davextreme: March 2009

31 March 2009

Visit Metropolis

On how the current Superman books team are working to create an identity for the fictitious city.

New MLA Rules for Citing Graphic Narratives

26 March 2009

Wolverine Anniversary Homage Covers

To celebrate the character’s 35th anniversary, Marvel had a bunch of different artists draw Wolverine in the style of Picaso, Dali, and many more.

25 March 2009

Meanwhile, at the Hall of Justice

The Hall of Justice from Superfriends (and later in the comics) was based on Union Terminal in Cincinnati.

Laziness and the Decline of Blogging

I won’t argue that Blogging is dying, but it seems that people have moved on. Twitter’s 140 characters (or Facebook’s 160) seem to give most people enough space to say one single thought, and often I’d rather read one thought quickly spelled out than the same thing stretched to three paragraphs. More, I think the allure of “I can have my own website and people can read what I write!” has long since worn off. Turns out that publishing stuff people might actually want to read was hard work all along. And if you were blogging to be able to communicate with friends, there are better tools for doing that now that “social networks” exist in wider forms. LiveJournal did it early and well, but at least for me that need to stay in daily contact with my friends like I was in college has faded as adulthood has, sadly, reduced too many conversations to “so how’s it going at work” and talk of mortgages. But that’s growing up, I guess.

Anyway, I’m a bit surprised to see that I’ve actually published nine entries here this year. That’s three a month, which is almost weekly. It’s not that I haven’t had things to say, but somehow they just don’t end up being blog posts. Often I think of something but quickly find someone else has written the same thing on his own website, so I just link to it and add a brief comment. Or I distill the thought down to a few sentences and move on. Does the world need one more person saying the same thing on yet another blog? Maybe, if they’re adding something useful to the discussion, but often not if they’re being a parrot and adding to the noise. I just know I haven’t had the motivation lately. And sadly, much as I like the TypePad platform, and even with my lifetime 20% launch discount, it’s becoming harder to justify paying to host a site when Blogger can hold one less-than-weekly post for free.

A more productive use of words might be old-fashioned messageboards. Build up your community, whether it’s real life friends or people interested in your hobby, and post and get responses. Mostly that’s what blog engines are, except they underpower the discussion part where messageboards underpower the ability to find and categorize older posts.

Rather than disprove the above statement that I’ve lost the motivation to articulate myself in writing by providing sound reason, I’ll stop here for now, briefly pausing to copy edit the above. but likely still missing some mistakes.

Edit: just noticed the title I originally wrote. “Laziness and the Decline of Blogging”? Who did I think I was 15 minutes ago when I wrote that? Like I was about to author the definitive treatise on why “blogging” was in decline.