Ennui

I don’t know what to do on the internet anymore.

I’ve been blogging, on and off, since November 2004. That’s more than five years, and it suddenly seems like a rather long time. I’ll go out on a limb and say that my original blog was my best, and it has been largely downhill from there (though for relative interestingness, at least to me, The Wordle Bible is right up there).

Ennui is a strong inertial force. If I had been smart, I would have just quit cold turkey when I took my very first leave of absence. Instead, I’ve treated such absences after the manner of Urban Meyer.

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Blame it on Twitter, I suppose.

(Seems like that can’t be far from becoming a popular pastime, anyway.) It probably goes back further: my attention span for internet activity, be it active or passive, has shrunk dramatically over the last five and half years. I think of blogging more now more as simply taking brief notes of things, notes that other people can see, and I am less compelled (current post notwithstanding) to let my wind be long. The side effect of such thinking is that my own personal blogging doesn’t hold my attention anymore.

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Twitter and Identi.ca.

I prefer the look and feel of Identi.ca, but no one I know (in the “real” world, that is) actually uses it, which kind of makes me want to just forget about both services (until I own a smartphone, anyway). I won’t, of course, but I should.

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Internet (broadcasting) ennui

The internet as a broadcasting tool has wearied, for me & for now. Um, conceptually. I doubt I will be able to avoid it altogether, because, frankly, it’s in the nature of the beast. Record-keeping, though, and of course poetry, are more my style these days. After all, the future is curatorial, right? These days, for the internet to mean much to me, I think I need it to be as a tool for either a) communication between me and people I actually know, or b) curating. Conventional personal blogging, then, when cast in the light of those feelings, doesn’t make a lot of sense to me just now.

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To wit

A poem:

happy :: friendly smiles
stimulated from time :: to time
warmer :: richer :: redder
the child’s mind :: waiting

mad’s infectious, I believe :: it emerges
from the water :: detestable
thought! :: going to the images
locked in one :: another’s arms

the creature :: burst out
its sagging face

I paid :: by strength

(source texts: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and T.S. Eliot’s East Coker; composed using Mchain)

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Epilogue

I don’t know if I said everything I wanted to, and I don’t know if the things I said were said just the way I’d like; I don’t know if I want to expend that kind of thought on personal blogging. Maybe that’s the whole of it.

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That is all. Look for me, if you like, on Facebook and Gnoetry Daily, and Google Buzz; I will jumpstart The Wordle Bible soonish.

Filed under: meta

iMock

I tell myself I’m not overtly anti-Apple, but I suspect the deeper truth at work is pretty simple: I find their products annoying, because I can’t afford their shininess. There. Happy now, Jobs?

Now, that having been said, I’ll admit I do find some humor in mocking Apple products & consumers (of which I am one, thanks to my iPod). Of course, there are legitimate reasons to dislike Apple, and there are plenty (just as there are reasons to dislike most large companies). The whole iPad thing just makes my annoyance a bit more timely, I guess (Defective by Design can offer more reasoning than I can, with a touch less snarkiness).

Anyway, stuff like the iProduct makes me laugh pretty hard. (And notice the date on it: January 2005. Good jokes never get less funny.)

Don’t get me wrong, I’m no Microsoft-lover, either. Thing is, I’m not even a little jealous that I don’t own a Zune instead of an iPod, so things like this article by a former Microsoft employee only fill me with something akin to pity: Microsoft’s Creative Destruction.

What does it all mean? Well, aside from knowing I will have Andy Rooney style sarcasm-fodder for the foreseeable future, it means that as a consumer of computer-related things, my choice will often come down to choosing a product from one of two companies: (WARNING: gross oversimplifications ahead)

Company A, whose products are designed to be shiny and “cool” almost expressly to distract me from sketchy Big Brother-style policies,

or

Company B, whose products are either ill-timed for the market, clunky, or both, in no small part because it has lost control over its creative employees’ infighting.

Looks like iLose.

Filed under: misc.