On trying not to abandon your blog

Hey, it's the first ever Inverted Soapbox post! Meta meta.

Readers here will notice the flood of posts has dried up to an infrequent drizzle over the past year or so and it’s due in no small part to being Actually Busy with Work That’s Read By More Than Four People. And this is the problem with blogs, the personal kind you start when you’ve got nothing else to do, say you’re maybe a frustrated reporter stuck at a small-town paper writing the same rezoning stories over and over again like some sort of Mac-toting Sisyphus.

So then you find yourself (not complaining at all) in the position of spending 8am-10pm some days in front of the computer writing, posting, editing, reporting, re-editing, pre-posting and working on even more pitches to give yourself even more writing and reporting work, and by the end of the day you’re so dead tired of staring at the computer screen and banging out content that you want to spend your one free hour chugging Trader Joe’s wine and killing an episode or two of Dr. Who. Which is why, if you ever look around the internet, you see lots of withered and abandoned blogs among the recently promoted set of the internet, the folks who had time once to blather away to their little corner of the internet before, you know, a bigger audience might look them up. Suddenly this little webspace that once contained emo ramblings about breaking up with a girl in South Carolina (long-since deleted) or what the iPhone means for the death of the bar argument (still up here somewhere) suddenly might be stumbled upon by someone I’m trying to profile for Inc. (like this guy) or, yikes!, even a potential date (Yes, I know who you are, sometimes. Statcounter is like reverse stalking: stalking the people who are stalking you. Does that count as stalking? Yes, I’m asking you, stalker).  Continue reading

Xeni Jardin has breast cancer

I just got way too overly emotional reading this tweet from writer, Boing Boinger and all-things-brilliant tech gadfly Xeni Jardin:

I follow Xeni’s work regularly, and even though I don’t know her personally, I think at this point it’s fair to say I’m pretty sick of cancer wreaking a pretty devastating path across this 30 years of life, claiming family, friends and friends who are so close they are most certainly family.

At last count, I am among a group of six close friends who all lost fathers to cancer of one form or another, including three of us to whom it happened with the same three-year period. A gallows humor club known as the Dead Fathers Society. And there’s more and more and more, breast cancer, prostate cancer, leukemia, thyroid, whatever. Does it stop? What else can you do except fight on and on? Tell it, XKCD.

The best Occupy Wall Street sign?

Via Dave C. from Thursday’s Occupy march.

Sadly, Glass-Steagall will only be coming back to Netflix streaming, exclusively. But man is it one quotable act.

The part of my Halloween costume no one got

This, as part of the Newspaper Layoff Clark Kent outfit:

(If you don’t get the Patch joke, this comment from Etanowitz might help).

Also, this:

Hard times in the newspaper industry, especially when you always disappear instead of reporting on the biggest news events in Metropolis.

Ghosts of editors past

Among the reasons I miss my former editor, Fitz McAden of the Island Packet:

via sports editor Justin Jarrett, who adds: “The photo doesn’t do it justice. He has several days’ stubble and is wearing flannel pajama pants and house slippers.”

#OCCUPYHALLOWEEN.

Also, #OCCUPYNEWSROOMS.

Unemployed life coaches create a human resources dept. at Occupy Wall Street

Life coaches stake a claim to a piece of Zuccotti. Photo via Coaching Visionaries.

At the edge of Zuccotti Park amid a sea of signs and a crowd alternating between snapping pictures of the cardboard handiwork and creating some of their own, a girl in her mid 20s walked up to a plain folded table covered in printed sheets of paper.

It was about 7pm on a Friday and the post-work crowd of gawkers and evening tourists had swelled the park population significantly so she had to speak up a bit to be heard over the din.

“OK,” she says, easing cautiously into an explanation. “I’m wondering if there’s anything I can do. I work 9 to 5.”

A girl behind the table stuck her hand out to interrupt her: “Same for me,” she says, smiling and nodding. She’s bubbly and energetic, wearing the kind of comfortable suit you might expect to see at a public relations staff happy hour.

“I’m an artist,” the first girl continues. “I have no money. I’m poor.”

Without missing a beat, the girl behind the table starts pulling papers out of the stack and makes an elevator pitch about a planned art exhibit outside the JP Morgan building that needed artists.

“Cool,” the first girl responded, seeming shocked to have found such a quick answer, and a place she could go.

Is this the central booking for all newcomers to Occupy Wall Street? Not exactly, because it goes a bit deeper than that. The table is staffed by a team of about eight professional, certified life coaches with the goal of helping newbies not just find something to do — after all, anyone can sling a plate of free vegan pizza at the chow line — but to tap into something deeper that draws out their life skills.

If Occupy Wall Street is meant to be a national come-to-Jesus sermon, this table is the private confession booth. Continue reading

This wins at Hurricane Irene

I’m underwhelmed at being underwhelmed all the time. Which is why it’s good we have the internet to enhance news events.

Via New York Shitty: