This blog will no longer be posted to, or, largely, maintained. For further posts by the same author, see http://misterfishes.wordpress.com

Additionally, due to the quantity of spam comments this blog receives (and the fact that, since there are no new posts, there are no new real comments), comments are being disabled for all posts. You may leave a comment on my new blog at the above address, or e-mail me if you need to get in touch.

La vache est fachée wrote (in a comment thread entirely unrelated to the actual post at hand, which I suppose is my fault), that this blog [had been] added to my file. . . . To which I responded:

you must have missed my subhead: “Whatever it is, this is not a blog”

Okay, so it’s really just because I hate the word “blog”—it’s just flat out ugly, ugly looking and ugly sounding—but there’s also a bunch of politics in “blogs” these days, what with some of the controversies over “blogrolls” and “Top 100″ lists and “A-list bloggers”. . . . and I want none of that. I’d love to be well-read and well-commented, but mostly I just want a space to talk about what I want to talk about that I can control the visual styling of (which was a big part of my problem with LiveJournal, along with the continued absence of Trackbacks and related things for linking together different journals).(I’ll add some more links a little later, but I’m probably going to get kicked off this computer soon.)

Ok, so I’m not as adamant about it as it probably sounded (oh, for the love of vocal inflection….), and I’m curious about other people’s (assuming there are other people reading this, I haven’t looked at the logs recently) opinions—is there room for another word that sidesteps the politics (and, yes, the ugliness) of “blog”, or is that word simply too well entrenched to change it?

Ok, so technically, this is, in fact, a “blog”:

blog

(WeBLOG) A Web site that contains dated entries in reverse chronological order (most recent first) about a particular topic. Functioning as an online journal, blogs can be written by one person or a group of contributors. Entries contain commentary and links to other Web sites, and images as well as a search facility may also be included.

This site does, in fact, meet those definitions, including the potential for multiple contributors (if you wanna be one, let me know, although if I don’t know you, the answer’s ‘no’) (well, ok, it’s not on a single topic; hell, sometimes I can’t keep to a single topic per post. . . .); at the base of it, I just flat out don’t like the word blog, and that, in fact, was where the original name came from, way back when this was in MT, maybe even before my host, F2O was started. . . .

(do you have trouble dealing with parenthetical remarks? sometimes I do. instead of rewriting the paragraph, though, i decided it was just more fun to do it in colours. this is maybe why juicy shouldn’t post at the end of a sixteen hour day. . . .)

If I were feeling more coherent, or more antisocial (but mostly more coherent), I’d add something about the social structure of blog culture and the way blogs and bloggers interact (especially that whole “i linked to you, now you link to me” mindset—what the fuck is up with that? If your writing sucks, I’m not going to read it, whether or not you read mine, and if I’m not going to read it, i’m sure as fuck not going to tell other people to read it. . . . (the links down there marked “Stuff I haven’t actually gotten to read yet” are either things I looked over briefly, long enough to decide they warranted a further look that I haven’t gotten to yet, or things that came recommended (i.e., they came with the journalling software :-P ) that I haven’t actually looked at yet.)) and how I don’t like or agree with or want to be associated with much of it, but when it comes right down to it, I just think the damn word’s ugly, and I hate it.

Definition of ‘blog’ from The Computer Desktop Encyclopedia, via Answers.com