I apologize; this has become very, very long and very, very disorganized. Sloppy braindump, but hopefully some jumping-off points here.

First I think there are some important terms you need to make less vague. This might begin with identifying the things you read on the internet (or in life in general) that you feel *do* give you some “tangible benefit.” Are all Twitter messages worthless? Why do you subscribe to that person specifically? Are his tweets sometimes poetic, prosaically clever, or otherwise mentally engaging? Does he sometimes link to news or products or services that you wouldn’t have otherwise heard about, things that then *do* provide “tangible benefit”? Is it your fault for subscribing, or is it his fault for providing worthless content? What about his real-life friends who follow him, won’t that tweet be of interest to them? As a figure in the public eye, then, should he be required to have two Twitter accounts, a professional and a personal one? What will you lose by unsubscribing from him entirely? Can the things of value that he does provide be found anywhere else on the internet? Reddit? Metafilter? TechCrunch? Delicious?

On the other hand, didn’t that tweet of his in fact provide value, since it is one of the things that prompted you to think about this problem and write a Tumblr post about the subject?

What qualities does a media item need to possess in order to provide you with value? Are things not worth doing if they don’t alter the way you think or behave in the future? Do things need to be valuable for longer than the time you experience them? If so, you might start with a braindump of all the things you can remember that did change your life for the better, to begin to identify the qualities that make these things unique, as well as what channels you received them from.

Where does humor stand in all this? Do humorous things, even the most humorous, permanently or even temporarily change how you think and behave, beyond the time that you are experiencing them? Is value gotten from re-telling a joke to a friend? From watching a funny movie or TV show with a friend? If so, is it because this involves relating personally, in real-life? If yes, why is meatspace interaction more valuable than internet interaction? Is it at all?

Consider this: In November of 2007, I went to London for a week. By myself. I’d never been outside of North America, and I found myself with some money, and decided it would be worthwhile. I deliberately did not construct an itinerary so that I didn’t feel dictated or obligated to see anything specific. I just wanted to be there, for a week, walking around, relaxing, reading, stopping into pubs, and taking photos.

What did that do to me? Anything of value? Frankly and truthfully, I don’t know. I know that I enjoyed it while it happened. But am I different person for it? Should I have spent the money on some class instead? If so, *why*?

I wonder if the problem is that we *think* there’s a problem. We are now, on the internet, haunted by opportunity cost, and feel more pressed to be doing something valuable than I believe we would if we didn’t have so much information available to us. Why does this change things? If a person enjoys playing backgammon, and another person enjoys watching YTMND animations, why is one person better off than the other? Backgammon doesn’t make you a better person. Yet somehow it feels more wholesome or valuable, doesn’t it? Is it the meatspace thing again? Or do we need to reconsider that maybe backgammon is worthless? What about kite flying? Kite flying is an enormous waste of time!

I suppose that kite flying has the probability of providing you with memories of being with a friend or friends, something you can look back on fondly, while you will never look back fondly on reading Twitter. Or will you?

I’m reminded of this Cat and Girl comic: http://catandgirl.com/?p=283

I read Cat and Girl every morning. As well as Overcompensating, Scary Go Round, Achewood, and xkcd. Why? Why do I read them? Are they a waste of time? I was fortunately able to remember this particular Cat and Girl, as it is relevant to this discussion, but what about all the ones that I don’t remember, or that don’t ever get linked by me in an email? What about xkcd? Is xkcd at least a small portion of the reason I switched to Ubuntu? Probably. What good is that? I get far less done in Ubuntu than in Windows because it is foreign to me, but I enjoy the challenge and the open-source philosophy. Is that worthwhile? Will the things I’m learning about Linux ever provide me with value outside of using Ubuntu? Should I care about that? Why can’t I just enjoy it for the sake of enjoying it?

I find myself unable to read long articles on the internet anymore. I have so many starred items in Google Reader that I don’t want to think about it. Not to mention my “readlater” tag on Delicious. The internet has become to me what TV is to so many people. It’s just the default thing I go to when I don’t know what to do. Or out of habit. 99% of the time I’m at my computer, it’s because I just sat down there, opened Firefox, clicked my Gmail and Google Reader bookmarks, and then clicked around until there was nothing new to stimulate me. Can’t be bothered to go through my starred Google Reader items and actually sit and read one. Why not?: Because there are too many! Which one should I read, *and why*? Opportunity cost.

Maybe here’s the trouble: We have too many queues.

Have you ever fantasized about your hard drive crashing? Or your Google Reader data being lost? I have. In 2003 my laptop was stolen. It was so refreshing! Meanwhile I have copies of most Daily Show episodes from the last three years, because I used to torrent all of them. Why can’t I delete them? Why do I keep “burn Daily Shows to DVDs” on my mental to-do list? Get rid of that shit fer chrissake!!

Have you ever considered how you might go about taking your life offline? How that might look? Writing letters and making phone calls instead of emails and tweets and Facebook statuses; maybe even a REAL phone at home so that you can’t be bothered at any minute of any day, and you can speak with friends with the luxury of a big, comfortable handset against your ear? No danger of being disconnected? Learning about new music from Magnet and Fader and The Wire, buying the music that sounds interesting in them, or on their sampler CDs? Reading articles in Wired and The Economist rather than wired.com and Slate? Subscribing to The New York Times? Lying on your carpet listening to records without having to check their Last.fm, Wikipedia, and MySpace pages?

As you think about living like that, think: What on the internet is TRULY irreplaceable? I sent this valentine to somebody last week: http://www.presentandcorrect.com/item.php?item_id=195 I only knew about it because I had a subscription to ilike.org.uk in Google Reader. ilike is a blog that mostly posts pretty pictures of retro British architecture. What do I get from it most of the time? Nothing, other than the opportunity to see pretty things. But when that valentine was linked to on the blog, it affected my “real,” meatspace life, even a real meatspace relationship. What would I have sent if I hadn’t learned about it? Does this alone conclusively demonstrate that my subscription to ilike is valuable? Or does it do more harm than good? How much time do I *really* waste passing over its more boring posts in Reader’s list view? I subscribe to a lot of typography blogs too, just because I like typography. Isn’t it ok to just *like* typography, just because I like it?

I just began reading a book from 1978 or so called “Four Arguments for the ELIMINATION of Television,” which argues that the medium itself is beyond reform. As I read it, I try to imagine that the author is talking about the internet, to see whether his case applies here, too. He describes what it feels like to hear a news report of some violence in a distant continent, followed by the sports scores and a commercial for laundry detergent. This experience robs the important story of any reality it might have otherwise had. It is compartmentalized, contained, requiring no more thought than it took to hear about it. Isn’t this even *more* true on the internet, when every page has dozens and dozens of hyperlinks that are clamoring to interrupt you?

Or is *all of this* just backwards, nostalgic, techno-apocalyptic thinking? People once argued centuries ago that the PRINTING PRESS, *the god damn PRINTING PRESS*, would dumb people down. And, later, that *typewriters* would turn people into bad writers. Is this the same thing? Or is the internet so profoundly different in the way that it manipulates our attention that we do need to worry about it?

Also important to consider: Is the content itself the problem, or is it the way we relate to the content that is the problem? And how are these two things related? Is dicking around in Google Reader ok if I set aside an hour to do it in each night, with a beer or a cup of tea and some music playing? Rather than just clicking bookmarks like a rat with his paw on the cocaine button?

An article I read some time ago that I think of occasionally. It’s ostensibly about “email addiction,” but really relates to a lot of the ways we interact with the ’net.

http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2006/09/why_email_is_addicti.html

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.