Your mission, should you choose to accept...

Hey, guess who has a phone interview for a copy editor gig with Nintendo of America? Go ahead...guess?

Yee-haw! Gonna post this entry, play a bit of Diablo 2 to relax and then brush up on my grammar skills before "Civil War" comes on.

Wow.

Rules of the road

Okay, to fully understand what I'm talking about, you have to go here and read this guy's list of Blog Rules.

Huh...well, okay then.

I think the writer misses going the next logical step: the inevitable blog crash coming in a few years, just like the coming crash of the massively multiplayer online role-playing games. Let's face it, as far as blogs go, there's a finite number of readers simply overwhelmed by the vast amounts of blogs out there and, to borrow from Sturgeon's Law, a great majority of them are crap. Eventually, this blogging craze will go the way of the dodo and the dotcom industry, the latter collapsing due to uncontrolled growth and depleted bank accounts. For all we know, the companies that host our blogspaces will soon wither under the strain of tremendous operating costs. Or they will vanish when they have to jack up the price to keep everything going and the bloggers jump ship with their wallets intact.

However, right now, the blogs mean something to people. The blog is a release valve, a writing exercise, an artistic play space, whatever. Look, I'm not saying my blog is any great shakes. In fact, I violate a couple of Bob's rules greatly. However, this is my place. If you like it, great. If not, thanks for stopping by. Blogs, in my mind, are just alpha-release thoughts anyway. No one is honestly going to make a living doing this. Personally, I'm trying to find my voice and get into the habit of writing on a daily basis (despite being married and chasing my resurgent "Diablo 2" dragon all over again). Other people, well...they write about politics or boyfriends or whatever. Like what Bob said, it's the quality of the author that makes all the difference.

I always think it's strange that we bloggers are all people sharing points of view that were never solicited. Discounting whatever you pay for online access, the blog you are reading is free. In fact, I'm probably shelling out more money putting this together than you are reading it. So, why am I doing it? Well, I have some habitual craving to throw words at you. I can't explain it, because I think that if I do, it'll all go away. Not being one to dispel magic, I craft up sentences and ideas, throw in a couple links and grind them through the Blogger text editor and...viola...you get a textgasm...all roughly written and clumsily edited because the "Civil War" was on PBS last night competing for my attention or something. And remember, when people write about their daily lives, there’s no guarantee that their lives are going to be constantly interesting.

Hmm…looking back, it's hard to steer this boat away from getting closer to "self-justification island," so I'll slow it down. When people blog, it's an extension of whatever they are thinking about at the time. It's a cross between a dream journal and the movie "Rashomon", documenting things through their point of view and shoving them up on some HTML truss.

Interestingly, I see a lot of people who blog paste comments on their blogspace with the caveat that "this will probably suck, but..." or "I don't know why I'm writing this...", almost disarming the reader into thinking that what they are about to read is unworthy of their time, so you've been warned. What is it about the blog that makes people afraid to post but yet operate a blog? Are we afraid of blogs? If we are afraid, why are we planting homesteads in blogspace to begin with?

(Note: Maybe it's to share juicy tidbits like this. By the way, the sound you just heard was a million lust-driven geeks on the Web exploding in fantasy-ecstasy.)

Are we doing the blog thing because everyone else is? If so, I think those bloggers will be first out of the pool when the blog craze crashes. Serious bloggers will seek high ground elsewhere and continue writing because it’s what they do.

And I wonder how many animated icons and personality quizzes got sent ol' Bob's way after he posted his rules.

I will say this, though. Ol' Bob, Mr. Happy Pants that he is, made me think about my blog. And about how lucky I am in my marriage. Both are living things I try to concentrate on daily, tinkering with the alchemy to make them better, more vibrant and more rewarding.

Coming soon

Tomorrow, the video game "Star Fox Adventures" for Gamecube hits shelves, along with a new CD by Peter Gabriel. Alas, yours truly can only give money to Mr. Gabriel this time around and will have to rent Fox McCloud's latest pixilated romp.

French Word of the Day


toujours perdrix (too zhoor pehr dree): "always partridge"; too much of a good thing.