Tag: Meta-blog

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Inspiring? Moi???

Judith Heartsong has bestowed upon me the Inspirational Blogger Award, which is rather like the Thinking Blogger Award, only it rewards, you know, inspiration. I’m tremendously flattered, inasmuch as I find it amazing anyone would be inspired by my blatherings in this space, but hey, I’ve always found it prudent to undervalue my own contributions to as great a degree as possible. And really, I’m glad that it wasn’t called the Perspirational Blogger Award. (Which, in normal summertime temps, I could win in a walk, to be honest. Hence the fact that I generally never wear the overalls between May and September.)

So where was I? Well, as part of the Inspirational Blogger gig, I now have to name five recipients myself. The following inspire me (as do many others):

:: Belladonna’s Mind Muffins, whose spirit of life-as-adventure (or slapstick!) makes her blog a daily read of mine.

:: Mrs. Mental Multivitamin, whose simple three-word philosophy might have been admired by Moses (it would, after all, have fit onto a single — and smaller — stone tablet).

:: Erin, who likes words.

:: I very much doubt she’ll accept this tag, but I find Dorcasina‘s blogging terribly inspiring, in the face of circumstances that I wish weren’t so.

:: He’d probably think it weird, but PZ Myers‘s fiery commitment to science inspires me.

So there we go. Inspiring, no?

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The stupid! It burns!!!

It’s official, folks, and I can no longer deny it. I am a complete idiot, and am no longer fit to sully the doorsteps of Blogistan.

This is the Jason I had in mind, so if he has any interest in coming out of self-blog-exile, he can take those same questions and go with them. For the actual Jason who responded, I’ll come up with some real questions tomorrow.

God, am I stupid. I deserve some kind of embarrassing punishment for this! Suggestions for punishments can be left in comments, I suppose, but keep it clean. We’re still PG-13 here!

[slinks away, shoulders slumped]

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Dumb Question Time

OK, I keep forgetting that I have an account on that Facebook thingie, so I’ve just done some actual editing of my profile over there, here. So far so good, but is there a way to find people who marked me as a friend? I got an e-mail about someone doing this a while back, but at the time I didn’t have time to reciprocate and then I must have stupidly deleted the e-mail because I can’t find it anywhere.

Anyway, as social network sites go, I think Facebook’s a lot nicer than MySpace. Too much looking at MySpace sites makes me have seizures.

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Earth?

I’ve only received one guess as to this week’s Unidentified Earth location. Is this one actually hard (unlikely), or are there readers sitting on the correct answer but feel hinky about e-mailing me with it (more likely)? Fret not, readers; I won’t broadcast e-mail addresses or sell them to spammers!

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Yeah. Best. And don’t you forget it!

According to Alan, I won something the other night: Buffalo Spree Magazine‘s survey of Best Blogs, or something of that nature. I think it was one of those surveys city publications do to see what their readership thinks are the “best” of whatever in that city, whether it’s restaurants, arts venues, sports teams, or websites devoted to sporadically-updated thoughts of persons of varying degrees of geekitude.

In truth, I wasn’t even aware in any real sense of being in the running. It’s kind of like a recurring funny fantasy I have, in which we’re at the Oscars, and they’re announcing Best Actor: after reading the five nominees, the envelope is opened and the name therein turns out to be some completely-unexpected sixth actor. Camera then cuts to that actor, who’s in his kitchen, eating a sandwich, and we freeze-frame his reaction as a piece of pastrami hangs from his mouth and a dab of mayo oozes down his chin. “The nominees are Sean Connery, Denzel Washington, Colin Firth, Geoffrey Rush, and Ralph Fiennes — but the Oscar goes to Bob McGaskill! Congratulations, Bob!” And Bob says, “Gwhaaa?”

Anyway, apparently this blog won. I’m frankly amazed, because I’m in no way one of the cadre of “citizen journalists” who constitute the larger portion of the Buffalo Prefecture of Blogistan; my Buffalo-blogging tends to consist of the occasional thing about the Sabres (not terribly often because I don’t know much about hockey), the more frequent stuff about the Bills (especially during the season), and once-in-a-while takes on urbanism. I don’t do reportage here, and the vast majority of the content I produce could as easily come from Peoria. That I, a guy who’s content to blog about the obscure SF books I read and movies and food and women who look good in workwear and whatever other obscure topics leap to mind, should come in first in such a survey is somewhat amazing. This blog isn’t any kind of organized set of thoughts; it’s rather my own personal mix-tape for the world.

So, thanks to those who voted. The full roster of winners can be found here. I should really start paying attention to stuff like this, I suppose. I could delude myself into thinking that they could do a big profile thingie on me, like they did for Jennifer a while back, but — well, I suspect that a big picture of me in that magazine wouldn’t be the best thing in the world. I still cringe when I see the way I looked in the Buffalo News for my short-story thing.

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A few notes from Hiatus-land

I had originally figured on returning to regular blogging today, but I’ve decided that I don’t much feel like it yet, so I’m not. However, I want to note a couple of things:

:: Last week’s Unidentified Earth was guessed correctly as Southfork Ranch, near Dallas, Texas. I’m not putting up an installment this week, but they’ll start again when I start again.

:: For Better or For Worse has completely lost it. Seriously, it’s just a joke now, between Michael moving into the family home with his former grade school sweetheart (now his wife), and Lizzie clearly gearing up to get back together with her grade school sweetheart, and April providing the local special needs kid with her Dead Poets Society moment, complete with standing on the desk. This strip is now officially embarrassing.

:: When the hell is the Season Three set of Once and Again going to come out?!

:: Earlier today this blog reached 300,000 hits, according to SiteMeter. Thanks to that small number of regular readers of mine, and thanks also to the much larger number of people who come here by searching for photos of beautiful women. (Not so much the people who come here looking for “overalls porn”, “overalls spanking”, or any of the other such search terms that show up in the referrals. I sympathize and all, but this ain’t the place for that.)

That’s it. Back when I feel like it.

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Until its rhythm you have found

I’m not feeling too much like blogging at the moment, so I’m going to take a few days off. Could be the heat; it’s pretty hot in Buffalo right now. Could be something else.

For now, I’ll leave you with a song that’s been haunting me for several weeks now. It’s “Scythe Song”, by Scots great Dougie Maclean. It can be heard here here, the song starts up at about the 1:40 mark. (Don’t worry about the sound at the outset; it clears up before the music starts and for YouTube sound, it’s fine. And don’t worry about watching the video. It’s just an unchanging title card.)

The song is a meditation on the kind of learning that takes place when you undertake a craft that may look simple, but whose mastery eludes everyone but those who work at it alongside a giving teacher. The idea, I think, is that learning is as much a function of someone teaching us as finding the secrets on our own.

The lyrics:

O I still remember when
I first watched him work the blade.
‘Twas down in the Buckney den
my questions tumbled and he said:
“O this is not a thing to learn inside a day!
Stand closely by me and I’ll try to show the way.

You’ve got to hold it right,
feel the distance to the ground.
Move with a touch so light,
until its rhythm you have found.
Then you’ll know what I know.

O wild are the ways we run
when at last untethered out we fly!
Straight into the burning sun;
need no direction, no, not I!
But it is not a thing to learn inside a day….
Stand closely by me and I’ll try to show the way.

You’ve got to hold it right,
feel the distance to the ground.
Move with a touch so light,
until its rhythm you have found.
Then you’ll know what I know.

And so, little dancing girl,
you want to learn to play a tune?
One that your heart can fill
to help you shine under the moon?
Well it is not a thing to learn inside a day!
Stand closely by me and I’ll try to show the way.

You’ve got to hold it right,
feel the distance to the sound….
Move with a touch so light,
until its rhythm you have found.
Then you’ll know what I know.

Then you’ll know…what I know.

I’ll be back soon…but right now, I need to move with a touch so light.

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Fixing the Interpipes

For a while now I’ve had problems with the blog loading; none of my readers have complained of same, but I can only assume they’ve had a problem as well, at least in part. Anyway, I finally got off my arse and tried hunting down the problem. Turns out that the site blogwise.com is not working, and that the Blogwise widget I had in my sidebar (a hotlinked image of one of those button-things that links back to them) was therefore unavailable, and thus gumming up my Interpipes. So I ditched the widget. No great loss, really; to my knowledge, nobody ever arrived here via Blogwise.

The Blogarama widget was still working, but I figured since nobody’s ever come here from there either, might as well dump it as well. I don’t even recall when I signed on for those services, but generally speaking, sites of the “Join our directory and see your traffic grow!” sort tend to be totally useless as drivers of traffic.

(If you want to see traffic growth, just post photos of beautiful women and wait for Google’s image search to index them and move a few of them to the front of their search results for those particular names. That’s where just about all of my traffic comes from these days: I’m up to over 600 hits a day, but I’d say that at least 475 of those daily hits are image searches for various ROWR! designates.)

Anyway, if anyone’s been experiencing trouble loading this blog, I hope I’ve just solved the problem.

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