Mixed Plate: Vox Goes Silent, but the Beat Goes On

They say you always remember the Firsts. The first taste of candy that makes your brain go fizz-boom-pow! That first plunge into the ocean where you learn to sink or swim. Memorable recollections that get socketed away in the scrapbook of one's brainpan, no matter how big or small. The first food blog post I wrote wasn't on Blogger, it was on Vox, an easy-peasy blog template network that's shutting down on the day of September 30th, in the year of our Lord-twenty-ye-olde-ten. Also known as, Tomorrow. The content is being vaporized into the binary ether, and so goeth Wasabi Prime, version 1.0, ashes to ashes, virtual dust to virtual dust. With hopefully a Tron-like sound effect.

Wasabi 1.0 , and my big meaty loaf - RIP, Vox!

For the most part I still have all the original photos I've taken. This includes the early harsh-flash pics with my pocket digital camera, sawing into a girthy loaf of Beef Wellington for the first official Wasabi Prime food blog post back in January of 09. It's a beaut, ain't it? The blog had been conceived out of many martini-soaked nights with friends equally disgruntled with our respective Cubicle Worlds. We needed a creative outlet, a desperate means of escape to slingshot us from the purgatory of a corporate-fueled void. Recreational drug use or donning masks to become vigilante superheroes seemed altogether impractical, so the logical choice was joining the New Media revolution.

At the time, Vox seemed an ideal choice. It was Blog Lite with its premade templates and simple content formatting. Meaning: we couldn't break it if we tried. Awesome. The posting rate on Wasabi Prime 1.0 was fast, furious and without heed to whether or not the food looked good in the photos, as this was more of a blogger boot camp, getting accustomed to churning out content on a regular basis, but learning to momentarily slow down if only to document daily life. Somewhere amid the sound and the fury of blog-building, I decided Wasabi Prime needed to put on her grownup pants, take better photos and get a more customizable format. Enter Blogger, yadda-yadda and so on.

Those halcyon Vox days were when I wasn't aware of tracking visitors and playing the comment/linkback boogie, only about how food got to the table every day. Looking back at those posts of simpler times, I'm reminded why blog politics aren't important, at least not to me. I didn't know what an RSS feed was then and I'm fairly confident today that I just don't care. This blog was always about moving forward with a self-employed intent towards trying something new and developing better habits. Let someone else be Perez Hilton, or save rainforests and cute baby seals. Instead, I make my own chicken and beef stock. I garden more. I strive towards baking breads and pastries. I identify ingredients more as separate flavor profiles, so as to better understand why something tastes properly balanced. The experience hasn't made me a good cook, as I still suck at measuring -- instead it's simply resulted in feeling more resourceful as a human being. You start to realize most goals in life, even the inedible ones, are achievable through slowing down to comprehend its separate components before being able to understand them integrated in a process. I'll bet dollars to doughnuts that Buddha was a line cook before achieving Nirvana.

The end of Vox isn't something to mourn, simply a reminder that content on a blog is more than an open diary to the universe or meant to be kept forever like some dusty tome. Instead, it's perhaps a vehicle to move lives forward into that profound great unknown called the Big Badass Future. (P.S. -- I did archive all my old content on Vox before it went kaput, so maybe that's the only reason I can be so glib about all this)