“Welcome. This is Eight Mine Fortress. I’m Katrina, and I wrote every single thing on this happy little website. I like it. Serves as a nice depository for my old written gems, my new ones, and whatever the hell else I stick on here. Look around. You’ll figure it out.”
With those words, twenty years ago today, this site launched. A long-planned project, as well as, with Sure, Why Not? here, wanting to join in the 2005 blog craze at the time.
Followed by two decades of my ranting and rambling. Regular features like Mmmm Candy Hearts and the New Years Eve recaps. NYRA happenings. Travel. Holiday gripes. Philosophical questions.
And, of course, these three:
I talked already about how it feels to have a blog that’s been running so long, the habits and inspirations, the capturing of past events in real time, the self-consciousness and cringe of old posts.
So for today, I’ve selected twenty posts from over the past twenty years to highlight, some that I consider favorites and/or classics. Let’s just go oldest to newest. Let’s begin with…
Moving – January 18, 2006
Not quite a month into this thing. Flanked by numerous other posts of varying degrees of mediocre, I wrote this one about my experience of assisting the staffing agency I was with in moving offices, between assignments. This involved desk after desk, shelf after shelf, of fitting things that probably mostly could have been thrown away into the exponentially increasing number of boxes all labeled Random Crap. You know. You’ve likely moved somewhere before. And, of course, reading back on this after other harrowing moving experiences now like “you don’t know the half of it yet”.
The Little Caterpillar – May 25, 2006
It’s the fascinating tale of… that time I was waiting at a bus stop watching and attempting to rescue a caterpillar hellbent on trying to cross the street.
A Tale of Two Newarks – March 11, 2008
My earliest detailed travel story. About the day I drove up to New York City for a NYRA event, passing through Newark, DE on the way and seeing the Thermo Fisher distribution center building because I’m a dork, and later on the way home, getting turned around on the New Jersey Turnpike just outside Newark airport.
Final Boss Defeated – June 27, 2011
Another one about a NYRA event. Or, actually, the end result of one. That previous November, on 2010 midterm election day, we rallied in front of the Supreme Court during the oral arguments of Brown v EMA, a case attempting to ban video games for under-18s (and when I first met Kathleen). This post is when the verdict came in, 7-2 against the ban, listing some notable reactions I’d found to it that day. In rereading it, my gaze lingered on the words “Scalia’s great majority opinion”. Weird.
Oddities – August 23, 2011
What I thought, at my Rockville, MD workplace at the time, was just something heavy being wheeled down the hallway turned out to be a 5.8 earthquake. The ensuing mockery from Californians brought up other less common natural phenomena in this area about which regions where it is common also mock us.
About Last Night – May 14, 2013
Another NYRA/youth rights victory, the biggest one of all. The initial hearing and then two readings later, Takoma Park, MD officially lowered the voting age to 16, the first in the US to do so. Followed later by others. The events are recounted in this post.
How to Be Religious – June 6, 2013
I’ve always been annoyed from both sides, from the ultra religious pushing their bullshit onto everyone else, to the anti-religious reducing every global issue to the existence of theists. I have a number of posts on this topic, but for the list, I’ll go with this one, a nice clear list of what is good and bad when religion inspires someone. The more you know. I revisited this after the Charlie Hebdo attack in January 2015.
Offend the Offensive – July 28, 2014
“I’m offended by people who get offended.” Well, then, sounds to me like you’re still offended, jackass. You know the ones. They claim some emotional and social superiority because racial slurs (or any other slights against anyone who isn’t a cis-het white male) don’t bother them. What losers. This post was about just that.
Death by Paper Cut – April 28, 2015
The eternal shame in life and afterlife should a paper cut be the cause of death.
The Actual Innocence – December 14, 2017
On how our society has a gross and warped view of “childhood innocence”. It actually means how children just got here in the world and thus haven’t had much opportunity to be guilty of any real wrongdoing, but it gets twisted into “cute ignorance that adults find pleasing”.
False Alarm – January 31, 2018
Remember in 2018 when there was all this concern that North Korea was going to launch missiles at us? Then there was some systems malfunction in Hawaii, triggering alarms that missiles were actually incoming, causing a whole panic. It was fine, but I happened to spot an article about how the FCC was giving Hawaii shit about it happening. So I laid out in this piece just that happening, and then how the other states responded… when Hawaii finally snapped.
Nothing but a Number and a Distraction – March 21, 2018
Age restrictions aren’t a solution to social problems. They are in themselves a social problem. This post is about just that, how creating or strengthening enforcement of an age restriction in response to a societal problem is at best a cop out, a useless change so to pretend you’ve accomplished something, while leaving any true root causes untouched. I went over it again more specifically about school shootings a couple weeks later after the March for Our Lives.
This Is Not Who We Are – July 4, 2018
With the Orange Thing occupying the White House after promoting the most hateful ideas, what does that say about the country that elected him? Perhaps feeds a lot of stereotypes. Perhaps erases the rest of us. So I made this declaration, that “This is NOT who we are!”, to those who saw him and thought this is fine and cool. With an acknowledgement of the reactionary backlash to this statement. A less optimistic sequel to this piece appeared earlier this year.
Midterminated – November 30, 2018
This post about the 2018 midterms was so much fun to make, with all the graphics and reactions, even if many of the results detailed were frustrating. I wish I’d been able to make something like it for 2020 and 2022, whereas the 2024 one took a different approach. This was when, halfway through the Orange Thing’s first term, we were to “grab him by the midterms”. And now we’re facing the same situation in a little over ten months from now.
Imperfect and Incomplete – April 21, 2019
This entry on this list is for this Easter Sunday post but also kind of for the ones earlier that same week, for which this one was a culmination. There were posts earlier that week on various topics, such as deadly locations around the world, extraordinary animals, and some weird trees. I concluded Holy Week with this optimistic post about the wonders of the universe and, well, of Brookside Gardens on that lovely spring day.
One Pursued – October 31, 2019
A play off the slogan “One Pursuit” they had been using a couple years earlier, my timeline in tweets of the Washington Nationals’ 2019 season, beginning with them playing like shit and then suddenly getting really good, complete with dugout dances and Baby Shark, right up through a World Series Game 7 win at 11:50pm Eastern on October 30, 2019. A year and a half after the Caps won the Stanley Cup.
Core Values – January 25, 2020
This post came about when sometime before I’d been tasked with writing about my experience with NYRA, for its own 20th anniversary in 2018. It never got posted, and it took me a while to write, and a lot I cut out as being extraneous and perhaps suited for its own piece. That piece did end up getting posted, and I called it Core Values. And it was cross posted to the NYRA blog. I’d made attempts before to square the need for a cause to be pragmatic with remaining loyal to the underlying philosophy that drives it, the ridiculous “moderate versus radical” dichotomy, a source of many fights back in my days with the organization. Thinking back on my time for the original piece I was writing, some of those feelings were brought up again, so I wrote about it in this one.
A Big Sphere – January 1, 2024
This one was originally a Facebook status that I expanded into an optimistic New Year’s Day post, similar perhaps to Imperfect and Incomplete above. How we are living in an age where, thanks to technology and other advances, our once scattered species has come back together again.
Easter: The Final Battle – March 31, 2024
Another Easter post on this list, this time rethinking the story of Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection, suggesting there’s more to the story than is known/told. And tying it in with my own celebration of Easter as about freedom from religious restriction, from the very concept of sin itself.
Pride and Groom – May 4, 2025
And finally, from this past year, my long-awaited defense of LGBTQ+ youth and blasting the ridiculous “grooming” accusations leveled at those who support them. And how anti-youth bigotry allows for the persecution of LGBTQ+ youth.
HAPPY 5TH ANNIVERSARY, EIGHT MINE FORTRESS!!!!