v-s.net v0.6

Wednesday, 2:19 pm in Bloglife

See, I told you I had a tin of mints from Symantec.  (No, they’re mints, okay.  Seriously people…)  The tin itself, incidentally is just about the coolest thing in the world; its has like this pop-top lid.  It’s kind dome-shaped, and to open the tin you push in the little dome and it ‘pops’ the claws around the outside out just enough to slide the lid off.  When you want to put it back on again, you squeeze the little claws and they snap back in place; it’s the best vendor gimmik ever invented, seriously.  Apparently every vendor and his subsidary were giving them out at the conference my boss went to, but Symantec’s ones actually tasted nice (there were some others that came in a trendy black tin, but they were oogie and cinnamon flavoured).

Oh the boring crap I write about.  Like how annoyed I was at around 8:25 this morning to realise that I must’ve left some part of Mozilla open at home (usually its the download window, which opens on my left-hand ‘junk’ monitor and which I always forget to close).  This means, of course, that Moz has been dilligently sitting there all night long downloading all my email.  Which is normally good, except for the fact that I’m at work and it means I can’t access my webmail (or, in fact, get mails on Vexx; no wonder I had nothing when I opened him this morning in front of Pokémon).  And, it’s not like, yanno, I should be doing work or anything, but I do like to have my webmail there.  Just to check occasionally.  You other office drones know how it is, right?  Plus it lets me know when I have to resubmit for BotB.  Very important, that…

Speaking of which, Tricia had an interesting post today about BotB voting trends, you know, the eternal question; why do people vote the way they do?  I had to admit she mentioned something that I had literally never, ever thought of when considering BotB voting; post content.  No seriously, it sounds obvious, doesn’t it?  But here I was, sitting in my ergonomist-approved chair slack-jawed at the thought that maybe – just maybe – people out there actually bother to read the crap people write in their weblogs.  I guess it’s because I rarely do; like i’ve mentieond before I’m a design snob first and foremost, which means I tend to skip over blogs with ‘default’ or – let’s face it – ass-bitingly ugly layouts.  But if other people out there actually read content… well, fuck me, I’m in trouble aren’t I?

Heh.  It’s odd; I’ve always told myself I keep this weblog (and I’ve kept it for a long, long time) primarily for myself.  I think this is 96% true.  I mean, like every other human being on the planet I enjoy getting praise and comments and whatnot (detractors can fuckoff and die) but, realistically, when I sit down to write I don’t sit down to write for anyone.  I don’t look back over my posts and think, “What will other people think of me from reading this?”  I mean, aside from the fact that I don’t really give a shit… well, I don’t really give a shit.  I guess I write ‘for’ my friends – the existing ones I already know I have who read this – some of whom I really only know via blogging and email (such as ~H [h] and ~starfyre [h]).  But mostly I write for me, I guess.  Maybe it never really occurred to me that, on a personal blog – about my life – that I would do something else.  But in retrospect, browsing other people’s blogs, it’s obvious that a lot of other people out there do.  The most gratingly obvious is when I encounter blogs that use a first-person past-tense fictional narrative style.  You know:

We stolled amicably in silence for a short while, before finally she turned to me.

“It’s really stupid, I think,” she said, and I raised my eyebrow quizzically.

“What’s stupid?”

“You know,”– a thick pink mitten made a vague, looping gesture against the sky –“when people put on airs in their weblogs, pretending that they’re trying to write for the fucking Pulitzer or something.”  Angry little white clouds hung briefly in the air at each word.

“Oh,” was all I could think to say. “That.”

Like, I mean seriously people.  If I wanted to go read a novel I’d go read a goddamn novel.  I have to admit that when I see blogs written like this I just turn off, instantly.  It’s like a distancing thing for me; an emotional wall goes up straight away, I stop percieving the author as a person – whose ‘intimate’, ‘personal’ thoughts I am miraculously privvy to – and start seeing them as a character.  The connection just falls.

I’m sure I was going somewhere with this.  Oh well, lost now.

Mmm, mints.

I have a weird compulsion to write Evil Ernie fanfic.  Yeah, I dunno either eh…

Also, if anyone is experiencing 406 errors at void-star.net, can you guys let me know?  Cheers, you’re such troopers.