There are a number of things we could do if we wanted this blog to become “more” than it is. I’ve frequently considered writing posts on the subject – proposing new site features or initiatives, exploring ways to bring back some former participants, to recruit new ones, and to raise the blog’s profile – but the ideas never felt right. I’ve come to realize that the main reason I’ve held back is that I don’t think I’m not sure that building up the blog – this blog – would be worth the effort the right thing to do.
Even if we could revive the ZC of a year ago, I wouldn’t want anything to do with it. It was a place where a relatively big bunch of politically conservative people felt comfortable, welcome, and, in a bloggy kind of way, important and full of potential significance, and where a few others sometimes enjoyed tangling with them. I’d be interested only in a very different ZC than that thing was – different content, different people for the most part, different circle of connections, different sense of context and direction. And I’d prefer a different blog title, too: Though I eventually grew accustomed to “Zombie Contentions,” I’ve never really liked it very much, and it’s lost resonance over the year and a half of the blog’s existence, since I don’t think any of us think much about, or of, the Contentions blog anymore.
I’m mostly fine with things, so this isn’t a complaint. I like having an all-day coffee klatch and sanity-tester. I enjoy working with you all, seeing what you come up with. I prefer relatively intensive dialogue with people I know – in the way we know people on the internet – to the alternatives offered at high-traffic blogs and major commercial web sites. Also, for the first time in a long time, I have some other writing/editing projects going on, so I feel much less driven than I might have otherwise felt to “make something” of this blog.
In the last connection let me emphasize that I don’t see a zero sum contest between pursuing those other projects and pursuing a blogging project. To the contrary, useful and unique synergies can develop between seemingly separate and divergent writing interests, and, for my purposes, have done so already on the level of material that I’ve tried out here and been able to plug in elsewhere, and vice versa. We may eventually see some community synergies as well.
Still, I said “mostly fine with things” rather than just plain “fine,” because I’m not completely confident that what I’m saying goes for the rest of you, or applies well enough to keep the blog going. In fact, my sense is that, in the life-cycle of small blogs, ZC is well into old age – if not already dead, just dragging itself along in an appropriately zombified form. Either way, I suspect it will soon – probably not next week, but likely within a few months at the most – cease to exist in its present form.
That eventuality doesn’t have to be a bad thing at all. The next “thing” may resemble this “thing” in numerous respects. Maybe it’ll be almost the same thing, just at a different location and under a different name. I’m open to suggestions, and I expect I’ll have further ideas of my own to share as well.
). Go to our 
Sic transit gloria mundi…
Mortality is fatal —
Gentility is fine,
Rascality, heroic,
Insolvency, sublime!
For my part, I find ZC workable, which is quite high praise. But I have wondered about the issues you raise here. I hope the morph is also something I’ll be able to participate in. In the meantime, I’ll be sticking around..