Well nothing could be further from the truth. The reality of it is, if anything I am a technophobe. I've only ever learned enough to do what I needed to do, and I've often used the laziest ways available to achieve that. And after 25 years of internet culture, I'm suffering from "screen fatigue" and find it hard to do anything in front of a computer monitor for more than a few hours. If I've got a lot of computer work to get through in a given day, it has to be broken up by some type of physical activity or I will go completely loopy.

   That being said, I still know my way around PHP, SQL and CSS well enough to build the web site you see before you from the ground up (with a lot, and I mean a lot of help from online resouces such as codepen)- I'm not a complete noob. So when I decided recently that it was time to bring back the zblog, I figured I was at least up to the task of maybe finding and installing some kind of 3rd party software into my site, or failing that maybe following one of the many online tutorials available on YouTube and elsewhere on the subject.

   Well, I really had to dig and dig and search to find anything even remotely useful. And to tell you the truth, the main problem I was encountering was that most "solutions" out there have far too much functionality built in. You can't just find a blog template that enables you to make a simple post and then, say, go back and edit it later. Oh no, that would be far too simple. It has to have a login system, a way to index things 18 different ways, multiple users and widgets and usually involves accessing style sheets and scripts from other remote web sites- something I've always tried to avoid.

   So I wasted a good 2 or 3 full days trying to make these things work. And none of them did- they just didn't. I could have dealt with the fact that they were ugly, or had too much extra crap I didn't want or need, but in order to put up with that stuff, they at least need to do one thing: work. And they didn't.

   And so I decided today that I'm going to post my new blog anyway, and it will be the simplest blog in the universe. I write a post in my favorite text editor, I paste it into a line in my database and I'm done. It ain't pretty, but it will work, and it will keep all my entries safe and ordered by date for now until I find something better, or just improve on this. So suck it, internet.

   Anyway yeah! This is the zblog, welcome back. I say "back" because way back in the day when I was impressing all my friends with my early tech "savviness", as early as 2003, I used to keep a very regular blog on the site and it was called, you guessed it, the zblog. It became an important part of the site and I had reason to believe that a lot of people really enjoyed reading it. And of course it also became a live archive of my life and the life of this clothing brand at the time, which is why I find it interesting. And yes, that means that I plan to post archives of the original zblog as soon as I can find the time.

   So in that spirit I have re-started the zblog and I aim to once again make it a regular and important part of the ongoing ZBQ story, a story that goes back 30 years at this point. I plan to post regular updates about things happening in ZBQ world, but I'll also stray off the reservation in any number of other directions, as is my wont. All while continuing to keep as many balls in the air at a time as possible to convince you, the reader, that I might actually know what I'm doing. Spoiler alert: I don't. Stay tuned kidz.