Kloutless
October 8, 2011 Leave a comment
I really need to get back into gear with the blogging and the tweeting; last time I looked my Klout score had declined to a miserable 16, which is not going to get me into any of the cool parties.
Benign neglect
August 14, 2011 Leave a comment
I’ve shamefully neglected this blog over the summer, which I rather regret, since there has been a lot going on which I could and should have written about, like the war in Libya, the News International phone-hacking scandal, the massacre in Norway, the Eurozone sovereign debt crisis, the US debt-ceiling stand-off and, just this week, the rioting in London and other English cities.
I suppose that the world has managed to scrape by without the benefit of my opinions for a couple of months; anyone who has read this blog for more than five minutes could probably guess what my take on these events would have been anyhow.
What have I been doing instead? Well, as I’ve alluded to previously, I’ve been working on another writing project, one with somewhat greater pretensions to serious literary merit than the idle musings that make up my output in this space. I’m pretty excited about it at the moment, but, if past experience is any guide, my interest will wane soon enough, when I remember that proper writing is actually quite hard work, and I am far too lazy to keep it up for any length of time.
I expect that things will stay quiet here for the next month or so, and after that it’ll be back to the usual diet of lightweight psychological, cultural and political commentary, leavened with a little whimsical nostalgia. I have managed to read a few books over the holidays, so I may throw in a couple of reviews too, we’ll see.
Four Years
May 26, 2011 Leave a comment
It was four years ago today that I started writing this blog, and I’ve managed to keep up a fairly steady flow of posts since then, with the biggest gap being about three weeks I think.
Inexplicably, my literary endeavours in this space have, as yet, failed to bring me fame and fortune. Perhaps sometime in the next twelve months the world will finally wake up to my genius, if my senses don’t fail me.
Do You Believe in Rapture?
May 20, 2011 Leave a comment
Readers may have noted that I’ve not been posting much recently. This is of course in line with my general slacker ethos, but it’s been even harder than usual to rouse myself to action of late; what with the Rapture forecast for this weekend, blogging seems rather pointless.
I’m not entirely familiar with the finer points of evangelical eschatology, but, as I understand it, Christ himself is going to visit Earth tomorrow, and bodily transport the faithful straight to heaven, while the rest of us are left behind to face the wrath of Satan and his minions.
If this miraculous event does come to pass (the pastor predicting it may not be completely reliable), I wonder if we will actually notice much difference, apart from the sudden disappearance of the most annoying 10% of the population. Humankind is well capable of creating mayhem without Beelzebub’s input, so if the Dark Lord is given untrammelled dominion over the mortal plane he may decide just to sit back and let us go on heading straight to hell in a handcart all by ourselves.
[I couldn’t decide which of two tunes was best to accompany this post; this Sonic Youth track is one of my favourites, but it would be criminal to cover this topic without linking to this classic by Blondie.]
2011: The year in preview
January 11, 2011 Leave a comment
So, the New Year is here, time to think about the future, and make plans for what we want to do with this blog over the next twelve months.
Looking back over the last year, there are a few things that I planned to do but never got round to; organising some political activity within SL, delineating the psychological profile of a typical Second Life resident, and posting more general cultural commentary, in the form of book, film and music reviews.
I failed to complete, or even seriously start, the first two of these tasks for more or less the same reason; they are big projects, that would demand an investment of time and attention that couldn’t possibly be justified by the results, and thus seem rather self-indulgent. This is particularly true of the political organisation idea; virtual agitation isn’t going to have any practical effect, whereas spending even a fraction of the time on real-world activity would probably have some positive consequences. (Of course I can do the Second Life work from the comfort of my own home, rather than having to go out and stand on cold street corners, but that’s not quite enough to tip the balance.)
One can make more of a case for the SL psychological investigation plan; not because the final result would be particularly earth-shattering, but rather because there would be some likelihood that I would find the process educational in a generalisable way. Again though, utilising the time to study something more immediately applicable to my day-to-day work is likely to be more profitable.
So I’ll probably quietly forget about the political activity thing, though I do have a vague idea about doing a series of posts on the various political groups that already exist on the grid, and I’ll definitely be commenting on real world politics a bit more. As far as psychological comment goes, I suppose I’ll have to keep that going, since it is the ostensible raison d’être of this blog, but I’ll stick to small scale stuff rather then any more ambitious projects. Sherry Turkle has a new book just out – Alone Together, which “describes new, unsettling relationships between friends, lovers, parents, and children, and new instabilities in how we understand privacy and community, intimacy and solitude”; I expect I’ll have something to say about that once I get round to reading it. I may also try to do more about the psychosexual aspects of virtual interaction; I have written a little about this in the past, but mostly in the form of comments on other blogs.
I am going to start writing some more cultural reviews; the problem hitherto has been my rather obsessive nature, and my consequent inability to keep posts down to a manageable length. What I need to do is pick out a couple of aspects of the work in question and restrict myself to a few succinct comments.
I’ll have to do some basic blog housekeeping too; update the links, tidy up the tags, create a custom graphic for the header. The domain is due for renewal soon, and I’m going to pay WordPress a bit extra so they stop putting adverts on my pages, which should make things look a bit neater.
So there we are; a handy list of my aspirations, which will double up as a reminder of my shortcomings come December.
2010: The year in review
December 31, 2010 1 Comment
The year’s end draws nigh, and I feel I should produce some sort if review of the twelve months gone by…
First up, the topic that is dearest to our hearts, this blog. Here’s our top ten posts for the year, by traffic:
- Second Life demographics – a brief review
- Second Life, with graphics, on the iPhone?
- On Second Life and addiction
- O Superman
- What’s up
- Zombie Epidemiology
- Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space
- Anatomy of a scandal
- Running Away
- That gum you like is going to come back in style
The demographics post is top by miles, with nearly as many hits as the rest put together, thanks to Google deciding that it should be the #1 result for the query “second life demographics 2010“. It got a lot of traffic in October, presumably due to media studies students researching start-of-term assignments, with another surge this month, probably because other SL bloggers are preparing their end-of-year posts. I think that the fact that this very slight essay, which I knocked out over one lunchtime back in April, should still be able to masquerade as an authoritative source says more about the paucity of serious academic interest in the topic than any brilliance in my writing.
Of the others, the addiction post benefited from my efforts to promote it by dropping a link into the comments of any blog post that mentioned the topic; the Superman post got a boost after it was featured in the Herald; “What’s up” gets traffic from people looking for pictures of 4 Non Blondes (a Google quirk that has at various times also given us hits from searches for Laura Palmer, Mae West and Catherine Deneuve/Susan Sarandon); the Zombie post is still getting referrals from the Undead Report; the rest, I don’t know, probably just random clicks.
Other posts from this year that I thought were OK, but that didn’t make the top ten:
- Two Galleries
- Reoccuring Dreams
- On the unreliability of memory
- Upon the dismal shore of Acheron
- Прощай Woodbury
- From Off the Streets of Cleveland
- Rubber Soul
- Gaza Flotilla
- Discordant thinking
- Après le déluge
- Cut Away
- The Revolution Will Not Be Twitterised
I’m not sure if there was a theme to our posts this year; possibly something about the importance of narrative in the formation of identity, or some such pseudo-intellectual nonsense.
The year in Second Life? Stagnation, layoffs and general management chaos are the things that spring to mind; more detailed round-ups can be found at Daniel Voyager’s blog and Your2ndPlace if you’re interested.
In the real world it’s been a busy year politically; the event with the most direct effect on us was the return of a Conservative government to power in the UK. It’s been a bit of a phoney war since the summer, with only some student-led skirmishes, but the cuts will start to really kick in from now on, and the class struggle should get more intense. 2010 saw the right resurgent over in the US too, without much sign of the left regrouping; hopefully that will change in the months ahead.
In our last New Year review I suggested that we would be posting more general cultural comment during 2010; this remained, alas, an unfulfilled ambition, but I have belatedly managed to think about picks for book, film and album of the year.
Choosing a book was the hardest task; looking back I see that I didn’t read a single new novel all year, though I did buy a copy of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, which is glaring at me accusingly from the shelf. Instead I stuck to the classics, of which my favourite was Fielding’s Tom Jones. I hardly saw any new films either; from a restricted field I would have to give the nod to The Social Network. I did buy a lot of new albums; the two I’ve listened to most are Majesty Shredding by Superchunk and The Suburbs by Arcade Fire.
And so to the future… I expect I’ll keep this project going, out of habit if nothing else. Things might be a little quiet in January, while I’m busy with my New Year resolutions – do more serious writing, get more exercise – but once these have been discarded it’ll be back to our usual cavalcade of whimsy.
I’ll finish by sending our best wishes for 2011 to all our readers – may the New Year find you happy, healthy and prosperous.
300
December 21, 2010 Leave a comment
This is our 300th post; it’s taken a little under a year for us to make it from 200, just about as long as it took for our second century, but a good bit faster than our first ton. I’ve been responsible for the vast majority of these posts; at about 250 words a go that’s the equivalent of a fair-sized novel.
Has it all been worthwhile? I’d struggle to say that the world would be a poorer place without the benefit of my bon mots, but I fancy that there may have been an occasional felicitous phrase that brought a smile to the face of one reader or another.
I have no doubt though that the principal beneficiary of all this literary endeavour has been me. There was an interesting article in the Guardian this week, which examined the therapeutic potential of blogging, for those who have experienced life-threatening illness or other trauma. I have never had to face such a trial, thankfully, but I do find that the discipline of composing a regular column is a powerful antidote to the anomie of day-to-day life.
Anyway, I reckon that persevering for this long qualifies me as some sort of blogging guru, so I feel that I should be sharing the benefits of my wisdom with my less-experienced fellows.
What have I learned about the art of blogging? Precious little if I’m honest, but here are a few pointers:
- Avoid being too restrictive about your subject matter; you may think you have a lot to say about something, but you are likely to find inspiration running dry sooner than you think.
- Conversely, don’t be afraid to repeat yourself; if you come back to a thought often enough you may eventually express it more or less the way you want.
- Don’t look at the statistics page too often; no matter how low your expectations your traffic figures are likely to be discouraging.
- Do read lots of other blogs, and leave lots of comments; if you’re stuck for a topic to write about then rip off someone else’s idea (but do link back to them).
- Don’t stop; once you let it drift for a while it’s hard to get started again.
- Finally, and most importantly, don’t ever think about all the useful things you could be doing if you weren’t wasting your time with your stupid blog.
Cleaning up
December 15, 2010 Leave a comment
We’ve received three emails over the last couple of weeks from Barbara Dunn at haiwatch.com, encouraging us to share the following message with you, our esteemed readers:
As you may be aware, hospitals still have a lot of work to do to put an end to the ongoing – but solvable – problem of Healthcare-Associated Infections (HAIs). To help achieve this goal, Kimberly-Clark Health Care launched “Not on My Watch” (www.haiwatch.com), a website that provides tools and information to help facilities eliminate HAIs.
Ms Dunn is evidently labouring under the misapprehension that we are running some sort of serious health-related website here, but since she’s right about the problem of hospital-acquired infection I feel we should do our part to support this campaign, which I’m sure Kimberly-Clark are backing for purely altruistic reasons, with no commercial agenda at all.
So I’ll encourage anyone who is curious about HAIs, or just wants to know how to wash their hands properly, to head over to the HAI Watch News site, for up-to-the-minute information.
That’s the end of the Public Service Announcement, we’ll return to our normal programming soon…
