10 posts tagged “shamelessly fishing for comments”

(Or at least the same amount of fun with less effort, thus producing a higher happiness quotient.)

As my good friend Unkie Dev pointed out, my posting here has been lagging lately.  Partly, this is because I got berated for watching goofy videos on the internet when I should have been working, but it is also because I have diversified my time-wasting portfolio to include the following:

• Promoting Fezzik, Greenland on Yarold's Samurai War Link Exchange - Actually, this is sort of a crass lie.  Mostly, Boots spends her evenings link farming to promote Zizzle, Sri Lanka.  The mindless simplicity of the process, and her compulsive pursuit of it are fascinating.  One night, she volunteered to click links on my behalf, which resulted in my account getting BANNED 4 LIFE!  So, I'm faced with the prospect of arguing with 13 year olds that I am legit, or just giving up on the whole thing and leaving Fezzik unemployed, in Greenland.  Of course, if someone else wants to take on stewardship of this little 'berg, I'm sure you could click to your heart's content.
• Playing Kingdom of Loathing on my lunch break - I am currently a level 13 Accordian Thief and I am waging war against the Hippies on the Mysterious Island of Mystery.  My trouble is that as I am (disguised as an Orcish frat boy) I can't actually manage to hit any of my opponents. Soon, I hope to reach my first Ascension  and become a Sauceror under the Moxie zodiac sign.  Doesn't that sound like fun?
• Submitting random crap to my Tumblog - Tumblr is so much damned fun.  Basically making a post is as simple as using a bookmarklet and making a few clicks.  It sort of feels like randomly looting the internet for goodies.
• Browsing for random content with the help of Flock - I do so very much love the RSS reader in Flock.  With it, I can scan random images from the web with easy and loot them into my Tumblog:
  
  

  Rss
  It's especially good for scrolling through Tumblogs, Ffffound, and my Ravelry friend activity.
  
  The "My World" page is a fancy console for checking out what all is being updated by friends around the web.  (It ties in with Facebook, and I think that as soon as I'm done with this post I am going to sign up.  That is unless someone comes by my desk with something more valuable that I'm supposed to be doing.)
  
  

  Myworld
   
• Racking up points on PMOG for taking other players' tours of the web - PMOG has a fair amount in common with Me.dium (or however you place the periods) in that you install an extension, and can see notations left by other players on the web.  It has two main advantages over Me.dium, however.  The first is a kickin' steampunk aesthetic and some "game play" to it.  The second is that one of the main ways you interact with other players is by taking "Missions" which are like little website slide shows that players assemble.  I've taken one on Fantasy Art, one on Roller Derby, one on Libertarianism, etc.  For each TLD you visit, you get two points.  Points are spent on goodies and also let you "level up".  The benefits of increasing your level are a little beyond me at this point, but going on a mission is a fantastic way to kill five minutes learning about something new.  At some point when I have another slow day like this, I'm going to have to make a few missions, myself.  I get to invite two people per week to join, and I'd love to have some company here.  (When I signed up, it took almost no time to get from invite request to being on the site, so maybe the invite codes aren't a big deal.)

There you go.  I hope you join me on some of these time-wasting diversions.

Every now and then, I miss the Polls feature back at LJ.

Please vote on the following:

W. B. Mook should sign up for MySpace as his fictional promotion company: 1000 Mooks.  (y or n)

W. B. Mook should suck it up and join Facebook because anything that improves his lackluster ability to keep in touch with people ought to be encouraged. (y or n)

W. B. Mook should sign up for another web toy or service which I have provided the name of here:__________

Do you know the interview meme?
...the interview meme?
...the interview meme?

Do you know the interview meme?
That lives on...  oh sod it.*

I've been taking on a few new neighbors lately.  Some of this is due to my hegemony, but some of you came here looking for me.  However, this little deal is for all of you.  Leave a comment here and I will send you a set of five questions to answer in your little neck of the woods, and then you go ahead and offer the same to your readers.

Alternately, I suppose you can leave a comment, I'll send you some questions, and then I'll write up a paparazzi-like narrative wherein I make a whirlwind tour of Vox trying to interview you.  Please specify method of delivery. 

I was ridiculously inspired (read: jealous) of Zombie Birdhouse's intro to his Max Ernst post, so I may as well try something similar.  I'll be hoping Alfred Stieglitz drops by next week's cocktail party.

* Four back to back episodes of Torchwood has resulted in me cursing with a Welsh accent.  As a matter of fact, I think I spent more time last night watching Torchwood than I did sleeping.  That could explain why I completely abandoned my work for several hours today.

I am apprently intent on making sure I tear through my good grace with the current employers as quickly as possible, so I started randomly uploading more fun projects I've worked on for myself over the last several years.

The Scurvy Pirates web site mock-up that I ended up using, and another one for a project that's still (not surprisingly) mostly imaginary:

I come from a backwater part of the blogosphere where we still know the milkman, we still smile at each other when we pass each other on the street, and we INTRODUCE OURSELVES WHEN WE ADD EACH OTHER TO THE NEIGHBORHOOD!

*ahem*

Okay, I'm not mad, but I'm insanely curious.  Who the hell are you people?

Firefly - The Complete Series

So, I've figured out what I'm going to write.  The elevator pitch version is that I'm going to be applying the Firefly treatment to  nineteenth century nautical adventure stories.  Of those, there are four big categories: military stories (a la Master and Commander), whaling stories (I was more or less raised in a whaling museum), pirates/privateers (which are achingly cliché at the moment), and packet sailors (working class lads visiting the far corners of the galaxy and seeing weird things, getting into bar fights, and sort of coming of age).  Any thoughts about which would be most interesting?

So, there I was, paging through TechCrunch comments and saw the one about the Vox launch last week.  A particular phrase caught my eye: "I talked to SixApart's Anil Dash"

Say, didn't somebody named Anil leave a comment on my blogging etiquette post?  I mean, sure, Anil isn't an uncommon name in certain parts of the world, but if you'd snagged the .vox.com with your name on it, you had to be there pretty early on, right?  Well, yahtzee, it was in fact him, and it left me with another unsettling revelation about interconnectivity.  (Which, surprisingly enough, Firefox doesn't flag as misspelled, even though it reeks of nuspeak.)

Some things that are true about me:

4 Dada Suicides: Selected Texts of Arthur Cravan, Jacques Rigaut, Julien Torma & Jacques Vache (Anti

The Revolt of the Cockroach People

1. I am a shameless gadgeteer.  I will often try out something new for the sake of it being new.  This leads to headaches, but overall is a harmless character flaw.
2. I try not to sign on to popular things until they become passé.  It started with not buying a pair of Doc Marten's boots until 1996, and to this day I won't sign up for MySpace.
3. I sort of count on item two to cancel out in volume, any general conspicuousness caused by item one.  I use this because I developed an unhealthy idolatry of Arthur Cravan, Oscar Zeta Acosta, and (if you prefer the fictional to the often exaggerated) Caleb Peck, who, like Tibetan sand paintings, left no trace behind.

This could be because I have a colossal ego and the only way to curb it is to actively direct it away from the limelight, lest it cloud my ability to judge my own work.  Anyway, SixApart's Anil Dash made a glib remark about how I'm creeped out by people assuming familiarity when there, in fact, is none.  Basically, this makes my head spin for two reasons:

1. Celebrity is another condition where people assume familiarity where there is none.  And while I don't actually know  (and didn't bother to research as of the time of writing this) if SixApart's Anil Dash is analogous to LiveJournal's Brad Fitzpatrick, but that's a sort of celebrity and the inherent (or maybe just imagined) irony of the whole thing makes me giggle.
2. 

   The Complete Prisoner Megaset
   There is a certain amount of an assumption that we are all interconnected as peers, when, at the end of the day, some of us are still the prisoners, and some of us are still the wardens, and I've never really been able to come to a comfortable feeling about that.  We all pretend that the internet is this great democracy, when, in fact (choose your nightmarish scenario)*.  Sure, it's abhorrent, to Vox's business model that they'd ever be misconstrued as wardens, but all the political science I've ever taken relates to late fifteenth century Florence and that leaves me a little paranoid.  (Just ask a nipple on LiveJournal if the use of power is always fair and even-handed.)  So, you know, being noticed at this stage stirs a gut irrational distrust of authority, even if the scale of that power is minuscule compared to, say, the United States government.  The crazy thing, of course, is that, given the LJ-6A connection, someone from the one could, with the right phone calls, probably get the access to the entries where I rail in depth about my former employers.  As luck would have it, there is no connection between LJ or 6A and those employers which would actually make this plausible, rather than just an illustrative example of how an innocent remark can have two meanings.
   

So, all of this shakes loose in my brain, just because some guy at SixApart leaves a glib remark in my bl-g. I obviously think too much.  Oh well, it's all more of a koan than a well-formed thought, and is lacking several gallons of vitriol before it becomes a diatribe.**  Largely, I think, because I never write conclusions.

In other news, I suspect I have added another professional Voxer to my Neighborhood, and I hope she doesn't make this out to be the UUs burning question marks on her front lawn.

* Select from the following options: Google censors content in China, the telecoms are plotting to give privileged connection speeds to users/sites willing to pay, internet use is limited to those wealthy enough to own computers and pay for the service-- largely the American middle and upper middle class.