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Another milestone is that my blog, Skeptophilia, recently crossed six million lifetime hits. I’d have never believed it if someone had said when I started that I’d eventually have this kind of a following. I’ve been at it a while—my first post was in October of 2010. Blogging itself was something I fell into more or less by accident; I was chatting with a student of mine named Brad after school, and he said, “You have so many interesting stories, and such a funny delivery, you should start a blog.” I knew nothing at all about where even to start—I was, and still am, a terribly low-tech type—so Brad told me about Blogspot, a blog host that was supposedly “really user-friendly.” (Which, in fact, it turned out to be.)
My very first post (screenshot below) was a rant about educational bureaucracy (https://www.skeptophilia.com/2010/10/if-you-cant-teach.html), a topic that was to show up with alarming regularity over the following nine years, until my retirement from 32 years in the classroom in June of 2019. Since then I’ve dealt with various claims of the paranormal, cryptids, weird anecdotes from history, and the latest from scientific research (especially from my favorite topics of astronomy, geology, archaeology, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, paleontology, and linguistics). I’ve strayed into politics and social issues, not out of a deep interest or expertise, but in cases where I’ve felt like I couldn’t in good conscience remain silent—looking at such subjects as fairness, equal rights, separation of church and state, and LGBTQ+ issues. (In fact, when I came out publicly as bi in 2019, it was on Skeptophilia—and I later found out that my post had inspired three other people to publicly claim their own identity, something that makes me proud to this day.)
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