I’ve been blogging for a couple of years over at IGN. While I do like the community there, despite a vast range of topics it is very videogame-centric (as you would expect). Recently I tried Blogger, MS Spaces, Xanga, and Myspace.

I thought Blogger would mesh well with my gmail account, but there is no sense of community there and I never received one post on any of my blogs.

Myspace was worse. It is full of incredibly strange people with bizzare looking pages. Many people (women) have set their accounts to private to avoid being hassled by men. It’s funny to think that was once a place that was primarily a kid site until the adults and celebrities took it over.

MS Spaces has lots and lots of young people and is more social than thoughtful. I have nothing against the younger crowd, as there are many at IGN. But IGN has a great mix of ages. I’m 41, and I don’t have much in common from what I ran into at Spaces.

When I went to Xanga I thought it would be the main competition to WordPress for my attention. Now, Xanga has a good text-search features, as opposed to the link-search feature of WordPress. However, when I searched for topics that interested me, I found far more appealing threads on WordPress than Xanga. As you can see from the title of my blog, I like mythical creatures. All the ones I really would like to use as usernames were taken at Xanga. So here I am, Hippogriff at WordPress.

The main reason I’ve always wanted a blog is to find other people like myself that share similar interests. Given the things I like, that’s hard to do in a city of a million people. I could spend years trying to find those people. Here, I hope to find them as fast as I can type.

Here’s some of the things I’d like to use this blog for:

• Book reviews, particularly Fantasy Fiction. I’m writing a book myself, and have an extensive library of the genre.
• Movie and TV show reviews, mostly action/adventure and sci-fi, and collectibles.
• Computers – problems, resolutions, software. I build my own PCs and do DVD authoring.
• Hi tech stuff – I have an Creative mp3 player, Treo phone, and will be building a home theater next year.
• Games – video games, pinball machines, board games, card games. My favorite PC game, Microprose’s Magic the Gathering.
• Digital photography and travel. I’m hoping to go to Europe soon.
• My favorite music, 80s & 90s melodic rock, musical instruments I have/want, and songs I’m writing.
• Home remodeling and gardening/landscaping.
• Portland Trailblazers!

You know where I’ve been and where I’m going. I hope you’ll hang around as Hippogriff takes flight.