Hey there, and thanks for joining our birthday party – we are officially wrapping up the first full year of The Slowdown today. It’s all in the books, baby, and it’s been great! (It’s also the time for another Wordle, to capture the Zeitgeist… by the way, does anyone know of fun alternatives to Wordle for that?)
Admittedly, the date – 4th of February – is revisionist history: Like you might have noticed earlier, our archives actually extend back to August of 2008. It’s the domain, slowdown.vg, that was registered on this particular day.
I think the date is as good a birthday as any because it marked, for us, a distinct change, akin to Woolf’s 1910, where nothing effectively changed, but we now had a marker, a calling card, a signature – something to go by. In the beginning, after all, we had few goals beyond simply publishing to and for the whole wide web instead of just mumbling, redundantly and repetitively, to each other like we had, for years before.