This blog is ten years old (wave your hands in the air like you don't care)

This blog is ten years old as of today--can you believe it? That's a hundred and twenty months, or 3653 days of my random rants being on public display.

Over the last ten years, I have published 1410 blog posts, annoyed several people, been accused of being a member of a conspiracy comprised of dark magicians hell-bent on destroying the reputation of the most gifted and enlightened occultist ever (because we must continue to enslave humanity), pimped my ebooks,  and shared a godzillion cat pictures--all in the name of fighting of boredom and having a soapbox to yell at people from.

My posts get 319 views on average, and I have about 3749 views a month. And yes, I realize that every other occult blogger in the world has a bigger audience than I do; that's not going to change because I refuse to tell people how spiritually advanced they are, refuse to buy up tons of internet domains all feeding into my blog, and generally find advertising my own stuff a complete and utter bore.

Imagine that I said something witty about cats and money controlling the world.

So what have I learned over the last ten years? Here are ten things I learned...

# 1: I like cats better than I like certain people. And cats are as good of teachers as anyone else's Secret Chief. Every blog post that I write includes me saying, "Don't walk across the keyboard" at some point.

# 2: Stockpile your "nuclear troll" posts. There are a dozen posts that I have written, but have never published because they consist of me saying that the Imperial Pickle is the nastiest occultist I know (though Buddha Night does give them a run for their money). But never fear--if they annoy me, my finger might slip and "accidentally" hit the Publish button.

# 3: Peace is over-rated. And those who believe that you should never read another person's blog, and post your own response declaring them a wheelbarrow short of a garden shed, have no idea how the blogosphere actually works. The blogosphere is just one big argument, flowing from one blog to another.

# 4: Never use white text on a black background. I was one of the first Golden Dawn bloggers to do this (if not the very first) for symbolic reasons. And honestly, if I could go back in time, I would not do it again. Why don't I change it? Because I would have to manually fix all 1410 blog posts--I tried fixing it a couple of times, and ended up with white text on a white background.

# 5: A picture in every blog post is nice for link sharing purposes. I don't follow this rule as religiously as I should.

# 6: You can't please everyone, but you can easily piss everyone off. Every blog post I have written has been misread by someone.

# 7: Hiving off topics into other specialty blogs does not work for me--because I do not have the patience to build up another blog. That's why I talk about anything I want to on this blog, even if it has nothing to do with magic and witchcraft.

# 8: Everyone knows more than I do...because they have told me so. This includes the guy at the doughnut shop, who has never opened up an occult book in his entire life.

# 9: I am the class clown, the court jester, the Forest Gump of occultism. Or so I have been told repeatedly. In other words, people think that their opinions, beliefs, and practices are better than mine (absolutely correct, like Ten Commandment level of correctness)---and they really, really do not like people treating the subject of the occult with anything less than 200% seriousness. In other words, they think that I tell too many jokes.

# 10: I still like blogging, so I going to ignore all of your requests for me to quit blogging. Obviously, blogging is one of my guilty pleasures because everyone knows that occult blogging does not pay.

Just some of my stats for this blog--and yes, I know that your blog stats are better than mine.