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+---
+postid: 001
+title: The Tar Pit: an introduction
+author: Lucian Mogoșanu
+date: July 25, 2013
+tags: asphalt
+---
+
+<p style="text-align: right">*[Isn't this where we came in?][1]*</p>
+
+About eight years ago I started writing. I suppose that's an idea bound to
+arouse the intellect of your average guy in his late teens, although most of
+them have next to no subjects to approach. I myself had no idea what I was
+going to write about and I'll confess this has changed very little in these
+years. But I felt an urge to write, in very much the same way someone needs to
+pee after five beers. And I was motivated by two main ideas that I can
+remember.
+
+Firstly, I had started reading seriously since three or four years before. I
+hadn't read much else besides Romanian literature, which, mind you, can prove
+to be excruciatingly dull at times[^1], but I was interested in structure and
+in how to write after reading all these books, the same way I had been
+interested in how to make music after listening to rock and so on. I never
+claimed I could do it right, all I knew was that I had to try it.
+
+Secondly, I had found blogs as a way of expression on the Internet. I had
+started using computers shortly after learning how to read (at about five) and
+was spending most of my time mindlessly reproducing Basic code on a Z80
+Spectrum clone, so I could draw geometric shapes and the likes. At ten I
+already had a good idea of how to use a PC and at twelve I was browsing the
+Internet on dial-up on Friday evenings. Two years after getting my permanent
+Internet connection, blogs were looking mighty cool and Wordpress intrigued me
+so much I decided to give it a shot. I made a hosting account on some
+Geocities-like platform[^2], installed Wordpress and wrote my first post,
+entitled "Another Brick In The Wall...". It was an article about mostly
+nothing, but I didn't care; I thought I had become a blogger.
+
+However, that didn't stop me from writing other articles about something, some
+of it even interesting stuff. To be honest, I didn't care if it was interesting
+to anyone else, since all I felt was sharing my experiences with "the
+Internet", regardless of whether that "Internet" included anyone except myself.
+But I interacted with people, and I kept writing about stuff. And it felt good
+for a while.
+
+So why did I decide to start another blog? you might wonder. Well, I always
+felt pretty good about having a clean slate. Sometimes such changes are bad,
+other times they're beneficial and, finally, there are those times when change
+is necessary, and I happened to find myself in the latter situation. Sure, the
+new blog™ isn't going to be fundamentally different from the old blog™, but I
+felt there was no other way to go.
+
+There are also some technical reasons behind this decision, but I'll cover them
+in another post.
+
+*And what's with this "Tar Pit", anyway?*
+
+[^1]: The only novel taught in Romanian schools in the first eighth grades is,
+as far as I know, "Baltagul" ("The Hatchet"), written by one of the first
+Romanian communist writers, Mihail Sadoveanu. The novel attempts to make a
+parallel with the myth of Isis and Osiris, at the same time introducing
+traditional Romanian themes and motifs. I suppose the only reason they keep it
+in the curriculum is a dumb sense of nationalism.
+
+       On the other hand, I spent the summer before my eighth grade reading Marin
+       Preda's "Cel Mai Iubit Dintre Pământeni" ("The Earth's Most Beloved"),
+       which, if nothing else, is a good read on the wrongdoings of the Romanian
+       Communist regime. Also, the book's rather dubious philosophical content
+       made a deep impression on me at the time.
+
+[^2]: Now as dead as Geocities itself.
+
+[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlR3wUPwJCg