Blogging is dead, long live blogging

I find it interesting how much blogging has changed over the last 6 or 7 years.

I think the “dear-diary”-style narcissistic blogging of the LiveJournal variety– publicly venting personal inner dialogue (um, like this blog for example)–, is dead. Nobody wants to read that shit anymore.

But what’s taken the world by storm, is the “Citizen Journalist” and “Town Meeting” style of blogging– like DailyKos. Millions of comments, hundreds of thousands of members, it’s impressive.

Blogging has grown up from being a purely ecocentric, individualistic expression, to being a form of civic discourse, information exchange, activism, and force for social change.

Ironically, I’m going in the opposite direction, and it’s fine with me to be going somewhere that everyone else is leaving.

I haven’t done much with individual expression and have instead spent a lot of time on political blogs in the civic square. I’ve had enough of that, and now I’m more interested in ranting about my own personal thoughts.

Managing expectations

One of the more annoying tasks I have to deal with, is managing people’s expectations.

I always make a point of warning people, ahead of time, that I suck.

I have learned to do this through a lifetime of hard experience. I also have learned to play it a lot cooler when starting any new thing.

The problem is that I tend to enjoy learning new things and jumping into totally new fields. I can hide my enthusiasm for a little while but not too long. After a while it comes through. And then, despite all my warnings, people decide that I’m much better than I am. They mistake enthusiasm for comptence, or even aptitude, when I have neither. As soon as I start to get a clue what I’m doing, the inevitable disaster is set to follow. Because then everyone’s expectations start to rise. Even though I told them I couldn’t meet them.

And then, finally, every time, the awful moment eventually comes when they realize, hey, this guy sucks. He has no idea what he’s doing. He shouldn’t be doing this. He’s totally wrong for this. What were we thinking?

It annoys me every time this happens, because, I warned them. I suck. I’m not meant for this. I can’t really do this; I’m just faking it because I happen to be good at faking it. And I told everyone I was faking it. But every time they are surprised. Stop being surprised! And don’t dare be disappointed either. I told you I suck.

Ahead of their time

One of the nice side-effects of the world moving so fast, is that if you’re the kind of person who tends to be way ahead of their time, a fast-moving world presents the chance that your “time” may come while you are still alive, and even young enough to enjoy it and benefit from it.

The dollar is dead

The dollar is dead. The American Century is so over.

I wanted to order a t-shirt from a great European nu-jazz band that I like a lot. Their t-shirts are silk-screened in Sweden by some friends of the band.

They are 20 Euros each. Apparently that’s pretty cheap/normal for a T-shirt there.

I can get t-shirts silk-screened here for US$15. So I figure a t-shirt is not a hugely expensive thing to make.

Then I looked it up… and 20 Euros would be like US$40!! Forty bucks for a fucking t-shirt??! Not including shipping, of course. No way.

That’s nuts. I emailed the band, and they kind of shrugged, apparently 20 Euros is not a lot of money over there.

I can imagine now what it must have been like to have lived in the Soviet Union just before it collapsed, when a pair of French or American designer bluejeans cost the equivalent of six months’ wages in Roubles.

The USA is in a steep decline, and I’d say a collapse is imminent.

Forty dollars for a t-shirt! I’ll just make my own American (Chinese, really) T-shirts instead, thank you.

Ron Paul is the Ralph Nader of 2008

I see Ron Paul signs everywhere these days, in a lot of the same places that I used to see Ralph Nader signs in 2000.

I’d encourage Paul to run as an independent, because he’d completely cripple the Repug party the way that Nader cripped the Democratic party in 2000. Come to think of it, whatever loser the Repugs end up running this year will cripple their own party, much as Gore’s inability to woo and/or fight the corporate media crippled the Democrats in 2000.

But then I wonder: will Paul cripple the Repugs or will he siphon off too many Democrats and end up hurting the really strong candidates the Democrats have lined up for 2008? I ask this, because I see a lot of Paul signs in liberal, hippie areas. Creeps me out because these people have no idea what Paul actually stands for: the privatization of everything, and handing our whole country over completely to massive, global, multinational corporations, without even the pretense of trying to govern them or counter their immense power.

Hey, hippie with a Ron Paul sticker, weren’t you in Seattle in 1999? Why the fuck are you even thinking about Ron Paul? Sheesh.