1 post tagged “bloggish”
Most of my friends from college (and immediately post-college, when I was being a webmaster in California for a small company and not making any money to speak of despite living in California and doing web work at the height of the bubble) are LiveJournal people. Having discovered weblogs somewhere around 1998 -- and then MetaFilter, through a Jason Kottke post -- there always seemed something a little bit off about LJ, even above and beyond the fact that all the pages looked like something the cat dragged in. I had just enough graphic design abiity to know I should do something better (I stole unrepentently from Heather in her jezebel.com days), even if I couldn't actually pull it off. Not running your own code on your own server also seemed like a cop-out for reasons I can't really articulate beyond a sense that driving a stick-shift is a better way to understand the road.
My blog, Snarkout, is more of a writing exercise than anything else; I write about weird historical anecdotes, mostly, and ephemeral literature and con games and people who believe in flat earths and aliens. (Also, there are many stories about elephants.) It's the kind of book I like to read, only irregularly produced and with a level of scholarship so low that an eighth-grader would laugh at it. On the other hand, even after the 2001 explosion of mainstream interest in blogs, a sort of September That Never Ended for personal content on the web, it's not the sort of thing that most people are doing, so I'm largely content.
But it's not the same as writing about what I'm up to, which apparently is interesting to some people. (Thanks for the invite, Andre.) I'm bad about taking photos, worse about uploading them to Flickr; I generally assume that the last album I listened to (Quasi's Featuring "Birds") is of little interest, and I know the world doesn't give a damn about my opinions of Al Swearingen. But I can write a little bit about code, and a little bit about music; people can check in and see what I'm up to. It's what my colllege friends get out of LJ, mostly; I'm not invested in interpersonal drama so much, but it's worth a try. Maybe I'll finally figure out what people who aren't obsessed with Edison murdering Topsy have known all along.
