Musical accompaniment: The American Analog Set – Fuck This…I’m Leaving, from the 2005 album Set Free.

Fun game with the musical accompaniments I attach to posts: put the song on repeat while you read it, as I did while I wrote it. Determine how many listens it took from start to end. This is a good measure of how links and things contribute to your procrastination while reading an article. Try it with other articles, too. I got through just under 17 listens, which means I got this article written in about an hour and a half. Pretty good for me considering it’s about 1,050 words, and I’ve been milking a 1,150 word-post since mid-December.

I’ve been preparing my return to Phillies blog world for a couple of weeks now. I had expected to do this at some point, but I hadn’t done much of any work for it – save brainstorm ideas and write about 600 words of a piece that I’m still working on that will probably end up around 2,000 or so – until it was time to renew my hosting fees. In the past week, I’ve really started upping my production: trying (and failing) to transfer stuff from the old site, realizing it’s better to simply start fresh, and making the new site look remotely decent. I was planning to get this back up once I was ready to publish enough content to make it look more like a desert with a few trees scattered around than a completely barren desert wasteland, but I had a goal for myself with it that I obviously missed and I don’t like keeping the five or so people I’ve told about this in the dark. So here we go.

Let me explain to you how I’m gonna do things around here. Then, next month, when it’s the rarely updated piece of shit that I’m constantly trying to avoid, we can all look back here to find the exact point at which I fucked up. The about page will be up by the weekend, so we can see where I fucked up the last two times, and with any luck, not make those same mistakes. It’s fairly boring, however, to describe why I’ve been a shitty blogger up to this point, but I do want a written history of the past and for y’all (Christ, I’ve been in Florida too long) readers to know what you’re getting without having to go back to this every time. I’ll have actual interesting things, like about the Phillies and stuff, going up as well. One thing, which I suppose would qualify under “stuff”, is a really awesome new thing that I’m going to obsess over and quite possibly from favorite perk of being a shitty blogger yet. In the Phillies category, I can guarantee two things soon: the aforementioned post I started about three months ago. It is mostly fictional and uses Dan Lozano, Jimmy Rollins, Ruben Amaro, Jr., and Jon Heyman as characters. Make of that what you will. Also, a thing that furthers my love of connection baseball and music, where I connect a certain beloved Phillie with a 1970′s folk song that no one, according to my three-minute Google search, has made before, probably because it’s really dumb.

As for things that don’t rely on my bizarre humor that no one else seems to understand, I may do some sort of preview for each player, like The Good Phight’s, only weirder and worse. It won’t rely on my bizarre humor, but it will certainly utilize it poorly! (I’m laughing to myself as I’m writing. Yes, my bizarre humor is mostly self-detrimental.) I’m considering ways to recap regular season games, but that’s still over a month away. The sabermetric library I talked about way back in November is still likely, but on the back burner, at least for the time being, while I determine the best way to do these other things.

Another thing I started doing over the offseason was collecting Eric Bruntlett merchandise (yes, I swear to God, I really am this weird), thus the new blog title. I plan to list the stuff I have in a new page and maybe if you do something helpful for me/the blog (like find me a life? or kill me) I’ll send you your choice and you, too, can share in my sad experiences. I am also sponsoring Bruntlett’s Baseball-Reference page, so that will get me about ten extra hits by year’s end. Cool.

Fun Fact 1: If you subscribe at the top of the right sidebar, I will personally send you an e-mail thanking you for joining the Eric Bruntlett Fan Club and congratulating/mocking you for willingly becoming a part of what must be the most useless, unimportant one in the history of fan clubs. If you find a more useless one, I’ll send you a card/picture just for going to that trouble. Maybe if I help you start a memorabilia collection, it’ll help you get a life and spend your time on better things. Seriously, dude, that’s just sad.

Fun Fact 2: If you go to the old site, it automatically redirects you here. You obviously don’t care, because you’re already here, but I find think that’s incredible. Ain’t life grand?

One final note: along with the revival of the blog, I also intend to start a podcast, because much like a blog, anyone in the world can have a shitty podcast if they want. Remember that thing I just told you about life being grand? Also, it’s more fun to make bad jokes to other people with Internet phones (Life is grand, I can not possibly stress this enough.) than it is to do that here to no one in particular. I’ll go more in-depth with it once it’s a real thing and not a mere idea, but I already have one guest lined up.

The blog’s Twitter feed has changed to @beardofanclub, although the one I use even occasionally has not. (@uublog) The Facebook page‘s title has changed to match with the new blog name, but the URL has not. The e-mail address, fireericbruntlett@gmaill.com, also remains unchanged, as those are two things that are unchangeable. Now that I’ve thoroughly bored you, I’m glad to know that you won’t be around when I embarrass myself further.