Old Blog, New Face..Get Straight to the Pint

I can't believe it's been almost 5 years since the last time I updated this fucking thing.

I first moved to Brooklyn over 5 years ago from a quaint town on the New Hampshire seacoast. Before the move, I had been a bit familiar with the blogosphere, having been a member of Livejournal since 2002. Like most people who used LJ though, I didn't really consider it as much of a platform to get my thoughts and ideas out to the public as a whole as I do now. The early days of LJ were more of a diary I could share with my friends, utilized in the same way that the Facebook wall is today. It wasn't until further down the road when I started using blogs to develop more of my internet identity for the world to see. Instead of being some dude from the burbs who left status updates about the day-to-day of a slacker twentysomething, I started participating on political and art forums as a form of reaching out to people I would never meet in real life. This eventually lead to using early social media to reach out to bands I wanted to book. By the time I left Portsmouth, I was no longer just Steve the drunk proto-hipster who worked at a tobacco store for years. To me and my internet presence, I was Steve the Anarchist stencil artist who booked shows for touring bands. How cool was I?

Not very, as I soon learned upon my arrival to Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Going straight from suburban social butterfly to alone in the big city was quite a culture shock to me, and gave me a sense of perspective. I might have thought I was cool before, but it didn't take long for me to realize how much of minnow I really was. So for the first 6 months of living in the city I didn't really do much socializing. I did do quite a bit of drinking at home. New York had 1000 times the beers that were available back home, so for a self-proclaimed connoisseur of fine beers back home, I had a lot of learning to do. Since I still felt the need to shake my internet tail-feathers, I created this blog shortly after I moved here. Not necessarily as a medium to flaunt my expertise in alcohol, but more of a learning and growing process with both my love of beer and creating a more suitable web presence. Instead of continuing the "look-at-me, look-at-me" persona that currently plagues the urban areas of America, I could be a semi-anonymous critic of the finer things in life. It was a much more fitting path for an aging hipster such as myself.

But over the months, my dedication to my beer blog waned almost overnight. I can't quite put my finger on exactly what happened, but it did. Even after five years of no entries, I never lost interest. Instead of sharing my opinions about beer with the world, I kept my findings more to myself and concentrated on other interests of mine, like trashy cinema and a social life. Over this time, I've learned how to market my opinion better with social media so my musings have a much larger audience than before, but I still don't feel as if I shake too many feathers. Since then, I have attached myself romantically to a fine specimen of a beer lover such as myself, and stopped being such a drunk socialite. My knowledge and excitement about beer has also increased tenfold since I've lived here, to the point where I'm in the process of brewing my own. Since I spend more time at home with the girl, and being a seasoned blogger, I figure now is as good of a time as any to jump start the first blog and add a a few new elements, namely a female perspective. So I've added a better name and design to the primitive blog I kept before and hopefully, a continued written word on one of my favorite things in life.....Beer.