blog for blog’s sake
I can’t believe I didn’t write on here at all in June. Check out ReadComics for some of what I’ve been up to, but other than Wizard World, Convergence, and Peter’s visit last week, things have been pretty stable and steady. Oh, I guess the new apartment counts for something also.
I’m trying to get back into drawing… (this is going so-so… I’m not being very serious about it) and trying to exercise more often… blah blah blah…
…the 2 year anniversary of the day that florence and I met.
…the first day of national poetry month.
…April Fools day.
…the day I upgraded to livingtech.net to WordPress 2.5.
…the first day… of the rest of my life.
…nothing special.
…the most special day EVER.
…getting old already.
…more than half over.
…a clusterfuck of ellipses.
…just another word that means time has passed and our lives are ceaselessly marching into the future regardless of hesitation or observation or introspection.
…beautiful.
I’ve been reading through old posts, mostly looking for this one that I linked to in another old post, but since my permalinks have changed six ways from sunday (what a fun phrase, technically, it’s only been three ways since sunday), the link was/is broken. (I still haven’t found the post I was looking for.)
Point? Was there a point? The point is that my posts, even the longer ones, are totally unfocused and pointless. Maybe especially the longer ones.
This is not to say that I don’t say anything… (HA!) just that all my rants are about six different things at once. I’ve been trying to add categories to all the old posts I read (hey, why not?), and I’m finding myself checking boxes for at least two or three categories per post. And these are broad categories!
Anyway, what I meant to get to with this post is how reading my old posts feels a lot like reading excerpts from my journal. I guess I’m getting a bit nostalgic. I read this stuff and flashes of memory are jarred into the present. It’s not re-living moments, but it’s like reliving a very narrow slice of a moment. Like a phrase, or a glance, or an image… a tiny sliver of the whole memory suddenly jumps out at me, not supplanting the present, because the present is so much larger, but supplanting one tiny sliver of the present.
Is it worthwhile, this nostalgia? I guess it’s compelling, and that’s enough. For sure it’s as worthwhile as any other non-productive activity. And are non-productive activities worthwhile? That’s a different question, and one that’s bigger than this blog post. I think my inclination is to say no… but that doesn’t mean that I don’t take part in non-productive activities on a daily basis.
Hmmm… This begs the question: What is a non-productive activity? I basically mean anything that does not directly lead to the creation of something. So for me, common ones are playing video games, reading, watching TV. Hell, even eating counts, really. So I guess we’re forced to participate in some of these activities, and maybe the goal is just to maximize your productive to non-productive “time spent” ratio. I guess it depends on how you count work, but I’m guessing my ratio is very low right now. I’m sort of planning to raise the bar after x-mas/new years, when I’ll begin creating my new video game in earnest.
new twitter philosophy: If I don’t think something is blog-post-worthy, then I’m not going to tweet it. This is partially (ok, pretty much wholly) because it will now show up here.
I’m still working on fixing twitter-tools, to get all my tweets into a Twitter category, but I made this post initially in twitter (via IM!), and it did indeed show up here on my blog. (Not right away, but not terribly long after either. I do wonder wherein lies the delay…) Anyway, the only thing that I was a bit unhappy about was that my initial Tweet was too long, and it got ellipses-ized. (I would rather Twitter just tell me the tweet is too long, so I can re-write it a bit shorter.)
I also wish there was some way to indicate to twitter-tools where the title of the post should end and the post should begin… maybe a line break? I haven’t experimented with this yet, but I’ll bet I could do a bit of custom hacking to allow me to use whatever delimiter I wanted.
UPDATE: I have now hacked my copy of twitter-tools.php to use “:” to indicate the end of a title for creating blog posts, and also to not make blog posts at all out of tweets that begin with the “@” character. I’m really enjoying this plugin hacking, and I may just have to write my own, if I can think of a project that sounds interesting enough.
OK, I think I’ve got the layout here more or less back to readable. I’ll probably be making tweaks to the stylesheet indefinitely, but for now at least I’m happy enough with the colors to not feel totally disgusted. Astute WP geeks will notice that I installed K2, and also Twitter-tools, which doesn’t play terribly well with WP 2.3, but it’s good enough for now. I didn’t expect it to create entries for all my old tweets, but I guess I can live with that… (I may delete a bunch of them when I get around to it.)
Mike and Jason and Florence and I all went to The Source this afternoon. Florence and I picked up the first two issues of Cory Doctorow’s Futuristic Stories, which I think is a comic re-telling of his “When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth“. (I haven’t read them yet.) We also picked up the new Buffy (Florence is a huge fan), and a new Luna Brothers comic called “Sword”, (issue 1), and the new Groo comic. Of these, I’ve only read the Groo so far. (One of my guilty pleasures.)
We’re planning on seeing the 4:45 showing of Wristcutters: A Love Story at the lagoon.
I have been too lazy to change this default theme. Soon. maybe. someday. possibly.
In the mean time, enjoy this braindump I haven’t actually typed up yet.
livingtech is back.
I’m posting this from Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. I’m sitting propped up on a hotel bed, surrounded by fluffy pillows. From here, I have a nice view to my right out the sliding glass door of the beach and ocean stretching to infinity on the horizon. (Check out my flickr stream for some photos from the beach.)
I have tons of actual work to do, (I’m not on vacation, just piggybacking on Florence’s work travel), so I’m going to keep this short. Astute readers will have noticed I’ve switched from MT to WP, and moved the old homepage out of the way. No more hiding the blog behind a /blog/ subdirectory. I’ve still got lots of minor formatting changes I want to make to the stylesheet, and I want to do some pruning of useless old pages too.
So much to write about. So little time!
Well, I was basically not blogging because Movable Type ate all those entries last year. Losing six months worth of blog posts was just about frustrating enough to put me off blogging forever. (But as it turns out, it really just put me off blogging for… oh, another six months or so.)
I guess there were other factors at work as well. For instance, I got engaged.
I also wrote a puzzle game.
Blogging on chesstris about puzzle games has made me want to start this thing back up again.
So anyway, I’m using Word Press now. Also, I found a whole shit-ton of my missing posts over at the wayback machine. I think if I wait long enough, they will probably have them all. Unfortunately, it’s been kind of a lot of annoying copy-pasting to get them into word press.
I have grand plans for replacing livingtech’s index with this blog. I’ll preserve all my old pages too, but clearly some of them will have to move.
More soon.
I ask myself ‘why write?’, and ‘why update?’, and don’t. Every day I write on the way to work. I write poems, and short short stories. I read when I can, lately it’s been short stories by gabriel garcia marquez.
I listen to CDs on my ipod. I bought one by Ivy that I really love.
I feel like time has been floating by gracefully for weeks now. I haven’t been paying any attention at all. I’ve been lost in a new love, and have literally been home for only a few hours a week.
I’ve tried to update my flickr account. There are tons of new photos I posted last night from the downtown library opening last week.
My battery is low, and I’m going to return to low-tech (hand-written) journaling now.
I stubmpled into/found this old page of entry-like web writings today. Clearly these were written before I knew what a blog was… I’ve linked it on the right as “before blog” and again on my archives page at the bottom of the list. It’s funny how I struggled with whether I should use blogger to update my blog back when I first started blogging, but I had already been keeping a blog without it for over three years! (Sproadically, of course.)
Of course, for a while I’ve wanted to get away from using movable type, but I still haven’t found software I like any better.
I made some changes to my homepage today too. Updated the copyright from 2004 to 2006, for one thing, and removed the link to Thorsday, the blog that Laura and I kept about the cats. I’ve been missing them lately, and am seriously considering getting a cat or two when Christy and my mom move away at the end of the summer. (Although Christy is so allergic that she STILL can’t spend all that long in our house, and we haven’t had cats since September… but maybe we just need to clean.)
I’m currently sitting in a coffee shop. Ostensibly I’m here to write, but it’s not really happened yet. I was going to go spend some time working on my 2004 nano project, but now I think I’d rather start a different short story or something. Or maybe I’ll just write some poetry like I usually do.