re: Online Reviews

Crashed for another ten hours last night and it still wasn't enough. This has been the single roughest week for sleep that I've had since switching to this stupid schedule years ago and I have no clue why. Thank christ it's Tuesday. This bag of Spicy Nacho Doritos will be buried with full honours for its service.

The weather continues to be utterly bonkers. I walked home across large swathes of bare grass yesterday, and today it is RAINING. Truly insane, backwards world stuff happening in our atmosphere these days. I might actually live to see the end of the world, so that's kinda cool!

My adventures in RSS feeds are really eating up the hours. Just a little over eight to go! That's, like, a normal work day! Woo!

Here's a little thing about blogging that really resonated with me here, in my quiet little corner of the internet:

The reason it’s hard to (re)start and sustain a blogging practice nowadays is the same reason it was so hard to leave the birdsite.

[...]

Blogging was not just a thing you did, a solitary practice: it was a thing you took part in; the thing you did was merely a means of entry, a contribution to a collective thing, a complex emergent system. Even if you were only ever a very minor and marginal part of your particular corner of the discourse—and certainly that’s all I ever was—you had a sense of belonging and contributing to something larger than yourself.

[...]

The act changed to shorter, thinner things: tweets, updates, instas, whatever. But crucially, the party went elsewhere. Which is why all of us who once were a part of that blogging thing, no matter how marginal or massive we might have been, will always—upon returning to the post-editing window—feel like former-scenester thirty-somethings passing by that one pub down on Granada Road where, ten years ago, there would always be a live show on a Friday night (and probably a house-party nearby later on!) but which has long since been converted into a wine bar, if not simply left boarded up.

[...]

So why make a point of writing this out, and then putting on my blog? To remind myself that there’s no point in trying to chase that particular high. If there is to be a practice of personal writing online which inherits something from what we once called blogging, then it can only inherit the act, and never the context. The world has moved on; attempts to revive what blogging was are doomed to failure, because they are at heart nostalgic.

Oof, yeah. But I'm still here! Plugging away! you can never step in the same blog twice

12. How Much Do You Trust Online Reviews?

Less than I used to, but I still take them into consideration. If you're willing to use a little bit of critical thinking, there are still plenty of real opinions that are actually useful to consider out there somewhere in the great digital yonder.

I'm going to sleep so fucking well tonight, y'all don't even KNOW.