Wednesday, July 15, 2009

Trading tips on being awesome...

Guilty as charged...

Repeatedly.

Things Marketing People Love.

Thanks to Javas for the heads up.

This only seems like one of those annoying State-of-the-Blog*-not-posting-excuse posts.

In actuality, it’s a far more cerebral thought piece about the very nature of blogs.

You’re welcome.

First, a little context. Sunday I was driving back from Southern(ish) Oregon after an epic weekend of golf down at Bandon Dunes in celebration of my dad’s sixtieth. It’s kind of a long drive (7.5-8 hrs) and a seemingly random series of rolling stops and violent downpours added a couple more hours.

Good times.

Except it actually was. I listened to some great music and got caught up on podcasts and did some good old-fashioned thinking.

Mostly about you, dear readers.**

I listened to a couple of the Bill Simmons (Sports Guy) podcasts, which I’d actually never checked out before. It’s kind of hit-or-miss based on who he gets on as a guest, but it’s more than entertaining enough to help pass the time on I-5 when you’re sitting at a dead stop for no discernible reason.

Two of the episodes I downloaded were a two-part conversation with Simmons; regular blog and podcast guest, Chuck Klosterman. The two of them chatted for a couple of hours and a good deal of it was fairly boring. But one of their longer tangents (about why Klosterman isn’t on twitter) actually turned into a really interesting back-and-forth on the nature of expression right now.

Simmons was talking about how, today, you can’t just go and put up a half-baked blog post or article about a given subject (baseball was his example) the way you could ten years ago because everything’s so interconnected (and accessible) that there are a million baseball blog writers and readers who will just slam you to shit for not knowing what you’re talking about.

A relatively banal point, except that it led Klosterman to ask if Simmons thought the quality of online discourse was better today that it was back then. Simmons said yes and went on to offer that the nation seems (in at least some ways) far more literate than it used to be. Klosterman challenged this, but Simmons talked about how everyone writes now. Everyone is on Facebook or twitter or a blog or texting or whatever.

I think he’s totally right. Even a few years ago, when I became a late adopter to blogging, I was one of only a handful of people I knew who was doing it. In retrospect, I think that’s part of what made it fun and interesting.

I have to go back to why I started the blog originally.

We’d been in LA for just under a year and I’d gone from working in the shittiest ad agency known to man*** back to freelancing****. At that point I was working mostly on small projects and mostly from home. Mindy was crazy busy with law school and my days lacked a certain human contact.

Blogging seemed like a fun way to reach the outside world. Without having to talk to actual humans.

Actually, it just seemed like a good way to do some more writing. Like most people who write for a living, I find myself spent at the end of a lot of days and it’s harder than I wish to motivate to do the personal writing projects I keep meaning to get to.*****

Blogging, and its pseudo deadlines, seemed perfect. And it actually worked. My first few months of blogging featured a (relatively) interesting mix of original stuff, cultural snark, tech reviews/Apple fanboydom, music reviews and the beloved Caption Contest.******* It wasn’t all great stuff, but it was at least stuff. It led to a piece on McSweeney’s site and a modicum of Internet fame when a couple of pieces somehow managed to snag a few thousand hits.

Now for more context.

I didn’t have a daughter. My wife was studying 93.72% of her waking hours. And I was blessed with some longterms freelance assignments that were fairly sane in their workloads.

Blogging every single day seemed really easy.

Flash forward a couple of years. Work is much more demanding and involves a lot more actual face-to-face meetings. That means what used to be spare time goes instead to doing the work that comes from said meetings. Throw in a wife who’s actually present******** and a daughter who I’d much rather spend my free time with and blogging every single day seems less like a fun idea and more like an albatross around my neck.

Pretty much how reading it lately has probably felt.

The blog has devolved into an aggregator for cool shit I find on other aggregators.

Maybe devolved isn’t exactly the right word though.

I enjoy passing along videos and cool sites and other Internet gems. I like evangelizing the bands that Mark Hall hates*********. I need the chip shot that is a five minute post.

But as much as I enjoy that stuff, if that’s all the blog is going to be, it’s not worth doing.

It needs to be a mix like it was before. I need to do some actual writing. It’s more fun for me that way. And I think it’s more fun for you. I’m going to change my expectations a bit. I’ll keep sharing the stuff I find and like. I’ll keep giving short takes on that stuff. But I’m also gong to work to do more of the writing that I did at the start. I’d like to try to get something else on McSweeney’s. I’m eager to do my poor-man’s Chuck Klosterman impression with pop culture and my less-talented Bill Simmons on sports (hello NBA preview, MLB analysis and week-by-week football yawn that used to be ICBINB! staples).

Who knows? If I get the reader numbers back up a bit again, maybe I’ll even bring back the Caption Contest.

Which reminds me, readership…

That’s the other interesting aspect of the Simmons-Klosterman conversation that went unexplored. That increased competition can’t help but dilute audiences. It’s harder to get readers, even if you do write something great or interesting or funny or original, than it was even a couple of years ago.

There was a golden period********** when my daily musings on Apple, the filming of The Hills, fantasy baseball and the magical semen-volumizing elixir that is Ejaculoid ranked on the first page of Google searches for said topics***********. I certainly never started the blog with much thought about audience, but I have to admit it was pretty damn fun while it lasted.

These days, blog success tends to mean feeding content to highly specialized theme sites that are parts of larger blog networks. The quirky, independent blogging generalist seems to be a bit of a dying breed. Likely due to inbreeding,

Similarly, social networking sites have totally undercut blogging. Facebook and twitter are the thousand pound gorillas of Internet self-expression. I only know two people who having been consistently blogging as long as I have, but I know hundreds who manage a sentence or two status update every few days. I have to admit that the seductive ease of Facebook has definitely diminished my blogging as well.

It’s an interesting twist on the blog model. With blogging you have to build an audience with the quality of what you’re posting and then find ways to grow that audience through linking to other sites or building word of mouth (far harder today than it was pre-social networking explosion). With social networking, your audience is built in and your reach every single person with every single thought, idea, restaurant eaten at, movie seen, mile run, baby vomit cleaned, anniversary had, or whatever other life flotsam you/I decide to post.

“So why not just do an FB update about your blog and instantly grow your audience by dozens or hundreds?” you’d be asking if you’d made it this far into the post.

Um... Yeah… Good question.

Maybe I should.

I have to admit that it feels kind of weird though. I guess part of it is the nature of the two beasts. The size differences in audiences that I mentioned earlier are probably the biggest issue. I know that anything I put on Facebook will reach all of my “friends” and edit accordingly.************ People just life dump on Facebook. A blog is more of a brain dump. Broadcasting my blog to everyone I’m connected to on Facebook would invariably change the way I write on it.

In the end, I think it comes down to time. Twitter and Facebook are so appealing because they’re so easy. They take no time to update and if you take a few days or weeks off, no one really notices. With a blog, that just isn’t true. Plus you lose audience when you stop posting regularly.

And regular posting takes time.

Well, sometimes it does. Like I said, posting video from another site takes only a minute or two. But writing a decent post (crafting that proverbial non-shitty baseball post Simmons referenced) can take hours.

Lately I tend to spend hours on other stuff. Which is kind of a bummer. Not because I don’t love doing all the other stuff I’m doing, but because I miss the early days of the blog (and of blogging).

“Is there a point to this post?” you’d surely wonder if you hadn’t stopped reading after the third paragraph.

No. Not really.

Only that it got me thinking about what it is I do here. I’m not going to feel guilty about the quickie posts that help me stay relatively consistent with updates. But I am going to work to post more original content in the style of the old days.

You’re welcome.




*Big B, bitches.
**You were in various states of undress. If you must know.
***What’s up, hacks?
****Proud to say that I didn’t even last three months before quitting.
*****To do, Great American Novel.******
******Also acceptable, Mediocre American Novel.
*******Sigh.
********Bar exam months notably excluded.
*********Or will soon hate.
**********In large part because Luke linked my blog off of the NPR.org site and that begot higher Google rankings.
***********Or disturbing pornographic queries involving any of those words. Which there are more of than you might think.
************Ergo, no Ejaculoid status updates.

Wilco and Feist on Letterman

Wow, brutal opening "joke" to applause sequence, but great performance...



I've also decided that Eleanor and Jeff Tweedy have the same hair.

Monday, July 13, 2009

I feel less guilty about being excited about September since it pretty much feels like September outside today anyway.

Let's be honest, there really isn't that much good stuff on TV these days.

I'm feeling generous so I'll share my elitist version of the list with you:

30 Rock, Friday Night Lights, Eastbound and Down, Breaking Bad, Mad Men (though less so than before), (sometimes) The Office (again, sometimes) and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.*

That last one is probably the least seen of the group. I wish I could claim to be a fan from day one, but I was a pretty late convert to the religion. That said, I now have a convert's faith.

And that's why their simple, viral Season 5 promo that plays off of the uber-bizarre, mega-awesome Season 4 finale gets me so excited.



My only disappointment is they didn't find a way to work in the line, "If you want inside the boy's hole? you gotta pay the troll toll."

And seriously, Ted Leo and Of Montreal get even more credit in my book.**


*Am I missing anything?
**Which I know they were worried about.

Thursday, July 09, 2009

Rock Out With Your End O' The Week Cock Out - Discovery

Um. Wow. It's been a couple of weeks, eh?

Here's the deal...

Oh, forget it. I.O.U one podcast okay?

It's coming soon. There's been too much awesome music to not have done one lately. I suck.

In the meantime, here's a pretty awesome "new" band. Discovery is Vampire Weekend keyboardist Rostam Batmanglij and Ra Ra Riot lead singer Wes Miles.

Um yeah.

In other news, J. Crew has an awesome new summer collection.

Seriously, VW and RRR are two great tastes that taste great together.

"That's just because they pretty much taste the same," you protest.

Yeah, well calm the frak down.

Discovery takes the sound you've come to know and love/hate/eh/yawn and takes it to a whole new place. And electronic place...

OOOOOOOOH!

Here's their album, LP's opener, "Orange Shirt."

Enjoy!

And have a great weekend. Podcast on the way...


Orange Shirt - Discovery

Oh and because I've been a shitty blogger, here's a bonus track, "Osaka Loop Line."

Lucky, assholes...




*Credit to Gregg/Paco73 for our cock.

Wednesday, July 08, 2009

Happy 12:34:56 7/8/9

Yawn.

Tuesday, July 07, 2009

I'm not blogging to make friends

Monday, July 06, 2009

Sarah, Sarah, Sarah...

I love the spin attempts her spokesperson keeps trying...



I actually think it's more like the point guard asking to be taken out at the end of the game.

And the fair and balanced reporting continues over at Fox...



I mean please try and explain to me how this positions her favorably in any way for a continued life in politics.

Allow me to save everyone some time write the ad of any politician who will ever run against her again:

OMINOUS MUSIC FADES UP

ANNCR: Sarah Palin wants your vote for _____. But when things get tough, will she quit on you like she did on the people of Alaska?

MUSIC SWELLS

ANNCR: Sarah Palin. When the going gets tough, she gets going. Paid for by ______.


You're welcome. That will be several thousand dollars.

Very cool music video

That I stole from Mark Hall's Facebook update...



"This music video was shot for Sour's 'Hibi no Neiro' (Tone of everyday) from their first mini album 'Water Flavor EP'. The cast were selected from the actual Sour fan base, from many countries around the world. Each person and scene was filmed purely via webcam."

Um. Wow.

So the Mariners just completed pretty much the toughest road trip in baseball (LA, NY and BOS) and did so at 5-4.

Which, in my book, is unbelievably impressive. All the more so when you consider that they lost their Gold Glove third baseman along the way.

So consider me impressed.

Going into the All-Star break, the M's are going to face a difficult decision. Plug along with the seriously flawed offense and incredible pitching you currently have... Or try and make a few deals that could upgrade the new hole at 3B and/or the existing hole at SS, even if it might cost you a little of that pitching...

I'm still on the deal Bedard or Washburn side of the issue. I think moving one of them could give you an important offensive piece that plays every night (not every five) and could give this team a real shot at making a run for the AL West.

But, more importantly, I also favor trading those guys for the same reasons as before. Get something for them before they leave for nothing and fix issues with this offense (that you're succeeding in spite of) for this year and beyond.

I still wouldn't bet on the M's to outlast both LAA and TEX, but it's looking a hell of a lot more possible after their road trip.

So I'll keep hoping!

Go, Mariners!

This is how I spent my weekend...




Okay, technically there was probably a lot more of this.


Wednesday, July 01, 2009

Why?

This post brought to you by my awesome ass

So I'm like most guys, I have a closet full of pairs of pants that just don't fit that well. Being tall surely doesn't help, but in general most mens pants are shit. They just don't fit. They're badly cut and the butts tend to be really baggy and bunchy.

After reading a few articles and seeing a few evangelically-positive comments about Bonobos pants, I decided to check them out for myself.

Yesterday my pants arrived.

I'll go into much greater detail, but on the off chance that you're really busy, I'll cut to the chase. They are awesome. They are astoundingly comfortable and they fit perfectly. They're slim enough to look really sharp, but not too tight to cramp movement. They're the most awesome pants I've ever owned.

And I'm hooked.

See, here's the deal. They're just better made than the j. Crew or Banana Republic or Gap or whatever pants most guys buy.

They have this curved waist that makes the pants hang perfectly and moves with you as you sit or bend over. They have a great cut in the thigh so that they aren't tight or restrictive, but avoid being baggy and frumpy. They flair a bit at the bottom to look great with your oh-so-stylish kicks.

But the best part is the butt.**

I don't know what the magic is, but they eliminate the baggy, diaper butt that is the lame specialty of most pants.

Plus they have a cool Web site, great customer service, tons of styles, a smart and funny brand voice and these cool patterns for the liners that are a perfect little stylish detail on even their most conservative pants.

Like I said, I'm hooked.

Long live Bonobos. And feel free to stare at my ass when I pass by.***


*Except more awesome.
**See what I did there?
***Because it looks awesome.

So worth the DVD wait...



I'm fucking in. You're fucking out!

Let me wholeheartedly agree, Eastbound and Down is awesome. And there's a second season coming. Maybe I'll have to pony up for HBO to see it in real time.