Welcome back!
Exactly 3,900 days ago (and yes, I’m kicking myself that the idea for what must be like the seventh iteration of Route 38 didn’t occur to me 100 days ago), I founded a programming blog on this domain. I was a little over a year out of college, eager to make my way as a software developer, and I was trying this newfangled idea of “personal branding” to get what I perceived to be an edge over competing applicants.
My story didn’t lead me toward software, however. Despite having a bachelor’s in computer science and sound fundamentals, I never got a job as a programmer (the industry was difficult to penetrate in the early 2010s and is nearly impossible to penetrate now – I watched many, many people with nowhere near the needed qualifications basically walk into the industry, but those opportunities were withheld from me for reasons I don’t fully understand). I cleaned offices, mucked around with cameras, sold stuff on eBay and Etsy, and generally found ways to avoid making a living as a professional code-slinger. In 2018, I completed a training program and started to work as a medical biller, and that decision has led me into a rewarding career in the healthcare revenue cycle. Five years on, I’ve changed jobs twice and quickly built a reputation as the source of many good bits (though not all) within our office. At present, I’ve been an appeals coordinator for the past year, building a reputation as my firm’s foremost expert in the fine art of yelling at brick walls.
In my spare time, I mess around with linguistics, play too many video games, learn new skills on Udemy and Coursera, refurbish electronics for fun, and write a really boring personal blog over at https://tnwae.us. This site is meant to be more of an anthology of some of the ill-conceived ways in which I waste spend my time. That was the original intent with Route 38 when I founded the site as a place for me to write about software engineering way back when, and that’s the intent with the new-look Rt38 site as I’ve specced it for discussing conlanging, vegetarianism, electronics, cars, MOOCs, and anything else that springs to mind. The more navel-gazey posturing will remain on tnwae.us.
Why 38? Why “Route?”
The answer, my friends, is simple: at the time the idea for this site came to me, I was reading a textual “Let’s Play” of Pokémon Crystal, and that game features numbered routes between the various settlements the player visits during his or her play-through. At the time I was sitting down to register a domain name for this site (and, by extension, to think of a name for this shitshow), the Let’s-Player was traversing Route 38 in the game. If I had been reading a Let’s Play of a different game, this site would have a different domain name, simple as.
Similarly: when the Commodores, the legendary soul/funk/R&B group from Alabama, were coming up with a name for their band, drummer Clyde Orange, at a loss for any more ideas, handed a dictionary to trumpeter William King. King flipped open the dictionary to a random page and pointed at a random word – which just so happened to be commodore. Orange, King, and their bandmates liked the sound of the word, and it stuck as the name for their band. Those of you familiar with a good English dictionary (the Oxford American is the dictionary of choice for this site) may be aware that commode, that dated English euphemism for a toilet, is rather close to commodore in the dictionary. I somehow think that The Commodes or The Commodities wouldn’t have gotten as far as The Commodores. (I quite like the Commodores, as it happens. I’m more of a fan of Lionel Richie’s solo work, it must be said. I also quite like the great state of Alabama. I have been to nearly every state in the South, and I have unfailingly found Alabamians to be the nicest, friendliest people the South has to offer. Georgians and Floridians are by miles the rudest. Kentuckians and Tennesseans are in the middle, though in the latter case I’m biased since I’m a native Tennessean. People from the Carolinas (either one) are alright, as are people from Virginia.)
At least the Commodores’ name has a more compelling origin than Steely Dan’s name; the Dan takes its name from a steam-powered sex toy from Naked Lunch, the William S. Burroughs novel. I leave you with one of my favourite deep cuts from the last true Steely Dan album (I don’t really count the reunion albums from 2000 and 2003).