Posts

You know what you should do when you have a million things on your plate? Take on more work!

No, wait. That’s the opposite of what you’re supposed to do.

Liz and I want to do a series of posts next month about a lot of important topics--basically anything that’s been thrown under the bus by the current people in power, you know, like the arts, healthcare, basic human decency. If anyone wants to contribute on a topic or topics they’re passionate about we’d love for you to join in, just let me know.

Anyway, now I have to go off and write about a million posts.

Ha ha, please help me. Send cake.

Going Postal, Part 1

Oh, ha ha, I just realized that today is my blogiversary and I can use this as an excuse to put up old posts under the guise of reminiscing when I really just don’t want to think up new posts! Awesome, right? Anyway, here’s the very first post I did, which I had to copy directly from my blog because apparently I don’t have a copy of it in Word. Man, I did not know what I was doing back then.

Day One [First posted 9/15/2010!]

I suppose I’m not quite sure what to say, perhaps because nothing I say hasn’t been said before. A thousand monkeys typing for a thousand years might reproduce the works of Shakespeare, but a single writer most definitely will. Not on purpose, not even consciously. But it does happen. Is that necessarily a bad thing? No. Not if the writer is good.

Back in high school, I was taught there were only five types of stories: man vs. man, man vs. himself (or woman versus herself…I’m a terrible sexist! and a bit lazy), man vs. society, man vs. the natural, and man vs. the supernatural. If I’ve forgotten one or more, forgive me. It doesn’t matter anyway as my point is that reducing stories to man vs. anything is a gross oversimplification. You can say The Scarlet Letter is a person versus society and miss the point entirely, because it isn’t about Hester bearing the punishment for adultery. It’s about Hester. It’s about morality. It’s about love. And it’s about a million other things.

There are other stories that are man/woman versus society. Are they The Scarlet Letter? No! Are they even in the same genre? Nope! Because the real story, the real writing, is in the details, not the one sentence summation. That’s the reason why John Steinbeck could write the story of Cain and Abel and have it come out a book completely different from the book of Genesis.

So, how was this for the first post? Maybe once I get some followers, it will be a bit more impressive. Maybe.

Well, I can answer that question now: it was dumb, but luckily no one saw it. I have no idea what even prompted this line of thought. And how weird that I actually used to post about books and writing. It’s almost like this used to be a writer’s blog or something.

Alphabetical

I’m sure you’ll be terribly disappointed, but there won’t an etymology post next week. I’m saving it all for next month, when I participate in the A-to-Z challenge.

This is the first year I’ve taken part in the challenge. Previous years I was too lazy busy to take part in it, but I have an idea for it (etymology, obviously) and I think I’ll actually have enough time to make the visits to other blogs.

So what can you expect next here next month? Luckily, words begin with letters, so I easily found a word to etymologize each day. Except for X. I mean, I found one, but man, it wasn’t easy. Not a lot of actual words begin with X. I ended up with a freaking prefix because it was either that or xylophone.

I also made sure that there was something interesting, like a weird connection between words that you didn’t realize. The posts are very brief, of course—I don’t totally bore my new A-to-Z friends! Most of them are of words I never would have done anyway because there wasn’t enough to blog about, so the challenge is the perfect time for them.

Anyway, that’s the plan for next month. Regular commenters who aren’t doing the challenge, don’t feel obligated to comment every day. Fellow A-to-Z-ers, good luck!

The New Look…Again

For the first time in at least a year, I’m updating my blog by typing into the text box and hitting publish instead of copying in a previously written post and scheduling it for later. Who knows what madness will be unleashed when I don’t have a few days of sobering up to realize the stupidity of the words vomited out of my fingers.

Yes, I wrote that. I’m also tired and I write/say weird things when I’m tired. It’s basically the reason why I try to schedule these things in advance.

Anyway, the reason for all this is because, as I assume you’ve noticed, I changed up the blog design again. The last time I switched it up, it was from that disastrous experiment with…what was it called? Dynamic views? Hated that, although it was interesting to do something completely different. It was new, it was unique, and I thought it had potential. Unfortunately, that potential turned out to be mostly pissing me off.

In that particular incident, the cons far outweighed the pros. Infinite scrolling! Yay! Oh wait. Almost none of the add-ons are compatible? And I’m supposed to like this? You’d think the company responsible for Chrome and gmail would never produce a lemon the size of a dwarf planet, but it does happen at times.

Again, tired. I’m probably going to blame a few more things on exhaustion, either here or on Twitter. So don’t be surprised.

Do you like it? If you don’t, it probably won’t change anything. I find the squares soothing. Even though I’m not the one usually visiting my blog. But whatevs.

Later! Off to check other people’s blogs and I assume say weird stuff there instead.

TL;DR

Also seen as tl;dr, it means “too long, didn’t read” and is applied to posts/articles/comments that stretch on to a point where people grow bored and stop reading. Or maybe they looked at the length ahead of time and skipped over it.

Unfortunately, the internet has greatly decreased attention spans. I mean, look at Twitter. It’s made for self-contained 140 character posts. Have a random thought? People will read it if it fits on their iPhone screen.

I’m not getting into whether the decay of attention this is a good or bad thing. You can make arguments either way (You don’t take time to analyze the substance! You have to learn to evaluate quickly!). Things like this are shifts in society as a whole. You can’t alter it without making significant changes to the internet.

It’s happening and ignoring it won’t make it go away. With so much information available, in fact bombarding people from all sides, if you’re not direct and to the point, people will file you under tl;dr. Granted there are other factors, such as readability and the subject’s interest, but those are posts for another day.

What do you think about long articles/posts? Good or bad? Maybe a dying art?