Treasure Valley Treats and Tragedies: Omega and Alpha

This will be the last Treasure Valley Treats and Tragedies post. I'm not quitting blogging, but honestly it's time for a change. The main reason is that I'm just plain sick and tired of this site. The name is the worst part, believe it or not. I thought the hyperbole was cute when Ms. Golden Rule and I came up with it (her suggestion was Treasure Valley Treats and Travesties, I just changed the last word), but I have a hard time meeting someone's eyes at an event when they ask for the name of my site. I mean a mediocre or bad meal is hardly a "tragedy", especially in a time when it seems like real tragedies are a daily occurrence. It makes the name seem extra cheesy, and not the kind of cheesy that I like.

There are other issues. I don't like that I've saddled myself with a name that limits me to a certain geographical region, especially when I write quite a bit about things outside of that region and end up feeling guilty for doing so. I'm tired of spending hours on each blog post trying to make them seem more professional (or at least more family friendly). I'm bored with the design capabilities of this platform (Blogger). Hell, I'm tired of feeling like I'm only "allowed" to write about food (trivia FYI, my initial desire was to start a "bad movie" review blog). All of these things have contributed to the lack of posts over the years. If I don't enjoy doing it, what's the point?

The upshot of all of this is that in very short order (fingers crossed), my new site Good Taste / Bad Taste will be live at goodtastebadtaste.com, I'll let you know when it happens. My posts will still be primarily about local restaurants, of course, but I'll no longer feel bad when someone says "Why do you post about places in other states so often?". There will also be posts about movies, music, books, events, games, and anything else I feel like throwing whatever influence I have at bringing attention to. The writing will be more of an "off the cuff" style, so you can also expect more profanity and off-color humor, because honestly that's a more accurate representation of who I really am.

Of course I recognize there's going to be a downside for some, or probably even the majority, of my readers. I know a lot of you would rather just see pictures and reviews of Boise area restaurants, or even just restaurants in general, without seeing reviews and screenshots of horror TV shows, or kung fu movies, or comic books, or whatever else. I did think about cancelling my Facebook and Instagram accounts and setting up new ones for that reason, but it's honestly more work than it's worth so I'm just rebranding them. I mean I follow so many ostensibly foodie accounts where about a third of the posts are essentially advertisements or posts about beauty products and health supplements or whatever, but I like the food posts so I just scroll past the rest of it. I anticipate a lot of unfollowing and unsubscribing, but maybe some of you will stick around to see how it turns out. I fully expect that this new freedom will result in me posting more often in general, primarily local eatery write-ups as I said before, but I know that won't be good enough for some. But who knows, if you can be patient I might in the end decide this has all been a horrible mistake, and it will end up just being a food blog again...

I don't know how much longer I'm going to leave this site up in its current form. It might be easier to just leave it as an archive, or I might import the posts to the new site and redirect this site's traffic to that one (assuming I can figure out how to make that work). In the meantime, as a parting gift for those of you who will be going bye-bye, here are some pictures from restaurants that I didn't feel like formally reviewing, and from return visits to restaurants I've already written up. Granted, most of them have already been posted on my Facebook feed, but they've long since been buried unseen by most thanks to Facebook's idiotic algorithm. Happy trails...