Back At The Edge Of Time

I started blogging in 2006 for TheOilDrum and soon after at the EuropeanTribune, focusing mostly on Energy and its wider implications. This blog come to be a few years later mainly for technical reasons, as at the time I started experimenting with odiogo. The idea was to generate mp3 files with the spoken version of the posts I produced to be published together with the writen version. Eventually, as odiogo became ever more slow to generate the audio files, I simply quit the idea, and At The Edge Of Time was left to dust.

TheOilDrum has been going since the Spring of 2005, quite a remarkable endurance for a collective blog. It has went through many changes and ordeals but so far has muddled through and apparently continues to be sustainable from either the operational or the attendance aspects. But not only isn’t Energy the only subject that interests me, unfortunately TheOilDrum has for the past few years slowly acquired a scepticism against non fossil energies that todays makes me feel somewhat distant from this forum. My collaboration has lasted mainly through the close friendships I maintain with some of the staff; we may disagree in many things, but among the folk involved with TheOilDrum are some of the brightest and most pleasent individuals I ever met. Aside from that, the articles I submit to TheOilDrum usually get a great deal of improvement on the poetry, which for a non native English speaker comes handy.

These past few years my main writing harbour has been at the EuropeanTribune, a community blog where anyone can join and share their thoughts. Well thought rules for promoting and demoting blogs and comments have produced the website with the highest inter-individual treatment standards I have ever seen on the web. There I find some very stimulating discussions, especially on Economics and to some extent on Politics. Though still feeling much like home, I still miss some technical gadgetry, like an RSS feed. Besides that, sometimes I feel the urge to write about other subjects, like Software technologies, and more or less regularly I write about Music, themes that do not fit that well at the EuropeanTribune.

Hence, feeling these two fora are becoming somewhat narrow relative to my present horizons, I decided to reactivate this small pulpit, from now on in a more sustainable fashion (sustainable as in something planed for the long term). The EuropeanTribune will continue to host most of the stuff, with an article that's not too optimist on Energy submitted to TheOilDrum now and then. Here writing will just be a free thing, in whatever subject, in whatever quantity; just for the pleasure of it, as a way to evolve thinking and nurture a coherent discourse.

Regarding the name, “At the Edge of Time” is a poem by Michael Moorcock, that also provided the moto for one of my favourite music recordings: “Warrior on the Edge of Time”. I just use it as metaphor for the Transition our society is living today, from plentiful and growing energy supplies to something else, that is not quite known yet. Remarkably, even for people working in the renewable energy field, it is still hard to grasp Energy as the root of the economic problems we live today in the OECD. This still is, and will continue to be, the main motivation for my writings.

“We are standing on the edge, on the edge of time”, perhaps not of all time, but at least at the edge of a special time of plenty. Standing on the edge one can simply stare at the precipice or alternatively try the eyes to the horizon to identify a new path and produce a plan to get on to it.