blogging Archives - Page 8 of 23 - Ramblin' with Roger

Ten things I’ve done that I’m still proud of

It’s not that I’m averse to changing the blog layout. I’m just not particularly adept at it.

For this iteration of Ask Roger Anything, Eunai gets right to the point:

Ten things you’ve done that you’re still proud of.

OK. I found this challenging. In no particular order:

1. Getting arrested at an antiwar demonstration in the town of Poughkeepsie, Dutchess County, NY. The trial was very interesting.

2. Editing the Spider-Man Chronicles for FantaCo in 1982. I was learning how to do this by trial and error.

3. Going to grad school to get my Masters in Library Science when I was 37 to 39 years old.

4. Trying out for and appearing on JEOPARDY! in 1998.

5. My very good grasp of mass transit systems in fairly short order. That’s true in Albany, of course, but I’ve gotten comfortable in Atlanta, Boston, New York City, San Diego, San Francisco, and Toronto, and possibly others.

6. Keeping very good friends for a long time, even staying civil with ex-girlfriends.

7. Getting Black History Month at First Presbyterian to be less about the perceived needs of the black members and more focused on the whole community.

8. When I ride my bike, I generally follow the rules, even when no one is looking, or I don’t think anyone is looking. What I’ve noticed is that, sometimes, accurately used hand signals by a bicyclist has a calming effect on a driver. Of course, when I get passed by a guy riding on the wrong side, through the red light, my work is undercut, but so be it.

9. Helping to raise our daughter without totally wrecking her. Of course, she still has her teen years, so I still have my chance.

10. Doing this here blog, every day, for 11 years and about five months.
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And speaking of the blog, the fabulous Scott F wrote:

I’ve been reading your blog again and found I’ve missed it. How do you think you’ve changed as a blogger over the time you’ve been doing this? One thing that hasn’t changed is the layout of the page. Ever think of changing it? (By the way, that’s not me saying it needs a change.)

Welcome back.

Well, I sort of know what I’m doing about 90% of the time. I write ahead so that I don’t stress out if I get sick/too tired/too busy/a bad Internet connection.

I write about enough different things that you can say, “Well, that doesn’t particularly interest me,” but the next day might be more to your liking. The variety is more to MY liking; I can’t write the same category of post back to back.

Just a couple of weeks ago, I found a list of celebrities who will turn 70 in 2017 that I will write about. Knowing what the topics will be – and this also includes family birthdays, major holidays, and significant anniversaries – helps the brain to think about it casually so that when I actually DO write about it, it is not a tabula rasa. I may have even come across an article or two, which I’ll throw in the draft file until I get closer to the date.

I find that it is MUCH better to write about ANYTHING, so if that piece on Trump isn’t writing itself – it seldom does – then I’ll look for an ABC Wednesday post for three or four weeks from now, or a piece about a musician’s birthday, or a Music Throwback Saturday. As I’ve noted, some days, I have NO idea what is posting that particular day until it goes live, at which point I almost always see the damned typo.

As for the layout, it did change in May 2010 from my Blogger blog to this WordPress iteration. It’s not that I’m averse to changing it. I’m just not particularly adept at doing techie things or visual things, or especially techie visual things. Recently, some simple bit for my blog took a half-hour, which was aggravating, and I don’t have a half-hour to waste on something that wasn’t all that important in the grander scheme anyway.

Now if YOU want to take a shot at redesigning my blog, go ahead. Seriously. I also lack what George HW Bush called “the vision thing.” Change it to what? I have literally no idea.

Are YOU still blogging, BTW?

Is it down for everyone or just me?

Occasionally, my web page has gone down. It was annoying, not so much because I couldn’t have my purple prose seen, but because, almost always, I was trying to write some NEW ramblings.

I know the vendor, in fixing the last problem, suspended someone’s user account “for CPU overage,” whatever THAT means.

And I can’t always tell whether it’s a problem with my Internet at home – which has also failed me – or the blog itself. So I email a list of trusted folks and ask them, re my site, “Is it down for everyone or just me?” Unfortunately, almost always, it’s down for everyone.

I do back up my blog every month, or three, but still, it’s a pain.

As it turns out, I noticed that another website was down recently. I wrote on the closed Facebook discussion page, “Is it down for everyone or just me?” Someone wrote This is always a handy check and pointed to down for everyone or just me.com. There are similar sites, such as Is It Down Right Now.

Oddly, when I went to Is It Down, when a blogger I know was down in May, it showed: “[URL] is not down. (it took me 0.02 seconds to check, if it is down for you, go shout at your IT support or ISP). BTW: The status code I got was 502, which means that there is something wrong with URL or site.” To me, that means the site is not working.

At least the first two sites will be, I’m afraid, quite useful in the future.

May rambling #1: The Case Against Reality

I had a terrible blogging April, but because I work ahead, it wasn’t always evident.

1965 edition of “Our New Age”[/caption]

The Case Against Reality. A professor of cognitive science argues that the world is nothing like the one we experience through our senses.

Song Of My Self-Help: Follow Walt Whitman’s ‘Manly Health’ Tips, appearing in the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review. It was uncovered by a University of Houston student, and includes: “The beard is a great sanitary protection to the throat.”

The Neverending Workday – A pervasive cultural norm of work devotion leaves many employees with little time for family, friends, or sleep.

In rural Maine, a life of solitude and larceny. Police say the hermit stole to survive 27 years in the woods.

What Would Happen If We Just Gave People Money?

After ‘The Biggest Loser,’ Their Bodies Fought to Regain Weight. “Contestants lost hundreds of pounds during Season 8, but gained them back. A study of their struggles helps explain why so many people fail to keep off the weight they lose.”

United Methodist Church Requires Removal of Reference to LGBTQI Christians from Worship Greetings, and, reported the next day, United Methodist clergy come out as church conference begins.

Transcending ignorance. Plus AmeriNZ weighs in, as does Funny or Die.

This isn’t just for me. It’s for everybody who needs a pep talk.

The smug style in American liberalism.

John Oliver: science reporting and Puerto Rico debt and cicadas.

Russian Insider Says State-Run Doping Fueled Olympic Gold.

Someone Put Bartolo Colon’s First Homer In The Natural, Where It Belongs.

Boston Globe: As great as David Ortiz is, Teddy Ballgame is still No. 1.

Free Comic Book Day isn’t free for everybody.

Morley Safer Stepping Down From ’60 Minutes’ After 46 Years.

President Obama delivered a commencement speech at Howard University.

WHCD: Barack Obama and Larry Wilmore. Plus An Obama Blooper Reel, from The White House Correspondents’ Association.

America operates under a crazy quilt of voting requirements, “with each state making its own laws for different populations and with challenges to those laws whipping back and forth through the courts. But if the primaries have frustrated the candidates, try being a voter in November.” Including New York.

Former NY State Assembly Speaker Sentenced to 12 Years in Prison. And former NY State Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos sentenced to five years for corruption. Those were two of the three most powerful people in state government, along with Governor Andrew Cuomo.

MUSIC

First Listen: Bob Dylan, ‘Fallen Angels’.

Great audio/visual presentation of Billboard Top 10 songs from 1956 – 2016 (22,000 songs!)

Jaquandor: Music to write swashbucklers by.

Happy birthday to Reverend Gary Davis (April 30, 1896 – May 5, 1972) and James Brown (May 3, 1933 – December 25, 2006).

K Chuck Radio: Rare tracks.

Return of the Monkees and remembering Harry the Hipster Gibson.

What Have I Done to Deserve This? – Pet Shop Boys, with Dusty Springfield.

What does Becky mean? Here’s the history behind Beyoncé’s ‘Lemonade’ lyric that sparked a firestorm. (And me, nearly oblivious to it all.)

Keef cartoon: Nina Simone.

Local legend Ruth Pelham to close Music Mobile. Lack of funds leads the musician to close her beloved program.

Minnesota’s Broad Publicity Rights Law, The PRINCE Act, Is So Broad That It May Violate Itself.

GOOGLE alerts (me)

TWC Question Time #36: I Love You, But… Moments from your favorite comics characters you consider particularly embarrassing.

Arthur on the blog balance. I too had a terrible blogging April, but because I work ahead, it wasn’t always as evident. So we may be Blogging Twins™.

Dustbury is blogging. Chaz is my blogging hero.

AmeriNZ on Kasich dropping out of the presidential race and the REAL May Day.

Shooting Parrots is a grammar nerd.

Ted Cruz solicits me; no, that doesn’t sound right…

I goose Jaquandor; it was not painful.

Eleven years of blogging

I have long suggested that blogging, for me, is some sort of therapy.

Eleven years of blogging? If I knew now what I knew then, I’d probably do it anyway.

A month and a half ago, Ken Levine wrote a post called The link between successful writers and mental illness. Yes, there is one.

Andreas Fink at the University of Graz in Austria… found a relationship between the ability to dream up ideas and the inability to turn off that function in the brain that is always thinking…

We writers are constantly making associations between external events and internal memories. Make it stop!

Another study claimed successful individuals were eight times more likely as “regular” people to suffer from a serious depressive illness…

Lots of successful scribes have battled with extreme depression. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Twain, Dickinson, Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neill – just pick any writer Woody Allen reveres.

The theory as to why there is rampant depression is the following: We think a lot, we’re often isolated, and we tend to be narcissists. And that’s for the good writers. Imagine how much worse it is for [crappy] writers.

I don’t know that I’m a good writer. I DO know that I suffer that function in the brain whereby, even in sleep, my mind is processing what I want to write. And when it’s the case that I don’t have time to do so, the brain, the mood, the temperament gets…skewed.

I have long suggested that blogging, for me, is some sort of therapy. You all are my public shrink. Well, maybe not, in as much as I started writing before anyone was looking. Perhaps you’re all part of my group therapy session?

Maybe seven times this past year, I reposted older material, including three of the four Black Comic Book posts (one’s still to come) that were SEVEN posts when I first wrote them. I imagine this year will be the same use of older material, more or less. When I hinted at doing this a couple years ago, a few of you feared that it would be too familiar. I trust that I’ve allayed that particular fear.

As you know, I often write ahead in my blog, but, because of annoying things, such as LIFE, the number of posts in the queue is down significantly, 36% from the peak. This means that one of these days, I’m going to wake up, realize I have no post prepared, and will scurry around looking for a picture of one of my cats.

In any case, today represents my 4,019th consecutive day of blogging, which surely PROVES a certain mental illness. I plan to continue to “lie on the couch” for at least another year.

What is the information?

When I could not blog the last week in December, my brain got overloaded with stuff I wanted to offload.

Mark Evanier noted an article about information:

Anne Pluta says that the trouble with Donald Trump voters is not that they are uninformed but that they are misinformed. Biggggg difference. Uninformed people just plain don’t know. Misinformed voters think they do but they’re wrong — and they’re usually determined to never admit it.

Then Alan David Doane pointed to Frank Santoro, who wrote:

I asked my editor and comics scholar, Dan Nadel, about this occasionally quoted sentiment of younger makers
towards older makers and he said, “Here’s the thing about ‘knowing your history’ (you can quote me): It’s soooo easy. It’s a short history, there’s less than like 50 essential works that would take you about a week to digest, and, y’know, if you’re ambitious as an artist in the sense that you care about making good art (as opposed to making books, making Twitter, making a persona etc. etc.), it’s useful to know what was done before you in the medium of your choice. Only in comics (seriously) can one find a streak of self-hatred so strong that people would proudly talk about not knowing the history of the medium.

I realized why ADD’s rant about Facebook, on Facebook, made sense to me. A lot of those misinformed, or deliberately uninformed, people seem to gravitate there. “I am trying to wrestle it to the ground and preserve its usefulness while eliminating as many annoyances and aggravations as possible.” At the same time, I get less the value of, as one of his friends noted, “like a good cocktail party. You want interesting, stimulating conversation and a wide range of opinions.”

Chuck points to something Pat Robertson said about David Bowie. Except he didn’t say it. (And if he had, who cares? But that’s another issue, about online OUTRAGE.)

Some people are just mean, usually trolls, which is why SamuraiFrog doesn’t allow anonymous comments on any of his social media. “Mean” is a kinder word than what I’m really thinking.

I posit that if there’s a story about a firefighter saving a cat from a tree, it’ll be attacked by trolls. Some will think government money shouldn’t be spent on such minor activity, someone else will suggest the tree was harmed, some dog owner will suggest preferential treatment for felines, a person will note that it was a white cat and ask whether a black cat would have gotten equal treatment, and yet another person will declare that there must have been a payoff by the evil cat lobby.

Plus Facebook is just a time suck. I don’t even comment as much because, even when pleasant, is a degree of back-and-forth I don’t seem to have available. Some people seemed to get ticked off with me when I haven’t caught all their latest news, much of which is some boring memes.

Beyond FB, there’s a LOT of social media I have joined, such as GoodReads and Pinterest, which I find benign at worst, but simply cannot fit into the calendar. Those things that reward you for writing on your blog every day: I do the writing, but can’t be bothered to let “them” know.

But the blog stays. When I could not blog the last week in December, my brain got overloaded with stuff I wanted to offload. And it is, as as Arthur notes, an aid to memory. My memory. It is an information resource for ME. And, optimally, you too.
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The Novel is Dead, Celebrity is a Disease, and More