Return home from SciAm Blogs

Greetings and welcome to this particular pond of microbes.

I'm back! My wonderful time at Scientific American at The Ocelloid has come to a close, as I am currently not in the right place in life for semi-professional blogging. The pressure of having someone else's brand name associated with the blog actually made it hard for me to write, as all sorts of anxiety issues crawled out of the woodwork at the sight of that. It may take me some time to get back into regular blogging again -- while adjusting to graduate school -- but this is my primary online home again, for now. You know you've been away for a while when Blogger's interface is entirely different.

Hopefully, the more flexible commenting system here will help re-establish some of the readership and conversation that was lost in transition... well, over two transitions and a very long stagnant period, that is. It may be wishful thinking to expect anyone to remain here, but someone's gotta start sweeping up the dust!

This is mostly to ensure people coming from my last post at SciAm that I do, in fact, still have the keys to this place. Let's ignore that this is the first post of 2014... (whereas that last SciAm post was the... third post of 2014. Sigh.)

Anyway, I'll lay down this vaguely Christmas-y image of a red alga as a front door mat. Red algae are so vibrant under good optics that all too often the camera doesn't quite do it justice. Charismatic megaflora, if you will.

To those who have returned with me -- thank you for sticking along this far! And for those who are new -- welcome! Let's see where this particular leg of my blogging adventure heads to. (the leg must be quite confused as to why it suddenly gets a head, but that's besides the point)

Best wishes,
-Psi-