow my posts there.

I’m naming the blog mark Joseph “young”, calling attention to the fact that my name, being a sentence, is pretty easy to remember.  Well, I did say that titles were part of the hardest part.  Meanwhile, I will keep this blog clear of such trivialities.  My motivation this time around is entirely different.

I recently stopped writing for TheExaminer; I’m not sure whether they know it yet, but changes to their editorial policy meant that what had been a fifteen minute job to publish an article (pre-written) had become a task that would take hours or sometimes days, and the pay was simply not good even for someone (me) frequently in the top ten percent of their writers.  The old articles there are gradually being relocated here; future time travel analyses will be here.  However, the political materials are less durable–there is much that I would or could write about law and politics that will be of little interest in a year but matters now, and I would like to write that.  So this will be the forum for those pieces.

Meanwhile, I have often felt a bit constricted there.  There are articles I would write had I a place to put them that was not so permanent as a web site, and blog posts have that feature.  Oh, some of them will be useful forever, and as I recall WordPress has a tags/categories feature that should index posts automatically for future reference.  You are welcome to ask questions and make suggestions.  After all, the tagline under the blog title reminds that I am a generalist.  It’s worth repeating that a generalist is someone who learns less and less about more and more until one day he knows nothing about everything; he is the reverse of a specialist, who learns more and more about less and less until one day he knows everything about nothing.  I will write about everything; some of it will be here.

I should mention a few facts about myself for anyone just joining us here.  I qualified for Mensa, but after a year decided that I wasn’t getting my dues’ worth (not their fault, unless you count that they had no meetings fifty miles from nowhere where I live); I have degrees in Biblical Studies from Luther College of the Bible and Liberal Arts (formerly) in Teaneck, New Jersey, and Gordon College, Wenham, Massachusetts, and a Juris Doctore from Widener University School of Law; I have been for approaching two decades the Chaplain of the Christian Gamers Guild, and am co-creator of Multiverser and author of numerous books both related to and not related to role playing games; some of my role playing articles have been translated into French and German; I am probably the most prominent name related to the Replacement Theory of Time Travel; I am a musician and composer with a long list of insignificant credits from The Last Psalm to Collision; I have been in radio broadcasting, and have been published on quite a few Internet sites and a few print outlets.  I really am, after all, a generalist.

So welcome.  I hope you find something worth reading. [contact-form subject='[mark Joseph %26quot;young%26quot;’][contact-field label=’Name’ type=’name’ required=’1’/][contact-field label=’Email’ type=’email’ required=’1’/][contact-field label=’Website’ type=’url’/][contact-field label=’Comment’ type=’textarea’ required=’1’/][/contact-form]