About

Hiya, I’m Barry. I’ve been “publishing” stuff since my teens, starting with silly newsletters in Jr. High (oh, they were awful), zines in High School, and the inevitable political rags in college.  I grew up in Winslow, Arizona, and after 10 years in the hellish heat of Phoenix, I moved to Seattle in 2000.  New Year’s Eve 1999, in fact — you remember, right before the word was supposed to end. In 2014 I married my partner of 10 years, and we have a dog named Mondo.  I have a fairly soul-crushing, go-nowhere job, and I try to distract myself from the American hellscape we all live in by collecting vinyl records, tinkering with retro game emulators, reading weird books, and amateur mycology.

The site

Total Obscurity’s first incarnation was in 1994 as a crappy HTML homepage. The name referred to how, at the time, your website could barely be found online unless you were lucky enough to appear on one of those indexing sites like Lycos or Webcrawler.  It was self-hosted until 2006 when it jumped to Typepad under the name Quantum Moronics, bounced back to self-hosted WordPress in 2010, and finally landed here at wordpress.com. In 2021 I decided to start a new personal blog under the original title, separate from the politics/religion rants of the other one. Honestly, I’m gettin’ too old for that shit.