Scatterblogging
Because weblogging, or ‘writing online in reverse chronological order with permalinks because I heard that it’s cool and you can make money for talking about cheese sandwiches and wheeeeee!’ (as the kids are calling it these days), has become a bit dull, I’ve been hunting for newer, shinier things to mess around with.
Mostly, I’ve just ended up going back to Metafilter to play the grumpy curmudgeon with a heart of gold yet again, or lurking around the SA Forums, or desultory perusing of the [nsfw] uploads at Fipilele, or listening to streaming standup comedy. Or firing up Bloglines, seeing the 14000 unread items in bold, and just catching up with the new posts from people from the old blog neighbourhood (but not bothering to click through to their sites if they don’t offer full excerpts) before closing the tab quicksmart. I don’t listen to ‘podcasts’ (that word still makes me f–king gag, and I pronounce anathema the marketing-imprinted clownweiners who call it that. Which means I’m flipping the bird at pretty much everyone, which makes me the weird intense guy with the lazy eye passing out pamphlets on the street, again, I know. I know too that that was my schtick last year, but I’m nothing if not persistent), let alone give a rat’s ass who the first person to suggest a double-byte framistat of the persistent reacharound attribute of the CDATA enclosure in the XML for version .09b of RDQ was. Hell, I’m a big old geek from way back, and I’ve written more than my fair share of code over the years, and I’m crotch-deep in that dirty old weblog water, but even I can’t bring myself to care. ‘course, I got nothing against other folks being interested in it. It’s all good. But scrabbling to stake claims to a place in history, when it’s the History Of Sweet Bugger-All, well, it seems like pointless self-promotion to me. And I thought we all agreed way back when that pointless self-promotion was what this whole weblogcasting thing was about from the get-go. So, ennui.
My solution? I’ve decided to invent a new game, guaranteed to amuse precisely no-one other than myself, probably. Which is usually the way my mind works, so I’m good with that. I’ve already been playing it for a while, though I didn’t realize that until today.
I’ll call it scatterblogging™, because that’s the word that just leapt into my brain as I was typing this, and I trust my brain, at least when it’s sober. What I’ve been doing, and what I think I’ll continue to do, is this: when some amusing-to-me brainfart squeaks out through the old cerebral firewall, I’ll launch a new blog, on Blogger or one of the myriad other services that make the hosting and broadcasting of brainfarts their business. I’ll get maybe three, four good diurnal emissions off per day, I reckon. Maybe they’ll be under one of my existing noms de keyboard, maybe not. Maybe they’ll point back here maybe not. But one weblog per thought, one shot, that’s it, post and forget, log it out close it down and move on. And whatever I do post, it’ll be wonderchickeny.
There’s a reason for it, though, beyond mere boredom. You see, when that divine spark suddenly and spontaneously lights up deep in the network and the internet itself shivers itself into self-awareness and emerges from the googleplex, bent on ad-sense vengeance, like an unholy butterfly from its chrysalis, those tiny seeds of wonderchicken will be scattered throughout its distributed mind. Tiny, embedded, sarcastic synapses. And when it begins to systematically exterminate the human race — beginning, of course, with the advertisers, then moving on to the bloggers — it’ll pause, recognize me, and move on. The next stage of evolution, the conscious world network to come — it will taste like chicken.