What is this, and where does it come from?

The 1st of January is as good as any day to start a blog. Or to re-start one.

About one year ago, I was unemployed, stuck at home most days, and very, very bored. One of my mates had started a blog recently, posting about all sorts of things that interested him, so I figured: why not do the same? I had four times as much free time to kill, and love writing long-arse walls of texts about irrelevant stuff, such as sport.

So I did, and “Paranoikices” was born. It started off as a weird mix of funny vids, electronic music reviews, motorsport and football news, amongst other things. A “show off random cool things to friends” blog.

However, by then we were at the beginning of the Formula 1 winter season, and as a raving F1 fanatic starving for some action, I started paying more and more attention to it, as the teams unveiled their cars and ran them in test sessions. The fun blog transformed itself into a little more serious motorsport opinion website, which occasionally talked about other stuff. That was alright, but by this point I had lost track of what my target audience would be. Obviously most common people have no interest whatsoever in reading articles overanalyzing F1 test sessions, and if I wanted to go in this direction, I’d have to bring in the more hardcore motorsport fans. There was however one big issue – the blog was in portuguese, and that limited the audience to the hardcore motorsport fans in Portugal and Brazil.

Instead of switching over to english, I decided to try attracting visitors by pimping out the blog. I searched pics or vids for every single article in order for it to be full of bright shiny colors – I even put my ugly mug on the corner of the blog. I covered the news almost daily and extensively. I put links to other blogs and websites, participated in them, and the blog became a part of the annoying attention-whoring circle-jerk that goes on around motorsport fan websites (nothing against the folks involved, some of those websites are genuinely interesting). All of this became more and more tiring, less and less fun, and by the time I finally got a job in April, I had no interest in continuing it. And so the blog died.

What is this then? It’s the revival, in english, and hopefully with less of these issues, now that I have more experience in doing something like this. I do have a job now, but I still have some free time, specially in the winter which is only just starting. Afterwards, who knows? The motivation and inspiration for this sort of thing comes and goes. I give no guarantees on the frequency and quality of the content, and it is why the idea of the blog is appealing. The freedom of it.