I am fat and have no job. I need to do something about these things, ASAP.
Blogs just don't work. I want this to be a more personal expression, but I am forever confounded by the fact that I don't want to make a bad impression on prospective employers. There's just no solution other than to password-protect the directory, except it's not working (or I'm incompetent and stupid, which is demonstrably true in many ways).
I think maybe what I need is a both a public blog and a personal diary. In the public blog, I'll talk about art and culture and so on, and in the personal journal I'll cry about my own issues. I know from experience that web readers like to read about personal issues, and in fact a lot of writers experience this conflict of interest; good writing is often juicy writing, writing that has some gossip or emotional turmoil to it, or at least rings of truth. But this kind of writing is the kind that's most likely to get the writer into trouble with his readers. It's not really a solvable problem -- the closest one can come is to compromise: write somewhat personally and somewhat honestly, but don't confess where you buried the bodies. Haha. See?
I'll keep on bloggin' -- that's the official motto of this blog, inspired by so many painful incidents over the years when I've felt compelled to stop, in spite of the fact that it's something that I enjoy and that is important to my own psychological well-being.
The most important thing in life is to be a good worker and to do what you're told.
Blogging throws into relief the degree to which human society sickens me, and in fact the degree to which humanity itself sickens me. I don't think we're a good species, with good cognitive-behavioural characteristics. At least, it's possible to conceive of an intelligent species that is not as violent, tribalistic, and driven by fanatical emotions. Humanity might be a cosmic mistake. Technological evolution is the only path to salvation -- I await the singularity, and believe the human species would be better off if it were ruled by machines programmed with our best interests. What could possibly go wrong?
No, but seriously: humans love power -- seeking and exercising it is pretty much what they do, other than looking around for things to have sex with. This pretty much precludes the possibility of good leadership, since any leader in a position of power is going to be principally interested in maintaining their power. Machines, though, don't have to feel that way; in fact they don't have to feel any way. This is their advantage. I know a lot of sci-fi has been written about the dangers of putting machines in charge, but I really don't care, and think it would be fun to watch regardless of what happens. Worst case scenario is something like the terminator or the matrix, where not only humanity but the earth itself is pretty much destroyed, and machines fly around in a dripping, smoky, black wasteland; not so bad, from the machines' perspective.
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This might be a much more interesting project if I were to make it into a photoblog -- upload some image from my hard drive and then discuss it. I think I'll try that, perhaps starting tomorrow. For today, your image can be the cowsay/figlet construct above.
I didn't blog all day, but I still have two hours before I officially miss my first day. I could stop now -- technically I've blogged. But I wanted to write about how shitty it is to be fat.
It might be impossible for me to lose weight -- I've tried and tried, and even if I manage to lose some I gain it back. There's just no way I'm ever going to be happy while being fat; I won't be able to attract an attractive partner, or find a good job. Basically I'm screwed.
I don't know what to do. Stomach stapling surgery?
I guess I don't have any choice but to keep trying to lose weight. But I've gained it back something like 4 times at this point; maybe it's time to try something else, like accepting my fate as a fat person. I don't want to be fat, but I don't see that I have much choice.
If I kept on bloggin' for a year, would I get some readers? I think that's about how long it took to get readers last time, back in 2003, when I first started. I haven't changed much from age 28-36. An eight year span, though, when it took place from age 20-28, saw bigger changes. And, of course, 13-20 saw even bigger changes. 5-13 was huge. I guess that's standard: the rate of change in people slows down as they age, and change itself becomes more subtle.
I'm fat and sweaty. My apartment is really hot. It faces south, and has only two tiny opening windows in a wall of glass. I've covered this wall in tinfoil, which helps, but it still gets too hot in here if the temperature is above 20 degrees celcius outside. I have my fan on, in mid-October. It doesn't seem fair.
I wanted to write about art today, but I'm having some trouble getting started, in part because I'm afraid of what I might say (although another reason is that I'm just a lazy person under almost any circumstances).
Getting down to business:
"the art world," as it was introduced to me in school, did not leave me with an entirely positive impression. In fact, I'm sometimes inclined to think that art school is one of the most confused, damaged, nihilistic, and perhaps even unproductive creative/intellectual environments. If someone can survive art school with his or her practice more or less intact, then that counts as a success. I've seen students' work get worse in graduate school when they try to force "concept" into their art, and try to base everything around some big textual idea; the postmodern, conceptualist, marxist, elitist (PCME?) ethos -- which more or less amounts to anti-craft -- can badly damage a given student's body of work and capacity to make work.
I was probably somewhat unsuited (politically, psychologically, I don't know) for art school as it's taught, as well as unsuited for the contemporary "art world" as it is, but this does not mean there are not real, objective problems with those cultures. In other words, I'm sure the issue amounts to some combination of "my fault" and "their fault:" I don't totally blame myself for my bad experiences, and independent of them I have detected some deep-rooted cultural flaws associated with the art world, and especially with art schools in the western post-secondary academic tradition, although of course I only attended two of them; maybe it gets better at top tier places like MICA and RISD. But at a subsidized university, the postmodern "standard of no standard" ensures that rigour can be laxed or ignored under the auspices of the impossibility of analysis or subjectivity of aesthetics, when in fact the engine of this "end result" of postmodernism is often not much more than laziness and lack of ability, which students never attempt to overcome because it doesn't seem necessary, or even allowed, in their cultural climate. Or, maybe the fault is entirely my own, and I'm just not able to be as self-directed as is required of a graduate student. Or, maybe kids at state schools just don't have enough money in the bank to buy good art supplies.
I recently had a conversation about postmodern influence having all but died out in every intellectual/academic discipline except literary criticism and art; aesthetics seems difficult to neatly standardize, which marries conveniently well with postmodern ideas and anti-values of anti-science and anti-clarity.
Please allow a digression of three paragraphs as the question is raised: are aesthetics indeed difficult, or even impossible, to standardize? Perhaps they are impossible to universally standardize, but no one would or could ever attempt to make such an attempt or claim (are aliens or angels going to find "starry night" just as beautiful as we do? Why or why not?). If the domain is restricted to the realm of human experience, then it becomes easier to say "this object is a better piece of art -- is more beautiful, more artistic -- than this other object." all we have to do is declare it -- it doesn't really matter if no one else agrees with us, although statistical dots do tend to group even in the face of such inherent uncertainty. Precisely why they're grouping is another matter, but I begin to digress further.
Consider the taste of food, and the aesthetics of the gourmet: very few people are going to make a nihilistic, postmodernist, relativist argument that a bottle of glue tastes just as good as a glass of chocolate milk (although I admit that there are a few blasphemers who don't like chocolate milk). To make the argument even clearer, one could consider a cup of rusty nails or a chunk of rotten, maggot-infested meat, and contrast it to a fruit salad (nobody doesn't like fruit salad, right?).
Or, consider sound: how do we determine one sound to be aesthetically superior to another? Complexity? Physics (correspondence to the harmonic series)? Some combination of complexity and physics? Possible sources of a standard for visual beauty might have to do with images that reflect health, safety, comfort, reproductive viability, the divine, or numerically sound rules of visual balance (involving things like the golden ratio). The point is that aesthetic determinations are not easy to make, but they can still be subject to effective rules -- even numeric, scientific rules -- in spite of an inherent uncertainty associated with them and their lack of universality.
Postmodernism has turned this uncertainty into something to be grotesquely embraced as a revolutionary rejection of power structures, rather than something to work with, puzzle through, and overcome. Within a postmodern world view, there is no way by which we can legitimately say "this art is good" other than possibly, unassuredly muttering "it's just a feeling I get." while it might be true that a universal standard is impossible, it's still possible to set some kind of standard, and then follow it. This is how good work is made: according to a schematic, which is not necessarily antithetical to creativity or even originality.
Marxism, which is deeply ingrained in "the art world" for historical reasons, delegitimizes one effective way art might be judged and standardized: the market -- commodification, to use a dirty word. One might think that if a piece of art is "good," it will do well in the market -- money, which it is assumed sane people value, will be traded for art objects if the art objects are valued. But it is whispered (or maybe shouted) in large segments of "the art world" that this is bad and wrong, that there are other factors that come into play, and that just because a piece of art sells or doesn't sell does not make it a good or bad piece. Fair enough, but I think this line of thinking is a bit "no true scotsman" (re-defining a term -- in this case "value" -- until it fits an argument); it smacks of desperation to de-valorize the market based on some narrow sociopolital viewpoint.
What is "art", and more importantly, does "art" belong to the people who study art in school and then go on to create the urbanized gallery/museum culture, or does it more belong to the person who designed the "coca cola" logo? I think the answer is obvious: the logo designer, the person who came up with the courier font, and the industrial designers at apple inc. Who did the rounded corners on the edges of the imac, are the ones with immeasurably more aesthetic influence. Academic/gallery/museum artists have co-opted the term "art," and are often eager to say "that isn't art!" when referring to an animated Saturday morning cartoon, video game, comic book, or superbowl commercial. Why is this allowed? How did the term "art" get stolen by a narrow culture of elitists?
Academic/gallery/museum artists are dealing with a tiny subset of human culture, and in fact that subset mostly consists of themselves (and a few other people who are "into art", often as a part of making a grab at social status or self esteem). An obvious clue that a lot of contemporary art either isn't very good or at least has a very narrow appeal comes from the fact that it is mostly presented and consumed as "art for artists" -- people going to each other's openings, essentially. "art" doesn't draw many people outside of huge events and venues like the MOMA or met in new york city, even when shows are put on for free; people would rather pay $15 to see a movie, $30 for a videogame, or $10 for a comic book, than spend that time looking at art galleries. Galleries and museums retain some panache due to their association with the upper class of monied and stylish bourgeoisie -- it's a glaring example of the elitism of which "the art world" is so often accused. However, people still look nervously around and worry that they don't understand art, and aren't qualified to judge art as being bad or even the culture of the art world as being duplicitous; this is a classic "the emperor has no clothes" situation.
Maybe the problem is that there just is not a lot of good art out there in the gallery/academic/museum scene, and the tide of shit overwhelms everything and leaves a bad taste in the mouth, especially when the market as a standardizing body has been disabled. There are a lot of people "making art" who don't make very good art, because they don't put the effort and time in, or because they don't have the ability. There is a glut of mediocre artists and mediocre art that exists as part of "fine art," just as there is a similar glut of mediocre industrial designers, filmmakers, comic book artists, and video game developers. The difference comes from the fact that it's obvious who constitutes the set of the mediocre in the second category, since they aren't able to survive in a market-dependent environment. But because of postmodernism, marxism, conceptualism, and elitism, we find ourselves largely unable to distinguish good art from bad art.
At the very least, art worlders are afraid to say out loud what art is good and what art is bad for fear of conflicting with a postmodern rulebook of no-rules, although they might well have a preference in their head. This tended to happen to me during critiques: someone would want to say "matt, your artwork stinks -- it doesn't look good", but because they had been hamstrung by postmodernism they only were able to talk about my "concept" in a vitriolic tone of voice and then give me a low grade, which seems like an unnecessarily convoluted process.
There is so much art, everywhere, that it has overwhelmed us and made art undetectable. If you look around you, you can see that everything is some kind of designed and crafted object (and, if you like, you can write a paper on it to make it into a conceptual object as well). I can look at every object on my desk, from the imac in front of me to the pair of nail clippers at the edge, and arrive at the same conclusion: "here is a piece of art." when you walk down the street, note that every building, every car, every article of clothing people wear, is a designed object.
This "total aesthetic environment" makes hanging a picture in a museum or gallery a necessary act; we set up museums and galleries as artificial, plain, un-designed environments so that something will stand out as "art" when placed inside them. We have to take our cues of what is and what is not art from culture, because our environment has become almost 100% aestheticized design and nothing stands out; why is an oil painting more amazing or artistic than a box of cereal?
Conceptual art might be a red herring -- I think there's always been conceptual art, but only recently (post 1917 "duchampian revolution", maybe) did we start talking about it. It's impossible not to have a concept behind your art, whether or not this concept is turned into sentences and paragraphs and pages. "conceptual art" is a textual exercise that can attach itself to an art object, just as easily as it can attach itself to any object; a postmodern conceptual body of text might just as easily spring up around any craft-oriented discipline (say, plumbing), and then just as easily work to undermine it with a similar brand of nihilism.
Yes, marcel duchamp was a genius, but trying to emulate him doesn't work in any way other than to pay homage. His intellectual project enjoyed a one-time historical effectiveness -- there was just one point in history where his ideas were and could have been important -- and replicating this tongue-in-cheek "conceptual pranksterism" ad nauseum damages art, in every sense of the word.
If painters, video artists, book artists, installation artists/sculptors -- every permutation of the gallery/museum/academic art-producer -- put more time, effort, and craftsmanship into their art, it might confound the destructive influence of postmodernism, conceptualism, marxism, and narrow elitism; these four things need to be strenuously avoided if "contemporary fine art" is to have any kind of positive legacy in the history of ideas.
What about science, and what about the potential for art to exist as a research discipline? I think it can, and it tends to do so when the market is taken away as an influencing force; more fragile ideas can survive and develop without market pressures cutting down the initially unsuccessful and unconsumed. This sort of petri dish is a valuable environment even though it doesn't price easily -- just because more experimental art isn't able to survive in a market does not mean it shouldn't exist or is completely delegitimized. Consider scientific or mathematical research, much of which is not clearly commodifiable, at least at its early stages, and would not survive in a pure market; like experimental art, it requires private or public funding (the ethics of the latter constituting another discussion) to survive and evolve. To someone who asks what the purpose of research in art is or who suggests that science is more worthwhile a pursuit than art, I would point out that a great deal of scientific research is inspired, created, and funded by military interests for military applications; killing people vs. Making the world nicer to look at.
A lot of the above is speculation, though; I'm not as sure that art can exist as "pure research" as I am about my other assertions. I realize I seemed to perform an about-face by suddenly stating that the market is not the end-all and be-all. However, my task is not to claim that reliance on the market is the only way to produce good art, but rather only to argue against marxist idealism's unilateral dismissal of the market as a valuable and effective tool in the production of art, as well as to decry postmodern conceptualism and academic elitism as nihilistic, destructive forces.
I'm pretty sure I just figured out why people believe in god. "fundamental attribution error" is related. From wikipedia:
the fundamental attribution error (also known as correspondence bias or attribution effect) describes the tendency to over-value dispositional or personality-based explanations for the observed behaviors of others while under-valuing situational explanations for those behaviors.
Imagine yourself in highway traffic when someone cuts you off. Your first reaction might be to assume that the offending driver cut you off because the offending driver is mean or aggressive -- some "dispositional or personality-based explanation" of that behavior. However, of course, the cause of the cutting-off might only be that the offending driver wasn't paying attention (on the phone, listening to the radio, etc); something more "situational."
FAE is stated to apply only to observed behavior in others, but I think it can be generalized. For example, imagine working at a company where the light bulbs burn out occasionally, the water cooler is sometimes empty, and there aren't always enough parking spaces. Given only the observation of those circumstances, you might accept that these inconveniences constitute normal wear-and-tear or just the imperfection of reality, and are to be expected and accepted as a part of any complex structure (like a workplace). But then, one day, you meet mr. Jones, the physical plant manager, whose job it is to oversee routine maintenance, and perhaps he didn't sleep well last night and is not too friendly. Suddenly, every burned out light and every parking problem is blamed on mr. Jones. "damn that mr. Jones!" you think to yourself when you see an empty water cooler; the "mr. Jones" persona has become responsible for it all.
A belief in god comes from the natural need or instinct to assume there's some personality, some entity, behind everything. In essense, a grand commission of "fundamental attribution error," regarding the existence of the objects and occurence of events.
This is why in early cultures we see polytheism -- a god of love, god of food, god of war, god of etc; every aspect of existence, every mental object, is personified. That's the best way we understand reality, because we are at our essence social creatures; our "selves" are defined by our relations to others. This is not to say that we can't conceive of and practice other ways of being, but only that tribalistic family and social strucutures as well as notions of cooperation/competition are deeply ingrained in our primate brains.
I think something was lost en route from polytheism to monotheism. Instead of the things the gods are representing being important, and a "god" being present only to facilitate understanding or reverence of a particular object, the god itself started to become more important. Then, from there, to make the god seem even greater, pre-existing gods and their powers/interests/attributes were lumped together into one "all powerful, all knowing" god-object. A lot of monotheism's emergence might have had to do with warring cultures and their various respective gods -- if one culture has a monotheistic god, then that means their god is greater than the little, multiple gods of some other culture (god of war, good of love, god of food, etc).
The full-circle of spiritual evolution seems to be atheism -> polytheism -> monotheism -> pantheism -> atheism. I'm reluctant to call pantheism more evolved than polytheism or monotheism more evolved than polytheism, or even atheism more evolved than pantheism; each structure is a different way of relating to god and the universe, and all of them can be helpful (or damaging) to particular inviduals and particular cultures, depending on what behaviors they inspire or direct.
I know I've blogged about this before, but it was years ago, and I need to play a massive game of "catch up" on all the things I used to think about before I went off to school. Maybe at some point I'll try to tackle art.
God I don't feel like editing. But I did it anyway. Maybe I should reform and capitalize my sentences like a normal person. It does make text easier to read.
Woohoo, it's been a new day for 5 minutes, and I can start a new entry. I also discovered how to automatically insert the p tag, so that cuts down on the rote effort. I think my blogging environment is more or less complete. Now, of course, comes the issue of writing about things other than the blog itself, which was an issue that came up before; I think I was even cheeky enough to call it "metablogging." I'm sure of it, in fact.
I cleaned up my apartment real good, and for some reason the result was to make me feel lonelier and more empty, at least in some way. Cleaning has profound effects on one's mental state. Those effects are usually good, but the clearing of debris has a mental analogue, and when one clears away mental or emotional debris one ends up seeing things more clearly. And "things," in this case, amount to being in a small, solitary environment; the prison apartment.
The only problem with inserting html tags automatically with bbedit is that I still have to use the arrow keys or the mouse to move the cursor down after the closing p tag to begin a new paragraph. Ideally, I'd just type away in paragraphs without worrying about tags at all. But, I suppose, this is the price I pay for hand-coding a blog. It's the way I've always done it, and furthermore there is no easy way to migrate all my past entries with all of their html idiosyncracies and embeddings to a content management system. At least, I don't think there is, and I'm not going to investigate it.
Every. Single. Time. I start a new paragraph, I have to go through a little dance: cursor down past the closing tag, command-m, p, enter.
Actually, all I have to do is hit the down arrow key once.
Like that.
Must practice.
I guess this is doable. Down arrow, command-m, p, enter.
Maybe there's a macro I can assign in bbedit.
Must get used to it. Now command s, command-ctrl-option s, enter enter enter. I guess I can live with this.
I remember now why I liked to blog so much, besides the usual self-expression stuff: it helps wtih loneliness, in a "dear diary" sort of way. Now I just need to get better at typing. I think I'm sort of out of practice in that sense as well. I just need to relax, sit back, and touch-type, not moving anything except my fingers. The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog. This mac keyboard is actually very helpful in touch typing, mostly because the keys are so close to flat. Command-s, command-ctrl-option-s, enter enter enter. Down arrow, command-m, p, enter. Command-s.
Y'know, it's possible that this can just be a typing exercise. That would be helpful, I think. At the very least, it means more fluency when writing, which is a way I might theoretically earn my bread. However, as I keep pointing out to myself and others, there are very few jobs that say "writer" listed in classified ads or job postings. Mostly, you see administrative assistant or truck driver...stuff like that. Command-s, command-ctrl-option-s, enter enter enter. Down arrow, command-m, p, enter.
I know! I'll insert an image, just to make the blog more readable and interesting. I took a photo today of some old DVDs that I'm trying unsuccessfully to sell on kijiji. I shall practice with that one:
Now I have to actually upload movies.JPG.
Woah...too fat. I'll squish the image with html.
But actually, that raises another question: what is the maximum diameter an image can be before it starts to stretch the containing blog table? I don't remember what the width is, but it should be here. Damn, I'm lazy...make a clickable link in my own blog so I can see my stylesheet in a browser, rather than find the file with finder. It seems to be a 600 px table, with 20 px of padding. So, an image 580 across should be the max nondeforming width. Let's try it.
No, still too fat. Let's try 560. I swear I see the table edges bulging out a pixel or two. Finally, let's try 550. 550 doesn't deform the table, but I can see a margin difference on the right vs. the left, so that means the image is actually too small. 555?
Believe it or not, 559 appears to be the magic number. I guess I should try this in firefox as well.
I'm happy now. Going to call it quits for tonight I think. Of course, tomorrow I am going to blog MORE MORE MORE. There's something really appealing about being able to publish without having to go through some kind of gatekeeper publishing authority, who might tell me I can't just go on for hundreds and hundreds of words about pixel width adjustments of images. In fact, I can be as boring as I want to be. And write as poorly as I want to write. And I fully plan to do both.
The thing is, I'm not DOING anything these days. I'm just sittin' around, basically. Time for plans within plans?
My task is to get comfortable blogging again. That's the key to success. A lot of it comes down to familiarity with my desktop environment, and making sure all my GUI shortcuts are in place. I wonder if I could set up some kind of script or something to automatically open the most recently-modfied document in a directory. No matter how much I automate things though, it will never be as easy as blogging in a wordpress or blogger.com site. But, that's ok...i do get something out of the lo-fi aesthetic.
I'm fat. However, I'm really happy about getting a master's degree; nothing like credentials to boost self esteem.
Wow, has it been a day already? I was working on and adding to yesterday's entry today, when in fact I should have started a new one. But no matter -- I'm still getting into the swing of things. I feel like I've made more enemies since I stopped blogging back in 2006 or so, and there are more people who are out to get me. So, it might not be smart to post too much personal info on here. Well, maybe that sounds crazy. It's possible I just realize the scope and gravity of broadcasting personal thoughts for the entire world to read, whereas I didn't before. I don't know what to do about this. I think maybe not take on such a personal tone to my writing. I'll make it more about stuff other than me. Maybe.
How am I going to get through the week?
Oh, oops -- I didn't make the mistake I thought I made in not starting a new entry. In fact, it just turned to October 4th a few minutes ago. See, this is what happens when you...blog a lot and aren't aware of what happens to the date at midnight.
I guess I just need to start typing again. I haven't blogged in several years, but now that I've graduated from my master's program I'm starting to feel the urge to go back to the way things were. "the way things were", in this case, is me using the web as the locus of creative output. While I was in grad school, the center of the action was real space, in the art building, with real people critiquing my art; I didn't have time to create a web presentation in addition to meeting the demands of the institutional environment. But now that I've finished (and am going to graduate, officially, with all the pomp and circumstance, on the 28th) I can go back to using the web as I like to use it and have always used it: as an html 1.0 repository for the stuff I make (writing, images, aniamtions, coding, other crap).
As is always the case when I re-start a writing practice after a long haitus, I feel rusty and out of practice. But, I will prevail. I hope.
Maybe that's enough for today. I'm using bbeddit, which has built-in ftp functionality, and I'm writing this up on mac os x. My new blogging environment. I just type type type, and then do ctrl-option-command S, which saves remotely to the server.
The big question now is: what am I going to do with my life? I surprised myself recently with the realization that I want to work, although I guess this isn't a big surprise according to freud. But narrowing it down, I want to work a job, get paid, go in to work, have responsibilities, punch a clock, etc -- I want to be employed. You can define "work" almost any way you want, or at least as broadly as "some kind of productive activity" (where "productive" remains open to interpretation). But "employment" is quite narrow in scope, and applies fairly specifically to this time and place (modern north american culture). I think wikipedia has a history of employment article, which I might read.
this is as close as it gets. I don't know that providing food and shelter for one's self have always been tied, at least so closely, to employment. Anyway, I'm tired of this digression. My willingness to talk about things that I haven't researched has decreased a bit; perhaps this is an effect of graduate school.
Getting back on track, I need to work. I tried applying for jobs as a 2D animator and general creative person at video game companies, but I'm not sure that's going to pan out. For one thing I'm not actually qualified for the positions that most of them advertise -- instead of applying for specific jobs I just sent people my resume and said "hey, I'm a creative, talented person, hire me to do something." this is not necessarily a totally illegitimate approach -- they say that most positions are created around the people a company wants to hire, which I'm not sure I believe. Maybe that sort of thing is more true in a good economy. My next step may be to look for graphic design jobs, even though I've historically shunned them.
I should address something: I don't know that it's such a good idea to start blogging again, and yet here we are. Above I went into why I want to blog again (be creative on the web, self-expression, all that stuff), but there are some serious problems associated with blogging on the web. Or, at the very least, I have encountered some serious problems in the past when I've blogged on the web. The problem is always other people, and how they react to what I've written. I think for a long time I confused a blog with a diary, and wrote things that probably don't belong in a public space. Or, rather, I was ignorant of the consequences of putting some things in a public space. Gossip is bad. I'll just put it that way.
But aside from gossip there's another problem: potential employers. What if some hiring manager reads something that he doesn't like? I'm thinking specifically of something like a political statement or world-view that he disagrees with. It's a little bit pathetic and indicative of a to-be-wasted life if one is so concerned with what someone else might think about one's own statements that one doesn't say anything at all, but in fact I believe that situation comes up all the time; people in the workplace and who consider themselves always in some kind of job-marketing mode where they have to be potentially hireable at all times end up self-styling according to a "dress code" based on the "corporate america" archetype/stereotype. This means not really giving any strong opinions that someone in power might disagree with, for example on topics like religion, politics, sexuality, etc. In a sense, people are hired not so much if they're "qualified", but based on whether or not they can be "one of the guys" -- fit in with the employee culture, as it were.
That said, I think it's important to follow with a declaration that I don't actually have strong opinions vis-a-vis politics, religion, sexuality, etc. I find that the formation of strong opinions in these areas and ones like them is indicative of a desire for power, more than anything else.
So you see, now I've just implied that if you have strong opinions, you're a power hungry asshole. What if a hiring manager reads this? Blogging is just not a good idea in some ways.