Ramblings and musings of John Zeitler.
Well, folks, by the time you guys see this, I’ll be offline. I expect to see it through to the end, though if there’s an abject emergency– say, someone’s body parts are no longer all present and accounted for– give me a call. I hope nothing like that happens. Anyway, I’ll post on Sunday morning to let you know how it went.
Ciao.
(Incidentally, since the upgrade of WordPress last week I’d noticed that the cut mechanism I used had kinda disappeared. What’s worse is that I couldn’t find the plugin I’d used before– its site still existed but the link gave a 404. So, I found a different one, hacked it to my purposes, and there we go, good as new. If you see any other weirdness, please let me know.)
I’ve made mention over the past week or so about a phenomenon known as Shutdown Day, which this year falls on this coming Saturday, May 3rd. According to the site, the project’s goal is to see how people’s lives are deeply intertwined with the technology they rely on on a daily basis, and to see if individuals can thrive without the high-tech tools we’ve come to take more or less for granted. While I think it’s an admirable goal, and I am participating, ( their reasons are not my own… » )
So, Saturday, I’ll probably have an automated post up saying I’m offline, and I likely won’t be answering e-mails or messages. I’ll take phone calls but only if they’re absolute, complete and total end-of-the-world emergencies. No net, no television, no movies, no music. Nothing going on beyond some reading and writing. As scary as it sounds to me– because, despite my protests, I’m very much aware of how much I lean on my tech gear– I’m really looking forward to it, mostly for the peace involved in it.
When I was in school, and this is something I just recently realized, I liked sitting in my back yard and reading. The sound of the wind in the trees was something I didn’t notice back then, but I remember now. Every time I get back to my parents’ house in the summer, I listen for that sound. When I’m at my house, over the summer, I sometimes hear it. Hopefully if the weather cooperates on Saturday– it’s set for a possible rainstorm– I’ll be able to hear that sound that brings me such calmness. Even if it does rain, that will be fine too– I love the sound of rain, too.
Besides. Computers aren’t the only things that need rebooting once in a while.
I’ve spoken at some length about Essay Week, without actually giving the skinny on what it is or what its goal is for the May session. I figure now’s a pretty good time to get it taken care of. Those of you who were around for the last EW, back in August, might consider yourselves excused, but I’d appreciate it if you’d stick around; the explanation’s a little different this time.
Well, first, to address the question on everyone’s mind: “What right does this jerk have to write these long, ridiculous diatribes and expect us to care?” Funny thing is, I’ve been thinking the same thing. I’m not particularly notable and I don’t really aspire to be; if I do become famous, I’d rather be known as a storyteller than as a commentator or discussion-master. Still, every once in a while I get these urges to try to speak my mind in what’s been called “the new marketplace of ideas”. (I’ll get into this more on Monday, when I talk about Web 2.0 and social networking.)
So, put short, Essay Week is five straight days on the blog about a handful of topics I feel the need to speak to. I come close sometimes outside of the designated Week, but usually scrap those because the topic on my mind at the moment is (nine times out of ten) fanboyism, and I’ve kinda done that one to death. The purpose of the week, when I first did it last year, was to give me some time to work through a game without having to worry about writing for the blog (recall I was working on the nonstop-posting challenge). This time it’s a little bit of an inversion– I’m writing so that I can, in essence, focus on my writing; the draft, specifically, needs some solid attention without interruption, and this coming week is an excellent way to do it. So, by prepping five long posts ahead of time, I can ensure that content stays flowing while at the same time giving myself a break.
Now, if that’s the purpose, why not simply take the week off from the blog? After all, Shutdown Day is coming– why not just stay offline and out of relative contact for the entire week? That’s more than a little impractical in this case. First off, I’m flirting with inertia enough as it stands. Recall my rules of writing– if you stop doing something long enough, eventually you stop doing it altogether. The second reason is that I do pride myself on having “something” up when I say I will. Even the excuses I’ve habitually posted, in my mind, count– it’s not that I don’t want to write for the main page. Sometimes things just come up, or sometimes there’s nothing really I want to say (or what I did say isn’t just bad, it’s whiny and annoying and you really don’t want me to post it, trust me). Finally, I did make a resolution to try to keep up a consistent set of updates, and I intend to keep that promise. (Maybe next year I’ll try daily updates on both sites…. hrm.)
So, now you know what it is, and why I’m doing it. Just to give you all a little taste, the five topics I have in mind– I’ll be writing the essays tonight and tomorrow– are as follows: “On Social Networking”, “On The Tantalizing Fringe”, “On A Lack of Organization”, “On Reinventing Oneself”, and “On Being A Programmer”. I do hope that you enjoy these topics.
One of the things I’d like, really, is to see people start discussing the topics a bit more. I always feel a little self-conscious posting all this crap up, as if I were some sort of twenty-first century Walter Cronkite telling you all The Way It Is. As much as I style myself a Forum Tyrant, I think there’s room to challenge me on a few things.
One way or another, I hope you’ll all join me in at least exploring some of the things I’ve had in the back of my mind for a while.
Yeah, so I’ve not exactly had much to say this week. It’s been busy at work and I’ve had other concerns. This weekend I’m hoping to get enough gaming and anime watching done to be more loquacious in the week to come… I will say that I did finish watching Please Teacher! over this past week, and I’m saving some thoughts on that for the April anime report, but overall this has been a slow month, as expected. I needed this month to slow down and “recharge”, I suppose.
Anyway, thinking about both running the Game and Anime reports next week (since otherwise they’d be delayed until the 12th and 14th), and setting up for an early Essay Week. I’m also curious: would it be too over the top to do two Essay Weeks in 2008? Maybe one in late October? Of course it’s really up to me, but I’m wondering if maybe it would be considered a little too, I don’t know, overbearing.
Off to enjoy the wonderful weather, folks… that’s why there’re portables, you know.
Not much to report right now; thunder threatens to take out my connection, so I’m going to just get this up and not worry too much about writing something deep for now. Catch you tomorrow on the LJ, I hope.
If you noticed the blog page loading kinda sluggishly of late, you weren’t alone. A vulnerability in WordPress caused a great many sites to be hacked, with loads of spam links, invisible to the user, being injected into the footer. WP2.5 closed this hole, but unfortunately upgrading was a pain in the ass and a couple of custom features were broken in the process. I’ve restored everything to a more-or-less usable state and as a result things should be back to relatively normal. If you notice any strangeness on the blog, please let me know.
But really, please go look at the Tekko Report. Really.
As you can see to the right (or here if you’re one of those weird RSS people), the Tekkoshocon 2008 report is up. I’m still working through what few photos I do have, and once I get them all into Flickr I’ll post a link to that set, but that might be a while longer. In any event, I hope you like text.
Off to the con today; weekend updates will conti– wait. I don’t do weekend updates anymore. Hrm.
Oh well. Have some Red Bull. You know I will… well, probably not, as there’s usually enough Bawls to go around at Tekko. (And I don’t want to hear any remarks from the peanut gallery about “Bawls at an anime con”.) The full Tekko report will be up… eventually.
Re-installing World of Warcraft sucks bad enough, but it’s even worse when suddenly your install discs refuse to be read, and you’re left downloading the client. That’s a great thing in theory, except Comcast thinks I’m haxing teh megahutz and throttles my bandwidth randomly.
No writing has gotten done since Monday lunchtime, and no gaming beyond very minimal Audiosurfing has been done either. Both are situations I want to rectify tonight…. but I’ll probably only be dealing with the latter as I want to save up writing inspiration for the con report.
It’s a con week, so naturally all hell has to break loose. I just hope that by the time things get settled Thursday evening I’m not going to be hyper-depressed. In any event, this entry aside, we’re likely to have some bleed-over of the anime and game content on this side of the blog this week. The LJ should be business as usual, but no promises.
I’m trying to muster up the motivation to want to play through more of Ratchet and Clank, but unfortunately my remarks over its genericity (that’s not even a word– but genericness is?) have rung true, and so at the fourth planet I’m succumbing to the crippling apathy that threatened my enjoyment so far. I’ll say this, though: getting new weapons did help to make the game a lot more enjoyable, but the fact that it’s exactly like any other platformer that’s been endemic to the PS2 since launch did not help it at all. So, it’s going back to the movie store today, a day early.
As for anime, I’ve been re-watching The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya and Ouran Host Club, for no particular reason. There’s still no schedule for Tekkoshocon, so I’ve no idea what I’m likely to see there (and I probably won’t find out until Thursday night) but I expect to do a bit of watching this year. Though I suppose it couldn’t hurt to watch a little more Kiddy Grade in the meantime.
Which reminds me– I need to update the novel word count with what I managed to eke out during lunch. Then I need to go return the movies, get dinner, think about doing the laundry, etc. etc JOHN R BUSY. Catch you all tomorrow.
