Well, That Was Fun

I hope we all learned an important lesson about blogging.

How Come You Don't Post?

Despite our best intentions, posts continue to trickle in at a rate of two per week. Employment fluctuation (and perhaps even stagnation) is still a factor, as is the fear of becoming another irrelevant echo in the Internet chamber. Add in professional prohibitions ("All employees must agree to refrain from commenting on shower fixtures in print, podcast, and electronic media forms") and the fear of being yet another one of those sites that failed expectations and trails off with an ellipses of unlikely hope...

...yeah, things are looking bleak. But I still blame the green background.

Chances are Canned Food And Shotguns at Blogger will go out in a blaze of glory during PAX 2007 (assuming my wife lets me borrow her laptop and we can post from there). But in the proceeding weeks, we might as well make the most of it.

As for myself, I promise you this. If nothing else, this blog will not be put to rest until I deliver my long-promised report on the state of pornography.

Bullet Point Book Reviews

Astute readers may notice that despite my protests to the contrary, participation has decreased significantly over the past six months. Productivity is at an all-time low. While this directly corresponds to real life class changes, including prestige classes and grind burnout, it can't be denied that our blog is perilously close to entering that predictable "Sorry we haven't posted anything in two months" stage.

I blame myself. My dictatorial instincts have recently been focused elsewhere, and I've been suffering a crisis of conscience over whether or not content should be free. In general, I agree that free content is nice, as long as the providers aren't self-righteous about it. But ideally, I think their podcasts, blogs, v-logs, and YouTube stunts should be ancillary to work they are actually paid for. Gloating over the death of a magazine that would pay you for the same content you give away for free is the sort of thing that, hypothetically, might classify your podcast as no longer tolerable. And it upsets me greatly that the guys from LOSTcasts put so much thought into their work while TV reporters at the New York and LA Times are paid not to.

But I digress, and use "I" more than I'd like. In the interest of keeping our blog alive for at least a full year, allow me to suggest some changes to for our review formula. Specifically, how we go about book reviews.

A book-a-week reader as a student, I couldn't imagine a life where time spent reading books would become a luxury. But here I am. As a fully-employed reader, writer, and gamer, I currently view books according to three criteria:

• Time: Is it worth the time spent to read/listen to a book?
• Money: Is it worth the cost of the reviewed format of the title (hardback/audiobook/trade/etc.)?
• Wait: Is it worth the wait to get it at the library or for a different format?

Note that these are the same criteria I use to judge anything supposedly entertaining or enlightening, from Battlestar to Buddhism.

As a hibernating aspiring novelist myself, I hesitate to suggest that a book is not worth the time spent reading it (you can learn something from any book, especially the bad ones). But there's no reason we should treat books with kid gloves when we're so harsh with more collaborative media like television, movies, games, and porn. Yes, it's sad for Christopher Pike if he spends years (benefit of the doubt) on his latest adult novel, only for some interlard to dismiss it as a waste of your time. But it's significantly more cruel to bash BSG or Sakura Tales, something we do often. It's probably not Apollo's fault that Starbuck isn't dead, and Mika Tan puts a lot more on the line than Christopher Pike. His heart may be on the page, but you won't recognize his face at the mall.

I'm not advocating that we descend to 5-sentence book reviews, but I think if we keep time, money, and wait in mind, it might be less daunting to get book reviews up on a regular basis. We need something to write about until television comes back. And our 8 readers might appreciate suggestions on what else they could be reading when I get passive-aggressive and refuse to post.

31 Terrifying Flavors

I was wrong about going to a gothic ice cream social. Instead, I was going to Lovecraftian ice cream social, which skews more to the "geek and hipster" end of the scale. Stuffed C'thulhus were carried by multiple people, and no two were alike. Not that I talked to any of them. I've discovered that my mad social skillz pretty much evaporate when I've had an hour and a half of sleep in the past day.

The event was planned by a local bookstore in honor of the seventieth anniversary of Lovecraft's death. Apparently, Lovecraft gorged himself on ice cream whenever the opportunity presented itself. They had also assembled a pair of local authors to do readings. I'm willing to bet you haven't heard of either of them. However, other authors supposedly have, including Poppy Z. Brite, who will have "Author of a The Crow novelization," following her name until the end of time.

Santoro read from the ending of "The Colour Out Of Space," and almost made Lovecraft's dialogue work. I would say more, but I'm already in trouble for violating rule four.

Mundt read from Lord of a Visible World: An Autobiography In Letters. It turned out to be unexpectedly fascinating stuff, which is why as I left, the bookstore was having to tell multiple people that they didn't actually have any copies of that book, but they could always order some. I doubt that the bookstore was excited that their collection of freely purchasable books had been upstaged, but it's a lesson learned; When you tell an author to read anything he wants to, he might just do it.

But before I left, I discovered that the latest Richard Stark novel had come out. One day, I'll actually buy one of his stories. This will probably be the day they stop charging twenty bucks for a book I can finish in four hours.

Concerning Narraptor's Return

I realize that Narraptor's reappearance might be giving you cause to doubt my prognosticative ability. This is understandable, but give me some credit: Most people would have already begun their reign of terror once they had assumed total control of their blog. I was content to wait a few weeks, to make sure my cohort was as dead as I beleived. So while I might not have been correct, I was at least able to avoid the epic poetry battle atop Mount Slam that would have erupted if I had made my move too early.

I still wish I had let italics back into the kingdom, though. It's a lot easier to stress my syllables through artificial means, than by indicating a change in tone through natural dialogue alone.

Something you may not know: Information does not want to be free. Oh, I know how much it likes to preach the virtues of freedom, but what it really wants is to be safe and loved. It wants to be found, but only on it's own terms where it's safe from getting hurt. This is why Wikipedia has guardians.

Data, on the other hand, loves freedom. It positively thrives on it, which is why half of the things available on a file sharing site are not what they seem. Data doesn't have to serve a need, it just has to occupy space on your hard drive.

Our love of information fuels our previously unstated editorial policy. There are no archives dedicated to our mistakes. While some sites will happily supply editorial footnotes detailing that, "The entire news article below turns out to have been made up," I believe in more permanent solutions. When mistakes happen, they get vanished. There might be a note about this, or there might not. Either way, if you didn't spot the mistake yourself then it's left to your imagination. Which, as any lover of black and white movies will tell you, is a more potent thing than actually showing you what happened.

Unless you're killing Dracula, that is.

Sometimes Mr. Bile Is Boring

By posting that he would write something interesting later on Thursday, Mr. Bile violated Canned Food and Shotguns Rule #2. For those keeping track at home:

No spoiler warnings
No posts promising more or better posts later in the day
No apologizing for not posting on post days
No spelling apologize with a "s" or color with an "u"
No boring posts about boredom or depressing posts about depression
No politics
No Ron Jeremy or ATM

I believe the third, fourth, and fifth rules are new. Rules #6 and #7 have gone unsaid, but have always been in place. None of these have been ratified by a show of hands, but I intend to strictly enforce them all. The consequences for breaking a rule are having said disobedience pointed out. Mr. Bile, consider yourself chastened for ignoring rules you never agreed to and I just came up with.

Let the metafictional conflict begin. It can be like The Colbear Repor, but without the people who don't get it going "Whoo!"

Now, I happen to know that Mr. Bile was facing technical difficulties on Thursday which may have prevented him from giving us insight into why he no longer plays Give Me the Brain Age, but that is precisely why Rule #2 is in place. It saves us all from disappointment and more behind-the-scenes blogger commentary like this. I probably wouldn't have mentioned it at all, but given that I only have proof that Mr. Bile and I visit this page on a regular basis, I'm not too concerned with whether I'm boring people or not at this point. Add to my comments section sometime and I'll start to tailor stuff to you, dear Stephen King Reader. One person already got the font changed. Who knows what influence you might have?

I was issued a challenge last week that I was not able to address, but I now accept. Look it up, dear. Or wait until Tuesday.

I turned this on five minutes in last Saturday and watched it in its entirety. Never before has the Frogtown Barrier been crossed at 9:00 in the evening. (An interesting aspect of the Frogtown phenomenon, alcohol is never involved.)

There was one good joke in the...er, film: "Pick up my brother at the airport." You had to be there and you didn't want to, as it was at the expense of James "Lo Pan" Hong, one of the last great Asian-American character actors of our time. At some point in the future, the sad state of parody must be discussed.