First Entry - What This Blog Is and What It Isn't

Hey y'all,

I'm off traveling again, this time headed to South America, a continent I have yet to visit. Last year I lived in France and it was awesome, but this trip should be just as good and a whole lot more exotic. I mean, southern hemisphere... the seasons are fucking reversed! I'm leaving in the spring and that's when fall will just be starting down there. Since I didn't even consider that important little nugget of information until I started making plans to go there, I can just imagine what kind of other strange and utterly foreign things are in store for me.

So I have succumbed to the luxury of a pre-made blog service thing... as you can see, I did not code my own blog this time around. There really is no good reason to code your own blog except for the learning experience and bragging rights (though it isn't particularly hard or impressive). These pre-made blogs are much, much better in every way: prettier, way more features, easier to use, easier to add media, and on and on and on.

Fair warning: I WILL be talking linguistics in this blog. Foreign language is my passion and my goal is to become reasonably fluent in Portuguese by the time I leave. I have been studying for several months now towards that end and I will be very actively engaged in learning the language while I'm there. Thus, I will be thinking about it and will want to talk about it.

I will also probably be talking nerd stuff, i.e. programming, from time to time. I will make it so that very technical posts will be obvious as such and thus easily avoidable for my dumber readers. At the same time, I'll talk about more accessible stuff like the culture, the food, the hot Brazilian chicks with the badonkadonk asses, etc.

Speaking of badonkadonk asses, I will not be censoring this blog. Last time I sorta did because the grandparents were keeping up with it, but this time I'm going to try not to. I'm not going to be super lewd or post the written equivalent of bawdy guy talk, but I am going to try to stay true to my "voice" or whatever and just describe things as I normally would to my friends. I'd like to have more of an outside readership this time around since last time most of my readers were just family and friends; hopefully my content will be interesting enough to draw in some strangers.

Lastly, I am going to try to adhere to a higher standard of quality with this blog as opposed to the last one. I will do my best to get rid of typos and spelling mistakes and actually proofread stuff before I post it.

Well, that's pretty much it. Next post I'll talk more about where exactly I'm going and what I'll be doing. I might include some prep stuff if I find it compelling enough to write about.

Tchau!