Second Gen (2003-2016, 2016- )
…from a Sunday nap. First, an unholy pool crashing upset…thought I am secretly happy some place called George Mason won…but I can’t tell you why. And then I see the goofiest whack across the temple of the English language by CBS sports when you try to check out what happened…they appear to have even registered “GLOG“ as a service mark.
What next? Good Lord, what next???
I’ve been wonding what this is all about for a long time so I am glad that Craig is wondering, too. Aside from the question of unauthoritative semi-fact, there is much good in the entertainment value of blogs but one simply can and should only devote so much time to being entertained. There are other things to be about in life. But the most interesting comment of his for me is this:
I am also finding old favourite blogs of less interest to me. More often than not, having a high noise to signal ratio. Many, seem to be evolving to a BBS sort of community (which is a good thing), but if you are not interested in the same types of topics that that community discusses, then interest in being part of that community wanes. Thus, I seem to be leaving the using computers and the Internet as a recreation to using same as a tool.
I think this is a very valid observation. One can only rant to oneself so long. And being cranky at the sites of others is only fun when there is mutual fun in the cranking. Things eventually have to settle down to a more honest personal diary-style of writing, writing for writing sake, topical writing, community discussion or even writing approaching what Eric Idle is quoted as saying about Monty Python: “it turns the focus back onto itself. That’s the Python key: to mock the form in which it lives.”
Conversely, there is little place for the type-A-list guru-iffic floggy fantasies as those that have taken that stance have just shown how the ego can get in the way of honest understanding. If I look now at what I thought two and half years ago about what would kill off the bloggy cacophony I would now go with RSS as being the fatal app at least in its present use of being author rather than content based. No one can reasonably be expected to pay attention to everything written by 100 or more individuals. It is too much. So then you read only those you knew or wrote well or were sharing and interest…and the A-heads. And then the futuristic A-heads proved their own dullness and showed their motives. Aggregation became the reductio ad absurdum. I thought this taggy stuff would be it but it only became another bulky impossible aggregation.
Once again, we need a topical tree to index this damn place to find the content, so you find what is actually interesting to you and not what is supposed to be (according to the blogsperts) interesting to all. Any chance of that happening?
I can be rash. I have bought suits without putting them on. I think. I have only bought two suits. Anyway, Blork mentioned Geez magazine and I subscribed for 25 bucks. That is about 125% of a large La Chouffe at Volo when you add tax and tip. For a year’s worth of a bunch of ideas that is good value maybe. Good value maybe is usually a decent test for me. And my magazine subscriptions are at a low ebb having at least four named here lapse.
The other day when I did rock, I stood for a moment before the tour t-shirts and decided that, no, I would not buy one for 40 bucks even though there was a brown one with orange printing displaying the large Queen crest on the front. It was not that I would not have occassion to wear it or that I could not find the 40 bucks in the wallet. It was that I could not foresee it entering the hall of fame, that particular pile of t-shirts, soccer jerseys, ballcaps and hoodies that are retired from active use to be pulled out at the right moment years from now seemingly unworn yet displaying information from a point decades past.
There are not enough in the Hall of Fame as I was not as careful in the past as I might have been but that is no reason to judge unwisely and presume. That the 1988 Bill Bragg T is too thin now is testimony to its beauty. That the 1970s “Radio Sweden: Keep In Touch” T from high school is now appropriated by others does not mean its place on the shelf should now be filled by another. Yet entropy is and, despite best efforts, the temptation to wear causes wear and tear and, like ourselves, these things do fade. But for the decade, the brown Queen tour T with the orange ink may well have deserved the place in the pile.
Back. Just like that. Two hours and a bit ago I was in Toronto and now I am not. Intercity highways are the business:
Two more thoughts. I was impressed how the exposure of shoulder musculature was key to the entertainment experience at the concert. I was unimpressed how the lady in front of me – devoid of any sense of rhythm or shame as she was – had secretly for years harboured the secret love of “Radio Ga Ga” and unleashed her spastic passion therefore directly in front of me. I never knew there was something other than finding a cat air in one’s mouth that made one feel like one had found a cat hair in one’s mouth.
Without getting into the politics, this news strikes me as simply incredibly sad:
The bodies of more than 85 executed men have surfaced across Baghdad in the past two days, in Sunni and Shiite neighborhoods, providing graphic proof, yet again, of sectarian mayhem. Many bodies bore marks of torture — badly beaten faces, gagged mouths and rope burns around the neck — though it remains unclear who is responsible.
The article reports fear that the killings are by “police commandoes” but that is unknown:
The widespread suspicion is that many executions are the handiwork of death squads backed by the Shiite-controlled Interior Ministry. On the other side are well-organized Sunni insurgents, quite skilled at killing, too. One result is a slow strangling of whatever had remained of normal life: shops are closing earlier, people are hunkering down and politicians are feeling squeezed. Iraqis elected a new Parliament in December, but until now, political leaders have been wrangling over the composition of a new government.
You feel it is banal even to make any observation at all. Maybe it is my age but I think of a view of a bridge at the beginning of the Balkan War with people trapped among gun fire. I think of sitting in the school bus in junior high listening to the end of the Vietnam war or, later, revelations of Cambodia. It flows over you day ater day until you notice enough to thank God it is not here and then it flows over you again.
Which is worse during bachelor week? Talking to the cats or the computer. At
least the computer does not run away when it sees you. But being cats they make
you do things through the power of staring…like making you think it is Friday
and making you want to post stories in bullet format.
Well there you go.
The cats are staring at me so I now have to make some changes to my bank
accounts. I must. Then, I am off to buy new larger cat carriers. Cat treats,
too. I obey.
As usual, the Flea has exposed my real intentions in writing here day after day after pathetic day – the dream of undeserved riches. Well, apparently that dream is no longer a waste of time as the NYT reports that pickings are slim but wallets are fat in the bubbly economic world of web buy-outs:
Media companies are still hungry. Is there much left for them to consume that they’ll find satisfying? NBC Universal’s $600 million acquisition of iVillage, an early Internet company catering to women, highlights the continuing interest by media companies in adding new Web sites to reach and connect with consumers, hobbyists, parents, investors, car buyers, Scrabble players and virtually every other niche audience.
Scrabble players? Investors?!? Phft!!! How obvious. How structured. Doesn’t the world of mega finance know that the real wealth of the web is to be found in the drifty and derivative? Like the products of GX40 MegaCo International.
Now, how to pitch the deal? Maybe a merger or two will have to start the ball rolling. If the Flea joined forces with A Good Beer Blog you might have a new blog called Toast of the Flea in which the beer and other beverage tastes of really skinny often hypercephalic celebrities are shared. I’ll have to work on this. But it’s looking gold.
When I think of all the promises that information technology has made but not followed through on, this is the sort of futurificationing that most alarms me:
The divide that separates people from their online lives will utterly disappear. Instead of leaving behind all those net-based friends and activities when you walk out of your front door, you will be able to take them with you. The buddies you have on instant message networks, friends and family on e-mail, your eBay auctions, your avatars in online games, the TV shows you have stored on disk, your digital pictures, your blog – everything will be just a click away.
It could also kick off entirely new ways of living, working and playing. For instance, restaurant reviews could be geographically tagged so as soon as you approach a cafe or coffee shop, the views of recent diners could scroll up on your handheld gadget. Alternative reality games could also become popular. These use actors in real world locations to play out the ultimate interactive experience.
The promise of the review-laden world has been with us for well over a decade, before the internet when personal computing as being updated by CD-rom mailouts. Yet it is still a shock to find more than three reviews of anything on a site like expedia when you are looking for, say, hotel information. How does the human, disinterested in helping strangers by writing opinions provided for free, populate the world of content in this new world. That human won’t. There would need to be a model of exchange of idea to trigger an increase of participation beyond folks like me with foolish dreams of $2,000 a month from Google ads. But no one will pay me a nickle for my thoughts now – will anyone pay everyone for any of theirs?
But beyond that – why the brave new world of staring at a wrist watch screen wherever you go? What is so wrong with the people physically near you that you would want to exchange them for digial strangers? Again, for geeks of which I am of “C” grade, the transition is already in place. Is it that real is not play? It should be. Is it that real is not play that you rarely have the option of clearly winning? The digital world allows each Rob and Victor to know victories and even robberies that would never be possible in reality. It is any different than striving to be the guy who got the most points in the arcade? What kind of backbone would a society have if that actually became the pervasive goal?
I think CM is keeping track so just for the record I finally got what the kids have. There was a story on the TV news that something around 50% of the kids in school have been hit with this one. I know the elementary school of our choice is running on a very limited population. But spring is just around the corner…