I was going to type up something about how focused blogging made me think/act/feel blah blah but I can’t really get my head around anything else right now.

So, thanks for all who played (see the sidebar link), and thank you to all involved in taking out Bin Laden!

Weird = good.

Of course, anyone else who wants “in” (whatever that is) is welcome.  So if you happen to be a lurker or passerby and want to participate, drop me a comment and I’ll throw in your link as well.

No frills, no pressure.  There is no requirement to “blog every day”, just to bump up your regular blogging pace. I’m going to shoot for almost every day – because I like the way my brain feels when I’m forced to write that often – but I’ll be happy if I hit 60%.

So, who else is in the pool (and where did my bourbon go?):

Benjamin the Ass : Aspiring writer & cartoonist – it looks like he’s been on a serious diet of Hume & Lewis for a while, and I’m just not equipped to process that into a catchy text bite.  But there’s lots of brainfood in those jars.

Three Yellow Plums : The first thing I noticed was that I really dig her colors.  But, in addition to not being colorblind like me, she can also draw! Jealousy is ON.

[EDIT: LINK ABOVE FIXED!   That was odd.]

Line Hollis : Esoteric video game criticism.  I say ‘esoteric’ because it’s a word that sounds smart, and reading Line’s blog makes me feel like I should sound smarter.

Your Critic is in Another Castle : K’s been on my reader list for a while.  She always has much smarter things than me to say about video games.

Emily L. Hauser :  Every day is a blogging month for her… in the sense that she’s already blogging daily so she makes the rest of us look lazy.  Life & politics with, I think, a focus on Israel.

Anonymous Secs : A personal blog, similar to my own little net-home, except totally different.

Witty Librarian: He reads, he writes, he does whatever the verb associating with “library” does.  He’s also got some self-pubbed books to check out (a route I think I’ll wind up going in the future, so it’s always interesting to see how others do).

Giving the Dog a Bone: He lives in one of my favorite places (Santa Barbara), he just did two posts about stats & Star Wars, and I just learned a new word from this post.

[04/06/11 UPDATE:

C_Brown's sketchblog : A brand new sketchblog!  People who can draw are seriously awesome.

I'm more in awe of them than writers because with writing, even though I am not awesome, I at least peer around corners and understand how the awesome might happen.  Trying to comprehend the process of visual art is like staring at braille to me.

/UPDATE]

Q: What kind of shoes do you like?
A: I don’t.  Shoes hurt my big, wide, unsymmetrical feet.  I’d much rather be barefoot, or in sandles at the worst.  But, since I have to choose: Comfy shoes.  Shitty answer for a shitty question.

Q: What’s your favorite episode of Everyone Loves Raymond?
A:*bitchslap*

Q: What was the first comic you ever bought?
A: Uncanny X-Men 234.

Q: Favorite book?
A: Hard to say, maybe the Illuminatus Trilogy, if only because I’ve read it more times than anything else.  I counted the writer as my favorite author at one point.

Q: Favorite band?
A: Even harder, because I love so many.   Of all time?  Starflyer 59 was my favorite for a long, long time, but their recent stuff has been unimpressive, to say the least.  Clash, Springsteen, & Costello are probably in there somewhere though.

Q: Why do you love Portland?
A: I don’t.  I’m kind of ambivalent about it, but I make the best of what I have.  Anywhere my family is with me, I am happy.

Q: Strongest compulsion?
A: Dishwashing.  Maybe.  My wife could probably better answer this one.  Where do you get these questions?

:Q: How long have you been blogging?
A: 6.5ish years since my first post.  Wow.  That’s way longer than I thought.

Q: Why did you start blogging?
A: Because I needed to vent, probably.  Wanted to vent, maybe.  And I vaguely recall someone telling me that this [WARNING: I cursed waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay more in blogs back then than I do now.  You have been warned.  Fuck, I was an angry dude then.  <.<] amused them and asking me to make it available online.

Q: What is your blog “about” man?  Where’s the hook?
A: Me.  I mean, whatever me wants to blog about.  So no, it will probably never be any kind of net-sensation, simply because I’m just not that focused.  Sometimes I talk about comics in a serious manner, sometimes I rant about them.  Sometimes I talk about politics - sometimes I even do so seriously.  Sometimes I talk about family.  Or intestinal pain.  I tend to blog a lot about music and  books… sometimes I propose editing suggestions for kids books.  Once in a while I’ll talk semi-seriously about my attempts to become a published (or paid, either is good really) writer.  Rarely, I will share a poem I’ve written.  Annnnnnd sometimes I review an entire season of DS9.  Anything is fair game, especially the corners of geekery.

I think my joke was supposed to be something along the lines of how people never ask me things because I rarely have conversations about non-work things with people other than my wife and netizens, and netizen conversation tends to already be directed in a particular direction something so the questions weren’t actually that weird or…. yeah.  Something.

I just haven’t felt much like posting lately.  There are one or two things I kind of wanted to write more than a paragraph or two about but then… meh.

I’m still here, I’ll get back to posting eventually (especially April… which will be my 3rd year of celebrating my own made up “Month of Blogging” with entirely too regular posting.  I HOPE).  Maybe I’ll even post something of substance this week.  Maybe even today!  Or not.

As of right now, *all* of the blog comments are AWOL…but they are supposed to come back.  I suppose I should have backed up before trying this but hey, <insert colorful idiom here, preferably one with deep cultural significance and somehow involving a rhino>, right?

UPDATE: Looks like comments are back… and appear to not be screwed up.  Yay!

UPDATE2: Functionality appears spotty.  Couldn’t get the FB connector to work from IE or FF, and now it’s not letting me edit/manage comments.  I’ll give it a while to settle down…

UPDATE3: Meh. Functionality continued to be spotty.  Removed.

I’ve been following his blog for a couple years.  He was not that old.   To just die, out of nowhere?  So tragic.  I don’t have anything eloquent to say.  My heart goes out to his friends and family.

Here are two links with more info about him and his life.

In light of the digital foot traffic, I thought it might be a good time to post a general little summary of what it is I do here.  Which, admittedly, isn’t too much.

I write most of my blog posts at night (although sometimes I’ll hit ‘post’ the next morning so I can double check it after some “sleep”).  Because I have a day job that doesn’t pay me to blog, unfortunately.  So there will usually only be one or two a week.

Most everything will have some tie to geek culture.

Lately I’ve been doing (usually brief) book reviews of everything I read.  Once in a while I talk about comics.  I used to do that more, but none of my (few) regular readers really cares much about comics, so it was even more of a self-dialogue than usual.  I may do it more, or less in the future.  We shall see.

Rarely do I talk politics – other than to occasionally mock a politician – usually done via twitter as it’s rare for one of them to be worth more than 140 characters – but occasionally I will.  Like during an election year.

I like music.  I don’t have as much time for it as I used to, but I’ll still find a new (to me) band from time to time and push them a bit.  And there’s always old favorites to trot out…

I play video games.  Usually only one or two at a time.  Currently it’s League of Legends (PC) and Mass Effect 2 (Xbox360) mostly, with a little City of Heroes (more when the new issue & xpack come out) and Magic online thrown in.  Just in case you were curious.

Other than that, random stuff.  Maybe more leaning towards writing-oriented stuff lately, as I’m an aspiring writer armpit-deep in editing a book with hopes of someday seeing someone pay to read it.

Also, this amuses me more than it probably should:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRnSnfiUI54

And I’m ok with that.  After all, even if it’s only me laughing at my jokes, someone is laughing.

If I have any avid blog readers, they may have noticed me removing all direct traces of the infamous “d*nkey p*rn” phrase from my blog.  It was funny for a while, but now I’m trying to clean up my hits and see what people are actually finding me for, as well as umm… ward off the wierd ass fucks who came here actually looking for the aforementioned crap.

The original post and follow up still exist, for purposes of historical amusement, just with the text changed a little bit, hopefully that will help.

Interestingly, I don’t think I got many more comments than I would in a standard month, nor did I really pick up any new active commenters – which is kind of the point I guess?  A discussion is only so lively as its participants – assuming they exist.

So?  Where from here?

Same place as always, duh.

I’ll be back to my more leisurely pace I think, and devote the extra time I spent blogging to (hopefully) working on that book I want to finish before my knees give out and the brain starts going.

Huzzah!

Hopefully not too much.

Why?

• More customization: I can dl whatever theme I want (even though I’m not using that).  I can edit the .css and .html for the themes (you may not notice but I will!).
• I can hopefully allow other kinds of media embedding – wp.com embedding was driving me nuts.
• I can add new plugins and widgets.
• Better management.
• Maybe I can get some google adwords and make tiny bits of money – still need to look into that.
• More self-learning as I set this and the aggregator blog up.  More on that later maybe.

Why not?

/shrug

Let’s see how it goes!