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December 30, 2004

Response to: "You Relentless Cock," an Essay by Will Pardue

On Boxing Day, Will posted this as a comment on my RSS feed on LiveJournal
(which, by the way, is by far the best example of a misfeature in the history
of stupid programming).

I am not technically sophisticated enough to know why your blog sucks, but
I do have a couple observations. In a powerpoint friendly format.

• It means more to you to read your own blog that to have others read it
• You blog what you eat
• I’m not shure but my suspicions were confirmed by Jarrod that your RSS
  infects other blogs with sloppy text formatting
• You are a relentless cock

Point by point:

It means more to you to read your own blog that to have others read it

There are lots of different perspectives that bloggers can have about their
blog. Some people have purposes, intentions, and target audiences for their
blogs. Clearly, I’m not one of those people. Let’s consider the three cases
alluded to in Will’s statement:

Case 1: “It matters more to me to have others read my blog than for me to read
my blog.”

In this case, we have your trailer-trash livejournal whore. The kind of
person who posts about the aspects of their life they find confusing or
amazing, for the benefit of other people. In extreme cases, you wind up with
someone who has either no self-esteem (someone who needs advice from strangers
on day-to-day life), someone with too much self-esteem (someone who thinks
that the world benefits from knowing their innermost thought and ideas) or
someone who just happens to think that the boring details of their life are
very interesting (a Christian, I guess).

I definitely don’t think that what I post is there for public consumption
because it is delicious, inherently interesting, or informative. I’m not
really sure why I have a blog, but sharing my wisdom really isn’t it. I find
it strange and cool that people like to have me on their friends pages, when I
typically post monstrous, asinine things like this. You aren’t being paid to
have me on your friends page, if it’s offending you, you can take me off. And
so forth.

Case 2: “It matters far more to me that I read my posts than that you do.”

I guess this is true of me. At the same time I try and achieve some level of
interaction with people when they choose to interact with me. I like have an
avenue of expression that forces me to write in complete sentences from time
to time, and I would say I like writing for the sake of writing. I don’t put
an especially large amount of thought into whether or not I have readers,
which leads to case three which I think is really where I’m at:

Case 3: “I don’t give a rats ass whether anyone is listening or not.”

And the reason I think I’m here is this: I haven’t ever gone through my own
archives. I thought it would be a nice place to keep personal notes and such
of my own devising, but now I’m leaning more towards a Wiki for that kind of
thing. In general, here are my rules for deciding when and what to post:

1. If I haven’t posted in a week or so, I should post something.
2. If I am spending a lot of time thinking about something, I’ll post about
   that. Even if it’s food.
3. If I encounter something interesting in the global entertainment morass,
   I’ll post about that, to share it.
4. If I feel inspired to write about nothing, I’ll write about nothing.

I don’t care much whether you like it or not, because your liking it or not
liking it has essentially no effect on my enjoyment level. When I started
this blog, I had no readers. I will probably lose most of my readers
eventually the way Schlake does, by stating his opinion and offending people.
I may or may not gain more. I certainly am not going to play the LiveJournal
popularity game.

I think that may lead to another case…

Case 4: “I’m going to play the LiveJournal popularity game, while posting
things that are alternately inane and terrifically offensive, just to see how
much I can make my friends list fluctuate.”

That seems like fun, but too many people playing that game would get boring
for me. Slashdot got boring for me, too. There’s nothing else here to base a
score on apart from friends and the quantity thereof, but it’s just not for
me.

You blog what you eat

This is the funniest criticism I can recall anyone ever levying in my
direction. :)

On the one hand, Schlake does this too. Unlike me, he also occasionally eats
truly interesting things, because he has income that’s essentially
inexhaustible, only one other hobby, and a lot of time spent on it already.
So he really has the upper hand there. But he’s also into the LiveJournal
trailer-trash game, so I think the intent behind posting about food for him is
a combination of “this is really interesting” and “this is intended to put you
to sleep.”

I try to post about food when I think it’s something other people might be
interested in or when other people might have noteworthy commentary about it.
Cathy has commented a few times on my food issues, and she usually has
something interesting or insightful to tell me. Schlake has a few times as
well. So I guess I see it as peer-to-peer health discussion: have you tried
this? what was it like? what did I do wrong with it? you know what’s better,
is to do this… Besides, if you can’t bother to be concerned with what you
eat, how can you be bothered to turn off the television and think for yourself
at all?

I’m not shure but my suspicions were confirmed by Jarrod that your RSS
infects other blogs with sloppy text formatting

I’m still unclear on how or why I should give a fuck about this. HTML only
puts line breaks where one of these tags exists: BR, P, DIV. So, as far as
HTML is concerned, my whole blog could be on a single “line” because HTML does
not have lines.

I also happen to use a technology called Textile, which is basically HTML
short-hand. Textile lets me write more natually, without all the very
unfriendly XML shit all over the place. Textile then takes some little escape
codes and makes the whole document into valid XHTML body text. My blogging
software then inserts this text into the website, and that’s what you see on
the site or get in RSS.

I use Firefox at home and Safari at work (and soon, at home as well), and I
find that neither of them produces anything weird either on my site or on my
friends page, or yours or Jarrod’s. So I really have no idea what behavior
you’re seeing that’s got your panties in such a knot, but I suspect you’ve got
pages that are as wide as my longest paragraph in a single line. I don’t know
what could cause that especially, but my suspicions lie with the LiveJournal
default CSS. At any rate, I’m typing this one up in Emacs with a word
wrap. If you or Jarrod read this and it looks right, let me know
and I’ll write my posts in Emacs to alleviate the problem for
you. Even though it’s not a “real” problem. Unless it fucks up
the formatting on my blog’s webpage.

You are a relentless cock

Of course, you realize there is no way I could see that as a problem.

Let me know if you still have a problem with the way I run things.

Posted by FusionGyro at December 30, 2004 08:20 PM

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Posted by: Vorfeed at December 30, 2004 11:34 PM

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