Saturday, April 27, 2013

Miscellaneous Errata

I almost forgot that this blog even existed.  On nothing more than just a hunch, I meandered back here and found that I haven't posted anything in some time.  Likely laziness and the general disinterest in writing probably contributed to this.  Not that I had a vast following; it is quite interesting that one when starting a blog imagines vast hordes of followers hanging onto each word you type.  Sometimes I think that my ability to trudge through a mass of writing online is less than it would be if I were flipping through the pages of a cheap pulp novel.  Is this a symptom of growing up in a mostly analog world before heading off to college and discovering high speed Internet, or is this merely a symptom of merely desiring mindless escapism for online entertainment?

What comes to mind is the rediscovery of the animated GIF files that are now proliferating across the Internet.  I'm not that old, but I still remember when it was the GIF that provided entertainment; YouTube was not even in existence and right now, if I were really pushed, I could not recall how I was able to find music videos for some of my favorite bands.  I am drawing a blank with no relief in sight.  I think the Oatmeal put it best in his comic: http://theoatmeal.com/pl/state_web_winter_2012/animated_gifs

Now it is bothering me: where the hell did I go to watch the music video for that one KoRn song.  Oh shit, I used to think that KoRn was a great band?  *hed-desk*  Well, at least you grow as you age...or is that you ossify and become a close-minded curmudgeon?  Ossification; that seems to be a concern now that I've shattered the 30 barrier and 40 is less than a decade away.  I've always wondered what it would be like to exist as a "living fossil."  I would prefer to not be one, but the aging continuum goes in only one direction, not the other.  The one no one likes.

Back to the forgotten blog; and it appears that I'm not the only one who has not posted in some time: those that I follow for the most part have not posted in a year or more.  On one hand, the vast purgatory of the forgotten blogs seems a bit sad...much like your forgotten MySpace page.  Logging into MySpace a year of so back was...not depressing nor very interesting.  It was merely there.  Nothing more, but there.  Old contacts now long forgotten.  Old comments now long forgotten, but saved on a server out there still humming along.  MySpace was tossed aside in favor for Facebook; or in the alternative, there are those who opt to use Google+ to avoid having to deal with families or friends they are now regretting having added-but-now-cannot-delete-because-they-don't-want-to-have-to-deal-with-the-social-repercussions-of-doing-so.  I guess the blog for the vast majority of we amateur writers was abandoned in favor of the 140 characters of Twitter. 

Twitter.  140 characters per post describing the world; or your retweets of tweets you find interesting; or favoriting those who choose to revisit for their content or the shortened hyperlink.  And it is only recently (in the past two years?) that Twitter automatically shortens the URLs you post; previously, it required visiting the vast menagerie of URL shortening websites in order to post a link that wouldn't crack your 140 limit.  I think I've subconsciously chosen Twitter over blogging; it gets to the point and I don't have to worry too much about grammar or sentence structure.  But if anyone has ever read anything I've posted, I don't think I spent too much time worrying about those concepts.  Sitting at 28,755 tweets, I wonder how much time was expended to create those tweets, most of which are not of any real interesting quality; well, I think that is the case.  I wonder what those 28,755 tweets would look like in print.  Pretty sure there are a fair amount of tweets that are regrettable or are of an inane subject.