I swear to God I have me some Wordpress hate. But I'm determined not to let that slow me down anymore. I wanted to move this blog to it's own domain and everything. The plans are still there, just not the knowledge yet.
Oh, but I have stories to tell!
Later though, mustn't make this temporary residence too ambitious. First things first:
I do believe Karen O has been replaced as my fake rock-star girlfriend by the glorious Victoria Hesketh, more commonly known as Little Boots. I say this in a non-stalkerish way, sort of. She's adorable, a fantastic singer and an inventive lyricist and composer. Then of course, she has a blog where she says things like this:
"what a difference a year makes.
when i think back to sitting freezing writing songs that are now going to be on my first album its almost incomprehensible.
thank you to any one who has listened, written, watched, come to a gig, told a friend, taken a picture, shared a link, downloaded a song be it legally or otherwise... everyone who has supported me in any way whatsoever this year, i wouldn't be making music without you so thank you from the bottom of blackpool tower to the furthest stars in the cosmos....
ok i'll stop being epic now.
go and get pissed, eat quality street and fall asleep watching love actually.
happy christmas,
victoria x"
I don't have the time at the moment to post her two blog hits "Meddle" and "Stuck on Repeat" but go find them. Now I'm off to work when I'm not supposed to.
The alarm is ungodly loud. I did wake up to an email from a friend I'm sweet on though, so it evens out. Apparently my comics are delayed and someone new is following me on Twitter. I found this out while in the bathroom getting ready for work. Still haven't put everyone's info in, then again I never have collected all of their information in one place before. I need to get a card adapter so I can pull all the business info off of my dad's old Palm. Beyond that, happy with it at the moment. The damn thing looks like an oversized version of my old phone.
There are many legitimate reasons for why someone would be in their rights to painfully torture me unto death. That I spent my money on clothes and new tech versus art like James Jean's is a primary one. I will have this painting one day.
Work has obviously slowed what is already a spotty blog. But be assured that I will return to posting things only I care about soon. Or rather, be warned.
I think this post will qualify as a genuine shotgun blast of information as I'm very tired.
First off is this excellent link provided by the near and dear Miss Information. It's along the lines of something I think college professors should do at the beginning of class or at least when the opportunity presents itself: pronounce the names of key figures in the class literature. I always have to spell out the name of a philosopher highly influential to me, Ludwig Wittgenstein (the 'w' is pronounced as a 'v') and I still don't know how to say Hegel's name properly yet. So finally there's a site that provides those pronunciations. About fucking time.
Next is a post from Ezra Klein linking to another blogger who makes a point about the raft of Obama appointees and their informal name as "Clinton staffers". The point is it seems the mainstream media and particularly the rightist punditry refer to "any Democrat under about fifty or fifty-five years of age who has had work experience in the executive branch of the federal government." This generally puts said Democrat in the Clinton administration but doesn't necessarily make them a Clinton appointee. Both Klein and Hertzberg think this isn't a problem in the first place but look to clarify the difference between President Clinton's appointments, President Bush's first term appointments and President-Elect Obama's appointments. The key differences are: a) President-Elect Obama has avoided the "no Carter people" or "no Johnson people" of the Clinton and Carter presidencies respectively based on his desire to collect the best people to do the jobs he wants done; and b) most of the Democrats with any executive experience naturally come from the Clinton administration since that was the last time the Democrats held that branch of government. So calling an appointee from the 90s a Clinton person does refer to someone but that reference is pretty meaningless since it doesn't really tell you anything about the person. More to the point, by calling on such people President-Elect Obama is looking to avoid the learning curve of White House staffing.
The final tab to close comes from Andrew Sullivan (naturally) who links to a review of Clay Shirky's book Here Comes Everybody that described both the advantages and drawbacks to distributed, or cloud, actions on the Interwibble. Where you have Flickr providing the first pictures of the 2005 London bus bombings that no news organization could have gotten you also have cloud organizations for Holocaust deniers (re: future lead pipe victims) or even terrorist cells. Shirky, through reviewer and tech security guru Bruce Schneier, speaks about the Interweb's ability to allow loose collections of people to form informal organizations with near zero financial costs and a wide latitude for collaboration and potential action. Personally, I think there's some over-stating of the matter. Loose collections of people don't necessarily evolve into informal structures and informal structures don't necessarily do anything.
