A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

What's the purpose of having jumps ("Click for more...") on long blog articles?

I'm not talking about sites that break stories across 10 short pages so that they can expose you to 10 times as many ads. I mean the click-once-to-read-the-entire-post style that I very often see on popular blogs. Random example: Andrew Sullivan puts a "Continue Reading [topic]..." link at the bottom of posts which reach past a certain vertical length, maybe one out of every four of the posts on the front page.

I can guess some reasons, but what reasons does the conventional wisdom hold? (Yes, I'm wondering if we should institute something like this for the Gameshelf.)

http://fjgallagher.wordpress.com/

Blog of Frank Gallagher, the dedicatedly brilliant personality who brought UMaine's student newspaper, The Maine Campus, to statewide prominence in the early-mid 1990s. He also made it an exciting place to work, enough to become the reason my undergraduate career took an extra year to complete.

Looks like he's joined the ever-growing crowd of people I know in Portland, ME, though he clearly keeps strong ties to his beloved San Fransisco.

In some ways he was the first real boss-slash-colleague I ever had, and I have been looking for this guy off and on for ages. He dropped me a LinkedIn invite just yesterday! I look forward to reading him once again.

This one wasn't about McCain, so maybe this dream-theme is winding down. Again, very realistic, though my dream-self's emotional state was ramped way up.

I was seated at a table in some sort of dining hall with my parents, talking about the election. (In real life, I haven't spoken to them since October, and I've been thinking lately about how this inevitable conversation might go.) The flow of conversation led me to describe an effect that really touched me, how a lot of right-wing bloggers seemed to go through a kind of soft transformation through Obama's acceptance speech. I started to describe how even Charles Bloody Johnson made a post asking his readership of frothing, tail-chasing hyenas to chill out and soak in the moment of transcendence that their country had just passed through, electing a black president.

All this is true. In my dream, however, I couldn't actually express any of this, because I was spontaneously overcome with emotion, and began choking back tears. Other conversations around us ceased and strangers turned to look as I tried to describe this, but I was completely breaking down. I woke up on the verge of crying.

Michelle Malkin finds herself needing to calm down her own readership with assurances that Obama was recently seen speaking in front of the Ohio state flag, not a special "Obama flag" that is a harbinger of his founding New Zimbabwe upon taking power.

It's like even the top layers of crazy have weathered away from the Right's support-bucket. Nothing but rich and pungent Deep Crazy left here.

(I think I need another break from the internet. I dunno yet if I'm gonna do the debates.)

This year I made a resolution to be less overtly negative in my writing. I have been doing pretty well.

Next year, though, it will be to stop wasting my time reading stupid shit that makes me stupid. The But it's like coming across a car wreck! excuse doesn't work when you went out of your way to attend an all-day demolition derby.

I launched the Appleseed Blog. Yes, another blog from me. But really, running a technology business's website without a blog attached is a poor idea these days.

It look so long because getting Mason and Movable Type to play together was a little rough, but (with daerr's assistance) I got it going, and ended up learning a lot about all technologies involved. So I call it a win, even though none of it's billable time.

Anyway, I'm going to use it both to make public updates about Appleseed as well as occasionally pontificate on Appleseed-relevant technology. And, yes, the neglected jmac.org blog is still running as a separate thing. I still need to hack a way to crosspost consistently between that and this LJ, since I've discovered that I can't just give this up.

I just suggested Jmac's Arcade blip site to Wonderland, as per queue's suggestion from a while ago. Wish me luck!

I like to hear people talk about their jobs, if they enjoy them. Here is a survey of people on my friends list whom I know mainly through an admiration for their work, and who have blogs where they often talk about what they do. (Are there others I ought to be reading?)

jwz runs a nightclub in San Fransisco, and frequently posts of his adventures, often including a copious amount of his photography. Occasionally posts something that draws from his cred as the maintainer of xscreensaver or the brash alpha-hacker responsible for much of Netscape Navigator, back in the day. Grumbles about macs sometimes (he is maybe the most famous Mac user known to the Slashdot crowd, besides Jobs and Woz I guess). Most of his posts, though, are either fascinating links or crazy photos and movies. His tastes in non sequitur are quite similar to mine, I suppose.

grrm is still writing the Song of Ice and Fire series, that thing I repeatedly declare that I hate forever and then continue plowing through. Posts infrequently, but often enough to assure us that he's still there. Likes SF cons and football.

tmcm is a cartoonist most famous for Too Much Coffee Man and whose cartoons haven't really been all that good in a long time. But I love his posts and photographs about his life otherwise, including his recent adventures in producing an opera based on his famous character. He posts all of his finished cartoons, as well as many preliminary sketches and doodles. Sometimes he gets the blog involved: in a recent post he grumbled about not being satisfied with a particular punchline, and ended up replacing it with one that a fan suggested in comments.

urbaniak is an actor living in New York City. He's most recognized for his roles in the film Henry Fool, which I have not seen, and Venture Brothers, which I adore (he provides the voice for Dr. Venture). About half of his posts are bizarre, slow-paced flamewars with (so far) two particular LJ users who might not even be real people. These are not very interesting. Much of the rest is stories of being an actor in New York, and are great. His fans enjoy making animated gifs of his babies beating each other up.

officialgaiman is Neil Gaiman. Much of the content is public responses to fan mail, which gives it a very different feel than the other journals listed here. Most of the comments are the ladies swooning every time he posts a picture of himself, which is often.

(Was going to add zarf for the yuks "gee he's been quiet lately" but he doesn't actually use his website as anything remotely like a blog, so.)

I mean DIGG THIS STORY.

Actually, for real. I would consider it a personal favor if you did vote up the story by clicking on its "Digg" link (though you need to create a free account there if you don't already have one). (Unless you think Volity is lame, in which case please refrain, and chuckle as you allow it to sink into deserved obscurity.)

http://digg.com/software/Volity:_open-source_interactive_environment_for_games

Thanks to keimel for making the post, which is a more accurate version of the last one, and a better link too.

I had a nice chat yesterday with Andy Oram, a longtime editor at O'Reilly, about Volity. It resulted in him writing this entry in his own blog: http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/05/volity_opensource_interactive.html

I am pleased that our websites are in such a state that even hardened veterans of the open source scene like Andy take one look at it and immediately get intensely interested.

Not to say that I didn't have to make the effort to point it out to him. I got the idea to write him the night before last, when I remembered having a chat about games and gaming culture at a party two Decembers ago. This reinforces the fact that I really gotta keep pushing to get the message out there... the influx of developers I wrote about a couple of weeks ago hit a plateau shortly after that.

Things are better then they were a year ago, when I was. Then Zarf got involved, and much more recently than that we've had a low but constant level of outside developer interest. It's the last that I really need to ratchet up, and now.