About

BASALTED comes about as I struggled with blogging services that overprint their own ethics and morality on those using their services. Recently, I found myself in a situation where, through my silence, I would be tacitly condoning hate speed. I am not at all comfortable with this. I started BASALTED  as an experiment to see how it would feel to run my own blog instead of be an author on someone else’s platform.

Short-form publishing

One of the posting mechanisms I want to explore was publishing to the blog by text message. That would have allowed more of a “stream of consciousness” style of writing that I’ve tried on a few occasions. For example, I once tweeted a state agency meeting, minute by minute, for four hours. For people who couldn’t be in the room, this was informative. Of course, that was before Zoom and live-streaming of meetings, so perhaps this authoring style is no longer useful. Nevertheless, my initial concept for BASALTED is to post short-form content most of the time.

Why BASALTED?

You might be wondering why the name BASALTED. The answer is: unique branding that intersects with my personal story. I’m a geologist by education and experience, with basalt figuring strongly in my life history. I have reviled the ever-present, ugly, “it’s everywhere” outcrops of basalt. But in hindsight, I have come to realize that it is so ubiquitous that it has formed a kind of underpinning or glue throughout my life. On that basis, I recognize now that I appreciate basalt, because even though it is everywhere, it is always unique at some scale.

I had some other names in mind but as I looked at domain records and did trademark searches, they landed a little too close to what others were already doing. For example, in keeping with my short-form concept, I came up with JotThoughts. That domain was available yesterday and not at an inflated price. But in searching the web, I found spaces like jothought, jotthought, and a host of education-oriented sites that spoke of jotting thoughts. I left that concept behind and moved on. Nobody had a trademark for BASALTED.

BASALTED pays homage to my education, my first career as a geologist, and the ever-present nature of basalt, always lurking in the background.

BASALTED is a verb

Finally, BASALTED can also be thought of as a verb, as in: “I’ve been BASALTED!” For me, this is the process of realizing that something you did not like or appreciate now has much more value than you might have given it. It is the epiphany in the middle of the night. It is the palm to the forehead in a flash of realization. We’ve all experienced it. Now there’s a name for it: BASALTED!

The copper-tone accent color in the BASALTED theme is reminiscent of lichens that grow on basalt, at least in the Pacific Northwest. The tag line about ruminations refers to my intention to write about my thoughts and observations during the frequent travel I do for friends, family, and work.