Introduction

Welcome, everyone, to Randy's Rant! This is the third iteration of my personal website, having evolved to its current form after starting life as a fun little experiment during my junior year in college. It has grown from a generally random collection of facts and links about me and my hobbies into the more streamlined and focused endeavor you see before you. I have four great hobbies — writing, heraldry, history, and vexillology — each of which you will find highlighted in some fashion on this site. But it's mainly going to be about my writing.

As the name "Randy's Rant" implies, you'll find a number of thought pieces, or rants – things that I feel strongly enough about to put into words. Let's be clear about one thing up front, though. This is NOT a blog! I hate blogs — the useless musings of some random person's inane thoughts. I have no desire to read about someone's dinner recipe or their half-formed thoughts about world events they know nothing about, much less produce such drivel to the chagrin of the thinking world. Instead, I intend my rants to hearken back to the days of the well-informed and researched essay, relaying well-reasoned thoughts and assessments and highlighting the underlying facts and research used to inform them.

To that end, do not expect something new every day. I will write my rants as the issues strike me, placed here for the viewing of anyone who shares an interest in well-reasoned thought and discourse. I welcome feedback and thoughts from readers, though please do try to put some effort behind them, especially if you disagree with anything I've written. I'm perfectly happy to engage in healthy debate, even featuring your words and thoughts here in a kind of call and response format.

There's going to be more to this website, though, than just my current and past rants. There will also be a section dedicated to the works of fiction that I've produced over the years, as well as a gallery of my heraldic endeavors, and a page featuring my vexillological passions. (Still haven't figured out yet what I'll do about my history passion.) There will also be links to a geofiction Internet-based game to which I belong, but all of that is still in the future. For now, please enjoy my rants as I start writing them, and feel free to contact me at the E-mail address below if you so desire. Thanks!