Meta – Wis[s]e Words

Into the glorious future of blogging made possible by Elon Musk

Published on November 15, 20224 Comments

Disco Stu pointing at a graph of growing disco record sales from 1973 to 1976

Due to the glorious future Twitter is being dragged kicking and screaming into thanks to the inspired leadership of Elon Musk, suupergenius, UI thought it was time to give the ol’ blog a bit of attention again. Not that I haven’t been blogging semi-regularly, but whereas a decade ago I’d hit a post a day fairly regularly, the past couple of years I’ve lucky to get into double digits in a given month. Mostly focused on anime too, as for political and other writing Twitter was just too handy. But if Twitter is going away, will blogs make a comeback?

Doubt.

So much of the blogging infrastructure has been trashed over the past decade and a half, so much has been moved to centralised social media platforms that it’s unlikely we’ll ever return to the Golden Age of Blogging. If Twitter really does get destroyed by Musk, we’ll lose that as a platform as well though, so what are the alternatives? Hastily thrown up Twitter clones, single purpose Discord servers or Telegram channels, other social media like Instagram or *shudder* Tumblr, maybe even Mastodon, the technohippy anti-Twitter? None of them really suits my needs sso if I’m going to put effort in a new platform, it’s going to be my own.

Hence me culling the blogroll today. A bit of a slaughter there: so many blogs that stopped updating more than a decade ago, finally removed. Interestingly it’s the fandom blogs that proved the strongest. Perhaps anime weebs and sf nerds just have more staying power than politics geeks, cravingly following the masses to Twitter. A sad moment to be honest, seeing all those blogs that had so much time and effort put into them, just gone. Some were removed entirely, their servers no longer available, some on blogging sites had been taken over by Indonesian spamhouses, some just had their last post still displayed, October 11, 2015.

Regrowing these links will take time and it will never be as exciting or cool as it was the first time around, but that’s no reason not to try it. Won’t you join me in taking back ownership of your online presence?

Fifteen years later & still not famous

Published on March 7, 2017Leave a comment

Fifteen years ago I wrote the first post on this blog as a way of getting me to shout at my television less often. It worked. These days I shout at Twitter.

A lot happened in those fifteen years. I moved jobs three-four times (once involuntarily), got three cats and lost one, started living together with Sandra, bought our first house together, donated a kidney to her, spent two years struggling to ger her healthy again, failed, learned to live alone again. The blog meanwhile continued steadily, madly swerving in content as well as blogging system every few years, from pure reacting to the news using blosxom (as recommended by Charlie Stross) to finally settling down to WordPress with mostly anime, taking my cue in this if nothing else from Steve Den Beste. Its archives are now a vast warehouse of half assed ideas and temporary obsessions and every so often I look at them and despair.

The world has changed a lot since 2002 too as well. We got a mad Republican regime hell bent in driving its own country to destruction while sowing the seeds for war, pandering to a following of out and out racists and assholes who don’t care how bad it gets, as long as those people get what’s coming. The UK meanwhile is not much better, with a sycophantic prime minister happy to lick US arse and pretending there’s such a thing as a Special Relationship while flogging of the country to whoever wants it. And in the Netherlands some xenophobic wanker is poised to win big in the upcoming national elections while establishment parties can only countered with a watered down version of same.

Sometimes you wonder why you get out of bed.

You follow me on Twitter…

Published on February 8, 20111 Comment

A piece of graffiti found in Amsterdam Noord. Roughly translated it means “you follow me on Twitter, but will cross the street when you meet me”. No idea who put it there, but it’s been there for at least a year or so. Thanks to my nifty new HTC Wildfire phone I finally could photograph it.

The moving finger blogs; and, having blogged, moves on, selfconsciously

Published on January 18, 2011

Just put a post up at Prog Gold, where I try to explain what I think is now happening in Tunesia in that great blogging tradition of instant expertise on subjects learnt about in five minutes of cribbing from smarter people. You may want to go over there and see if I make any sense.

Or you could read Lenny’s last, three posts and get his, much more self assured, analysis of the situation,as he’s actually quite good at this sort of thing. Mind, there’s a thin line between what Lenny does and the sort of communique put up on the websites of every obscure Trotskyite three man band revolutionary tendency, explaining Tunesia in their own, slightly warped Marxist theory and why only their interpretation of what $INSERT_DEAD_SOCIALIST said about The Revolution can provide a full understanding of the revolt in Tunesia and why this is the True Start of the WorldWide Revolution, or just a Intra-Capitalist Struggle, though not why they never paid attention to the country before.

Because for the most part of course none of us in the English language, political/socialist blogosphere did, but we do now do our level best to become instant experts on it. Just as we did with Honduras last year, or Georgia before that. Nothing wrong with that, but there is a tendency to fit such happenings in whichever schema we’re pushing on our blogs, especially on the more hardcore socialist blogs, without much regards for what’s happening on the ground.

Hiatus

Published on December 24, 20102 Comments

It was the day before Christmas and all through the ~~house~~ internet, not a creature was stirring… So I think I’ll take a little leave of absence myself as well. See y’all in the new year, though I may be back earlier if inspired.