I started blogging on this very day in 2001, when I created my LiveJournal account. My how the internet landscape has changed in the past twenty-two years.

My first LiveJournal post is still up, and indeed my entire LiveJournal is mirrored on blog.franklinveaux.com. I still use LiveJournal occasionally, though these days I’m most active over on Quora.

My first blog post, back when I hadn’t the faintest idea what a blog was for, included a set of photos I’d taken, so it seems reasonable that a post on the copper anniversary (and who comes up with these rules, anyway? Why isn’t there a ytterbium anniversary? There should be a ytterbium anniversary) I should do the same.

A scene from the Thames River at night, June 24, 2023.

Dramatic sky from the balcony of the place we stayed in London

Graffiti at a skate park in London.

The Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. This place has been on my bucket list since I was a kid in uni. The reality was even more magnificent than I imagined. (I have an entire blog post brewing about that, in fact.)

It’s been a wild twenty-two years. I am grateful for most of it, but most of all, I’m grateful to have been given the extraordinary, and extraordinarily rare, opportunity to exist, to have these brief moments in the sun.

I spent roughly thirteen billion years not existing, and some decades existing. Existence is better.