davextreme

blogger

I'm playing with blogger. Not sure I'll stick with it, but if I do I'll redirect the domain name there. For now the Feedburner feed is pointing there.

• Web site: http://davextreme.blogspot.com/
• RSS feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/davextreme

Laziness and the Decline of Blogging

I won't argue that Blogging is dying, but it seems that people have moved on. Twitter's 140 characters (or Facebook's 160) seem to give most people enough space to say one single thought, and often I'd rather read one thought quickly spelled out than the same thing stretched to three paragraphs. More, I think the allure of "I can have my own website and people can read what I write!" has long since worn off. Turns out that publishing stuff people might actually want to read was hard work all along. And if you were blogging to be able to communicate with friends, there are better tools for doing that now that "social networks" exist in wider forms. LiveJournal did it early and well, but at least for me that need to stay in daily contact with my friends like I was in college has faded as adulthood has, sadly, reduced too many conversations to "so how's it going at work" and talk of mortgages. But that's growing up, I guess.

Anyway, I'm a bit surprised to see that I've actually published nine entries here this year. That's three a month, which is almost weekly. It's not that I haven't had things to say, but somehow they just don't end up being blog posts. Often I think of something but quickly find someone else has written the same thing on his own website, so I just link to it and add a brief comment. Or I distill the thought down to a few sentences and move on. Does the world need one more person saying the same thing on yet another blog? Maybe, if they're adding something useful to the discussion, but often not if they're being a parrot and adding to the noise. I just know I haven't had the motivation lately. And sadly, much as I like the TypePad platform, and even with my lifetime 20% launch discount, it's becoming harder to justify paying to host a site when Blogger can hold one less-than-weekly post for free.

A more productive use of words might be old-fashioned messageboards. Build up your community, whether it's real life friends or people interested in your hobby, and post and get responses. Mostly that's what blog engines are, except they underpower the discussion part where messageboards underpower the ability to find and categorize older posts.

Rather than disprove the above statement that I've lost the motivation to articulate myself in writing by providing sound reason, I'll stop here for now, briefly pausing to copy edit the above. but likely still missing some mistakes.

Edit: just noticed the title I originally wrote. "Laziness and the Decline of Blogging"? Who did I think I was 15 minutes ago when I wrote that? Like I was about to author the definitive treatise on why "blogging" was in decline.

New Avengers 49

If you were looking for justification for both why decompressed storytelling in comics has worn out its welcome and why Marvel's just ripping you off at this point by increasing their cover price, look no further than New Avengers 49. That's Brian Michael Bendis trying to recreate a cinematic zoom, and in the process spending three pages to show three panels' worth of action. It could have been a panel where Jarvis is shot, a panel where Luke looks through the hole the bullet came from, and panel where Bullseye is shown as the shooter. Instead, you get a panel of Luke looking out eh window, the same shot from another angle, seven panels showing the same thing, then a full page showing Bullseye. I used to love Bendis's stories and ritually bought everything he wrote. Now I'm glad I've stopped. I'll just wait for Powers trades¹.

1. Okay, I still love Ultimate Spider-Man.

Google iPhone Sync

I've played around with Google's new sync services for a few days now, and mostly it works well. Since I use Google Apps instead of regular Gmail I had to go into my administrator panel and turn it on first, then reload the mobile page a few times to get it to work. I've found three problems so far, two of which I've solved.

1. Junk contacts from Gmail. When I synced I had a lot of people in my list I didn't want. I did some pruning and this is fine now, but even when you tell it not so Gmail likes to add contacts on its own, so we'll see how that plays out long term.
2. When you enable over-the-air syncing on your phone, iTunes no longer syncs back to your computer's iCal and Address Book. For iCal, you can use their CalDav support to get iCal to sync up on its own. My calendar needs are pretty simple so this works fine for me, but BusySync is I'm told a good utility for improving this.
3. What I can't figure out how to do is keep Address Book on my Mac updated. iTunes doesn't pull that data down from the phone anymore, so I'll be left having to remember when I type a new address or phone number in my phone to also do it on my computer.

So basically I'm left with less than what I had before. I can use iCal and Google Calendar, but I could do that before with CalDAV. Now my Google Contacts stay up-to-date, but Gmail already knows people's email addresses, and for anything else my phone is where I need them.

Bunny

The Web certainly doesn't need another post about how good The Wire is, but here's a small moment I keep thinking about. Early in season three (Netflix is sending season four today), we meet Major Colvin. He's chewing out two new police officers for not being able to properly identify their precise location. To do their jobs, they need to be able to radio exactly where they are to other officers. They get out of the meeting and the other officers make fun of them, revealing that every new recruit gets the same speech.

Flash forward half a dozen episodes. Colvin comes into the major crimes unit HQ, sees McNulty, and asks, "Where you at?" McNulty immediately rattles off the address of the building he's currently standing in, what floor he's on, and what corner (southwest, etc). Without telling us explicitly, the writers are showing us that McNulty was once an officer in Colvin's district, was under his command, and learned this skill from him (and many others, one immediately concludes). We see how he's been an effective leader who gives the cops he's worked with skills they take into the rest of their careers. All in one short sentence.

(Full disclosure: Katherine got this before I did.)

PADD

(I've deleted and started this post over five times now. For some reason I can't put words together about this topic I'm happy with.)

The Kindle 2 doesn't appeal to much more than the Kindle did. Though I can see some uses for e-readers, and there are good arguments for their advantages, especially in saving printing and distributions costs for publishers, I really like reading novels.

What I'd like is not a book reader but a magazine reader. I actually feel guilty reading newspapers and magazines because I'll often only read a few articles. I look at all that paper that was printed for my to read just a small percentage of the words. Sure, most of the articles are online, but the Web isn't a great place to read newspapers or magazines. You get a column of text with maybe some embedded photos. None of the nice layout you get on the real deal. You often don't get the sidebars or inset graphs, or if you do, they're squeezed into what the Web can do.

I'd like to see a device with some size to it, maybe 7"x10" or so with a color screen that can display a full page of magazine text. Give it pinch-to-zoom like the iPhone has for smaller text, and a sensor to let it flip to landscape for double-page spreads. Then you just need a subscription service (I think the Kindle already has this) where you can pull down each new edition of a publication when it comes out. Ditto for comic books. Lots of time is being spent trying to replicate comics on the Web, but reading tiny lettered text on a computer monitor feels unnatural. On a handheld device I think it'd work very nicely.

In other words, someone please invent this.

Groudhog Day

I guess really it could have been any day. Groundhog Day doesn't have to be about February 2, does it? Yet it works so well, and embiggens an otherwise strange, strange holiday. So, appropos of both the day and the film, we reconsider just how long Phil Conners was stuck repeating the same 2/2 over and over again.

1. A short article with some words from the filmmakers on the matter.
2. A look at some of the events in the movie and how long they seem to point to him being there.

I would point out that learning to play the piano requires muscle memory, which wouldn't carry over from day-to-day for Phil. I don't think you could play the piano with just the know-how and no muscle memory, but it's a small gripe.

Morrison on Obama

Short update on the post from the other day. Apparently the scene was inspired by President Obama's speech during the campaign at the Alfred E. Smith dinner. Writer Grant Morrison told Scotland's Daily Record:

I wanted to do something special for the last part of this huge comic book series. As I was writing it, I heard Obama making a joke about being born on the planet Krypton and being sent to Earth by his father Jor-El to save the world. I thought it would be a fitting end to all the darkness in America recently. All the comics have been dealing with darkness recently and, having defeated evil, it's now time to celebrate.

Worked out great for the story that he won I guess.

Vathlo Prime

Sort of an amusing confluence of events:

1. DC decides to do a political story called DCU: Decisions around election season featuring its characters choosing sides in the race. Except they use fictional candidates, and the story is poorly drawn and written. No one cares.
2. Marvel decides to do a Spider-Man issue that features Barack Obama in a 5-page back-up story of serviceable writing and art quality. It's a huge, sellout success. (Despite that they botched the covers, releasing the Obama cover as a rare variant, which most customers don't understand. Still, big success. The second and third printings feature Obama on all the covers. Last night when I was in my comic book store someone came in and bought three copies. The clerk then failed to bother to upsell him on anything, thereby squandering a great chance to sell him something else for himself or his kids that might turn them into regular customers.)
3. At the same time, Marvel bets on the wrong horse in the actual election, having Norman Orsborn, a big-time villain, take over the operations of SHIELD and generally staying with the tone of the Bush administration where we can't trust our government. No hope to be found.
4. DC releases a book that was supposed to come out in December, but due to artistic delays only just came out this week, eight days after President Obama's innauguration. It features an alternate-Earth black president who's also Superman¹.

How did both companies manage to both hit and miss here?

¹ DC actually once published a story about Vathlo Island, a nation on Krypton that featured dark-skinned Kryptonians. Morrison here is taking this fairly embarrassing part of DC's history and turning it around, imagining a world where a Vathlo citizen sent his only son to Earth instead of Jor-El².

² Jor-El lived in the city "Kryptonopolis".

Minus

My dose of surreality today (well, until I go home and read Final Crisis 6) was reading through the archive of Garfield Minus Garfield. Here are a few that really jumped out at me, organized by categories I just made up:

Hilarious Non-Sequitors:

• Shades
• Earmuffs
• Rice

Jon is Depressed:

• Beach
• Telephones Don't Care
• Goodnight Kiss
• Kimmy

Logic Puzzles:

• Missing Hat
• Plunger
• Arrow

Jon Goes Insane:

• Ice Cream Cone
• Sink

Jon is in Mortal Peril:

• Poison
• Frozen Chicken

Jon Made a Bad Purchase:

• Shoes
• Pants