Squublog

I don't blog anymore. I don't know what you call this. It's really what it used to be, except it's not. I used to just post something here that I didn't see how or why anybody would read just every once in a while.

Four or five times over the past few days I've been tempted to post here. Being out of the habit though makes that hurdle that much higher. It also lets all the writing organs rust, the spout crust over, and everything is then likely to just tumble out in a jumble once in a while.

I still read blogs, but not regularly. One of my most frequent stops is Byzantium's Shores. That's weird because I've never had any kind of back-and-forth thing with that guy, unlike some of my other semi-irregular haunts. The guy's stuff occupies a strange place too for me because I rarely agree with much of his opinion, but I also rarely disagree. He writes well, he posts often, he talks about things I've also got an interest in; but I rarely have much cause to strongly agree or disagree with anything he says.

It's probably intentional on his part, at least partially. Sort of alien to me in a sense, because one reason I blog, or used to blog, or occasionally visit blogs, is so that I can argue about something. This is not one of my most popular traits; nevertheless it's one that's pretty deeply ingrained in me. I'm not talking about online only; I argue about shit regularly.

Earlier today I read a brief post over there, and I read the linked article, and I felt a sort of disconnect, between what Jaquandor (Byzantium's Shores' author) wrote and what was presented in the linked piece. What Jaquandor wrote was "Note to self: Never, ever, ever, ever, stay the night in a hotel run by this guy. How disgusting can you get?"

Somehow I expected something else from the article after reading that "disgusting" descriptor.

So in short, some dude buys a hotel (he's a dude who buys lots of hotels) in New Mexico that he plans on remodeling and re-opening. He had Hispanic workers at the hotel, and he made some rules. They couldn't speak Spanish around him, and some of them he made use anglicized versions of their names.

To me: not disgusting. The guy gave reasons for what he did. Including, "Whitten says it's a routine practice at his hotels to change first names of employees who work the front desk phones or deal directly with guests if their names are difficult to understand or pronounce."

I'm not really defending the guy, I don't know whether or not I agree with what he did, but I certainly believe that motive, or at least think it's a believable motive.

But my point in this (much longer than planned) post wasn't really to argue this, though maybe that's some of it. My main point was about what happened after. I read the comments on the blog, posted one of my own, throwing an argument out there cuz this is something that could be argued; and afterward Jaquandor responded, sort of curtly dismissed my brief argument, and then said "I knew I shouldn't have left the comments open on this post. I'll be rectifying that now," and locked the comments on that post.

To which I say, wtf?

What I hate about having comments on my blogs is that sometimes I get spam. What I love about having comments on my blogs is that sometimes I get arguments, discussions, or interesting exchanges (or, well, I used to when I actually did this regularly enough to support any kind of traffic at all.)

Jaquandor is obviously free to lock down comments whenever he wants, including any time people express disagreement. We raving arguers can always post our responses on our own blogs, twitters, FacePageSpaceBooks, signs not allowed at Redskins home games. Even so: I don't get it. If these things serve no other purpose they at the very least can foster discussion.

So color me, "ih?"



In other news: I will be trying NaNoWriMo once again this year. I suspect I will find it difficult to do given my current time constraints, and more importantly my recent (or eternal) utter inability to remain focused on anything at all of substance. I "won" once, back before the children began shooting out of my wife at an alarming rate (yes, 2 in 3 years is alarming. to me. 'k?) I tried again when my daughter was a baby and my son was on the way but couldn't really manage it. That time I maybe got bogged down in working on a story that was just a tad too complicated, and too important to me, for me to find my way clear to writing in the required NaNo way. Unfortunately, of course, if I don't do it that way I don't do it at all, so the beginning of that story still sits at fifteen pages on a hard drive on the laptop I can't get data off of in any reasonable way. I considered cheating and continuing that story this time, but never got it off and decided that's not really the right way to go.

I had more but I think I'm gonna leave it at that.

Well, now that THAT's over...

The only time: the only time I really even think about blogging is when I'm supposed to be working. I think. Seems like that's the case. So when I'm sitting here, supposed to be working, thinking, "I should really start blogging more regularly again," I am also fighting my self, my conscience, my better self, saying, "you need to concentrate on working."

I could blog in the evening except that's basically family time. Most often. Immediately after working hours are over I'm on kid duty. Once my wife gets home we're both on kid duty. Even if I could pull some time out of then, I'd not want to write. My daughter goes to bed around 8:30. I could post then but I'm not sure my head works then.

(How many entries have I made like this? The real thing to do would be to make this a real entry, and see where that leads. But... man. As soon as I start writing like this I realize that I'm just not... I've not got it in me anymore, right now. I'm nothing but a bunch of ellipses blurred together. A heart attached to a cone. Spread thin like mayonnaise. Melted chocolate. Juxtapositions that mean nothing.)

The other day I drilled a hole right through my wall so I could run the only nearly-long-enough Cat-5 ethernet cable I have here (why does Firefox want "ethernet" to be capitalized?) through the wall to my Vista laptop. Vista has this awesome feature where your wireless connection to the internet can work wonderfully for months and then suddenly you'll be told that the connection is "Local Only," and then you won't be able to get to the internet anymore. You can find 217,383 solutions to this feature online, but none of them work reliably because the feature is not easily duplicatable. Because I was frustrated, and in a hurry, and because my other laptop, that one with XP, had contracted a piece of horrible spyway while I was using it to search for a solution, I drilled a hole. So now occasionally I have to hook up to this cable, which isn't quite long enough to run in any out-of-the-way way, in order to be on the internet. I've heard rumors that sometimes the Vista "Local Only" internet feature also works for a direct-ethernet connection. Here's hoping.


In part I started this entry because I'd been envying my past. I like some of my previous entries. I also like the way this place looked when it was hand-made. In an effort to shake myself out of this stupid reverie, here are some choice quotes from the past that maybe... well, they're probably more representative of the kinds of things I say here than would be quotes from entries I actually enjoy reading:

"This whole thing is horribly out of date. I just want to, just, I just want to. I just. Man, I just. I've got, I wrote some thing, but then, this is."

"HOW IS IT THAT THIS WOULDN'T BE BORING? I'm out of the loop so I've got nothing to talk about that's related to the loop."

"Don't get used to it. There's no reason to think this is anything except a stab out of the blunk, right from up in the... out, there, where it comes from. It's a one-offer, unless of course (oh, it's not an offer at all. I thought you said "soul,") I continue to do things."

"Taking the time to come up with anything to say that even vaguely resembles what I've come to associate with the sort of thing that this place is for is not something I've ever got a mind to do anymore."

"So then. I've become so utterly disheartened, and yet buried myself deeply into other endeavors lately, that putting anything here has seemed like just a... a... something that wasn't something to do."

"I've been juggling heavy (for me) things lately, all the while thinking that the floodgate for this weblog would open soon, and out would gush the well-considered and inerrently argued entries that should, in all fairness, be wedged right against that gate."

"I am failing to be relevant or revelatory."

"So this morning on the radio I heard a quote from your manager saying that Chinese Democracy would be out before the end of 2006, and this brings me to the favor I'd like to ask: please, whatever you do, don't release an album called Chinese Democracy."

Yeah yeah that's not right. I had to get out of whatever that waste of time was somehow. So that was 2006, that last thing. (Truth be told it was a little more difficult finding those "I've got nothing to say" posts than I thought it'd be; though I'm certain I didn't even come close to exhausting the list there.)

Currently, as of this writing, November, 2008 (fuck it just took me three tries to get the year right. Started with 2006, which makes sense after that last quote, but then I went to 2011. Let's do the time warp...) the Chinese Democracy album is due to be out on Nov 23 at Best Buy, early December elsewhere. So it looks as if everybody but Axel aren't the only people not reading my infrequent mumbles here: Axel is ALSO not reading them. Rolling Stone has a review, also. But I'll still hold out to the last, being blindly confident that he won't release the thing. Something will happen, and we won't know what it is, and it just won't appear. Like every other time a date has been specified. What bigger "fuck you" to the rock establishment than to release something to Rolling Stone and then pull it, somehow, before it ever hits a store. (Yeah, I understand that there could possibly be a bigger "fuck you" than that.)

Finally: My only post from April, 2007, started this way: "This won't be important. I doom myself to fail that way."

I couldn't have said it worse myself.

(This post dedicated to the 3 or 5 readers over the years who've occasionally bothered to come to a post that's been stuck at the top of this thing for months and asked me to post something new.)

(Seriously, this post has a dedication. That's wonderful.)

I'm late in discovering that another blogger on another of my blogrolls hung up his (astonished) hat:

Here's this news: Astonished Head is...well, it's finished. I've got nothing more to say here, really, and rather than give the place new drapes I'm just going to shut it down. I mean, it'll still be here, hanging around in the trackless space between pings and packets, but there won't be any more writing at this place. It's been over five years, and I've got other web-based things I want to do.

I enjoyed reading about this guy's recumbent bike ride across the country. This would be where I'd go into more detail were I so inclined. Instead, I'm playing experimenter in a grand parade.

A meme has tagged me. That's what they do, right? It's not the people involved who do it, it's the memes themselves.

DaveX at Startling Moniker tagged somebody in this institution; I'm going to go ahead and respond since Kingo ran off into the woods a few weeks back and I haven't heard a peep out of his shed since.

So. Rules:
1) Pick up the nearest book.
2) Open to page 123.
3) Find the fifth sentence.
4) Post the next three sentences.
5) Tag three people, and acknowledge who tagged you.

See there it doesn't say I have to say what book I picked up. I thought, being in my work office when I got tagged, that I'd be giving you a nice 3 sentence romp through some old Oracle reference book, but luck would have it that there was something else in the way. So here ya go:

Why don't other species have art? Once again, the answer that suggests itself--which does not mean that it is proven but only that it may well be provable--is that, lacking language, they lack the tools for creating surrogate stimulus combinations and hence they lack the perspective that permits exploration of the combinatorics of their own senses. Using acute observation and trial and error, Tinbergen cleverly devised the supernormal stimuli that enticed his birds (and other animals) into a host of bizarre behaviors.

Whoever guesses the book gets a big prize.

I have to tag three people. If I've still got three regular readers who are also bloggers beyond DaveX I'd be surprised. But just to piss some people off: Michael (kinda curious who owns the book closest to him,) Sarah (kinda curious if it's a different book,) and Taleswapper (I'm not sure, but I think he might have a book somewhere near him.)

All you others who got left out, your turn's next.

Oh, and DaveX: I think that Cage book you picked up is the one and only Cage book I've got in my collection. Currently it's in a box, with most everything else I used to have time for.

This will be unfocused or not, rambling, just. If you're a blogger or someone who reads blogs regularly, you may have noticed this. First, if you're a blog reader, without a blog of your own, do you read comments on blogs? I don't get many here, so I don't really have this problem I'm talking about. But as a reader of blogs and their comments, I often notice an irritating tendency of people to post comments that completely ignore all preceding comments.

Of course there are valid reasons for this happening. Some blogs have delays in posting comments. So a lot of people might comment before the comments show up for anybody to read.

Still, many of them aren't like that. A recent example: on this post on Atheist Revolution, the blogger (VJack) is talking about a letter from an atheist-hater to a different blog. In the post, VJack asks whether this could be some kind of spoof site. By the third response in the comments, someone is indicating that the site is a parody site. But at least a few subsequent comments indicate that the commenters weren't paying any attention to the previous comments.

That post is far from being the best example of this. I regularly see much worse, posts with upwards of 50 comments, half of them saying something identical to what was clearly said in the first comment in the thread.

I think this rant is a weird way of my getting around to wondering about what people are doing when they blog, and what people are doing when they comment on other blogs.

For me sometimes it's obvious: when I'm commenting on someone else's post, I'm blogging without having the time or wherewithal to do it properly. Reading and commenting on someone else's post is easier than hatching whole posts of my own, especially more recently when I'm low on time and very often feel as if I've burned through my reserve of personal topics-of-interest. (Present post, of course, excluded. I've been saving up the "blog about blog comments" post for years now, waiting for just the right moment to spring it on a stunned public.)

But still, very often when I read a post that for whatever reason strongly pushes me to comment, the first thing I do is to read previous comments on the post. If I find that someone else has already made my point, most of the burning urge to talk about it evaporates. Reminds me of an XKCD comic - Duty Calls that made the rounds not long ago (and since in today's market you're not a fresh, trendy blog if you don't link to that particular comic strip, it's about time I start.)

Speaking of which: lately I've been in a few "arguments." (At 2Blowhards here and here, and maybe some others, plus this particularly confounding argument at the Universal Church of Cosmic Uncertainty, which actually isn't that at all anymore but has just recently been re-launched with the name Mike Wilson.) It's certainly never a surprise to me when I get into an argument in a comment thread, as by nature I'm at least one third troll, although it is still disappointing when it's not so much an argument of substance as name calling and "nuh-uh, YOU are!"ing. Not that I probably haven't been guilty of the same kind of bullshit myself. In one of those 2Blowhards threads in fact Michael Blowhard sort of nailed something about me fairly well - "Treating that gumbo of highly-charged stuff as an attempt at argument-making is what strikes me as a little off." Of course without context that's pretty vague. Basically I'll argue with anything, and that IS a little off. Even if someone's obviously not interested in a rational debate, I'll act as if he is. In this case, though, I'm still not certain about Michael's take on the commenter I was "debating" (and I'll be the first to admit that my role in this particular debate has never been world-class-logician material.) But either way, it was a good observation about my own personality and just why that XKCD comic hit me right in the nuts when I first saw it.

So back to it -- why is it that some people do that drive-by thing, reading a post and then spewing out a comment without bothering to pay attention to the rest of the comments? It's a little like standing in a mall with a group of friends talking for half an hour about something and having some loudmouth walk by and shout out, "No, you idiot, you're all wrong," and then just continue on his merry way, when you were merely quoting someone else and that guy walking by clearly couldn't have heard the frame for the story you were telling and so had no point of reference from which to argue at all. Discourse in blog comment threads can be extremely interesting and thought-provoking. In fact recently I haven't been commenting on the 2Blowhards posts themselves so much as commenting on other comments (which actually is probably sometimes more annoying to bloggers than the drive-by stuff.) But the discourse falls down a rung or two when the threads get overly long and at least half of the commenters are just popping in to say something that's already been said, better, by someone else.

Haven't done this in a long time. My webstats used to be a source of much amusement for me. Somewhere though most of the hits starting being referrer spam, and I stopped paying attention.

Still, from time to time it's nice to see how people are finding squub (or one of the other sites hosted under it) through search engines.

I'm gonna utilize this after-the-jump thing that I don't really use usually due to a high volume of things you probably don't want your kids to read over your shoulder...

» Read More

I'm perched at the top of the drop, the roller-coaster having been so painfully slow snicking its way up the front side. Three days off, followed by a weekend, and I've got no idea. Driving the 150 miles from my office-away-from-home back here tonight I started feeling a heavy sleep wanting to knock me out. I'm still awake because I've stored up a lot of man-I-wish-I-could-stay-up-late-and-work-on-a-project feelings over the past few months of pretty solid work, but there's a headache waiting in here, shoving around in the back of my neck and shooting bolts up to my temples, and I'm having a hard time getting that midnight motivation up out of the puddle its melted into on the floor.

A few things occurred to me during that trip, one of which is about the way blogging might really keep me from developing any of the kinds of things i used to publish on squub when it wasn't just a space filler with a blog on it. Thinking about that now I realize that that's probably more excuses, because some part of me thinks I need excuses.

In the time that I wrote those sentences some number of other threads of thought have disappeared. I think I've turned my writing on its head in the past some-amount-of-time: it's all about the tangential thoughts that happen in between thinking about actual things. The voice-over has taken over and the movie's just showing what looks like a random corner of a closet where the crew dropped a camera. All action stripped away.

Except of course voice-overs, I think, advance the plot. In fact I very often like them (I'm thinking here of Shawshank Redemption, and of a movie called The Minus Man with Owen Wilson so oddly cast as a serial killer, which movie I thought was brilliant at the time but I'm left now with only hazy recollections; suddenly thinking my tomorrow should be about finding that film and watching it.)

Then there's the theatrical version of Blade Runner, which I've never seen. I've got the director's cut (one of them) on DVD, having bought it because I'd been assured from 13 directions that it's a wonderful movie if seen that way. I didn't think so, at the time of my first viewing, and began wondering if I wouldn't enjoy it more with the voice-over. As I've gotten further away from that moment I've grown more fond of the film, while still, I think, having not managed to watch it again in its entirety. It sure does look brilliant, and there is a great pace to the slower parts. I think maybe the action sequences are too action-sequency.

So if the voice-over in your film was just the guy talking to himself, sort of trying to find his place on a page you're not seeing, trying to get back on track. Now of course the non-existent film I'm thinking of is more interesting to me than was my intention (though I hardly expect that I'm conveying anything about what's interesting about it here.)

There's an exposition, something is setup, some tension put in place, and just when we're expecting to switch to act 2 the camera falls to the floor and we see the corner, and the voice-over continues talking with no direction.

Wednesday (tomorrow) is the only real independent vacation day I've set up for myself here, though my original intention was to take all of my time off by myself. My wife and I decided we'd take our daughter to the National Aquarium in Baltimore on Thursday, and my wife also decided that Friday we should spend together doing something. It's a good idea, except that I've had a serious hankering for some alone time.

When is this being posted? Tonight, surely. Though I'm in the middle of an experiment I've probably not... no, it's not really an experiment, I actually know what that entails, that is to say I'm not testing some hypothesis, but am instead just doing something to see if it makes anything happen. Generally when I do that: nothing is made to happen.

I do miss myself. I'm in danger here of going where I don't want to go but I'm going to go there anyway. I was just paging through some of my earlier entries, from 2003, trying to see what I had to say about the war at the time. Prior to that I was reading Balloon Juice's Iraq War Retrospective, (thanks to Byzantium's Shores), where some guy I've never heard of, who supported the war from the start, talks about how he was wrong about everything he said about going into that war. I followed a link from there to something else that I don't feel like bothering with linking to (there are a lot of prepositions in that thing I just wrote,) and that got me to wondering what profound anti-warness had come out of me back when the thing was starting.

Turns out: while I used to be slightly more funnier (at least to my now-me, which might be a little biased,) I never really said much. At least I don't have much to try to work back up to, as far as substance goes.

Here's a zinger:

I noticed that there's some shit going on over in Iraq. Whoever the hell's naming these campaigns (far be it from me to do any sort of research to find out if these are somehow "official" titles or things news organizations make-up) needs to take a fucking class or something in how to make up titles that don't sound like bad Jean-Claude Van Damme movies. Operation Valiant Strike? Operation Iraqi Freedom? There's also a name I'm forgetting for the "operation" to protect us here at home, led by Tom Ridge. What about Operation Increase Approval Rating, or Operation Distract Everyone So They Forget I Can't Pronounce Nuclear? I'd really like to support the troops and all, but I just have trouble getting behind something so obviously scripted by people who think Maximum Risk and Sudden Death were good movie titles.

In fact, I bet if they could name this campaign something a bit cooler sounding then a whole bunch of those countries who don't support it now would change their tunes right away. How about something like Dark Desert: The Change of Regime?

Yeah, I know, that's even worse. That's why I don't blog much anymore. I've got nothin'.

(from this 'un.)

I also kind of enjoyed Build a Fort for Uncle Sam.

So, you know, keep your eyes peeled for that "experiment." Due to start sometime in the middle of June. Mark your calenders.

(Note to anybody who's unfamiliar with my anything: Don't mark your calenders.)

A year ago today, Dave Blackwood threw in his dirty towel. I've always just taken for granted the fact that he'd be back. I "wrote" a eulogy for him another time he retired here.

There's not much to say here about that. These brief blog entries about other peoples' blogs just don't do much for anybody. Then, this blog isn't meant to do much for anybody, and Blackwood sure as shit didn't do much for anybody. Par Example: Here he vomited (no, sorry, no pictures.) And then there's this (I'm posting the whole entry here, so don't bother following the link.):

I got out of the van and walked towards my apartment. I stopped to slap an ancient, enormously wide tree, as if to say, "hello old friend". Somehow I misjudged the distance and wound up scratching the fuck out of my left pinky on an exposed piece of bark. Don't ask me how it happened. I almost amputated the pinky but I thought I'd give it some time. I just hope I don't get some kind of infection and get killed by this 300-year old tree-bastard.

One of the weirder aspects of blogging (and online interaction in general) is the way you can develop something vaguely resembling friendships, and then they can just suddenly stop. It doesn't happen all that often for me; most bloggers with whom I've exchanged comments don't end up feeling like "friends" to me. But for some reason every once in a while I'll feel in some way connected to the person behind the blog. I rarely take the time to try to figure out why that is. That's the case with Blackwood -- I felt some kind of kinship with him and I never knew why. We emailed back and forth a few times, but most of our interactions were in each others' comments. And then he posted his farewell while I was busy not blogging for a while. Fucker.

Cardhouse hits 13. I still don't really know why I visit this guy's thing all the time, and keep a link in my sidebar: the relationship feels really uneven. My adoration is apparently unrequited. At any rate, Squub's had a link to there since before there was a log on the end of it, and I still don't really know what "there" is. He talks about old packages and candy products sometimes. Cheers.

Relatedingly, Kottke.org turned 10 on the 14th. I'm a bit of a Squuby-come-lately to that place, but it has become my favorite of the few link-dump type blogs I visit. I love the layout; being an anti-feed-reader luddite, that's important. I also love the conciseness of most of the posts (the anniversary post is much longer than usual,) and the way the layout lends itself so well to the usual post length. BoingBoing has more content, and many overlaps, but it sometimes feels too busy. Maybe I prefer posts without pictures? The current layout for squublog owes somewhat to Kottke.org. I was inspired to sort of rip him off, in other words, but this is where I ended up.

Related: I hate the word "conciseness." thesaurus.reference.com says I could be using "concision" there, or "economy." Both of which sound better, but the former I couldn't think of (might not have even known the word,) and the latter means too many things.

Done?