I like the way I am — what this blog used to be called

While digging through the cPanel SQL dump from the old intrepidkarthi.com/blog to recover the lost archive, I went through the wp_options table for things like the permalink structure and admin email. Most of it was boring infrastructure. One row stopped me cold:

blogname:        I like the way I am
blogdescription: Earth is a nice place to enjoy our life
template:        pixeled
stylesheet:      pixeled
admin_email:     intrepidkarthi@gmail.com
siteurl:         http://intrepidkarthi.com/blog

For the first few years of this blog — 2008 through somewhere around 2010 — the title at the top of every page was “I like the way I am”. The tagline was “Earth is a nice place to enjoy our life.” The theme was a free WordPress skin called pixeled.

I had completely forgotten this.

what twenty-year-old me was actually announcing

Read those two strings together. “I like the way I am. Earth is a nice place to enjoy our life.”

That is not a brand. It is not a positioning statement. It is not even particularly grammatical. It is a twenty-year-old in a hostel room in Madurai writing the first sincere thing he can think of into a Settings → General form, and clicking Save.

I find I’m not embarrassed by it. The phrasing is awkward and the punctuation is off, but the actual claim is — I like the way I am, and the world is a place to enjoy — fine. There are people decades older than that twenty-year-old whose blog tagline is some version of “Hustle harder. Sleep when you’re dead.” and the contrast does not flatter them.

the drift

The blog name changed at least twice between then and now. From memory, the rough sequence was:

2008-2010 ▸ "I like the way I am"
              "Earth is a nice place to enjoy our life"
              theme: pixeled

2010-2013 ▸ "intrepidkarthi"
              "What I think / see / feel / experience"
              (pulled from the old Joomla nav bar — that line shows
               up on the bottom of every page in the dump)

2013-2024 ▸ "intrepidkarthi" / various themes / no consistent tagline

2026      ▸ this site
              "Engineer · Author · Speaker · full-time perpetual
               futures trader"
              cyberdeck terminal aesthetic
              built fresh from the recovered archive

Each version was confident at the time. Each version sounds, from the version that came after it, like it was written by a stranger.

what the rebrand actually does

The instinct, on finding “I like the way I am” in the dump, was to be slightly horrified. To file it under embarrassing past and move on. The instinct lasted about ninety seconds. Then I noticed something more interesting: the rebrand is the part that doesn’t compound.

The writing compounds. The projects compound. The discipline of showing up — sixteen years of it — compounds. #healthywealthy, the daily streak, is the same posture as the twenty-year-old’s “earth is a nice place”, just expressed in better grammar and with a Fitbit attached.

The titles change because the audience changes, the platform changes, the available vocabulary changes. The titles do not change because the underlying person changed. The underlying person mostly didn’t.

what I’m doing about it

Adding a small footer note to the about page acknowledging the original title. Not making a thing of it.

The bigger move is keeping this in mind for the next rebrand, which will inevitably happen — three or five or ten years from now I will look at the current cyberdeck-terminal-aesthetic site and want to redo it with whatever sensibility seems right then. When I do, I’d like to keep the spine and discard the surface, the way every previous rebrand should have done and didn’t quite.

The spine, here, is some version of I like the way I am, and the world is a place to enjoy. The surface keeps changing. That is fine. That’s what surfaces are for.

— Karthik

Note: the pixeled theme is still on WordPress.org if you want to see what the blog actually looked like in 2008. It hasn’t aged well in the way that twenty-year-old taglines age well.