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

• If I have been using LJ more, it's largely because I've finally gotten around to subscribing to various LJ-friends' (and, increasingly, Dreamwidth-friends') RSS feeds, using the proper kung-fu that allows the reading of locked posts therein. It's a small hassle to treat every "friend" as a separate blog, but since I've gotten used to curating a long list of incoming feeds over the last couple of years, it's doable. (I never got any full-friends-page subscription magic to work in a way that made me happy.)

• That said, I'm likely to try again to launch a new personal blog on www.jmac.org, sometime in 2011. I last tried it three years ago and didn't get anywhere, but I have new reasons now to try again, and new directions to take it. The top of my personal-project stack, which has been waiting patiently for me to finally finish Warbler, is the top-to-bottom remodeling of www.jmac.org. I've talked a good talk on this before, but it's been many years since I've done anything other than applying new CSS or rewording the front page a little. It's still too much the website of who I was in 1999. Needs less "I am jmac, and I seek the holy grail" and more "I am jmac, and I sit resplendent in my glory." You know how it is.

OK, so, I've been Twittering a lot, and I'm probably going to keep doing so. If you don't use Twitter or Facebook, you're missing a lot of the crap I'm writing every day. It's a different flavor of crap than what I write here (go look and see what I mean), but it's still crap by me, which is of theoretical interest to my friends.

So. Given my impression that some people react to this sort of thing with profound gross-out yuck, should I use a service like LoudTwitter to post my daily tweets on my LJ?

[Poll #1406258]

Great scott, that was the most horrible thing I've seen in davis_square in a long time. It's like coming home to discover a steaming turd in the middle of your kitchen floor. (And you don't have any pets.)

This is a compliment to the mods that the turds stand out so much, rather than being part of the background noise like-certain-communities-I-could-name, but I still feel like it shouldn't have gotten as far as it did. Wrote a mod about it.

(Started to mention TNH-style moderation tactics in my email, for I am a fan of them, but then had second thoughts. I'm not convinced that they apply in the case of every active internet community. It's an interesting question.)

I recently had to admit to myself that I'm once again in a phase where I can't really work on a TV show as much as I'd like. On radiotelescope's advice, I have also reconsidered my relationship with the blog. Happily, the short story is that I'm posting with confidence there once again, after a long dry spell. You can see more details yonder, as well as a shiny new post all about Space Giraffe. Surely you want to read that.

Blurb to put into your conference ad if you don't want me to come:

There was so much energy in the room - with everyone taking pictures, blogging, podcasting, and twittering - it was reminiscent of SXSW.

Why yes, I have set up a twitter thing, though I update it maybe twice a week currently (I'm "jasonmcintosh"). And I might go anyway - eh, it's $50, and I could stand to punch up my local network a little. But that description just makes me blanch, still.

After a hard day's work (for serious), watching Lost via abc.com. They upgraded their video player in such a way that the ads are bigger, which is nice, except that it doesn't work on my G5 any more and plays with lotsa sound hiccups on my laptop, enough to drive me kinda bonkers. I'd totally pay $2/pop to iTMS to download and watch pristine Quicktime versions, but since that's no longer an option, it's thepiratebay.org for me!

It's a race; I may end up watching all the current eps online anyway just from impatience, but we'll see.

I wasn't looking forward to season 4, but ruthling gave it the thumbs-up in her LJ recently and that sold me, since our feelings on the show have historically run about the same. (It's got tons of cool stuff, and tons of really annoying stuff. Arrrgh, so much annoying stuff. But... but the cool stuff!)

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Understood that jmac.org/blog isn't as unread as I thought. Very good.

I'm going to resume my hunting for cross-posting solutions later. Someone has to have solved this problem correctly, by now...

The Gameshelf Blog's subscription count has been increasing daily since its (re-)launch ten days ago. Yesterday it broke 50 subscribers, and also surpassed the number of people subscribed to the video-only feed. And we got our first comments from users who aren't themselves authors on the site. (Specifically on a Zarf essay about "The Game". The recent meme/prank, not the 1997 Michael Douglas movie.)

Meanwhile, I just soft-launched the Gameshelf Casting Call. This is separate from the specific casting call I will do for upcoming episodes, which I've actually started to schedule, if you can believe that. No, this is me trying to cast a wider net, something I've been wanting to do for a long time, and the show's having a blog (and therefore a continual presence even between actual episodes) makes it feel more feasible now. After the thon, I'll start promoting that page (and therefore the rest of the Gameshelf site) around LJ and such.

So after a month it's become clear to me that one can't just leave LiveJournal to start one's own blog and expect everything to be the same. Movable Type is excellent fun to run and tinker with (at least if you're a software tinkerer), but no combination of plugins can replicate LJ's community features. I particularly miss comments, which for a number of reasons lack the spontaneous and conversational nature of the comments here.

I find that I don't want to return to LJ as my blogging home, though. On reflection, I've decided that the "Flag this post / Flag this journal" controls offend me beyond reconciliation. They are idiot "How's my driving? Call 1-800-555-1234" bumper stickers, implying that I write at the convenience of a higher authority, who depends on you! loyal reader! to come running to them with reports of my transgressions. And if the LiveJournal AUP has in fact made this true since 2001, and it's just been easy to ignore until now, then all the more reason to take my business elsewhere.

So, I am going to start regularly cross-posting to this LiveJournal, by way of a cross-posty Movable Type plugin that someone else wrote. It's not perfect - in fact it is half-broken, and I aim to fix it as a small side project - but it will do for the nonce. This will probably make jmac_org redundant, and I apologize for the implied suggestion that you muck further with your friends list for my sake. But I invite you to wait and see how it actually ends up working out.

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I'm also going to start using the Gameshelf website as a blog (since it is one, after all) posting my own game news and reviews and stuff there. I would also like to extend an invitation to people in the Gameshelf community to join the blog as a games writer. Basically, if your name has appeared in the show's credit roll for any reason, consider yourself invited. Please comment here or contact me elsewhere if you're interested.

The prerequisite is another side-project: I've got to redesign the site template to have a big fat link to the show's most recent episode up at the top of the page somewhere, safe from off-scrolling due to new posts. And I'll slap a less-obvious-but-still-obvoius link to the show archives somewhere, too. I have some big new ideas for the 'Shelf this year, and I love the idea of meeting them with the potential of a blog-based online community, oo la la, instead of the crusty static website that's was there for years.

In New Jersey again, hanging out with doctor_atomic through Sunday morning. We just spent several hours burning our brains over the latest issue of Puzzles and Answers Magazine, knocking over two puzzles and shouting "This is brilliant!" at a third though we have no idea yet how to shake the meta out of it. Taking a damn break now. (I also love grumbling at test-solver tahnan via IM while working on these.)

Starting work on the one contract next week, though I noted half an hour of billable time on the train while I absorbed spec docs and such. Not a peep from the client who owes me in excess of two large now. Since I now have barely enough liquid to make rent, this makes me sad. Yes, I will get quite aggressive about it once I'm back on home turf.

I am annoyed at Blip.tv. They changed the design of show pages in a way I really don't like, and which apparently I have no control over as show operator. If you go to http://thegameshelf.blip.tv you are treated to our first episode from 2005, and while I Stand By All My Work, boy does that shit show its age. It's not the first impression I want made on a visitor. And yet it clearly is, in many cases, since my blip.tv stats show an order of magnitude more views for that ep than any of the others... which means that it's often the last impression made, as well. Blah.

I should just set up a Movable Type thing for the show, already.

Made my post about the Nintendo DS Wi-Fi reverse-engineering effort to my O'Reilly Network blog last night. It's already scrolled off the front page! Who invited all these other bloggers, eh? Oh well. I suspect that people who like reading the O'Reilly weblogs use RSS, anyway. (LJ has a feed for it: oreillynetblogs.)