So I disappeared again, real life exploded on me, blah, blah, blah. I could go on and on about why, or why not, but not only does nobody care, it wouldn’t even really be true. The truth is, I got a bit fed up with the Internet, blogging, everything computer-related (rather ironic for someone whose future career relies almost entirely on computers…). I burnt out without the excuse of having burning sufficiently beforehand.

About three months ago, I even made a blogging schedule – one day I was going to write about technology, one day politics, one day crosspost from Fourth Wave. It lasted for one day. Lovely. General weirdness/fights across teh interwebs only made things worse, first with a bunch of feminist blogs shutting down or going on hiatus (I know, I know…), and secondly the weirdness surrounding the lesbianish web-sphere (someday I’ll put all my feelings on Afterellen vs. Shewired vs. Autostraddle vs. the world down, but not now…)

I still haven’t completely gotten over it all, either, but I also miss writing rather badly. So here I am.

At the risk of setting myself up for failure, I’m going to set a goal – write something, anything, every day. Just to do it. I think the problem with my previous schedule was that it was too complex to make a habit of it (it involved rotating weekly schedules!). Perhaps I’ll do better if I just go for regularity. Or not. But I’m going to try. (Aviva – if you’re still subscribed to this, I’m going to get something up on fwf soon too, I promise…) I’ve got a ton of more-to-less interesting ideas, as usual. I just need to put them to work.

So in the interest of putting something in this post not completely introverted: I think one of the big fears I have about writing on the web is, well, sounding stupid. It’s not as silly as it sounds – I think a good deal of the failed attempts, the blogs with 30 posts, the video blogs with two episodes, the podcasts that last all of a week, are caused, not by a lack of time, but by the author’s suddenly realizing that there’s a dozen people on the internet, working on the same subject. Except, they’re an order of magnitude more intelligent, interesting, and so on. It’s enough to make anyone want to spend all their free time staring at the ceiling.

Actually, this is true of everything everywhere. I even ran across it in local volunteering of all places. You’d think a small non-profit, in need of endless amounts of help, would welcome anybody and anyone. Not so much. Instead, the two or three highly competent people unintentionally make everyone else feel useless. Now the organization is nearly gone from a lack of help.

According to lots of people, the antidote for all this is to specialize, to make sure you’re so good at what you do that you stop feeling so inadequate. But then, you end up looking stupid unintentionally. Worse yet, you don’t know it – you’re the expert, after all. Take ‘Joel on Software’, one of my my favorite examples. Joel’s blog was a big deal – it still is, for that matter. But I, and thousands of other people, won’t touch it with a very long stick. His various dogmas and strange ideas built up over the years make him impossible to take seriously, even if he is some sort of software expert. This isn’t new or special, of course. The story of Einstein’s various errors (and failure to see them) while working on a unified theory of physics is well known. And on and on it goes. The lesson, I suppose, is rather nihilist – the wise person really is the person who realizes they know nothing.

Not that it makes me feel and better about my own personal failings, of course.

I was going to end this by working collectivist cultural theory into it (less judgment! less stress! more productive!), but I’m just rambling anyway. More coherence tomorrow.

But hey… how else are you going to sell spam-based products?

I’ve been watching Sugar Rush, since it just got imported into the US. In many way, it’s everything South of Nowhere refused to be. It’s trashy, explicit (perhaps a bit too much!) and generally crazy. But as much sense as the show makes, I just can’t seem to fall in love with the characters like I did on SON. I think it’s all the fault of ‘Sugar’ – she’s just such a mess. As a result, there’s no reason to really want them to get together. I keep thinking, “Kim, find a different girl to obsess over.” On the other hand, her accent is really cute, and the show is rather funny at times.

So, it’s worth seeing, at least if you need something to help you procrastinate!

I’m sure that anybody who cares will have seen this, but Lucy Lawless is going to be on the L Word!

It’s going to be so cool. (How can it not be?)

And once there, you MUST click the ‘here for more messages‘ link. It’s absolutely the funniest thing I’ve read in a month.

That’s all.

That remains to be seen.

But this is just a first post. Nobody but me will read it when it first goes up – nobody will likely read it for weeks, at least. If you are reading this, I will assume that you cared enough to find my first post, that you wanted to know how my blog began.

Thank you.

And for your entertainment, a discussion on first posts!

I have noticed two types of first blog posts. A few just start on-topic, as if they were pulled out of the air. I suspect that these blogs were moved from some other site. Some times this is unavoidable (a large site with multiple bloggers that has been moved/redesigned many times, for example). But most blogs are not like this. A see a personal blog as a picture of the author – without a record of it’s creation, it seems… incomplete.

The other sort of first post is rather like this one – a note telling the reader that yes, this is the first post; whether the author has done this before or not, but with no real substance. I get a feeling of real satisfaction reading these posts. It’s almost as if I suddenly became old friends with the author – like I was there from the beginning.

Anyhow, I’d like to try something new with my first post. If you managed to read this far, leave a comment! Who cares about the whole ‘don’t comment on old posts’ rule? Let me know what you think about first posts – maybe link to you own first post.

Let’s be nostalgic about blogs!