The night of many posts, dealing with the mood I am in, facing Doug's Third Rule about Blogging, and coming back on Monday

(03:37:40 CST)

The night of many posts, dealing with the mood I am in, facing Doug's Third Rule about Blogging, and coming back on Monday

This post makes number five in the past two hours. Well, it makes past one in the past two hours but it follows four backlogged posts. I came up with a system to backlog posts because it makes good sense. Some days, I want to write a lot. Others, not so much. If I put aside a half-dozen backlogs, then I can go in and use one of them on off days. The problem is that the backlogs keep getting overlooked, and the days I don't feel like writing, I don't really feel like posting either. I'll keep it up, but maybe limit it to only one or two backlogs for now on.

Besides, with the exception of one, the four backlogs were just reviews and such. The kind of thing it is best to get out sooner rather than later. In the case of the Brian Keene one, much later. I wrote that back in, I don't know. A while back. If you came upon this in some way or another outside of the RSS Feed (in which case you just went "Wowza, five posts???") or the main page, and are curious about what these four other posts are (in order of most important for you to read to least):

1. Here is a pet-peeve of mine: Genre fiction still treated as a trash-pile with only an occasional winner
2. Brian Keene's Urban Gothic
3. District 9 (Movie Review)
4. "The Brain of Morbius". Doctor Who, Serial 84. The Tom Baker Years.

The genre post discusses a pet peeve of mine and it's a big pet peeve. I felt it was time to bring that back up. The Brian Keene post says some interesting things about horror. Skim the first couple of paragraphs anyhow. The other two are more straightforward reviews.

Posting in a clump like that probably won't help my blog's readability. No, I occupy, like everything else, a certain time-budget in everyone's brain. There is probably some formula like Celebrity Quotient times the Importance Quotient and divided by the square of other things vying for attention: (CeQ*ImQ)/other^2. This is the time-budget assigned to you. Celebrities get everyone's attention. Everyone else gets the attention of those who care about them or care about what they are writing about. Let's call this Doug's First Rule of Blogging . The result of this rule is that, and I will call this Doug's Second Rule of Blogging, unless you are a celebrity, you can either blog about yourself or you can blog about things people want to read about. In the case of the former, you will be overlooked by many, many people. In the case of the latter, well, it can rapidly dissolve into a popularity struggle based on a network of recursive references and endless promotion cycles. In other words, and let's name this Doug's Third Rule of Blogging, you can care about your blog or you can care about what your blog does.

I have come to grips, recently, that Third Rule there has a lot to say about old Dickens of a Blog. I care about it. It is my primary voice box to the world. My choice is clear, I can either continue to love it as itself, or I can try and reshape into something more viable in earning time-budgets from readers. There would be a lot of benefit from that: increased exposure, possible ad revenue, so forth. Except, you know, screw it. This blog will never be my professional voice. It is far, far too personal for that. I rarely write about my day to day life, but I always write from the perspective of a fan and personally interested scholar. One day, I will possibly own a website that focuses on something important and outside of myself. This one isn't it. I have too much to hide, clean-up, worry about. I accept the Third Rule and will live by it. The chance that strangers will wander by and be amazed by me? Maybe it is nil. I don't know. I just hope the people who did read this care enough about me to stick around a little. Seriously, dear readers, I love you guys.

This all leads up to me saying that I have been in a mood as of late. Not a bad mood, or seriously depressed mood, or even a particularly explainable mood, just "a mood". It is not self-doubt, but something like it. It is not frustration at others, but something like it. If I had to try and put some finger up on it, it would be in between a sensation of being bothered by things in the past and being irritated by some possibilities coming forth in the future. I think it is, ultimately, caused by that most-of-a-month I took off from work and school (and gaming, and other things). It took away a lot of the schedule that I was using to self-monitor and evaluate. With that gone, I descended back into casual reading and nothing to help maintain anything but the most arbitrary time goals. Which meant I felt like I was wasting my time at the same time I felt the future coming on unpaced. Also, having to focus on the quite minute day-to-day things, when stuff did arise, it was louder and occupied more of that aforementioned time-brain-budget than it should have. The past and the future became more important than the present, and I ended up feeling kind of crappy about it.

If I had to put a finger on the shape the mood took is taking, it has a lot to do with feeling second best or unable to quite escape criticism or even command a proper amount of respect. One of my weird paranoia-infused thoughts, and like all of them there is an equal measure of being intrigued by the possibilities as well as dismayed by them, has to do with my forgettability. Sometimes, I feel like I am ultimately forgettable or forgettable except as a series of ready-made labels. I have no reason to think this, outside of the common sense fact that everything is forgettable if you have a long enough time forget (nearly aped Fight Club, there). I mean more immediately forgettable. Like walking into a room and then, a few seconds later, someone looks up and realizes for the second time that you are there, having already forgotten the first time. I used to worry about it. Then I became enamored with it, ala a super power. Now, well, I don't really feel it too often but lately I have again. It is neither as fun a thought as my crazy "what if someone else is in the room and I have forgotten about them?" nor quite as disturbing. It is weird, while I am sure it is always an honor to just be nominated, sometimes worrying about getting too many silver medals can be the worst of all.

Thinking of this as well as the feeling that I am being criticsized or personally attacked when I simultaneously acknowledge that this is untrue, I find it interesting to note that a lot of my strange twinges of the brain have to do with things being there or not being there or being out-of-sync with the normal. I mean, I don't see things that are not there. I think about seeing things that are not there. If that makes sense. It is like a self-recursive insanity ("He imagines that he imagines things are not there!") At least if I ever go proper-crazy, there will be something to talk about.

At any rate, I am going to be offline until Monday afternoon sometime. Maybe even a little later (as in, Tuesday morning). It will do me a good to get out from in front of the computer and experience a little real life chaos so I can be glad to get back in front of the computer. When I get back online, though, I should have the second Audiopost ready to set up or nearly ready...and a couple more backlogs to get out. Blessed be, and all that.

Si Vales, Valeo

file under (Me in 2010)
and(...on Myself)
and(...on Linux & the Web)

• See other entries for January 10
• See Journal Archives (sorted by year then month)