Scott Yorke

I’m not good with anniversaries, as anyone who knows me will testify. So I failed to notice that this site turned five last month.

I’m sure you will be as excited by this milestone as I am. In five years I have gone from being a complete nobody, to being a complete nobody with a blogsite.

Things have changed a lot around here since I started blogging. I began not really knowing what I wanted to write about, and there was that awkward “earnest” stage, when I tried to provide serious and meaningful commentary on what was wrong with the world. At some point, I don’t remember when, I decided the future lay in writing material that was not altogether serious. As most people who attempt satire do, I went through a “fake news” phase, but that’s mostly (though not completely) out of my system, and there are (or were until recently) others who do it better anyway. There have also been dramas along the way, including a change of blog platform that didn’t go as planned, a short-lived retirement, and who can forget that most notable engagement with everyone’s favourite left-wing blogger?

The thing I’m most proud of is the level of engagement I’ve managed to achieve with my readers. Turning comments off has been a huge success, and if I can only wean myself off Facebook and Twitter I will be almost entirely immune to reader feedback.

So what does it mean to be five? This site is still a child. Like most five-year-olds, it’s still learning to behave in class, and it still occasionally wets the bed. But it’s getting better with its words, and hopefully now not everything it says is complete nonsense.

I’ve had the odd quiet success, though I haven’t yet managed to end anyone’s career or bring a government down. As for disappointments, my biggest one has been the failure to earn millions of dollars through blogging. It turns out that you can’t make money off providing free blog content, unless you behave like a complete shit. So there won’t be a retirement any time soon from my day job.

If you’ve enjoyed this site over the last five years, then I thank you for your support. If you have been abused or mocked or made fun of by me over that period, I thank you for not suing me for defamation.

And if anything I wrote has enraged you, then I thank you sincerely for not hunting me down and stabbing me to death.