I’ve been writing at Thudfactor for almost nine years now. Is that right? Yeah, just six months shy of that. When I started the weblog I wasn’t married yet, Elf and I were living in a small apartment in Prince William County, Virginia, and I still considered myself a “designer” more than a programmer. In fact, the first version of the weblog was my own blogging software written with brand-new knowledge of PHP and MySQL.

A lot has changed since then. Elf and I got married. I got laid off a couple more times. We moved a few times in the DC orbit, then finally to rural Southwest Virginia. We had a son, and then we bought a house. Professionally in that time I’ve changed from pushing PSDs, through HTML production, to web application development and now iOS development. Come to think of it, I’ve had about three career changes. But I’ve never felt like I’ve left the industry.

That’s a long time. It’s long enough for me to look back on my older posts and wonder, sometimes, what I was thinking. Sometimes I’ll start a post and I’ll think, wait, I think that contradicts something I said in 2004. And yeah, it does. It seems like I’ve changed my mind about a few things, too, without even being aware of it.

I’ve considered nixing the archives before. I’m not going to do it. For better or worse, Thudfactor is as close to a journal as I’ve anything I’ve ever had. So I’m going to keep it around, even if it is mostly ranting. It helps me keep track of my obsessions-of-the-moment. It helps show me how I’ve changed.

I don’t write here as much as I used to either. Partly because time is at more of a premium for me — I have work, and I have my son, lawns to mow, groceries to buy, meals to cook, APIs to study. That’s part of it.

The other part is that I’m trying to be more thoughtful about what and how I write. Large sections of Thudfactor read like me screaming at the television, and it has pretty much served that purpose. It’s been cathartic but not persuasive or constructive.

I’m not sure people like to read that anyway.

I’ve also slowly and gradually come to the realization that people inhabit entirely different realities from me. things that seem like they should be obvious to me sound like crazy talk to others, and vice-versa. I always had this faith that if you could explain something carefully and accurately, the people around you would go “oh, you’re right.” I believed reasoning things out would cause consensus.

Sometimes it does, if you’re starting out with enough common ground.

But time and time again I’ve run into thinking and reasoning that make absolutely no sense to me — people who seem not to just have different opinions, but live in a world with different facts. Arguing those facts is like arguing how frozen is up. It just doesn’t parse.

You can say, well, they’re stupid. Or they’re lying. Or they’re deliberately being obstinate.

But I’m not sure any of that is true. Well, sometimes it is. But sometimes it’s people off good faith, with good brains, looking at the world around us both and understanding something entirely different from me.

Robert Anton Wilson called these different perspectives “reality tunnels.” I’ve recently learned how to recognize when I’ve run up against one and withdraw. I used to stick around and fight it out because I didn’t want the other person to think they’d shut me up. But now, well, I have to mow the lawn.

And really, what can you do with someone who has different facts? How can you be so sure about your own. Neither of us are coming out of our tunnels any time soon. How do you deal with that?

All of which is to say I know things have been slow around here. But the “paper jam” light on my brain is blinking and I haven’t figured out how to clear it yet.