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How I Spend My Last Few Days as a Bum
Fishrush is going radical. Even moreso than usual. Honestly I can't say I blame him much. I'm not going to gripe about blogularity contests, but I've seen it and even though my Google cache is only a week or so old, I think it verily is lame. Then again, maybe I don't really sympathize so much. Maybe I'm just hoping I won't get phlegmy spit on me. ;)
But really: it's the natural tendency for any community or social group larger than 3 people to develop powerful cliques that subvert the ideals, values, and strengths of that community to their own advantage. I don't see blogging as any different. I'm not interested in telling other people how to deal with, respond to, or value that fact, but for me, I tend to divorce myself from it. I have a "rank" in blogaria that's slightly above average, thanks to my involvement with Blogstickers, Blogsisters, and a brief fling with Chris Locke and a hamster. But the driving force behind my blog isn't to get to that vaunted "A-List", to make money, to subvert BigCos and the Media Circus, to win friends nor influence others. I write because I like to write, and I publish it so that people I know can see what's going on in my head and in my world, especially since I am a long way from my roots and my family these days. Sometimes I happen to meet new people as a result. Beyond that, I couldn't give a rat's patoot. I don't even ping Weblogs.com when I post. The fact that some people do give a rat's patoot bothers me, but I don't really know what to do about it, other than to do what I've done since high school when popularity was concerned: ignore it and keep doing my own thing. But despite that, I salute Fishrush. I hope he gets Google to update their cache, and boo on Google for not.
Why all the existential blog angst? Well, since I'm starting a new chapter in life, naturally it leads to some cleaning house, internally, externally, and digitally. I've been thinking about ARJLog, my writing, what I want to do with blogging/ journalling/ whatever and my web sites. On the technical end I've been tinkering quite a bit with different ideas without much thought (until now) about the visual and larger structural changes those ideas will entail.
What I'm beginning to conclude is that the entity currently known as "ARJLog" will begin to phase out of existence. I'll still have sites that update regularly, some with a lot of personal commentary, but due to restructuring, this URL and this particular concept won't be used in the near future. I'll leave the site up, maybe dump the database into a set of static pages. I don't know how long the process will take. But I'm actually looking forward to the shift-- in some ways, ARJLog has been a red-headed stepchild with which I didn't quite know what to do. I kept myself preoccupied by tweaking the design a lot and tweaking features. I've mentioned and thought about overhauls before. This time, I think and hope, one is imminent. A new journal for a new chapter.
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