Category Archives: blogging

Ron DeSantis is as asshole and other thoughts…

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Ron DeSantis and his cronies in Florida want to require bloggers who write about him, his Cabinet or state legislators to register with the state.

Our rights protected under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution aren’t subject to “registration.” 

It says, in whole, the following:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Maybe Ron is confused in thinking that because the Constitution only mentions Congress and not the states, that such fuckery is permissible in his National Socialist State of Florida. 

Ron is, of course, wrong… both about this and so much else this wanna be tin pot dictator pushes out as his grand agenda to save the world. Banning books, passing decrees about what colleges and universities can teach, and using the broad taxing authority of the government to attack political “enemies,” is, quite literally Nazi shit. Our grandparents fought an entire world war to keep those kinds of ideas, and the people who spout them from their vile, stinking mouths, from taking over the world.

So, the government of the state of Florida should go ahead and consider this my notice and “registration.” I’ll continue to call Ron DeSantis a blowhard douchenozzle and comment on his abject fuckery and unfitness for office in any way and on any platform I see fit to use. 

If that doesn’t suffice, I’d recommend Governor DeSantis find a nice quiet room and go fuck himself. 

Sources and methods…

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I consider myself fortunate to not be one of those people who has an unseemly love for hearing his own voice. Like Mr. Ed before me, I try to make it a policy to never speak unless I have something to say. It mostly leaves me free to observe people’s comings and goings, their small tics and tells, and generally to spend my time trying to read the room rather than just sitting there cobbling together whatever I want to say next.

Once I make whatever point I believe needs making, I’m perfectly happy to fade into the background as things play out to their logical or illogical conclusion.

The result of this long practice is that, to quote Jed Bartlet, “I hear things. I don’t understand most of it, but I hear it.” Hearing the things, over the course of being dragged into a multitude of meetings, having offhand conversations, and overhearing random comments in passing over the last two decades has proven to be a veritable treasure trove of information about this, that, or the other thing. The vast majority is information that may not prove useful today, but that’s available to dredge out of deep memory at the point where it may be useful.

The trouble with sitting on this vast amount of information ferreted away in dribs and drabs is that much of it was never presented for public consumption. The amount of great stuff I have to write about that’s being self-embargoed because I don’t want to burn my sources and methods is an absolute absurdity… but since using any of it overtly risks leaving me out in the cold, embargoed it shall (mostly) stay.

Maybe someday I’ll get around to writing another helpful guide – this time one on not just joining, but learning to survive decades in the bureaucracy. It’s not the worse idea I’ve ever heard.

State of the blog…

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Is it even the end of the year if we don’t take a minute to review some of the stats from 2022?

In a nutshell, we’ve had 251 posts weighing in at approximately 90,000 words, seen by 1,500 followers. It’s a nice round number and I’m not even going to ponder how many of those are bots. 

Total views were down this year to 14,140. That’s a drop off of 2,333 views from last year. 2021 was the high-water mark for views since I started at WordPress, so this year ends a 3-year trend of steady growth. By the time views for this post and tomorrow’s yearly book review are published, I’ll be slightly ahead of where the numbers stood in 2020. I won’t be gnashing my teeth about any of that. 

I don’t spend a lot of time looking at stats since they’ve never really drive what I do around here. That said, since I created this blog, it looks like there have been 117,885 views from 50, 507 visitors. In that time, those visitors have peeped at 3,804 unique posts. It feels like reasonable numbers for a nobody blogger mostly using it as a tool to scream into the void and hang on to his own sanity.

So, that’s where we’ve been. If everything goes according to plan, we’ll all come back a year from now and see if 2023 treats us better or worse. As always, I plan to walk into the new year with absolutely no expectations either way.

Tossing the schedule…

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As the end of the year bears down on us like an onrushing bus, I’m strongly leaning towards temporarily abandoning the normal schedule.

I give it the good old college try to get a post up here every weekday of the year. With the exception of federal holidays that I sometimes forget are weekdays, I mostly hit the mark. You’ve probably noticed that at least a fair amount of what ends up on these pages is at least tangentially related to work. Given that we’re about to hit a two week stretch when work will be the very last thing on my mind, there’s likely to be a dearth of quality source material from that front. If I happen to also mostly ignore the news, well, there’s no telling what, if any, ideas might percolate. 

I don’t think I’ll be taking a two-week break – the chances of me shutting up for 17 days in a row is absolutely nil – but I do expect the final two weeks of the year will be a time when I toss the schedule completely out the window and let posts fall when and where the motivation strikes.

With all that said, don’t be surprised come December 19th if you don’t see a spanking new post hitting every night promptly at 6:00. I promise you’ll still get a healthy dose of angst and hostility over the ultra-long Christmas/New Year’s weekend, but I don’t want to commit myself to any kind of a schedule. It’s my longest break of the year, after all, and I fully intend most of it to be a true break from any kind of expected performance. 

Not quite off a cliff…

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I never intended or made any effort to use this blog as a money-making venture. First and last, it’s been a project purely for me to vent angst and aggravation out into the universe. I’m told keeping it all bottled up is bad for you and this has been my now year’s long venue for getting it out of my system without picking fights or putting my career in too much jeopardy.

Even though I don’t make any editorial decisions based on them, WordPress is chock full of metrics that, if one were so inclined, could help tailor content and optimize its potential reach. Back in 2021 it was picking up a surprising amount of traction for a nobody blog with no particular focus and no stated purpose. Over the last year, those numbers have, if not quite cratered, then trended back towards the historical mean.

Maybe it’s an issue with algorithms or maybe it’s a case of “they’re just not that into you.” That’s fine. Just like I don’t find my self worth in my profession, I don’t look at my daily page views as anything more than they are – a snapshot of who happened to pass by on any given day. 

I don’t know how long the average blogger lasts, but having been at this since way back when Myspace was a thing, I’ve got to be one of the old timers by this point. The focus of blogging has certainty changed since I started tapping out my first proto posts is in 2006. The ones I come across now have a lot more marketing flare, topical focus, and longer form writing than they did back then. God save me from ever feeling the need to be slickly marketed or well put together.

It’s well that this is something I’m just doing for me. Here in a couple of weeks I’ll roll up the full year’s numbers and they’re going to look anemic next to last year’s “state of the blog.” I’m surprisingly ok with that.

I’m still here. I’m still writing. I’m still offering up thoughtful and not-so-thoughtful takes on whatever abject fuckery is going on in the world and manages to catch my attention. I’m doing, at least one these pages, exactly what I want to be doing. 

The joy of nothing…

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It’s rare to get through from the time I post Friday night’s blog all the way to a Monday evening without having at least one idea jump out at me as being at least nominally worthy of writing up a few lines. It does happen, of course, but it’s rare enough to be noticeable – or at least it is for me. 

I’m going to attribute this weekend’s lack of anything particularly interesting to a combination of reasons. The first of them being that the only time I Ieft the house between 5PM last Tuesday and now, was for about 45 minutes on Saturday. That’s just long enough to get out for the weekly supply run and get home. It generally happens before most people have even properly started their Saturday – and that’s absolutely done with intention. 

It might have started as a pandemic-induced way to avoid standing in line and needlessly exposing myself to whatever bugs people are toting around in their respiratory system, but it turns out even absent a plague, it’s just a great way to avoid people, their small talk, their general bad behavior, and any need to interact with them en mass. Plus, two and a half years in and I’ve still managed to avoid COVID, so that’s a perk. I thought maybe I’d miss restaurants or going places, but it turns out I really don’t. The incentive to leave the house has to be pretty overwhelming. It happens, but it’s a rarity. 

Another reason there doesn’t feel like much to report is, I expect, due to having dialed back a lot of unnecessary spending. Between continuing inflationary pressure, general economic uncertainly, and home maintenance projects both scheduled and unscheduled, a lot of “fun” spending got either reallocated either directly towards covering other expenses or into various holding accounts to be banked against further unexpected requirements. Between shepherding cash, avoiding people/plague carriers, and generally being content to hang out at home with the animals, the number of things worth writing about – or at least the number that anyone other than me might be interested in, sometimes gets a bit limited.

I have no doubt I could gin up a few attention-grabbing posts if I went over and wandering around the local Walmart for an hour or two. You can understand, I hope, why that doesn’t sound like a particularly worthwhile trade off. Much as I enjoy writing, I’m not in any rush to put myself back in a position of having unlimited topics presenting themselves on any given day. 

For today at least, I’ll luxuriate in the joy of having nothing to say.

The first of June…

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Way back on June 1st, 2006 I published my first blog post… on MySpace. A lot has changed in the intervening 16 years. For instance, well, MySpace doesn’t seem to be much of a thing anymore. I’ve also managed to get 16 years older, which I suppose is nice give the binary alternative. 

I’m not big on celebrating my own birthdays, but having something to say day in and day out for 16 years feels like an accomplishment worth noting. 

With 3,660 posts under the bridge, being loud and obnoxious about having an opinion is still something I enjoy the hell out of doing (most of the time). It’s not without some irony that I recognize it’s the job I’ve enjoyed most all these years and it’s also the one that’s paid me virtually nothing. It hasn’t proven to be a money maker, but relieving all this bile on a regular basis is probably the thing that has kept me a reasonable approximation of sane.

So that’s it. That’s the post. If you want to see where it all started, you can check out that very first post here.

With joy in my heart…

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Someone dropped a comment on the blog last Friday evening. It happens from time to time. Every comment gets moderated, because my platform isn’t a general free fire zone. Everyone is welcome to their opinion, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to give them air time. I’m here, after all, to express my opinion, not charge off into endless debates. I get plenty of exposure to that on the other available platforms. 

Without going into detail, the comment in question was decidedly from a anti-vax, pro-conspiracy bent. Not the kind of thing I’d hit approve on under the best of circumstances. In fairness, though, I should note that the commenter was exceedingly polite and didn’t come across as the wild-eyed wackjob that so often representants that particular group. That in itself feels like something of a rarity and well worth acknowledging.

Politeness, of course, doesn’t get you a free pass to promote wild ass conspiracy theories under my masthead. Having your name right up there on the top line means being able to enjoy absolute editorial control. It’s not a function I need to exercise particularly often, but when I do it’s always carried out with joy in my heart.

Until Monday…

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I started about four different posts for today and not one of them made it past the first sentence or two. Good ideas, maybe, that just didn’t have the juice to go all the way. It’s something I’ve just come to expect occasionally – especially on Friday evening. By the end of the working week, sometimes there just aren’t any creative juices left to flow. It’s an occupational hazard of trying to find something fun, informative, or snarky to say five times a week, 52 weeks a year. Sometimes it just doesn’t happen.

That’s when you get this post. The one written bemoaning the inability to write any other post, or to find anything interesting enough to comment on, or something aggravating another to earn my ire. By this point in the week, maybe the well of ire is running predictably low… or maybe the ire is still there, but screaming about it into the void feels like more trouble than it’s worth.

In any case, it’s Friday evening, so that’s something. We’re about as far away from the working week as it’s possible to be in the absence of a federal holiday or burnt off vacation time. Instead of spending a lot of time wishing I had some better writing, I’m going to accept this as good enough, pour myself a large gin and tonic, and not worry about any other deadlines until Monday.

No time for idle hands…

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As most of you who follow along here will have noticed, I took something of a break from posting new content while I soaked in every moment of my Christmas vacation. They say a break every now and then is good for the whatever. Maybe it is. For the moment, at least, I don’t feel like every blank page is the enemy. Who knows how long that will last, but I’ll enjoy it for the time being.

Even though I wasn’t posting, my hands weren’t completely idle during the break. No matter how much down time I think I’m taking, I never really stop making notes or tapping out a few thoughts that might end up being the foundation for an interesting post. Right now, I have six potential future posts sitting in various stages from raw notes to decent drafts. They’ll probably make up the bulk of what I post over the next week or two.

It’s surprisingly nice not to be working from a blank slate against a daily 6:00 PM deadline. Even though it’s entirely self-imposed, the angst to get something ready is quite real. If I were the kind of person who made new year’s resolutions, making sure I had plenty of material in the queue would be a good one. I’m not that kind of person, of course, so I fully expect that by the end of the month every post will be a race against the clock.