don’t be a jerk

That’s right. Unicorns.
 
Well. Here’s the new blog. I’m moving on from the times of brother. Maybe I’ll go back someday.I like “don’t be a jerk”. It’s been on my cell phone banner for years. It’s not a bad bit of advice.What do write about for my first entry?How about this: why don’t I write about blogs? Everyone’s friggin got one now. It took me awhile, but I finally got on the bandwagon. Just like how I finally got a pager just about when people started using cell phones.Anyhoo. Blogs - the likes and dislikes.

What I don’t like:

People who claim that they write their blogs for themselves, and not for anyone else
That’s nice. Then why the hell are you publishing it on the world wide web, Captain Emo?

This is kinda like poets that claim that they only write poetry for themselves, which is bullshit. Out of anyone, poets care the most about what other people think. I had an old roommate who was and is a spoken word artist in the Los Angeles slam scene, so I’ve seen my share insecure, touchy poets and heard my share of shitty poetry, which, by the way, is the vast majority of it.

My roommate, thank god, was good. That saved me the trouble of lying to her face after each one of her shows.

Anyhow, so I think it’s alright for bloggers admit they give a shit about what other people think. Don’t lie about it. Just write something worth reading.

Whining and bitching
Everyone’s entitled to a bit of whining and bitching. Hell, I’m kinda doing it right now. Just don’t do it all the time. Chances are, you probably don’t have the hardest life in the world. I’m sure that distinction goes to someone who doesn’t live in in a developed country.

“Profound” blogs
I don’t like “profound” blogs. Blogs where every entry is deep and meaningful and poetic and cries out the fact that it is so. When your explicit purpose is to be deep and meaningful, it ends up being bombastic and even a little melodramatic.

Profundity and meaning should be a result, not a reason. Profundity and meaning should catch you off guard, and not be so obvious from the get go. The most meaningful stuff I read is the stuff that tries to affect me in some way, whether by entertaining me, or incensing me, or enticing me, or whatever, and uses profound, meaningful methods to do it.

When something is truly un-self-consciously meaningful, it makes me want to read it over and over and over again just to re-experience the effect. When something is explicitly, attention-whorishly “profound”, it makes me want to to put on a varsity letterman’s jacket and chase the author out of the locker room.

“Laundry Lists”
I don’t like consistently reading a minute-by-minute recap of a person’s day. I’m a hugely self-absorbed person and I have very little interest in what you did at 3:42pm this afternoon.

What I am interested in is *what it all means*. I’m interested in why it was so important for you to mention in the first place.

Then again, this only really applies to interesting, entertaining people. I’ve found that things that fascinate boring people tend to constipate me or make me depressed and angry.

What I do like:

Entertaining blogs
You ain’t writing in a diary that you keep in your underwear drawer. You’re writing on the web, where everyone can see it. I know we’re probably friends and all, but give me a good reason to read your page instead of looking at unicorns all day.

I’m sure that that night you went clubbing last Saturday and you got *soooo* drunk and some annoying guy kept trying to dance with you and you friends and you and Stacey both threw up at the same time on the car ride back home was truly entertaining at the time. But it’s a shitty story to put on a blog, cause it’s not that interesting to anyone other than yourself.

Unless you include pictures. If you post pictures, then I become mildly interested. More on that later…

Tell me something about yourself
There’s a handful of blogs I read by people whom I don’t personally know. The rest are people that I know in my physical, waking life. Tell me something about yourself that I don’t know. That usually perks my antennae.

Pictures are nice
I like pictures. Pictures help brain rest. Word are hard. Picture make Dave no smash things.

Shorter entries
The internet provides me with innumerable ways to procrastinate at work. There are quite a few blogs that I have the option to look over, so don’t pull a James Joyce. When I click onto someone’s blog and I see a biblically huge chunk of text, unless that blogger has cemented his or her reputation as an entertaining writer, or unless I’m pinned underneath my collapsed ceiling, I usually move onto something else.

On a completely unrelated note: Maybe I should stop writing now, hmmm?