Jason: I’m wondering if the age of personal blogs that have any meaning are over. It seems that a) you can do your own thing, but be obscure because instead of being one of 200 or 2000, you’re now one of 20,000,000 because the barrier to entry is a lot lower and everyone has an opinion,
b) if you do become popular you get a community of commenters and suddenly you have a relationship with your readers and that steers your site overtly because it’s not all about you anymore, or even subtly because you want to keep the readers you have, and unless you have a personality strong enough to go “fuck you, this is my site” and have people love you for it, you have to deal with that.
c) we’re in the age of mega-blogs, like Gawker and Perez and newsblogs and et cetera, and personal blogs are seen as quaint at best, ridiculously egotistic at worst, and that’s filtered down that
d) some personal blogs have become personal brands and all about selling the writer as an expert, and all the politics that that engenders that gets obnoxious for people like you and me who just want to write something funny occasionally, or make a point from our respective perspectives on culture as it affects us.
I’ll be the first to tell you that I’m completely aware of this blog as my personal brand. When something mildly hilarious would happen, I would run back to my computer, bring up a text editor and start writing, often adding mildly hilarious embellishments to fully get my point across. Two things happened that really changed this: At 31, the stories I would share back then seem distinctly more private now. Blogging about my parents separation and eventual divorce was therapeutic and defiant then; now, not so much. And blogging about the periodic depressive periods I have would just be, uhm, a downer.
The other thing is that whatever happens, I’m just trying to enjoy the moment, I guess. Owning the moment, as opposed to mentally processing it into an essay to share with others. And while that comes with a downside of not having these moments recorded on the Internet for the rest of my life, it comes with the upside of not having these moments recorded on the Internet for the rest of my life.
I guess this is just my way of saying that I’m not sure what the status of the blog is at this point. Like a lot of other old-school bloggers fascinated about web based communication tools, I’m on twitter and tumblr, which reminds me a lot of the type of blog posts I wrote my first year or two of blogging. It’ll be impossible for me to hide any of my identity at this point — I work for a social networking company, for gods sake — but as the methods of communication have evolved, so has blogging, and so I will as well. In what ways, we have yet to see.
While driving around the island, we turned on the car radio to discover a catchy little Calypso ditty in a major key, with a decent enough hook about a “Silent Scream.” “Silent Scream” ends up being — no lie — a twelve minute song about abortion; a delightfully musical track on how you should never kill your unborn baby, even in cases of “rape, incest and spousal abuse.” In quotes, of course, because those EXACT WORDS ARE SUNG IN THE FOURTH VERSE. (Naturally, they rhymed the phrase with “there’s no excuse.”)
The song ends, of course, with the sound of a baby crying and then a flat-line.
After I pick my jaw up from the floor and Laurie apologizes on behalf of all ofall atheists on exactly four people in the Caribbean, we later find out that we’re listening to the religious radio station, shattering my dreams that an abortion song is #2 on the Bajan Top 100. Behind Rihanna. (That said, if I had to choose between Silent Scream and something on a Contemporary Christian radio station, I’ll always pick the abortion song you can dance to.)
I’ve always prided myself on being a fan of yours; my ex got me listening to your first album Frankwhen you weren’t anorexic and you didn’t have any tattoos or freaky beehive hairdos. When I learned you were working with Mark Ronson I was thrilled, and when you won a Grammy in the brief moment you were sober or not [noticeably] on crack I turned to my friends and said, “see? I could totally be an A&R guy,” even though I’m in tech and, let’s face it, I could NEVER be an A&R guy.
As an Asian, I’m kinda like, “yeah, that’s fucked.” As a Winehouse fan, I’m all, “Girl, YOU’RE SINGING THIS FROM A CRACKHOUSE.”
Making fun of Amy Winehouse nowadays is like making fun of Whitney Houston three or four years ago: the “crack is whack” meme was hilarious for a while, but the story would get more tragic in passing. When it gets to the point that you see photos of her cracked out in a fur coat at a gas station at two in the morning and all you can really say is something like, “man, I hope she finds Jesus.” And I’m Agnostic.
With Amy, it’s the same thing. I would say something like “I’m so offended I’ll never listen to your music again,” but that’s not really true, because you were probably so twacked out you have absolutely no recollection of saying it, and there are other perfectly legit reasons why I may never listen to your stuff again: you keep getting dropped from labels, and the stuff you HAVE been doing sounds a little lackluster. (Your cover of “Cupid” is still good, but seriously, it sounds like you’re hitting the bottle between takes.) I would keep writing, but it really just depresses the living hell out of me.
Amy Winehouse, from one non-religious person to another: you need to find Jesus. That is all.
On Friday I went to my friends wedding. Okay, maybe not so much “friend” as it is the cousin of my best friend Royce. They live in Davenport, which is a sleepy hillside town, off a road built for white people when they want to drive by the oceanside to Santa Cruz. With a population of around 350, Davenport looks straight out of a Thomas Kinkaid painting, if Thomas Kinkaid imagined his paintings inhabited by crazy-ass drunk Mexicans. All of whom are related to Royce.
There are the things I have learned about a Davenport wedding:
1) I’ve only been to Catholic mass a couple of times, all of which were part of a wedding ceremonies. While I don’t necessarily believe in the Catholic faith, I’ve always felt that there’s a grandeur to it that’s fascinating to watch. You know, the cantors, the candles, the solemn “Thanksbetogod,” “Andalsowithyou” back and forth between the priest and his congregation. There’s something calming about the ceremony of it all.
Yeah, not so much with this one. I’m fairly sure this will be the Catholic mass I attend in a while where the wedding crowd “whoos” while the bride goes down the aisle. Twice. And where there are cholos waiting in the parking lot. And a guy with a pimp hat with a neckbrace in the audience. And a bridesmaid with three neck tattoos. (In her defense, she was very nice, so long as you don’t fuck with her, which meant “look directly at her.” Just kidding. Kind of.)
2) As someone who’s been to his share of Filipino weddings, I’ve decided there really isn’t much of a difference between a Filipino wedding and a Mexican one; one plays more Mexican ballads, the other plays more songs to do the thirteen-step cha-cha to. They both play latin freestyle. And serve pork. Pork, I have learned, is the sacred food of the Catholic people. And since pork is fucking delicious, I am okay with this.
3) Chinese wedding banquets might serve champagne - maybe beer - but it’s purely for show. After all, old Asian people don’t really drink at weddings, and they sure as hell don’t party with their own family. Mexicans drink at weddings. A lot. They also sneak in kegs, which unfortunately didn’t sit too well with the rent-a-cops. Six police squadron cars were called shortly afterwards a broke up the reception at 9:30pm, and while I can’t say I attended my first wedding-reception-turned-angry-racial-melee, I can finally cross “Attend a wedding reception broken up by cops” crossed off my life’s To-Do list. Baby steps, I suppose.
From my Inbox: LiveJournal Advisory Board Nominations Begin.
This morning we are opening the nomination process for the user-representative positions on the LiveJournal Advisory Board … Everyone here at LiveJournal is looking forward to this first-ever User-Representative election!
A motherfucking LiveJournal election. Sure, it’s for an Advisory position but for all you know, people are going to treat this as a shot to be LiveJournal Supreme Being of the Universe. And holy crap, that’s awesome. It’s just like the upcoming political elections, really, except you have to replace all the candidates with bulimic girls, furries, self-cutters, hirsute gay men and angst-ridden Russian teenagers. In other words: just like the upcoming political elections! These are going to have the best smear campaigns ever.
(As to why I’m getting LiveJournal updates? Uhmm…. uh….)
Having learned my lessons, I’m not going to blog much about my job but I will say this — the CEO of the company I work for was featured on the cover of Fast Company this morning. This photo looks a little bit like an ad promo for an ABC drama series, I’m just saying. All we need now is two Koreans and a burning plane in the background.
This is the result map that came up when I typed in that I wanted to take public transportation from my house to the DMV. (Public transportation since, you know, I forgot to renew my car registration. Ooops.)
I love how it’s all, “WALK THERE, YOU FAT FUCKER.”
I haven’t been to the office in the past two weeks.
Two weeks ago it can be easily explained; I was at the SXSW Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas. And while that in itself could be a separate post, last Friday was also my last day at Yahoo!. Yes, again.
Which is why I’ve been pretty quiet, I guess - the first time around, I made these giant waves about leaving Yahoo! to go to start a new life in Canada, blogging as if I was riding off with some mountee into a ridiculous maple-leaf colored sunset. When that didn’t work and I was back in the Bay Area, I decided to move to San Francisco and try to have a low profile, working for Yahoo! Brickhouse. Except for the fact that Brickhouse isn’t exactly low-key. So, now I’m leaving Yahoo! again and I kinda feel like the boy who cries wolf, except replace the word “cries” with “quits” and replace “wolf” with “giant Internet conglomerate.” (For those that care about the status of BravoNation, Gordon, who left the same day as I did, wrote a blog post on the matter.)
As for my opinions of Yahoo? I still have a lot of friends there, people that are still passionate about what they do from day to day stuff. They are good folks, and I’m going to miss them terribly. But morale is low, and as for all the corporate stuff and the possible Microsoft merge, well, no comment.
That’s all I’ll say about that. I’m moving on.
My new position will be as a Developer Advocate at Ning, a social software platform company based in Palo Alto - it’s kind of a hybrid role between web development and community management and support. I’m not going to jinx it so I’ll simply say this: the stuff I want to do seems to be right up my alley, the company looks to be in a good place right now, and I’m looking forward to the opportunity. The commute, not so much - I don’t think I’ve been at the office at 9:00am in a couple of years, no exaggeration - but I’ll get used to that.
This is usually what I do after work: I get home, boot up my personal laptop and start heating dinner up in the microwave. From there, I usually sit on my living room couch and stare at my laptop for the entire night until I get tired and go to bed - usually chatting via Instant Messenger, checking e-mail and twitter, work on my web projects, surf the web. Somewhere in between that time, dinner is consumed. For a diversion, I play World of Warcraft. By the time I crawl into bed, my shoulders ache and eyes hurt and MY GOD, I live a pathetic existence.
On Thursday, I got home, heated dinner up in the microwave and then realized that I wasn’t going to use the laptop that night. So, out of desperation, I started to clean. You know how crystal meth supposedly makes you suddenly want to clean the house? That was me, making my bed and washing the dishes, not necessarily because I had the energy but because it was there.
What can I say? Boredom is my anti-drug™.
After that, I sat on my couch and read. From a book. Did you know that pages from a book don’t have back-lit screens, so you have to sit next to a bright light? Yeah, I didn’t either. At around ten at night, I got strangely tired. Ten o’clock is a really early time to fall asleep for me - I’m usually up for a couple of extra hours on my laptop. But this time I was noticeably calmer and more relaxed, so any of those suggestions Ariel had on what to do when you were unplugged were quickly shelved for the next time. Write a book? Take a dance class? Eh, I’m sleepy. I’ll just lie on my bed and stare at the ceiling instead.
Oh God, I just re-read the above paragraph. No wonder I’m single.
You know what? I joke a little bit how “boring” the night was but to be honest I haven’t given myself a chill night in a while. I probably just couldn’t tell the difference, that’s all; you know how hipsters acclimate to conditions at Burning Man, or Swedes have to get used to the thinner air in an attempt to climb Mt. Everest? It’s like I’m trying to do that, except about a thousand times more pathetic. At the end of the night, I wasn’t as anxious and my shoulders did feel a lot better, especially after not being hunched over a laptop. (Like right now, typing out this blog post.) I’ll give it another try next week - maybe I’ll just to figure out what to do about this book I promised I would write years ago. Or I’ll go to bed at 9pm.
My old-school blogger friend Ariel is writing a book pitch around her 52 Nights Unplugged project, and recently sent out an e-mail:
The sample chapter I’m writing this week is I sat down to check my email, and woke up watching kitten videos: Internet addiction time warps.
I’d love to hear your stories of your worst web time warps, and why you think the internet has the ability to suck your time out of your hands until you find yourself at 4am thinking “Wait, is it Tuesday? Where have I been?”
That’s right, the campy dance version of FOX’s American Idol. That in itself is only slightly humiliating, but combined with the power of YouTube has single-handedly brought down hours of sleep and/or productivity. What? Through the power of Wikipedia, I’ve learned that Greece, Australia and Germany have their own version of the show? Well, I HAVE to watch ALL of the performances. ALL OF THEM. I mean, they’re only two minutes.
And that’s where the time suck comes, I suppose. You’re watching two minute performances, but you’re watching DOZENS AND DOZENS of two minute performances. Same goes for Wikipedia. It only takes a minute or two to scan an article, but then you see a link and it’s so EASY to click on it and learn more information about reality shows in Germany and/or Austria, that you glance at the clock and it’s already three in the morning.
