About Bugloaf

Greetings!

Welcome to Bugloaf, my fun little past-time which also happens to be a blog. Here is a short history of the site.

Twenty years ago, I had a Bulletin Board System. A BBS is what we used to pull up on our computers before there was a widely-public internet, and before there were websites except within the US Government. My BBS was called The Elusive Dragon, which was an apt name, for I never actually made it live. I had acquired BBS software, and I had the means in which you could post comments, download pictures, and maybe even play a game, but no one could get to it because it was essentially an unborn site. This is because I was a poor, largely unemployed high school student, living at home. For a BBS to be live, you need 2 things: 1) a computer that is 100% dedicated to running the BBS, and 2) a dedicated phoneline that people can call into 24 hours a day in which to connect to said computer. I had neither, because both cost money, which I didn’t have, being largely unemployed.

Fast-forward to May 2006. My friend Jason from Double Bass Blog, convinced me to start a blog. I decided to take him up on his offer, so I started The Best of Omaha. This began as a sort of online diary of sorts, with few, if any, links or pictures posted. This eventually changed into a site I primarily posted pictures and videos, with little commentary. After a year or so, I grew tired of the blog’s name, and renamed my blog Kraznoy, after Krasnoyarsk, a city in Russia that comes up often while playing Sid Meier’s Civilization games for PC and Mac. The site would still be named Kraznoy today if it weren’t for my forgetfulness. I let the license for the domain name “Kraznoy.com” lapse, and an enterprising jerk from Florida decided to scoop up the financially useless domain name. So, I changed the name to Dakota East. While I kinda liked the name…it was long, kludgey, and kind of generic. So, after fishing for another name for a while, in August of 2010 I finally settled on the name Bugloaf. And Bugloaf it will remain forever more.

Why Bugloaf? Well, I wanted a fun, short name for this blog, something easy to remember, something with personality. In August 2010, I read an article about one of the most disgusting foods regularly consumed in the United States, something called Nutra-Loaf. It is a nutritional brick of tasteless fried glob that is served as punishment to unruly prisoners. Around this time I was watching one of those shows on Discovery or Food Network about native foreigners in other countries eating bugs, and I thought, “What a great combination! Like a vortex of gross! Bugloaf!”. I had one of those EUREKA! moments, and thus, a name for my blog.

So, now you know how I came up with the name. As far as what Bugloaf actually is, well…

Bugloaf, for now, is simply a repository of the things I bookmark. I tend to surf an awful lot in my spare time, and I find all sorts of funny or unusual pictures, videos, and articles that I bookmark, then largely forget about. Bugloaf is my way of organizing things into a format where I can simply view them in one place, rather than having to click on items in my bookmark list one-by-one. The fact that it is also a blog is a great side-effect of this. Bugloaf did not start out this way, for it truly started out as an actual blog, a diary of sorts. I grew to realize that 1) I didn’t want my private thoughts broadcast out to the Internet, in case I want to run for office someday, and 2) I didn’t really care much about what I was thinking about even last month, let alone last year. True, some events come up that I want to know, “What went through my head that day?”, and so, when something significant comes up, I talk about it on Bugloaf. Otherwise, I like to keep my mouth, and my mind, shut to the outside world. It’s truly not that interesting, and frankly, I’d rather be surfing.

So this, in a nutshell, is Bugloaf. I’m very glad you decided to stop and look at my stuff, and I hope you will return someday, especially if I ever decide to advertise on here! Take it light, and have a great day.

~ Aaron, 2/4/2012

 

Addendum: Someone just asked me, “But what about you?”, so here’s my short Gravatar-bio that I wrote sometime in the past year:

My name is Aaron. I’m from South Dakota, having moved to Virginia in 2008. I am an Air Force veteran, having served 4 years as an enlisted nobody. Now, I’m a working dog who returned to college for Business and Graphic Design. Bugloaf started as a place to vent frustrations in my life, but now it’s morphed into a place to drop all of my bookmarked pictures, videos, and hyperlinks so I can find them several years later. The fact that people visit the site at all is kind of a happy side-benefit to my original purpose. My purpose now is to make Bugloaf my “first site to visit in the morning at work when I need some quick entertainment”, as if I weren’t the one actually putting these links on the site. I hope you enjoy it, and good luck on 12/21/2012.