As you all know, Thanksgiving (in the United States of America) falls on the monumentous occasion of the 2 month & 2 day anniversary bimestrial blogoversary of the launch of evolvify.com. Since the site is already on track to gross in the low-mid double figures in cold, hard cash this month, after a stellar first month, I wanted to thank you all and announce my retirement.
Or…
I wanted to thank all of you for making the first couple months more fun than I’d anticipated.
Let’s go with the latter. So… Thank you all (except for a few, but you know who you are) for reading and sharing and tweeting and RTing and subscribing and commenting and forum-izing and debating and complimenting and supporting and liking the journey so far (and for putting up with my sporadic whining about my broken collarbone)! I’d like to thank a few people in particular…
(the first few have been awesome in getting evolvify in front of a LOT of new eyeballs… maybe even yours… listed in chronological order by when they first sent a jolt of traffic to evolvify.com)
Robb Wolf
robbwolf.com and author of NYT Bestseller, ‘The Paleo Solution‘
Robb wins the award for making me feel profound by RTing my musings on haggis and Homo economicus on Twitter. Secondary thanks is due for the massive resource of the podcast. Not only has it accompanied me on hundreds of miles of random terrain via my iPod, but if someone asks me a paleo question while I’m too busy to answer, I can just say… “oh, yeah… totally… just listen to all the podcasts at robbwolf.com”. Normally, that would be considered a cop-out, but people are always grateful because it’s always good.
Robb, despite the fact that you and Andy misattributed my surprisingly resonant paleo quote to someone else in episode 52, I still love you (both). Andy, I’m not giving you a bold headline because I am still one of the ZERO people you follow on Twitter… Zero!? …like a cold-hearted gangsta.
Richard Nikoley
I think I first found Richard’s blog in The Great Denise Minger vs. The China Study Tussle of 2010. I’m pretty sure that I use the adjective “vitriol” every time I reference his writing… and I don’t mean that pejoratively. The first time I heard from him via evolvify was a comment thanking me for sparing him from spending time eviscerating the inanity of President Obama’s vegan advocate personal trainer, Cornell McClellan. Linking my post from his BULLSHIT! #3 post sent all sorts of fun people to evolvify.
Richard has also been cool enough to jump into the evolvify forum to prevent the spread of the menace of socialism, and has claimed the title of evolvify Facebook “Like Member #105”.
Mark Sisson
November 14 was a crisp Sunday Morning in the year of our lord two-thousand ten. Momentarily casting aside my task of penning the Great American Post-It note, I took to my morning coffee. Passing my coconut butter churner, I made way to Ol’ Bess, the family liquid-cooled, six-core, 3xHD magical adding machine and pressed “refresh” on the blog stats. “Golly Martha, would you look at that? There must be an evil spirit in the magical adding machine. How in the name of heaven could this many people be visiting evolvify.com on a church day?”
As it sometimes happens, there was no invisible superhero possessing the blog stats; it was attributable to a link at the very tippy top of Mark’s “Weekend Link Love” referring to evolvify as striving “to become a hub for the evolutionary-minded.” And on the 7th day, Andrew did not rest. Side point: The first commenter there called me “another palegomaniac”. That was highly pleasing to me for some reason, but I remain curious about the “another” part. Who are these other palegomaniacs? Is there a secret handshake? Are there membership dues?
This also brings up my 5-month+ plot to convert my mom to paleo/primal for the very purpose of an anti-neolithic Thanksgiving. As you read this, there’s a good chance I’ll be wolfing down pumpkin pie with vanilla-almond-coconut crust. Success! Anyway, I outsourced most of that conversion project to MDA. How can you go wrong directing newbies to the mega-compilation of posts at Primal Blueprint 101?
Melissa McEwen
Melissa sent a bunch of cool people my way via her post ‘Blogs that I want to read pretty much every day!‘. She said of evolvify, “This blog is, a bit like this site, a paleo pop culture/science/opinion blog with some great food for thought and an awesome design.” I think that’s a pretty good characterization of what I’m trying to accomplish with the site. Although… We should probably be careful about stroking the ego of the blog’s designer. In any case, I like Melissa’s blog a lot because I agree that it is “a bit like this site”. One of the areas in which I really appreciate her work is that she bases a lot of her posts on pertinent academic research and her wide base of good ol’ book readin’.
So… Robb, Richard, Mark, and Melissa… I thank you, and my RSS/email subscriptions thank you. Slainte!
Random Blogger Thanks to…
(all of these folks crank out tons of great stuff, and have been awesome at supporting evolvify both in the post comments and in the forums)
*Aaah! My sister, brother-in-law, nephew, mom, and dad are arriving. So… I apologize for racing through the rest of this…
David Csonka
naturallyengineered.com @thrivenaturally
David has a great archive of paleo related posts from evolutionary fitness to nutrition to hacking iPod+. Follow him on Twitter, then go dig through his posts. For serious. If you’re not sure where to start, here’s the first of multiple posts on his experiences with MovNat or a meatier follow up on MovNat (check out the related posts below and you should be well on your way).
Kevin Holbrook
www.paleoplaybook.com @kevinholbrook8
Even though Kevin doesn’t think bicycles are the coolest thing since everything, he spins some interesting angles into evolutionary topics. If you like Melissa’s stuff and my stuff, give Kevin’s site a look.
Jamie Scott
I’m pretty sure Jamie’s my evil twin… or… I’m his evil twin. He’s in the southern hemisphere (New Zealand), I’m in the frigid north. He’s a blonde, pretty-boy, road biker, and I’m a dark-haired, Grizzly Adams lookin’, mountain biker. His last name is my middle name… yada yada yada. And… we’ve apparently been writing posts on identical topics as if existing in parallel universes. Like Melissa, Jamie’s work often draws from empirical research and well-developed thinking from outside the blogosphere.
Emily Deans, M.D.
evolutionarypsychiatry.blogspot.com @evolutionarypsy
That’s Doctor Emily Deans to you, thank you very much. Emily is a pyschiatrist. Yup… a brain chemist with a medical degree. She’s probably smarter than you so if you’re easily intimidated, you may want to just read and learn… that’s what I do.
Also… Angelo Coppola
thisweekinpaleo.com (@thisweekinpaleo)
While Angelo hasn’t yet joined the elite “participates in the evolvify forum” club, he did flatter me by naming evolvify his “Paleo Blog of the Week“. Angelo provides a weekly podcast with musings on the latest goings on in the paleosphere. He’s also featured the above mentioned David Csonka, Melissa McEwen, Denise Minger, and Jamie Scott so I feel like I’m in pretty good company.
Thanks to the CrossFit folks at crossfitclackamas.com,  crossfitnyc.com, crossfitagoge.com, southbaltimorecf.com, who have linked to my mega-anti-gluten post (and others).
I’d like to thank MyPaleoLife.com, but I’m holding out until chef Brock‘s promised pemmican experiment! Maybe we’ll get it sooner if y’all bombard him at his site and @mypaleolife. 🙂
It would also be cool if I thanked all of the Twitter fiends out there who keep me entertained and share my writing with all of their tweeps, but… that list might get into the hundreds…
Well okay, I’m being totally rude to family… Sorry to all of the people I’ve missed (of which there are many). Thanks Everyone!
Wait a second… Is it just me, or did this turn out more like a New Year’s “Top Blogs of the Year” post? Oh well, maybe you can come over for turkey on New Year’s Eve.
Oh, and did you know that clicking through to Amazon via this link, or any of the book links at the end of posts, helps support all things evolvify related? If you’re doing some shopping anyway, maybe we can push that fat Amazon money high enough to buy daddy a new boat (or hat).
Slainte!
Thanks for the link! Enjoying your erudite blog quite a lot. However, I'm fairly certain that Jamie is *my* evil twin, as we are nearly the same age, ever since I broke my tailbone cycling I like to watch it on TV, and we've been simulblogging *months* before the first Evolvify post lit up the world wide web. You'll have to pick another evil twin. Maybe Stephan Guyenet?
Oh, if it's a contest, you can have him. I mainly didn't want him to feel like it was just him and the kakapos out there all alone.
I gotta admit he's a much better evil twin for you. No contest. Not that there was one. A bit of an odd conversation, really. Happy Thanksgiving!
Ahem…. As this is the internet after all, I could be a spotty faced 12 year old pretending to blog on interesting stuff in order to score brainy chicks… or hairy mountain bikers. That whole primal stuff and trying to sound like I know stuff and have an opinion that matters is just a front. But hey, it works for me and is a lot more fun than kakapo, kea, kiwi, and sheep.
Thanks for the mention and the traffic and calling me a pretty boy?? Ouch! Maybe it is time to get back to my mountain biking roots, stop shaving the legs, and go get a little bit dusty with my dirty old fat-tired self?
I do feel a sense of loyalty to Emily… apart from her likely being smarter than both of us, having access to prescription head stuff, and being better looking than you, we kinda had our gig before you. But I'm open to time share. And as I can guarantee that I dislike people more than you (my answer to everything is depopulation), I think that makes me the evil one… in a deceptive blue-eyed pretty-boy blond type of package.
Looking forward to getting my travel over and done with then I'll frequent the forum and generally sift around your place a bit more often… any chance of a chill out lounge there??
…added a "chill out lounge" to the forum.
Paleoman did not have six liquid cooled cores. Thou art a poser!
-Sent from my iPhone
I know, right? I think Macs were the last stone age tool, and I kicked that habit in the 90s.
You'd be nowhere without me. 🙂
True. Well… I owe it all to you and my global network of underage sweat shops that I've outsourced my writing to. It's such a pain to get ESL ghostwriters to quit with the self-indulgent prose!
Heyyyyy (Fonzi voice) Thanks for the mention Andrew, you're doing some really great work here. Have a great Thanksgiving!
100% fake paleo so far! (I'm not even going to pretend that those pies didn't have copious amounts of refined sugar, or that the whipped cream was dairy free)
Andrew,
Small world. Tuned into your blogs a year or more ago when you were first trying to put boat and travel money together. Enjoyed your meanderings about all things worthy of meandering about. Lost track of you for a while and then began receiving Evolvify discussing things important to me since my Movnat retreat with Erwan this past June in Summersville with Richard in attendance. Glad to see things are progressing so you will be able to fulfill your dream of sailing about the world. When we last spoke you were boatless. Sounds like you have one now. What did you get?
BTW, I am in Camas, WA today (Thanksgiving) headed to Port Townsend tomorrow for a few days. If you are up that way let me know. Beer's on me.
Jesse
Hey Jesse, glad you made it full-circle and reconnected!
I had a boat before, and still have the same one. The problem remains that a boat worthy of the high-latitude stuff I have planned requires somewhat of a custom build (read: lots o' cash). Anyway, that's still in the works. I'm rolling all the expedition stuff into a new site… 77Zero.org (@77Zero). Rather than wait around until I get the big bucks for a new boat, I'm putting together some microexpeditions (weeks-months length, rather than years) that will be fun and hopefully interesting… using all of the same principles I'd discussed before. I'll also be doing those on paleo nutrition, so I'll reference that expedition over here from time-to-time.
Bummer… I won't be that far north. I'm on the other side of the mountains in Oregon for Thanksgiving. Heading back to the Central/Southern Oregon Coast for a couple weeks, then back up to Portland before Christmas.
Speaking of all this stuff… If you, or anyone else reading this, knows of any paleo adventure/explorer type folks, please let me know.
Andrew,
Check out http://www.keepturningleft.co.uk/ Dylan is doing what you want to do around jolly old England and is making a pound (euro) or two in the process.
Good luck on your quest.
Jesse
A last-but-not-least of the H3-tagged shout-outs – I'm honored. 🙂 I'll see you on the forums soon. Love what you're doing here.