Tag: blogisms

I’m not the only one who counts everything

I was reassured to read Ken Jennings blog entry this afternoon where he mentions that he has had at least one blog entry for 74 consecutive days, which matches his streak on Jeopardy!. He has decided not to do a blog entry tomorrow out a respect for the day he lost. Then it’s back to blogging. But see, he counts ’em too!

For the record, this is my 240th consecutive day without missing a blog entry. It is also my 790th individual entry (divide by x, carry the one, and that makes for an average of 3.29 blog entries per day.)

Style change

So you may have notice I have (temporarily?) changed the style of this blog. Up until now, I’d been using the Bloggish style (S2) which I really liked. However, when I came in this morning, I noticed that the layering was not working properly. I assume that someone edited the underlying style and screwed something up, although I’m surprised that such an edit would impact blogs already using the style (one would think that all of the styles would be copied locally). In any event, until I can figure out how to fix the problem (or until it fixes itself, I’ve changed the style that I am using to the Flexible Squares, which I have seen in other blogs (in particular, shunn‘s blog), and which has grown on me. Once I have time to figure out what the problem is, I’ll switch back. Maybe.

Other random blogs

I’ve just spend the last 30 minutes or so reading through the most recent posts to LiveJournal to see what random people write in their blogs. It was a depressing 30 minutes. Keep in mind that my blog is a replacement for a diary that I have kept for nearly 10 years now. My diary has always been more of a social journal and never one of those cliche introspective things. I never write down anything that I wouldn’t care someone else read.

Anyway, I skimmed through a few hundred blog entries that had been posted in the last minute or so and I have decided that in most cases, blog entries fit into one of the following categories:

1. Teen angst and/or adult depression
There are a lot of depressed people out there and they all seem to feel the need to tell the world about it in their blogs. I wonder if there is some kind of correlation; depression -> blogging or vice versa.

2. Poetry
Regardless of mood, everyone seems to be a poet. There is a ton of poetry out there. Unfortunately, most of it is free verse, which I don’t like. I like poems with rules you have to follow, you know, meter and rhyme and scansion, etc. The poetry that people post to their blogs reads more like a mind-dump than anything else.

3. Long meaningless survey questions and their responses
Many people seem compelled to copy surveys that someone emails them and paste the questions, and their answers into their blogs. The questions are supposed to draw out answers that allow others to learn something about the person. Unfortunately, answers to questions (like: “sex before marraige?”) are often things like: “hehehe”. If that’s an SAT word, it’s one with which I am not familiar.

4. Psychotherapy sessions
Lots of talk about moods (see depression above) and medications. Also includes obvious teens complaining about their parents.

5. X-bashing
There seems to be a fair amount of this going on, often with lots and lots of profanity.

Maybe I shouldn’t be critical of other people’s blogs, after all mine is nothing to write home about. But then again, mine is like a reference book for me, so that I know when I did X or who I was with when I did Y. With an occasional rant here and there.