Well, first the bad news: I haven't updated in a long time. And not only that, but I don't expect to update this page again. Ever.

    This is because I'm moving almost everything over to my Rising Pun site, and am hoping to begin blogging there. So in the next few weeks, you'll see my first blog post there. But today is the end of my WSO blog, which will have run from September 20th, 2002, to February 11th, 2005. Not a bad run for a blog, and unlike some blogs which simply fizzle out and die because the author stops writing, this one will maintain the same tone and writing style, but simply be located in a different place.

    The good news is that for this final day, I have a fitting story to tell you. A last story that will appear on this page, seen by ye who have been reading this blog, and perhaps not by those future folks who will only look at the Rising Pun page. They'll miss the tale... of Seth Brown.

    The page I'm moving this to, RisingPun.com, I purchased over a year ago because I felt it was time to make a concerted effort to establish a web-presence for myself*. The most valuable thing a struggling writer can have is publicity**, and I hoped getting myself on the web with more than just this WSO site would help. I had considered getting sethbrown.com briefly, but worried that my name wasn't famous enough to be remembered, so I finally settled on RisingPun.com and hoped it was clever enough to be memorable. Sethbrown.com was a distant memory.

    I knew, vaguely, that other Seth Browns existed, but it didn't occur to me overmuch. The only one I'd really run across was one that went by the netname SquareTex, because when college friends had come across his webpage, they presumed he was me. And why wouldn't they? Here was a Seth Brown who wrote midis of video game music, which is precisely what I was doing in my first two years of college. Other Seth Browns whose pages I found on the web shared interests with me, from the Seth Brown in a philosophy graduate program (bizarrely living in a "Williams Hall") to a Seth Brown doing improv comedy in LA. And naturally, there were a few writers.

    When I began writing my book, I wondered if I should list my name as "Seth Brown" or "Seth A. Brown". I've never cared for my middle name or initial, and have been Seth Brown for most things I've done. But I started to wonder if I mightn't be confused and conflated with some of these other Seth Browns, and whether I ought differentiate myself by use of the middle initial. Then I came across something that made me wonder no more - one of the other writerly Seth Browns was also named "seth A. Brown". I decided if another writer was going to have my name either way, I may as well use the name I preferred.

    Anyway, the Seth A. Brown seemed to have acquired sethbrown.com. Time passed, and when my book came out, I was googling myself and wondering how easy it would be for people to find me. I know not how things will stand when people read this in the future, but for a time, this random little WSO page of my blog was the number one hit for "Seth Brown". Still, I worried that people who had heard of my book might try to go to sethbrown.com and never find me, perhaps presuming that the other Seth Brown had written my book. Although it looked like his page consisted mainly of a blog that hadn't been updated since April 2004 (and given how many times I've failed to update this for a few months, I'm not trying to cast stones), he's apparently the publisher of a magazine, so I imagined bizarre scenarios where someone had heard of me and went to sethbrown.com, and based on my earlier work, decided to award this other Seth Brown the best writing job ever.

    I decided I should purchase a sethbrown domain.

    So today I was looking at domains, not buying, looking, not buying. As I do with most purchases, I hemmed and hawed, and then finally decided to purchase sethbrown.net. I continued hemming and hawing, wondering if I should purchase another sethbrown domain just to be on the safe side. When I went back two hours later, I saw that sethbrown.info had just been sold. I looked up the registration information, and sure enough, it was registered to a Seth Brown with an email address at sethbrown.com. I can only imagine that I have more in common with this fellow than just a name, because my hunch is that he might have bought the .info domain rather than the more popular .org domain because it was on sale. I had in fact been considering the same thing during those two hours.

    Also in that timespan, his website was down, and I wonder if he had removed it for some reason, but it seems back up now and not changed from before. Still, I can't help but think his purchase of the .info domain was somehow related to my purchase of the .net domain. Here we are, Seth Browns on the web, each trying to carve out a little space for ourselves. Luckily, I can't see as we'll really be in each other's way at all. Seth Brown(.com) is writing a serious magazine about urban planning and architecture, while Seth Brown(me) is writing humorous articles and rhymes with little basis in fact. In fact, I wonder if one day the Seth Browns of the world might combine their might, and create something more.

    After all, I've now gotten an interesting blog post out of the existence of these other Seth Browns. They appear on my blog. Maybe if I gain enough knowledge (or they need a humor page?), I could freelance an article for Seth Brown d'Magazine. Maybe one day I could collaborate with Seth SquareTex Brown on a midi. An old friend of mine apparently met another Seth Brown at a meeting of creative artists last year. And a few months ago, a random Seth Brown contacted me to say hello. I asked if he was one of the above Seth Browns, and he was not. But still, it was sort of neat. In fact, I encourage any Seth Browns reading this to drop me a line and say hello.

    And that's the end of my WSO blog. To all of you who have been reading this blog for a while, especially those who have been reading it pretty much since the beginning - Thanks. Writing often feels like it's going into a void, and every time someone randomly tells me something like "Hey, I liked your entry about the cookie recipe", it improves my day more than you can imagine. Knowing that someone was going to laugh, or smile, or even just think when reading this is what has given me the motivation to keep it going for two and a half years. And it's not ending now, just moving.

    So for all of you Seth Browns, and all of you non-Seth-Browns, you can reach me at the site this blog will continue on: RisingPun.com.