A Your Mom-like Entity

24 dec 06

This "blog-like entity" is ready to evolve. What does it become?

i dunno. submit some suggestions in the box below.

one possibility is for this server space to simply revert to "ask the box", and to more directly and unambiguously solicit questions (and info requests). another is to create one long journal entry, spanning a single html document.

the journal format would encourage me to do more writing on my own. i'm uncomfortable creating a whole new page every time i want to babble about nothing. even submitting my own questions constrains me to a particular topic. but if one of my contributions is only an entry for 12/24/06 on one long, continuing html scroll, then i can with greater conscience go on about "i wore mis-matched socks today, and no-one noticed", and the quality of the project won't suffer. as much.

in its current form, i feel like i have put at least some effort into every question, even though this ethic has certainly faltered over the months, from time to time (consider, for instance, the previous eggplant question). of course it's an easy thing to blame the asker for asking a stupid question, one that's unconducive to expansion ("what is the percentage of water in, and mass of, the 'average' eggplant?" "92.3%, 300g"), but if i really want to, i can demonstrably turn anything into a sufficiently substantial piece of writing, at least as far as i'm concerned.

my original intent was to leave open the opportunity for me to "blog", so that in the event of receiving eggplant questions (getting a question about onions is what inspired the change from "ask the box" to "a blog-like entity" -- it's all about the vegetables), i could talk about whatever. but this is harder than it looks, for psychological reasons; believe it or not, i have some ethics when it comes to my own projects, and want a page that promises to be about "eggplants" to actually be about "eggplants", in large part. or at least tangentially related to eggplants, "tangentially" being open to interpretation.

now that i think about that eggplant question some more, i realize i could have talked more about that specific quantity of yielded water, and its possible uses. for instance, you could make a scotch-and-water -- a special brand of scotch-and-water, in which the water is harvested from an eggplant. you even get to choose your eggplant beforehand, sort of like those macabre restaurants out west where you get to choose your steer before it's slaughtered and turned into your steak. this would be a hit at hip urban bars on both coasts. or, i could have said something about the economic and environmental effects of farming. who knows. it all depends on how well my imagination is working that day, and how much energy i have. i guess that day i didn't have much.

my first instinct, dear submitter, was to agree with you, but maybe things can just stay the way they are for the moment. one option would be to install some contraption like wordpress or blogger, and be like every other sonofabitch on the web. but, there's almost no way that's going to happen. for one thing, it's the loneliest sight in the world to see "comments: 0" for the past 200 entries on someone's wordpress or blogger.com blog. also, it'd be impossible to incorporate my archives with the dates intact. another thing: i'm tired of mucking around with crap like php or perl, and just want to create the html myself. also, i'm too lazy, and haven't liked any of the wordpress designs i've seen -- it leads me to think the design isn't very changeable.

ideally, this server space could accommodate anything: questions, blogging, and maybe a pizza man blog, which is actually pretty difficult to do, as i predicted. an index page with a few links: "ask the box", "pizza man blog", "journal writing", and...i dunno..."musk ox porn" ('Your search - "musk ox porn" - did not match any documents. '). it's a possibility. at any rate, i have to go do some christmas shopping. it's going to be brutal, but driving pizza in rush hour traffic for the past year has desensitized me somewhat to facing the evil horde (that's you).

i did my final spam calculation, based on a month's worth of spam: roughly one spam every 47 minutes. now, i'll delete them all, and give a new monthly average in a month (if i remember); gmail's spam folder only holds a month's worth until it starts shaving slices of spam off the bottom.

i work 5pm-'the wee hours' friday, saturday, and sunday, which is christmas eve. we proles get used to this sort of thing. i mention this with the hopes that someone will read it and be aghast: our christmas bonuses at the franchise were lottery tickets. i kid you not. inside every semi-obscene scatological christmas card were nestled two scratch-n-win cards. i think one driver won $5.

i call for a return to traditional values (i mean really traditional), which include prohibition of work on sunday. i would have no problem with this, even though the 3-hour church services would become taxing. but fuck all of that crap about "the gift-buying holidays are good for the economy" -- just whom do you think that "good economy" benefits? you just deplete your savings on cabbage patch dolls, while matel's stockholders earn dividends. ho ho ho!