I'm a Gryffindor!
Wednesday, July 27, 2005
Tuesday, July 12, 2005
My blog-rate has slowed way down since summer started. One reason I haven't been writing in my blog is that I've been writing about blogs. I've got a rough draft of a paper available here.
Comments are of course welcome. I don't expect to be picking up the pace to more than one or two posts a week on this blog for a while though, there's also the need to get something tangible done this summer.
Comments are of course welcome. I don't expect to be picking up the pace to more than one or two posts a week on this blog for a while though, there's also the need to get something tangible done this summer.
Friday, July 01, 2005
Daddy, what did you do during the boom?
Ah, the acrid stench of nostalgia. Now I should get around to explaining that link from two days ago.
Well, I spent the dot-com years in graduate school. I entered grad school under one President Bush and exited under another. There are good reasons to suspect those who have given up a decade to pursue a single degree. I avoided this stigma by working as the Managing Editor for a monthly philosophy journal. I was also seriously fired up about this whole emerging internet thing.
When I first started at the journal we had Hyundai computers with like 286 processors on them. You couldn't get a full line of text to appear on the screen at the same time because the display font only came in one size. (Think about that for a second, it gets more confusing.) Nonetheless, it was clear that the ways that ideas were disseminated was about to change radically. The year before, I had started my own first contribution, developing a page on the old University of Chicago Philosophy Project called Chomsky for Philosophers. My thinking was two-fold, I needed to know about how this web thing worked and I didn't know enough about Chomsky's work, so I thought I could compare the two, so why not combine the two. Of course, I had no idea what I was doing, but I didn't think anyone else did either. This was an ongoing project most of the time that I worked at the journal, and wrote my dissertation, and helped care for my son, and commuted from Worcester to Boston. All of these things, combined with a complete lack of understanding of how corporations worked, meant that whatever thoughts I may have had on philosophy and the internet would remain starry eyed speculations for the moments before I fell asleep on the train each evening. This were often WIRED-powered dreams, HOTWIRED powered dreams at that. I have no idea of when I started developing a Suck habit but it started early and lead quickly to a habit that included Word, Feed and Salon.
The story of Suck chronicled those years nicely. The great Polly Ester columns in my opinion, she hit her stride with this inquiry into Jon Katz's crack smoking habits. Who is John Katz you might ask, that's easy, he's a guy who was immortalized as a crack smoker in filler. These started when I thought that writing about Kant was a good idea. Smoking Crack may have been a better idea. It probably wouldn't have been as expensive. Eventually I escaped from grad school when suck was running great pieces by Ambrose Beers and Peter Bagge when I made my final escape from grad school.
Just in time for it all to evaporate, suck in reruns only, feed gone, word only a memory, and the future of internet publishing transmogrified already into something else altogether.
Well, I spent the dot-com years in graduate school. I entered grad school under one President Bush and exited under another. There are good reasons to suspect those who have given up a decade to pursue a single degree. I avoided this stigma by working as the Managing Editor for a monthly philosophy journal. I was also seriously fired up about this whole emerging internet thing.
When I first started at the journal we had Hyundai computers with like 286 processors on them. You couldn't get a full line of text to appear on the screen at the same time because the display font only came in one size. (Think about that for a second, it gets more confusing.) Nonetheless, it was clear that the ways that ideas were disseminated was about to change radically. The year before, I had started my own first contribution, developing a page on the old University of Chicago Philosophy Project called Chomsky for Philosophers. My thinking was two-fold, I needed to know about how this web thing worked and I didn't know enough about Chomsky's work, so I thought I could compare the two, so why not combine the two. Of course, I had no idea what I was doing, but I didn't think anyone else did either. This was an ongoing project most of the time that I worked at the journal, and wrote my dissertation, and helped care for my son, and commuted from Worcester to Boston. All of these things, combined with a complete lack of understanding of how corporations worked, meant that whatever thoughts I may have had on philosophy and the internet would remain starry eyed speculations for the moments before I fell asleep on the train each evening. This were often WIRED-powered dreams, HOTWIRED powered dreams at that. I have no idea of when I started developing a Suck habit but it started early and lead quickly to a habit that included Word, Feed and Salon.
The story of Suck chronicled those years nicely. The great Polly Ester columns in my opinion, she hit her stride with this inquiry into Jon Katz's crack smoking habits. Who is John Katz you might ask, that's easy, he's a guy who was immortalized as a crack smoker in filler. These started when I thought that writing about Kant was a good idea. Smoking Crack may have been a better idea. It probably wouldn't have been as expensive. Eventually I escaped from grad school when suck was running great pieces by Ambrose Beers and Peter Bagge when I made my final escape from grad school.
Just in time for it all to evaporate, suck in reruns only, feed gone, word only a memory, and the future of internet publishing transmogrified already into something else altogether.
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