The Big Think

Car Lust: Our Cars–Tyler’s Pontiac Fiero

Google had a beautiful graphic up yesterday commemorating the 160th birthday of Robert Louis Stevenson. In case you missed it, here it is:

“So what if the best of our wages be,

An empty sleeve, a stiff bent knee,

A crutch for the rest of life, who cares?

As long as the old flag waves and dares.”

lest we forget. Thank you to American Veterans.

McDonald’s Happy Meal resists decomposition for six monthss: “”

eww.

I was all set to link to the awesome XKCD updated map of the Internet, but then I realized that anyone who is interested in it has seen it already, and anyone who hasn’t seen it is probably not going to go to the link anyway. I wonder how much of blogging is thus?

This makes me happy:

Bring it on!

Think your traffic is bad? Think again. How about a nine day traffic jam (and still going)?

Get Smarter by Realizing You’re Not That Great: “”

(Via .)

Names that match professions? This one takes the cake.

Today: splashes for a certain water-scene. Wolf calls!

Happy ANZAC day.

I’m sitting here on the couch reading with the window open while I listen to the rain. About a dozen seagulls did a low altitude formation flyby of the backyard while they made their distinctive seagull sound. We’re 200 miles inland!

A typeface choice flowchart for all of the typeface bigots out there. You know, the kind that think typeface choice is actually a decision that Matters (also, the kind that will scoff and mock behind your back if you admit to liking Comic Sans)

Had an early morning today (3:30) thanks to insomnia. The upside was that I got to see the extreme fog outside. It’s a few minutes past sunrise and I can barely see the houses across the street! It’s not whiteout conditions, but it does put a neat blanket on things.

Just got a robocall offering us a “free funeral, burial, or cremation”. Is there something they’re not telling us?

But I’m starting to begrudge being a blogger because people don’t talk to me anymore. They read my blog and feel as though they’ve conversed with me. But I don’t know about their days or their feelings. I don’t get to talk WITH them. I merely talk AT them. Or, more accurately, they overhear the conversations I have outloud with myself.

via Kat.

I agree. And while I can’t say I begrudge blogging, I have noticed that if I go into length on a topic of concern to me on my blog, I will often meet people who’s eyes glaze over when I try to bring it up in person. When pressed, their eyes will glaze and they’ll say “oh, I read that last week on your blog” in a very been there, done that kind of way. It’s a bummer because I sometimes feel like I’m giving half of a relationship (the me-to-them part) without getting the reciprocal. I doesn’t happen often, but when it does it makes me think twice about the time and effort that go into those long posts. I wonder if this is how professional writers feel?

The flip side of this is pouring myself into a post that I really care about and getting absolutely NO response. This happens all the time, most notably a couple of years ago with this post, the one I’m probably the proudest of in all my writing. Different strokes, I guess.

It’s not like there are thousands of people reading this, though- for some reason my blog has never caught fire, even after almost seven years. When I don’t get any responses, I remind myself that I’m really just doing this to keep a record of my thoughts and not to entertain. I guess we’re all busy, and the zeitgeist is that blogs are sooo early 90′s. It is neat, though, that the big Internet machine will still have a copy of all my posts in a thousand years.

Besides, I suspect that if I suddenly got a huge readership I would feel a lot more pressure to write. On the whole I’m very happy with the balance.