Shortly after the events of July 24, 2010 (I’ll get to that eventually), I started my first official blog. Previously I had had a Livejournal–and I made daily posts on various defunct forums and newsgroups for years before that–so I was no stranger to writing on the internet. But this blog was a little bit different from what had come before, because I was a little bit different from my previous life.

Titled “Dabid’s Blog“, it was a hodgepodge conglomerate of various random things I crammed into it, including toy and comic book reviews (of course), lists of worthwhile things I had done on any given day, song lyric interpretations and music analyses, a discussion of the merits of Pepsi Throwback, chronicles of my first experiences with coffee and baseball, a trip to Chiji’s restaurant and much more. (Though not necessarily much more of substance, mind you–I was pretty shocked when I revisited this blog.)

By early 2012, though, something went askew inside me again. I gave up on experiencing life outside of collecting and let it fully consume me (again). I created and published a multitude of toy-related blog sites, and was quickly having my work read by millions of collectors every year. Eventually, I let Dabid’s Blog die and allowed the domain name registration I’d purchased for DabidsBlog.com to lapse without a care, as I never thought I’d be writing a personal blog again.

It took almost a decade, but at some point over the last year (and largely for reasons still to come in this book), my heart changed again. I knew I was going to write a book about my life (beyond but including collecting, which is a core component of me, after all), and eventually I settled on this blogging format.

I briefly planned on re-registering “dabidsblog.com” and reviving that site for this project, but something unexpected occurred: the Internet has changed somewhat in the last decade, and someone had already purchased that domain name–for the intent of selling it for about a thousand dollars to some poor schmuck named Dabid who wanted to have an on-the-nose domain name for their blog.

While it was a bit irritating at first to see my old domain name being used in such a manner, ultimately I decided a new title would be best for my book anyway. I toyed with the idea of “Collecting Life”, but that domain name was already being scalped for $2500–and I’m glad it was, since it not being available forced me to the final title I came up with.

What I like about “Penguin Dome!” as the title for this book is that it’s an idea I had that says a lot about me as a human (if that’s really what I am)–and it’s also the idea I’ve had that’s most personal to me and not about collecting. If not for others, it’s at least good for me to be reminded that there is more to my self than just collecting.

There’s one more metaphorical reason I’m really content with the “Penguin Dome!” title, but it hinges on something we haven’t come to yet.

But I have said enough to start filling in some of those blanks in the header image and tagline for the site, so I’ll document the original and revised versions here before we move on.

Goodbye, “Penguin Dome! – A Blog About __________, Life, ______, ____, ______, _____ and ____ “.

Hello, “Penguin Dome! – A Blog About Collecting, Life, ______, Toys, ______, Anime and ____”.

I wonder what we’ll fill in next…