Greetings to all my friends and correspondents on Blogger, wishing you all a happy and rewarding New Year ahead.
I have not been online much for the last few weeks, partly because my two main computers both gave up the ghost within days of each other, thereby restricting my access to the Internet. This is not the only reason however, I have been able to access the Internet by my 'mobile devices' over this period and have occasionally done so, but it is not a very satisfying experience. Even using my netbook it is not that great, although it is an improvement upon using a mobile phone for the limited purpose of the very occasional 'tweet' and that is it.
The hardware will be replaced soon after the holiday, but will blogging be the same next year?
My own computer troubles coincided with the closure of Multiply and it has to be said an end of an era that began on Y360 for me and for most of my friends many moons ago now. To me it feels like an end of that old fluidity and to some degree the interactive networking because Blogger, bless its soul (if it has one?) is not as dynamic a medium as Multiply was, although it remains a very useful blogging platform. I now get visitors from places I never had visits from on Multiply, places like Ukraine, China, San Moreno and so on, but these are just recorded as dry stats.... they are not contacts but that is okay.....Well, were it not for the sneaking suspicion that making my site 'adult content' might attract some surfers hoping for something much better than what they actually find when they get here.
To them I can only apologise for any disappointment I have inadvertently caused and reassure them that this site does not rule out the possibility of hosting pornographic material, depending upon your definition of 'pornography' you might say it already has posted it on a number of occasions, or you may even feel that it hardly hosts anything else but?
As a blogging site Blogger is surely in the top league, this is obvious from all the worthy blogs that appear here some quoted in the press. Blogger has an interface that is just on the fringes of the mainstream media. It is at least in some measure both serious and committed.
In my view that is completely the opposite of the social networking sites which I've never been very taken with.... they seem characterised by a shrill pale blueness where all sorts of skulduggery actually takes place in a pastiche of life itself. ... could it be that my virtual palate has become jaded I wonder? Oh no I hope not!
Who knows what next year has in store for us all?
Who knows what sorts of communications will fill these spaces in time or what feelings they will arouse in us?
I am here at the end of this year bored with all the festive games on offer, especially this season's best selling family board game The US Fiscal Cliff Show (a.k.a Lemmingate).......and what a cliffhanger it is too, will the American empire be plunged into a vortex of accelerating collapse, Dollargeddon?......or, will a compromise between two completely irreconcilable opinions be cobbled together just in the nick of time to save us all from terminal jitters and restore our faith in the wise folk who write all our news for us.... mostly stories about the incredibly wise folk who employ them to write it? It has a certain symmetry about it I suppose.
I suspect we will see that old rusting, rivet popping US ship of state limping on through the oil slick and raw sewage it exudes, like a stricken version of the African Queen (now renamed the African King) with only the owners of the Federal Reserve bankster gang getting fatter at the tiller and laughing all the way to the complete ownership of planet earth's animal, plant and mineral kingdoms.
So plenty to write about coming up in 2013 I'm sure and it looks like this will be the main place for me to post, if only I can break this habit of just reading stuff interspersed with the occasional one liner, its easy.
I'll catch up with you all when I can......otherwise all the best for 2013, which on 10 February becomes the Chinese Year of the Snake....so that will be something to look forward to....won't it?
I am told that the (water) Snake is a great sign, a positive one, with energy that can help us face all of the challenges ahead of us. Wonderful!
I'm not sure if that includes the challenge of displacing China as a major trading partner in Africa though? Which of course is precisely why Mr Obama has been given a second term of office, meanwhile the Tea Party runs Congress ....that snake better be good, only time will tell ....so in the meantime let's make sure we have lots and lots of fun!
Happy New Year!
Good to see you back AA. I am sure that 2013 will give you plenty to write about here (in depth, not tweeting like a bird!). I am sorry you are having computer problems. I was beginning to get worried about you, but never thought to go check the bird nest to see if you were there :-P
ReplyDeleteThanks Ms C. You wouldn't find much from me on Twitter, but it is a useful source of information and accessible by various mobile devices I've come to rely upon since both laptop and desktop stopped working. I'm not quite up to speed yet but hopefully will be soon...have a good holiday!
DeleteDitto from me, AA: Good to have you back on the boards here! Sorry to hear about your computer difficulties, which, in my case, always strike at the point where I have lots of ideas to convey.
ReplyDeleteWhat will the post-Multiply blogosphere be like? For myself, I found Multiply in its heyday such a good platform for both feedback and pain -free media posting that it will be missed. Right now, the place is a shadow of itself; folks putting up little posts and just waiting for the end.
Well, I agree with you Blogger is a different creature altogether, more geared to essay writing than as a "fluid, interactive" platform. Perhaps it will just take time to build-up a fellowship of folks interested in frank but civil debate.
I find there are just too many US Grade-A Neo-Conservatives over on Blogster, which seems to be the Internet home for "low-information" trolls who want to convince me I'm all wrong and they are all right. I'm not mad about it; I'm bored. Blogster will remain an ancillary place for me, I'm only there for the few Multiply folk who settle there. I hope to keep this my primary blogging space. And, as for Twitter, I find it interesting mainly as a place to get news updates but Iri Ani and a couple of my old San Fran/Oakland friends are there so that's good.
Luckily there are some good ex-Multi-blogger over there, but I would NOT recommend the place.
I also miss the ability to go back and re-edit my replies after posting them. This saved me a lot of egregious spelling errors and took some of the sharper edges and unchecked emotionalism out of my replies.
As for "the fiscal cliff", well, as Bill Shakespeare the Brummie once said, "Angels And Ministers of Grace, Defend Us!" You are right that the viewpoints of the atavistic GOP Tea Party and the Obama mandate to bring an end to unabashed plutocracy (egged on by the "democratic wing of the Democratic party", don't and won't mesh.
The whole idea of the role of government in the economy is being debated; what a stupid state of affairs fro a nation that has proven time and again that under-regulated market forces break down time and again! But thanks to gerrymanded Congressional Districts and money-driven campaigns, here we are.
Wall Street will continue to rule by default, unless the public can wake the hell up. But gun debates, gay marriage, new laws on pot and other matters will cleverly keep the working poor and the middle class divided on social issues that will not help the economy one iota. Progress is being made, but it's slow and we lose ground to the rest of the developed world even when hope rears up as it did in the last election cycle.
I'm a little jaded about the whole experiment, as you might notice. All this head-butting in Washington might be amusing if it didn't effect so many who don't even have so much as a vote in the in the sludge-filled wake of "The African King". But I remain hopeful that this Second Era of Robber Barons will produce another Progressive Era. Just not soon.
Yes,I think you handle the trolls quite well, AA. And I admit there is much to be said for exciting them into displays of ignorance and bumper-sticker dogma.
DeletePeople who disagree with some of my views but also tend to treat others with respect and at least debate you with a semblance of open-mindedness is actually fun at times. But these are not trolls so much as people who have been schooled in some effective debate. Trolls, as you intimate, tend to come off like walking billboards of marketing manipulation--the sort of people who think they know everything that goes on in the world when, frankly, we are learning new things about dastardly deeds committed by leaders and companies that came off decades ago.
I'm looking forward to a switch in the Chinese calender, and the new Total Truth Awards. It's a shame Mr and Mrs Goebbels killed all their kids with cyanide capsules in 1945, because, for one thing besides the inhumanity of it, it would be fun to see how far some of them would have gone if they had gone on to careers as (likely demented) blog-masters themselves.
I think my edit has caused the sequencing to go a bit haywire - oh well
DeleteOh, and a Happy New Year to you as well!
ReplyDeleteThanks for that Doug, good to be back....Blogster sounds awful, although I do like to chew on the occasional troll - you can have too much of their assumption that you care a jot about the garbage they waste their pitiful lives typing.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand attracting trolls is also a mark of success in my world, it means to have pricked the opposition and prompted it into making a complete fool of itself in public for the entertainment of the jeering mob. For me blogging can be like lauching little barbs into cyberspace, the sudden appearance of a flaming troll I take as evidence of a direct hit.
The best part of it is you can play around with them until you get bored.... or just eliminate them upon arrival depending upon your mood.
As you know I like to torment them a little first, but of course there are no rules, they visit our sites not vice versa... so we call all the shots, but I do miss them a little bit on Blogger I must say, pity it is a tad too grown-up for the average troll alas.
So we will continue flicking inky pellets of total truth in the face of malevalent marketing, the ravings of twisted psychopaths and the carefully laid disinformation of the secret police.... i.e. that we call the corporate media.
In honour of this endeavour Total Truth Radio will in 2013 be giving Goebbels Awards to PSYOP jockies and opinion formers whose hamfisted work we uncover during the course of our deconstruction of the virtual state corporatocracy and all its deranged ambitions to rule the world and so on.
Upward and onward into the year of the Snake then Doug...watch out it will be coming soon to a watering hole near all of us! But it is supposed to be a good snake apparently!
Nice to hear from you again Aaron, may all your technical obstacles be but a vague and distant memory by the time of the great water snake slides into our lives. I’ve not been here much during December myself, first there were various family duties, and then the virus of all damn viruses descended and turned me into a poor wretched soul hardly able to leaver my bed.
ReplyDeleteRadio 4 has become my new best friend, a small and temperamental radio being my only solace while in the throws of fever. And I admit to becoming fascinated by the ‘fiscal cliff’ saga. This is the way I understand the problem; one side wants NO increased taxes for the majority of Americans and some limited tax increases for the very top earners. The other side wants NO tax increases for any American including the very top earners. Neither side is willing to compromise and if neither side compromises, ALL Americans, rich, poor and somewhere in between will face heavy tax increases. Can’t help thinking how, for any one who’s not American, it would be a no brainer.
Anyway…………..nice to see you back and trust you have suitable celebrations planned for tomorrow)
Thanks for that Loretta nice to see you back now too. Sorry to hear you haven't been well, it is the time of year for it, I've had a bad cold myself....hope you are much better now and getting ready for 2013.....Happy New Year to you Loretta .... the fiscal cliff show reaches its High Noon tonight, exciting though innit?
DeleteWell it is 8.30am in the year 2013 here in Aotearoa as I type. weather is hot and very windy right now. Sorry to hear about your technology problems I've been looking out for your posts and was assuming you to busy for us internet folk.
ReplyDeleteI am missing Multiply. Like Doug says, Blogster is Dullsville, I have managed to avoid the mad right wing American twits over there and there are nicer people but ... well ... it's not very interesting I guess. And a creaky site. I have now managed to get myself locked out somehow and have discovered their reset password system does not work. Tried to submit report but I don't think that worked either. I find my Ipernity contacts more interesting but I have yet to discover how to know when a contact posts, other than visiting each contact's site individually which is just too tedious.
Ah well, perhaps blogging is over for me. Don't really want to pull the plug on it though.
Anyway Happy New Year Aaran (and Doug too, if he is reading this) I miss you guys.
Hi Iri, its still last year here, how's 2013 looking so far in....any better?
DeleteIt is a pity that we are all cast to the winds of the internet whereby we send messages and cling on to no real substitute for what Multiply was, but set up camp anyway.
I don't really get Google + either, people could interact there but so far as I'm aware, the few people I know rarely do so.
I've considered stopping blogging and taking up a nice hobby and then I've thought nah....I'll spew out blogs til the cows come home and nothing can stop me. But I can see why it gets a bit tedious nipping here and there all over the internet.....maybe we should form a club or something? I suspect it is easy on Google to have a club, but would it be any better than what we've got now?
Happy New Year to you Iri, can't wait to see what 2013 is like for myself, but I'll just have to be patient for another 2.5 hours before I get a proper look. I'll nip over to your place meantime to get a sneak preview :-)
I don't get Google+ either, shouldn't there be an instruction manual somewhere?
DeleteWhat kind of nice hobbies do gurus like you contemplate? I am fascinated ...
errrrmmm I don't know really, collecting things I suppose, cross stitch something like that.....that's what gurus crave Iri, a nice hobby, whittling cathedrals out of matchsticks or collecting saucy postcards.... or something like that anyway, anything you can do in a shed that's it I think!
Deletelol.............just had a mighty coughing fit contemplating you sitting of an evening enjoying your cross stitch :-)
DeleteJust finished my Shed Sweet Shed cross stitch Loretta :-D
Delete