• Short posts: Despite my best efforts to resist it, there’s a draw to the instant gratification that services like Twitter and Tumblr provide. Sometimes I do want to say something short and trivial, without having to figure out how to tag or categorize or even title the post. I feel a little more guilty clogging up my WordPress database with stuff like this, for fear that these types of posts will far outnumber the longer ones. A workable solution might be to create a separate category for these types of posts, and hiding them from the normal “flow” that appears on the front page, in the “Previous” and “Next” links on single post pages, and in search/date/tag/category archives. This solution seems a little sloppy and ad hoc, however; no matter how much I try to hide it, the fact remains that these will be posts, strictly speaking in WordPress parlance. Even if I’m able to integrate this solution into the current design, if I create enough of these trivial posts, I’ll have to consider how to present them with every redesign in the future. I suppose that only means that these obstacles aren’t theoretical — their solutions just require more work than I’d like.
• Socialization: Although my “arbitrary comments” idea was short-lived (and has been pending a resurrection for a while now), I think I was onto something with it. One of the draws of Facebook is that everything is right there — its news feed can be a source of constant entertainment; every photo, every comment, every status update, no matter how trivial, is in there. This is how people spend all day on there. In theory, this activity doesn’t require a central hub like Facebook. Thanks to RSS/Atom, anybody can, with enough work, make their privately-hosted site just as social. The problem is that this isn’t currently easily implemented; sure, there’s FriendFeed, which can provide you with a widget to embed in your WordPress theme, but this relies unnecessarily on a centralized service. XFN was supposed to have solved this problem a long time ago, but little to no progress is being made with this technology. The Meet Your Commenters plugin for WordPress actually offers a glimpse of how things can so easily take advantage of XFN; it lists all the known homes of everyone who’s commented on your blog with a URL, via the rel=”me” attribute. From there it wouldn’t be difficult to scrape every one of each user’s available RSS/Atom feeds, from Blogger to Flickr to Twitter and everything in between — not to mention all their friends and their friends’ feeds. I should be able to effortlessly add a Facebook-esque news feed to my front page, but in order to do this at present, I’d need to hack around with Google Reader, Yahoo! Pipes, and/or Magpie RSS. It just shouldn’t be that hard. Yes, anybody can add any number of feeds from this blog into their Google Reader, but I’m not so sure they do. Even if they did, it wouldn’t provide the same user experience that Facebook does; they’d have to log in to Google Reader to see what I’m up to, and log in to Facebook to see what everyone else they know is up to. On top of that, even offering a link to my feeds feels presumptuous, while hosting my content at Twitter, which asks people to “follow me,” doesn’t. In the latter case, it’s Twitter who’s suggesting that my content might be interesting. Not me. They do the dirty work of promoting me. In short, there’s no easy way to be “friends” with a self-hosted WordPress blog, with all the implications that being “friends” means on social networks. This should not be the case. This subject really deserves its own post.
• Media: The JW FLV Player is really versatile and indispensable, and I use it a lot. Still, I’d much prefer to just upload raw AVI files and have WordPress convert them to FLV and generate thumbnails and embed code. There’s a solution for WordPress MU installs called WordPress Video Solution Framework, but (a) I don’t have MU, and (b) it requires a lot of server-side configuration that I’m not sure I can even implement with my shoddy GoDaddy account. Other plugins exist, but a lot of them rely on WordPress’ shortcode, which I’m just not comfortable with in terms of forwards-compatibility. What if development on a given shortcode plugin halts, or I move to some platform other than WordPress? Suddenly I have dozens of posts that once contained video, but that now just have [flv url:/stuff/asdf.flv] in them or whatever. Why do these plugins think we’re so afraid of code? Just generate the valid code and put it into the post window for me. I promise it won’t confuse me.

I’d also like to get the CSS cleaned up a lot so that the design can be more modular, in a way. Change color schemes quickly and easily, for instance. Maybe it could even support widgets.

I was working for months on a graphical overhaul of the last design, when I realized that the whole thing was actually pretty uncomfortable to read. And that my graphic art skills are lamentable. It was also preventing me from ever posting, because the newest post was always displayed prominently on the front page, although everybody who reads this thing gets here from Google.

Do blogs even need front pages anymore? What for? Anybody who would revisit a site to check for new content just subscribes to the feed instead. And if you navigate to the front page after reading a specific post from a Google search, what good does it do you to be presented with the 8 latest posts, all in a giant column several thousand pixels tall or more? I’ve increasingly avoided writing front pages like that, in favor of something that can fit in a single window, more or less, with content that isn’t just limited to most recent posts.

The focus of this design was readability and, to some extent, flexibility. It should allow me to post a lot more than I usually do, and about more things. I’ve always tried to avoid letting this become a links blog, which may change slightly. I shouldn’t be afraid of writing a post that’s less than 200 words, for instance. And a Delicious feed couldn’t hurt. And because people are here for such different reasons — some need advice on FFmpeg, some are close friends — I want to make tag and category subscriptions easier and the front page more dynamic and interactive, with a shoutbox and maybe with Matt Mullenweg’s community tagging, provided that I start posting more photos, which of course requires taking more in the first place.

As long as I’m talking, I just bought an Acer Aspire One, the white kind with an 8GB solid-state hard drive and Linux. It weighs two god damn pounds, and will be a real breath of fresh air after having lugged around my 7-pound Compaq for five years. I just pulled the trigger on it, I hope I like it once it arrives Tuesday. Everything I’ve read about it has been positive, so I’m sure I will. I plan to replace its little baby Linux with Ubuntu, so we’ll see how smoothly that goes, although I don’t really plan on using it for anything other than Firefox.

I suppose traditionally that’s what the blog format is meant for, to just kind of shit out everything you consume in the form of links and video embeds. But really that’s more like just “taking notes” at a lecture with a cassette recorder, see what I mean? That’s just transcription. I need something to do with it all. This problem is addressed to some extent by my meticulous music library curation with foobar, and my desperate calls recently for somebody to improve on the way we manage our music.

I think a prevailing problem is that of linearity; I can write a post on here, then another post, then another, and they appear chronologically in a line. Tagging and categorizing helps to make the content on here a little less linear, but it’s still not satisfying enough. I mean what I want is to be able to have some very loose, scrapbook-y interface where I can just kind of swim through collages of things: albums, journal entries. Snapshots of various aspects of certain time-periods. Paper is free-form enough to serve a purpose like this, but notebooks aren’t searchable or easily rearrangeable, and aren’t as ubiquitous as the web.

I actually am working on a new category in here that will present entries a little differently, to accommodate the kind of note-taking that I’m talking about, but even that’s too manual. Why can’t I, for instance, while listening to a D+ album in foobar, click something that will allow me to leave a note on it? The note will be linked to the album, to the song, to the artist, and to today’s date. Later that note will turn up in searches, and whenever I focus on this song/album/artist again. There are a couple solutions for this but all of them are inelegant.

It’s almost as though this whole paradigm of nodes needs to be re-thought. Nodes don’t adequately mimic the way we think, our brains aren’t that compartmentalized. When we are consciously focused on one thing, our attention is also inadvertently directed towards related things. For instance, when you think of an apple, you’re not likely thinking only of the qualities of an apple; a small if undetectable part of you is thinking about Snow White, thinking about Genesis, thinking about pears. And when does something like an apple evolve from a confluence of impressions — their taste, their color, their shape — into something as “node”-like as “an apple”? Is an apple categorized as “fruit” (which is itself a subcategory of “food”), and tagged as “crunchy,” “juicy,” “sweet,” etc.? Not exactly. And not to mention “an apple”’s faint associations with every experience you’ve had with one. Should those experiences be tagged “involved:apple”?

Simply put I guess it’s just a problem of memory. When I listen to an album for the first time, for instance, I never want to forget when I listened to it and what I thought of it. Yet I think it happens more often than not that when I listen to something, I forget sooner than later what I thought of it, or even that I listened to it at all.

A real-world example: I downloaded the new Evangelicals record some months ago. I listened to it once, and from what I can remember, I liked it a fair amount. But I never touched it again. I forgot they existed.

When they opened for Frog Eyes months later, I barely recognized the name. I seriously believed that I had only heard their name, but didn’t have a clue what they sounded like. It wasn’t until I was at the bar ordering a drink overhearing them play “Another Day” that it clicked. Since then I’ve listened to the album half a dozen or more times and found that I really enjoy it.

So, that’s a problem. What’s the solution?

I suppose I could have rated some of their songs when I first heard them. Looking at them now in my foobar, I see that “Another Day” is tagged with 4/5 stars. But when did I do that? I don’t know! I shouldn’t have to worry about these things.

What about a world in which, on some day a couple weeks after I first heard that record, I opened my media player and it presented me with that album, as if to ask me, “Hey, you listened to this album for the first time a few weeks ago, right after you downloaded it. You didn’t rate it; what did you think of it? Want to listen to it now to remind yourself?” It’s not that far-fetched an idea. But, again: media players are largely just spreadsheets.

What about all those movies I see thanks to Netflix? What happens to them years after I watch them? It’s as though I didn’t watch some of them at all. I remember seeing Alphaville sometime in 2005, for instance, but other than some vague imagery I’ve retained, I have no idea what that movie was like. Should I have written myself a short review of it after I watched it? Where would I have put it? What is the proper receptacle for that?

Somehow I’ve been trained to think that I should be not only capable of, but in fact actively thinking about everything I’ve experienced all the time. That’s sick, isn’t it? Is that a product of the internet? Over-stimulation? Is perfect recall too much to ask?

This already exists in the form of a third-party plugin, which I’ve actually used successfully before on another blog. I’ve always found upgrading manually to be easy and problem-free, though incredibly tedious. Because I don’t use many plugins or alter any core WordPress files, I think automating the process will be a safe option for me, one that I’ll trust more in the hands of the core development team. Still, I’m sure I’ll wait till it’s been thoroughly tested in a couple versions before using it on this site.

Weeks are flying. I have to stop and remind myself that the summer is technically only a third complete. I am wasting my time drinking sparkling-grapefruit-juice-based cocktails, riding my bike places to buy more sparkling grapefruit juice, and reading a lot about Ghost Box. The label had a feature article in an old copy of The Wire magazine that I once bought because it had Joanna Newsom on the cover. I think I threw it out in March, just before I moved, so I had to order another copy, as well as spend as much as I could afford on the Ghost Box releases most likely to go out of print next. I envy this guy:

I hope that when I turn 30 my taste in music doesn’t become depressingly banal. It probably will. Self-described geek bloggers/Mac disciples always gravitate towards the most inoffensive “indie rock” there is.

Ugh, and I hope I never ever turn into a “witty blogger,” that demographic makes me nauseous, one of those Hold Steady-listening, Colbert-worshipping, Pixar-loving, Guitar Hero-boasting, identity-cultivating, opinion-spewing, lowbrow-championing, tweet-twittering, Kottke-wannabeing, Peter Pan complex-having man-children who are only capable of making cheekily self-deprecating jokes about their own narcissism and who like name their iPhones and shit and say “FTW” and “[adj.]. [noun]. Ever” and “the Intertubes,” circle-jerking all over the blogosphere OH MAN DIE.

It’s like this anonymity through adopting a singular voice, that same tone, those same interests; half the blogs on Technorati, it’s that same picture-in-the-corner, “The personal weblog of,” “Random thoughts from a geeky guy,” everybody wants to need a soapbox but nobody needs one. I’m guilty of it too because it infects you, that tone, cadence, inflection, the way you write when you know anybody might be reading what you write, the suffocating stiltedness of it. Your audience isn’t your friends, and it isn’t the populace at large, so it’s this midpoint between the personal and the impersonal, with that safe, dry humor that just makes you look like a twat. Being proud of every nuance of the personality you’re trying to manufacture through associations with pop-culture signifiers. Somebody please know what I’m talking about. From now on I promise to be absolutely humorless, so there are you happy.

Click the image for the full photo montage.

I first encountered this last year on WFMU’s blog, and despite being curious of its origins, the internet has trained me to accept content without context. Funny pictures, drunk pig, pass it on. Neither the WFMU post, nor the blog they got it from even ask where this came from. But who cares — find it, blog about it, Digg it, make a YTMND about it, a YouTube spinoff, and move on to the next meme.

But there’s something clearly artistic about these images. They’re too perfect. And they depict such a caricatured past that you suspect they may have been taken recently. And, as noted in the comments that I didn’t bother to read until today, they were.

They’re stills from a 2005 Russian mockumentary called Pervye na lune, or First on the Moon, which actually looks good, its premise approaching what you might have expected if you speculated enough about the intent of those photos. From the film’s official site, as translated by Google:

You can argue long, the Americans were on the Moon or not, but there are facts that prove convincingly : Soviet scientists were able to run the first aircraft into space as early as March 1938. Information more than convincing, and at this time Russian cosmonauts ahead of the Americans …

It’s not on Netflix yet, but I hear it’s on Karagarga, the invite-only avant-garde film torrent tracker, which means it may soon make it to art torrents or gpod. There are also several copies on eBay, but I can’t be sure they have subtitles, or are even compatible with American DVD players.

Read more about it:

• Wikipedia
• IMDb
• Первые на Луне
• european-films.net
• Megan Case
• The Accidental Russophile

All I did was create a “Page” (a technical WordPress term) called Arbitrary Comments, then, in the sidebar, call that page and load its comments with these simple lines:

<?php query_posts('page_id=120'); ?>
<?php the_post(); ?>
<?php comments_template(); ?>

I also implemented a PHP trick from Libertà to sort the retrieved comments in descending order of creation, as all good shoutboxes do.

Shoutboxes are an interesting new medium. And they really are new, I mean, nothing like them has ever really existed in the past. A comment in a shoutbox is a message that is ostensibly addressed to the owner of the shoutbox, but is intentionally public. The closest thing to this that I can think of are those dry erase boards people put on their doors in college, with a pen hanging from them so that anybody walking by could write something. Bystanders aren’t exactly part of the audience of the message, but there’s clearly something more compelling to this than email or private messaging.

It’s certainly one of the biggest draws of MySpace. Their commenting system makes every profile organic, alive, interactive. People attract comments more often than they update their profile themselves, and that’s one of the main reasons to check people’s profiles, which is about all you really do on MySpace. And there’s something more friend-like in opening up your personal page to the impulses of those people you’ve told MySpace are your “friends,” extending trust in the mutual creation of a page that is intended to define you.

I remember trying out Vox a couple months ago, which seems to market itself as something like MySpace with a heavier focus on blogging. I thought it would be perfect, but I soon realized that, at this point, unless your social networking site allows arbitrary comments, you’re not using a social networking site — you’re using a blogging site with tenuous little connections between members. And nobody cares about your fucking blog.

And now I’m reminded of the time during the World Cup that they said this:

I don’t even know what the FIFA World Cup is. I’m guessing it’s soccer, which I hate just as much as any other pro sport. Every editor at Boing Boing detests professional sports, and we would sooner stream a video of a crumpled up paper napkin in the corner of a room than show some jackasses running after a ball. The only time we would ever post anything about pro-sports would be to make fun of them.

Are you so self-righteous that you think we care about how much you hate sports, while at the same time you worship all things Disney fer chrissake?

And why do you force your readers to use Google to search your site, yielding unorganized heaps of results? And why do you force your readers to blog about you in Technorati-registered blogs in order to “comment” on your posts?

I’ve had enough, I’ll just have to get by without that weekly interesting post about a glowing fish or something.

I should have known I’m not alone.