A loose compilation of thoughts
about things:

05/01/03, 06:55 p.m.: It has come time for me to explain why I stopped updating this blog, and what I'm going to do now. This will be up for a week or so and then go into the Hereafter archives. This will not be on your final exam, and will not affect your grade.

There was a period of about three or four months where I stopped posting to this blog after a pretty good period of posting a lot (this was right after my failed Onanoblogmo, where I was going to write thirty entries after thirty days (and named, of course, after my dear beloved Nanowrimo)) and I came to realizations about blogging, which I promised to myself I would reveal here when I shut down this blog and/or site. This was sometime ago, and this is well past due, but lemme try and remember my reasons.

I like websites, and I like blogs. I enjoyed keeping a blog on my site but there were some things that gave me pause, the foremost being that my idea behind blogs and the general blogging population's idea behind blogs were very, very different. My blog was about me, and about writing about myself. The general blogging population's blogs were exactly the same except they were somehow also about community. I had looked at some award-winning blogs, and they were pretty charming, but one of the things I found horrifying is they had links to other people's blogs that were as long as my cybernetic arm, column after column of links. Did they really read these people's blogs, the ones to whom they were linking?

If you can cross a pyramid scheme with a diary, you have something like how I conceived of those people's blogs, the world of blogs, those damn things with that damn term that sounds so much like forceful vomiting (I'm surprised that out of the endless slang terms for vomiting, the phrase "updating my blog" hasn't joined "choking the tiger," "yodeling on the lawn," or my perennial favorite, "talking to Ralph on the big white phone). Now, in fact, after the War, where I got a lot of my news from blogs listed on Metafilter, or linked to each other, I see another use for blogs--a terrifying possibility for biased, unconfirmed and unsubstantiated, subjective news that is still nonetheless more trustworthy than official media organs vested in the concept of making war. Out of the blogful multitudes comes the possibility for something that may eventually drive the news media (and grammar and spelling) to obsolecence--a system in which each one of us become the reporters of our lives and our conditions, town criers for own little section of our lives, with crawlers and metasites that stitch all the narratives into a shifting tapestry that reflects the outside world.

But before the war, all I saw was something that annoyed me: the blogging community. I would have to interact with it if I wanted readers who weren't just friends, and friends of friends, and people who stopped looking because I stopped posting something for weeks at a time.

And about the stops and starts of posting: in some ways, this website is an enjoyable dinosaur, a throwback (and no, I'm not talking about graphically or for reasons of design). Because I can only update my website while I'm here, sitting here, at home. Our server hosts a variety of websites and they all are, pretty much, unhackable, mainly because you have to be here in the house to update them. No outside access. It's like working for the government, or the way computers used to be, way back when, before the Internet even, when networks were these tiny things that ran only across a single office, and you had to log onto a certain terminal if you wanted certain information or to do certain things (this historical conception of computer networks I learned from playing video games, and may not be correct). Which is cool. But also a pain in the ass if, like me, you're spending three or four nights a week with your incredibly cool girlfriend at her incredibly cool apartment, and by the time you get back, you have other things, like laundry or bills, to do, thus making updating all the harder.

Also, there was the referral log. The very crude and basic referral log which I can run which shows me what on the site is being hit (or hit first). And what I was finding was that most of the hits for my website were for things like this:

http://www.wyakg.com/forums/viewthread.php?tid=2093&page=1

Yeah, the vast majority of my bandwidth these days is from jokers who use my graphics as their message board images. Everytime someone hits the message board, my site gives them the graphic. I've had people like Brian tell me that they're positive most people using these boards don't know they're actually using up my bandwidth, and that they mean no harm. I'm not so sure: if I was the message board kind (which I am oh so totally not) I would download the image, set up a geocities account of those images, and then link to them so I didn't absorb up another person's bandwidth. And I'm a freakin' idiot when it comes to the Internet.

Whether they're doing it intentionally or not, it also took the wind out of my sails as far as the purpose of this site, overall. To provide message-board graphics for [TACO]lokar? I'm sure I'm getting a variety of hits across the way from yahoo, google and (thank god for) IMDB. But are the bulk of those hits people searching for images to put on their message boards? One of the reason I chose movie reviews for my site is that everyone loves to read movie reviews. The damn things are like popcorn, and they are pretty ageless, I think. Someone is always looking for an opinion about some movie they've seen or that interests them. But maybe that's not true--maybe people only love movie images, things they can jam as humorous counterpoints to obvious troll posts on their board dedicated to the discussion of video games, or nightlife, or a favorite band.

Blogs, message boards, Instant Messaging--that's what the Net is now, that's what it's about: people communicating with each other. Quickly. Instantly. Shallowly.

The killer app of computers, after all, isn't the Internet but email, and I remember, a long time ago, typing out some heartfelt message to someone and wondering if, years from now, Ken Burns the Fourth would do a documentary about our times, as voiceovers would read beautiful emails to the backdrop of acoustically mournful Backstreet Boys covers: My dearest darling, I just talked to Jon at the water cooler today and I say the incentives at E-Vective are far superior to what we're getting here. And I have doubts the IPO here will be substantial enough to pay for our new Range Rover.

But unlike those lovely lads being blown to bits by musketball and cannon blast, we survived long enough for our emails to grow shorter, more terse, more to the point. I myself went from writing some good substantial emails to people after a lifetime of non-epistolary friendships (blame my ineptitude with stamps and my phobia of the post office) to eventually my emails being no longer than two paragraphs long. And I'm still a wordy correspondent than most of my friends, whose emails hit the sign off point at about two sentences or thirty words. See you for lunch. I've got your book. Did you tape Buffy? --J

And behind us is the whole generation of "w00t! I own u, btch!" types, the kids who learned to communicate in shorthand, the type who now how to communicate using only numbers and a pager. I fear these types because compared to them my hummingbirdish attention span seems like the restful contemplativeness of Buddha himself. I see literature's death-mask in their emoticons. Which is a humorous exaggeration: all I can really see there is a crowd who will flock to a novelist who understands them, who I am reasonably aware will not be me.

So, instead of beating myself with them, I joined them. I got myself a blog through Blogspot, one that I can update when I'm at work or at Edi's house or when I have a spare moment and which consists, in large part, of the same pointing to oddball articles and alarming news posts as other bloggers, broken with bits and pieces of the usual blogging as I do it: teeth-gnashing and brow-beating and recountings of long, odd dreams where I'm talking to blank-faced supermen. I've started some of this process, so there's lots for you to look at if you go here:

http://www.highconcept.blogspot.com

This will satisfy my blog itch and get me to be, I hope, a bit more of the blogging community--there's all sorts of weird things you can get mired up in just by having an official blog through blogspot (which is now part of google, another reason I decided to make the jump)--and be a bit easier to do so it's not competing with my "Oh yeah, wasn't I writing a novel?" time. I was crestfallen when I realized I would never win a bloggie just because I wasn't seen by bloggers. That can maybe start to change now. Maybe.

As for the rest of the site, well, I don't know. The movie reviews, a few book reviews. I should review more, do more, and maybe I will. But first I'm going to go through almost all my graphics, and add WWW.LAZYBASTARD.COM and see if I get myself a ton of free advertising. Maybe that will take a little bit of the sting out of being an image clearinghouse.

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