Blogging | Second Life Shrink

My God Is The Sun

October 15, 2013 by johnny Leave a comment

Normally around now is when we start posting gloomy pieces about the falling leaves, the lengthening nights, and the looming onset of yet another brutal North European winter (usually shoehorning the change of season into some clumsy metaphor for the dread of mortality), but this year my characteristic summer contentment has persisted well past August for the first time in while, and I’m actually feeling fairly upbeat about the coming months.

This may be because I had a relatively straight-edge summer – I didn’t sign the pledge or anything, but I did largely eschew intoxication in favour of healthy outdoor pursuits. Back in high school they told us that a natural high was sweeter than any drug, and while I probably wouldn’t go that far, I will say that it was different, and it’s certainly left me in a better physical shape than I’ve been for ages. Perhaps it’s this echo of youthful vitality that’s allowing me to face the winter without the gnawing subconscious fear that I won’t see the spring, or it could just be that I spent enough time in the open air to be healed by the fire from above.

Either way, I can feel my natural slothfulness reasserting itself, so I expect I’ll soon be slipping into my default winter mode of minimal exertion and comforting overconsumption, and undoing all the good work I did over the summer. On the positive side this should mean that I have time to devote to more cerebral pursuits, like reading and watching movies, or even blogging, so there might be a little more activity in this space than there has been of late.

Filed under Blogging, Culture, Psychology Tagged with Blogging, Culture, Music, Psychology, Slacker

Green Typewriters

August 31, 2013 by johnny Leave a comment

And we’re back… Slightly longer summer break than usual this year, for various reasons, not all connected to idleness. Mostly connected to idleness though.

But who can blame us for staying away from the internet? What with twitterised death threats, cyber-bullying, extreme porn everywhere, topped off by the NSA snooping on us all, browsing the web these days feels less like strolling around a virtual utopia, and more like dodging the cops in the town’s sleaziest neighbourhood.

It’s hard to believe that only a couple of years ago everyone was saying that social media was going to save the world, and even nominating the internet for the Nobel Peace Prize. One might almost suspect that these scare stories (mostly concerning phenomena which, while obviously serious, have been around for years) were being hyped up by the authorities, and their allies in the old media, to convince us that we should steer clear of any online content that isn’t government-approved.

Anyway, I’m thinking that we should take a tip from the Russians, and start producing SLS on paper, with typewriters. We could hand out hard copies in the street, to anyone who looked vaguely interested. Our productivity and readership couldn’t be any worse than they are now…

Filed under Blogging, Culture, Politics, Psychology Tagged with Blogging, Culture, Internet, Music, Politics, Psychology, Slacker, Social Media

The blogging dead

June 28, 2013 by johnny Leave a comment

I should have known that our obsession with the undead would end up turning us into a zombie blog – devoid of fresh content, but lurching on, in a grotesque parody of life.

The funny thing is we still get a respectable amount of traffic – a steady background buzz, with occasional inexplicable spikes. If I sold out my principles and put some advertising on the site I could just sit back and watch the fractions of a cent roll in.

Anyway, I’m feeling sorry what whichever low-level NSA analyst has been assigned the thankless task of trawling through our output looking for subversion, so I’ll try to make things a bit more interesting in the weeks ahead. Unless of course the sun appears, in which case we’ll be staying out for the summer….

Filed under Blogging, Politics Tagged with Blogging, Politics, Statistics, Vampires, Zombies

The Joy of Six

May 26, 2013 by johnny Leave a comment

Well, against the odds, we seem to have staggered our way through another year of blogging, though we’ve only managed 30 posts in the last twelve months, and the bulk of those were brief notes on general cultural and historical topics rather than the commentary on virtual life that is supposedly our raison d’être. There were a couple of pieces that I thought were up to our old standard, and a few more that were mildly diverting, but the general verdict is “Must try harder”.

One could argue that I should acknowledge that the well of inspiration is running dry, and wrap up this project before we descend even further into irrelevance, but I’m loathe to completely give up on my blogger identity, however tenuous my grasp on it is, so I expect we’ll trundle on for a while yet.

Filed under Blogging Tagged with Blogging

Jennifer She Said

May 2, 2013 by johnny 1 Comment

An interesting message arrived in the SLS inbox last week, from one Jennifer Gretson:

Hi,

My name is Jennifer, and I’m reaching out because I noticed that your blog https://secondlifeshrink.com/ isn’t updated very often. Without an active blog, it’s really difficult to get website traffic.

That’s why I wanted to reach out to you; I’m a freelance writer trying to build a name for myself online, and I’d be happy help contribute to your blog if you’d like. You don’t need to pay me or anything, either… I just want to get my name out there as a great writer.

I’ll be happy to provide some samples of my work if you’d like; just let me know!

Of course, paranoid cynic that I am, I’m assuming that this is some sort of scam, and that if I reply “Jennifer” will try to persuade me to give her my credit card details by promising vast income from Google ads, or whatever magical internet paradigm is the get-rich-quick scheme du jour. Perhaps she wants access to my WordPress account so she can use it for spamming, or link-farming, or hosting dubious content, or some other nefarious purpose that will bring the FBI to my door.

Or perhaps Ms Gretson is sincere, and she really believes that publishing work in our little blog will help her become the next E. L. James. If so, it seems cruel to puncture her charming optimism by exposing her to the disappointing reality of our obscurity.

Anyway, Jennifer has one thing right; five posts in four months is hardly what one expects of an active blog. I’ll have to try to raise my work rate a little – as usual I’ve got lots of ideas, and surely I can’t go wrong if I put it in writing…

Filed under Blogging, Culture Tagged with Blogging, Culture, Music

2012: The Year in Review – Part 2: Blogging

December 31, 2012 by johnny Leave a comment

2012 saw a landmark in the history of Second Life Shrink, as we celebrated our fifth anniversary back in May. Despite that it has been far from a vintage year, and our post rate and traffic have been well down, partly due to the myriad distractions of life, but mainly because, I must admit, I have rather lost interest in the whole concept of virtual worlds.

I don’t seem to be alone in my ennui; many of the Second Life blogs that were active when we started up are now defunct, and even the mighty Alphaville Herald is but a shadow of its former self. Hamlet Au, to his credit, keeps plugging away at New World Notes (even if he showed terrible judgement by leaving us off his list of influential SL blogs), and there is still a constant froth of SL fashion blogs, but the days when Second Life promised a new intellectual frontier seem to long gone.

Anyway, here are our top ten posts by traffic over the last 12 months:

All but two of these are pre-2012, reflecting our low output this year. Of the posts we did manage, these are my personal picks:

WordPress introduced a new statistical feature this year allowing us to trace where our readers live; here are the top ten countries:

United States
United Kingdom
Canada
Germany
Australia
India
Brazil
Netherlands
New Zealand
Italy

Unsurprisingly we’re most popular in the English-speaking world, but we have had visitors from 103 countries, on every continent except Antarctica. The most notable exception is China, where I can only assume we are censored as a threat to state security.

So what of 2013? Will we have a creative renaissance, and delight the world with our incisive commentary on culture and the metaverse? Or will we coast along, content to bask in the fading glow of our past glories? Watch this space…

Filed under Blogging, Second Life Tagged with Blogging, Second Life

End of Daze

December 19, 2012 by johnny Leave a comment

I’ve not had much time, nor inclination, for blogging in the last month, for one reason or another, but I thought I had better get myself together to post a final word or two ahead of the end of the world on Friday.

Of course the rational side of my brain is aware of the cosmic narcissism implicit in believing that the Universe turns according to an arbitrary schedule pulled out of the air by a long-dead member of our insignificant species, but my more fanciful side can’t help hoping that the promised UFOs will show up, bearing benevolent aliens who will issue us with personal rocket-ships and immortality pills.

Failing that I guess I might be able to shake off my torpor long enough to compile our usual year-end review. We’ve been pretty quiet over the last twelve months (and we already did a five-year retrospective back in May), so it shouldn’t take too long…

Filed under Blogging, Culture Tagged with Blogging, Culture, Music, Superstition

Post-viral fatigue

November 9, 2012 by johnny 1 Comment

So, I was looking at our traffic statistics today, and I noticed that this had happened last week:

That’s right, one of our posts had gone viral. Sort of. For a couple of days. How exciting! Unfortunately, the piece in question was this one, which is whiny and narcissistic, even by our standards. (Though if you ask me I will, of course, claim it was obviously meant ironically.) Also, all the extra traffic came via Plurk; it’s just about possible to imagine that someone was saying something nice about us, but probably not.

Anyway… another week, another list of Second Life blogs that we’re not on, this time over at New World Notes. I guess our omission can be rationally explained by reference to our obscurity, lack of recent SL content, and general rubbishness, but irrational theories are much more satisfying, so I can’t help suspecting that Hamlet is still pissed that we called him a Stalinist that time. (Though, now I’ve looked at it with eyes unclouded by paranoid jealousy, I see that this is actually a list of those blogs which fell outside the top ten, which Hamlet is going to reveal next week, so we might yet make it. If so, please disregard the above.)

Filed under Blogging, Second Life Tagged with Blogging, Second Life, Statistics

Guess I’ll go eat worms

October 19, 2012 by johnny 4 Comments

Second Life Shrink has been going for well over five years now, and in that time we’ve racked up nearly 400 posts. Our Second Life coverage may have waned a little recently, for one reason and another, but we do have an extensive archive of articles on the topic, and our pieces on SL demographics and SL addiction are still highly ranked on Google. We have a Facebook profile and a Twitter feed, not to mention our associated Tumblr and Pinterest sites. We featured in the last big survey of the SL-blogosphere, just outside the top 100.

So if you heard that someone had set out to compile a new list of SL-related blogs, and had managed to identify over two thousand examples of the genre, then you might think that we would be in there somewhere. Well, you would be wrong. Honestly, sometimes I don’t know why we bother…

Filed under Blogging, Culture, Second Life Tagged with Blogging, Culture, Music, Second Life

← Older posts

Newer posts →

Second Life Shrink