Unauthoritative Pronouncements

Preamble of Loathing

I want to be fair to Adobe. I want to, but I’m not. When I think of using their products, viscous, boiling rage fills my being. To narrow, and focus my rage in a single stream of piercing detestation: The stuff they do that is NOT the application is the problem.

Updating Updates for Updaters

I’d like to think that the farce perpetuated by these application updating applications is intentional comedy, but I doubt humor was the intent. Every application Adobe makes has another application that updates it. Flash has an updater. Creative Cloud is the updater for all the Adobe creative applications. Creative Cloud has its own updater. The best are those cascading updates that start with one updater needing to run before the next. They’re so much fun, why wouldn’t you want to click things and enter your system password over and over? It’s SO easy!

In an era where applications can be seamlessly updated in the background, this is incredibly backwards. This reeks of the kind of corproate fiefdom where someone is charged with writing the updater, and then it just gets protected, that role enshrined. You can’t have an app without an updating app!

They check for updates whenever they want. They don’t tell you any order in which they need to be installed. They are written with Adobe’s proprietary codebase so you can’t copy and paste error messages from dialog boxes. Remember Adobe AIR? The write-once, run-anywhere mess that they gave up on? In undeath, it still manages to exhibit all of the drawbacks that made people avoid it. Seriously, load the Console and look at all the font errors! Why are there font errors?!

A cardinal sin of these updating applications is stealing focus. It is not the most important application running on your system. You start the updater, and you go do some other work, and BLAM0! Here’s a window over everything! You wanted that, right?! This is the most important thing in your life, isn’t it?! Not an error dialog, not a failure code, just “HEY, LOOK AT ME! KEEP TYPING WHATEVER YOU WERE TYPING SO I CAN BEEP AT YOU!”

Installation failed. Error U44M1P7.

What does that even mean? Adobe’s application doesn’t say. You can search the internet and you’ll get a help page from them that says: “The U44M1P7 error means that the update didn’t install.”

If I was writing an app, and I gave it an error code, it would be human-readable. Sure, it’s great to have a code in case there is ambiguity, but the explanation of the code needs to be there. If I were writing an application where help docs have been written about what this error code means, I would include that text, or at the very least link to it. I would not want someone to go search the internet for the error code they can’t copy and paste out of the dialog window.

Especially not when the error message means:

The U44M1P7 error indicates nothing more than that the update wasn’t applied.

Step 1: Identify a problem exists. Step 2: Grant remote access.

Theoretically part of my monthly bill goes towards providing me with support and service. Unfortunately, I received no satisfaction at all from this service. You get in to the chat, and they check that everything’s in order with your account. They ask if you’re having the problem you said you’re having, and then you get put in touch with a specialist. The specialist asks if you’re having the problem you said you’re having, and he doesn’t mention anything about what the error code means. He asks you to download and install the patch manually with a URL that doesn’t format to a link in their chat system, because why make any of this easy? Download, install, and same error. He says he wants to gain remote access to my computer so we can look at this together.

I have an aversion to remote access. I am sure that Adobe support staff have fantastic training (confidence instilled by the repeated question about what my problem was) but I don’t generally consider remote access to my system to be Step 2 in a debugging process.

Instead, I found the help docs for the error that suggest uninstalling and reinstalling the application completely. I’d rather do that myself since I’m 99% sure that was going to be his next suggestion.

Sprawl

You may not realize this, but Adobe puts crap EVERYWHERE when they install things. So much crap is there that you get to run an uninstaller application included in the application’s folder. Let me break that down for you: On a Mac, in OS X 10.9, in 2014, Adobe has shipped a product with files all over the place, application-specific folders, and application-specific uninstalling applications. There is no drag-to-the-trash. I know that there are files all over the computer that those drag-to-the-trash apps leave behind as well, and it’s theoretically helpful that Adobe removes all the other stuff, but there’s so much stuff, and the uninstaller is written so poorly, that it takes 10 minutes to completely run the uninstall for 1 application. Drag to trash > 10 minute progress bar.

I’ve successfully installed it again (which involves downloading the application from scratch, gigabytes of it.) It runs, Creative Cloud is happy. Everything is right with the world! It’s just hours of my “creative” time.

Until next time. Until my menubar is invaded by a numeric badge for updating updating applications.

Yes, I know, everything would be so much better if it was all hand-drawn and there were puppets, and miniatures, and all that jazz. Except it wouldn’t be. Those things existed before, they still exist in some capacity now. They are fantastic tools, and mediums, for telling stories or for making spectacles come to life — except when they don’t work. Go pick your favorite movie, or television show, that used “real” artistry, not that “fake” CGI stuff. Watch it with a critical eye. Not a “Special Edition” or some remastered, augmented version. Go dig up the imperfect experience you would have witnessed before.

Watch the ghost train in Ghostbusters II float (“doesn’t track”) with the train tracks. It’s an optical effect. Watch it slide through Winston with no real reaction. Watch the guys get sucked in to the slime river and bob around. These were the best effects you could witness at the time, and though they are imperfect, we remember them as being perfect because our mind likes to edit and improve what we see on screen.

Watch a 2D animated movie from before computers contributed to them (you’re really looking at things before Disney’s Beauty and the Beast). You’ll see things that pop, edges that sizzle, and feet that slide on the “floor” — but it’s all charmingly handmade and adorable.

Now go watch a modern CGI movie, one of the ones that has won an Oscar, for example. You’ll see imperfections, but instead of being charmed by the flaws you’ll feel cheated. You’ll wish they had drawn it, or used puppets. This isn’t adorable.

I argue that it has nothing to do with the medium. If you’re willing to overlook flaws in one, why not the other? Are you just making an assumption that the act of using a computer has made what you’re seeing in to some soulless monstrosity? Why? Humans made all those things in the computer. They animated those things by clicking, and tweaking, very similar to what they would do when posing a stop-motion armature. Some studios even have tools that allow 2D shapes to be drawn for the 3D data to conform to. Why do you think the act of using a computer makes it inhuman?

This stigma is silly and dumb. CGI, computers, 3D, none of this is why you don’t like the movie. None of this is why you should feel cheated. You’re just as cheated with rubber-moulded prosthetics, and thick-black optical matte edges.

Watching all the knee-jerk reactions come out about The Peanuts movie made me sad for this very reason. They went through an enormous amount of effort to produce something unique. If you don’t believe me, watch that trailer again. (Oh? What’s that? You didn’t watch it? You saw a promo still and said something about it? You’re totes adorbs, go watch the trailer.) Compare it to the trailers for recent CGI movies from Dreamworks, Disney, Sony, other BlueSky projects… Write down the specific thing you’re critical of and it will be the goofy, 1960’s pop culture reference to Kubrik’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. That has nothing to do with computers. I can assure you that someone could do precisely what is in that trailer on hand-painted cels, and you’d still think it was a bad trailer.

Stop using “computers” as an easy-out for critical thought.

Oh, but it’s a cash grab? That’s why you object? Well, I have some rather unfortunate news for you, The Peanuts have been licensed for all sorts of things in the past. Life insurance, toys (the toys were even in dreaded three-dimensions!), cars, theme parks — even the animated specials had product placement inside of them. No, really. Don’t give me this “it’s sacred” nonsense. You are ascribing some kind of purity to it that never existed.

Does any of this mean the movie will be bad? No, stop whinging about your ruined childhood. Your youthful memories have been leveraged for money since before you knew what the word “licensing” meant.

Go deeper. Think harder. I could write a Python webapp that sent out a tweet condemning a movie every time a trailer for a movie was released because it used CGI and it would be just as incisive as the human commentary I’ve been reading on that trailer. Wouldn’t you like to sound smarter than a programmed response?

Stephen Hackett, of 512 Pixels fame, wrote up some of Apple’s infamous hardware lemons the other day. For those unfamiliar with the concept of a ‘lemon’ it is a defective, or unsatisfactory product or person; most typically ascribed to cars. It’s mostly funny because it’s a fruit, and apples are fruit.

Today, Apple (company, not fruit) released a very important software update for OS X 10.9.2 Mavericks. This was a big deal because Mavericks had a number of shortcomings in it since its release last summer. Most notably, a recently-discovered SSL bug that was sort of dire. The iOS update came days in advance of this. They didn’t mix it in with other updates, it was a critical security flaw. The OS X update, meanwhile, was held up for days and it was released with a slew of changes that seem to be causing stability problems for people. Irony.

I suggested to Stephen that he do a followup story on 512 Pixels about Apple’s OS software. LOL, critical failures.

The yearly release cycle for OS X was an exciting change when it was announced. I am less excited about this now. The perceived quality of the software seems to have fallen off a cliff since this announcement. Mac OS X Snow Leopard has long been lauded as one of Apple’s most stable releases. Lion, was a buggy, inconsistent mess in comparison. Mountain Lion was supposed to be the “Snow Leopard” to Lion’s “Leopard”, but that didn’t quite pan out. Then Mavericks was supposed to be the new wave in incremental updates to the platform. Unfortunately, it didn’t fix a number of misbehaving components (Messages! You P.O.S.! I hate your guts!).

I would argue that instead of incremental refinement, we are still seeing larger-scale adjustments. They’ve been toned down, sure; Apple’s not shuffling the Finder to brushed metal and back again or anything, but they are fiddling with all the bundled apps of the OS. Sure, they focus on the power-user features that people complain about every now and then, like Multi-Monitor support getting slightly saner from where it has been, but that was over the course of several OS releases, not one.

Mail is terrible, but at least I can add tags to things in the Finder. Huzzah? I can access my Safari tabs on all of my devices, but I still get weird Safari rendering bugs (and until yesterday morning, that cute SSL bug was still on one device).

I would advocate they move off of this yearly release cycle, for no other reason than we’re almost to this summer, and I am absolutely terrified they’re going to announce OS X Bakersfield while Mavericks is still all wet.

Of course, people could argue, what’s in a name? They could take whatever the improved version of Mavericks is and name it Bakersfield and it would be just as stable as what I had proposed, but Apple wouldn’t do that. They save these flashy PR changes for things that have a feature set difference they can tout.

Part of the reason for the change to a yearly cycle was to sync up progress between iOS and OS X. It isn’t really in sync though. AirDrop doesn’t work between OS X and iOS, but who cares about that? It’s there! Corporate synergy! Branding!

They’ve also tried to align their other software platforms across OS X and iOS, but they weren’t fully-cooked when they shipped. Again, what’s the point? Sure, nothing is ever going to be done, but it should be stable and it shouldn’t have giant bugs in key features. No one expects things to be worse. When they get worse, it really leaves a sour taste.

Maybe if everything they were shipping as working was working, I wouldn’t be so apprehensive about the next lemon.

Hi {FriendlyFirstName},

I so seldom receive email from Dropbox that I was surprised to see an item in my inbox from them. I was even more surprised by the first bullet point on the list. Let me recount it for you:

We’re adding an arbitration section to our updated Terms of Service. Arbitration is a quick and efficient way to resolve disputes, and it provides an alternative to things like state or federal courts where the process could take months or even years. If you don’t want to agree to arbitration, you can easily opt out via an online form, within 30-days of these Terms of Service becoming effective. This form, and other details, are available on our blog.

If you want to keep someone from opting out, make sure you tell them about all kinds of vague, nasty things that might happen to them. Like being locked up in court for “years”.

Dropbox, as a service, exists mainly to host your content for yourself, and to facilitate sharing the content with a select group of people. Exactly how would I enter in to a situation with Dropbox, as a company, where I would be sued by them? Any person paying for Dropbox service won’t even go to collections, or anything, their service just gets cut off. How could one be sued by Dropbox? I suppose if you are the sort that does nefarious things, then I guess this is the arbitration you’re looking for.

If you are a law-abiding Average Joe (ahem) then arbitration only exists to protect Dropbox, the company, from its users pursuing legal action against them.

I worry that:

1. Dropbox would like to be acquired, and would like to avoid any legal entanglements.
2. Dropbox is worried about being held liable for a hypothetical breach of security. Either through an external agent, or negligence.
3. Dropbox is considering doing things with the data being stored on its service other than storing said data, in oh, I don’t know, a box, and want to protect themselves from suit during this pivot.
4. Dropbox TOS also includes Mailbox, which handles very critical components of your email. Which, as we know, never gets handed out, or monitored, or anything. Totally unrelated to any government data requests.

Sure, I’m not a lawyer, and as such, this is not legal advice, but I see no upside to arbitration. Here’s an oldie, but a goodie, from John Timmer at ArsTechnica.

If you happen to have this email, I recommend you read it, because you’ll also notice that there are direct links everywhere else in the email to specific things Dropbox discusses in the email except for arbitration. That can be “found” on their blog. Emphasis is obviously not on users opting out. It is one of the curious differences between the mass-emailing and the blog post. Here’s the opt out form.

Thanks for reading!

— The Unauthoritative Pronouncements Team

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Harold Ramis was one of Hollywood’s most successful comedy filmmakers when he moved his family from Los Angeles back to the Chicago area in 1996. His career was still thriving, with “Groundhog Day” acquiring almost instant classic status upon its 1993 release and 1984’s “Ghostbusters” ranking among the highest-grossing comedies of all time, but the writer-director wanted to return to the city where he’d launched his career as a Second City performer.

So sad. He did some amazing work. Groundhog Day is simply a masterpiece.

A widely-used, communication service was acquired by another widely-used communication service. There was much revulsion and vocal muting[1] on Twitter in certain tech-savvy circles.

Of course there were jokes. There are always jokes. Witless fools.

Most of the conversation centered on what an obscene amount of money it was. It is an obscene amount of money, but it’s 7 Trillion messages a year on that service. Think of having possession of those “mouths” and “ears”. You could surreptitiously monitor and index all kinds of things that could be sold. You could also introduce, on the fringes, brands to converse about. Most importantly for Facebook: You now possess a competing service.

Possession of a competitor is the best thing you can do. It is far better than shutting them out of business. What you get to do is assimilate their customers to your needs at your pace. If they were fleeing a dying service they could go anywhere, and maybe not to your lackluster service.

We see this all the time these days with Large Company A acquiring Large Company B. Reducing choice means that the company needs to put forth less effort. Less effort means larger margins. Bloated negligence practically pays for itself!

“National competition law usually does not cover activity beyond territorial borders unless it has significant effects at nation-state level.” — Wikipedia Competition Law

Picture an ice tray. Now fill the ice tray only enough so each cell is still separate. That is the 1900’s laws we live by. Now fill the ice tray so those cells start connecting. That’s the internet. We are a world where the laws are confined to cells of the ice cube tray. Nothing above those cells is seriously regulated or controlled. There are no trusts to bust on the internet.

Foil hats are optional.

I don’t think anything greatly offensive will arise from this newest acquisition by Facebook of WhatsApp. I am not paranoid about this one particular thing. What I am paranoid about are the ongoing, and ever-worsening, conditions that allow for these mergers and acquisitions.

The concern over Comcast’s acquisition of Time Warner Cable has been nice, but it’ll probably go through. Yet there isn’t concern about the accumulation of personal communication. The concern is just over the valuation of the personal communication.

I put up the first chapter of a silly short story I’m writing last month. It’s a near-future piece of drivel where personal information, and opinion, has been subsumed as a form of labor. Where material concerns convince characters that the most important thing is generating interest for corporations. A token, merely a trifle. You can’t get something for nothing, you know.[2] It’s a bleak farce, but when I see headlines like today and last week, it makes me worry that by the time I get around to finishing the short story, it will have already happened.

I wasn’t a user of WhatsApp, but I have signed up for GroupMe. How long until GroupMe is acquired? How long until I am acquired?

User for sale. Condition: Slightly used.

It's pretty slick. I must say. Also color coordinates well with Weekend Read. It's raining apps.

I have been following the developer (Andrew Clark) on Twitter since last summer, before he conceived of this project. Watching it all come to fruition for him today has been really exciting. I love when people make things, and he certainly made something.

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First World Podcast Problems Stan Alcorn wrote a really brilliant piece about why audio isn't as omnipresent in our online experiences as video is. He conducts interviews with many people responsible...

I wrote this a couple weeks ago about a great article I had read. I've received a lot of positive feedback about it. However, all the detailed feedback I've received is about the part of the article where I describe technical limitations. I haven't received any feedback about the part where I discuss the issue of creating in-points for new listeners.

I am not sure why that is. I think it is just as much of a problem when you're trying to get someone in to a podcast with 100+ episodes.

One of my favorite podcasts, Bionic is up to episode 77. If you go back to the start point the hosts's recommend, that's episode 51, which is now 1,636 minutes of podcasts to listen to. How can I get anyone to start with Bionic when I have to tell them they need to devote 27 and a half hours to listening to this? That's more than a full day of podcasts to listen to now. That doesn't even go all the way back to Episode 1 (which Myke and Matt don't really recommend). This isn't like television, where there are seasons of TV, rather than 1 episode per week.

If you go with a show like Back to Work then you're looking at 157 shows. Even if you assume a bas level of 60 (which is insufficient) then you will spend 157 hours of your life trying to catch up to the current point.

No one wrote in about this. I think that's because this is the harder problem to solve. Where do you insert your catch-up episodes? Where are the recaps? The clip shows?

It's the kind of situation that comic books find themselves in more than television shows do. People will binge watch 24 hours of programming, no problem. They don't seem as inclined to catch up if they are more than a season behind though (more than 24-26 hours behind). How can podcasters bridge that gap?

I wrote only the first chapter and thought it might be interesting to kind of publish as a serial. Then go back and edit it all at the end for the final short story. If you’d like to just read the final result skip this. The title is just a working title, so don’t get attached if I think of something better later on. I also may change Mel's name, as it is too similar to another "character"

Chapter 1: Me

“Brian,” my voice said. “Cathy wants to meet you for Starbucks today. I had to tell her you can’t make it because of our meeting.”

“What meeting?” I asked Me as the apartment door gently shut behind us. I descended the painted, cement stairs to the landing. With the soft echo of my sneakers in the partly-exposed, beige stairwell.

“We are interviewing a new candidate, Mel, for an internship at —”

“Oh! Right, right. Thanks.” I rolled my eyes a little for forgetting this little thing. One always forgets things these days. Having a Me is barely tenable at all under the circumstances, but it was still under contract. An i was obviously the only thing worth having now. I should never have bought another Me so late in the cycle.

My Way was parked where it always was, in the back of the apartment building, in the alley, next to all the others. The white LEDs did their little dance when they detected the Me and my Way disconnected from the others. I noticed the neon, anisotropic, paisley-print finish of the Way next to mine and winced. The new neighbor wasn’t just loud, so was his Way. “Me, tell the manager about the noise last night.”

“We already have, and I sent an audio clip, with decibel rating, to his Me.” There was a brief pause here, I’m not sure why. “We did that last night, remember?”

I stood on the Way and it was off, down the alley. “Oh, right,” I lied. I did not recall.

We passed a few other early morning commuters on the way to my Starbucks. But it wasn’t crowded at all for San Francisco. Everyday there seemed to be less and less. The arranged work schedules really helped to space out commutes. As did working from home. I preferred my Starbucks. The only downside of the shorter commute is that I had less time to watch my YouTubes.

“Oh, Me, play that thing from last night. You remember, the one with the comedians.” I might have had a little more excitement in my voice than was probably reasonable.

My field of view filled mostly with the 3 minute episodes of Parker’s Pizza Place with just the periphery showing road, grass, trees, and buildings zip by. This was a funny one, but I suppose they were all funny. Ads showed new fragrances, and new Ways, and I made sure to stay engaged with them. It was hard to focus on the ads as we went up and down some hills. The Way never tilted, but it was still easy to get a little motionsick. I wasn’t going to be able to afford my i if I wasn’t on top of everything.

We arrived at the Starbucks office mall pretty quickly. I only got to watch two, or three episodes of Parker’s. “Pause it for later,” I instructed Me.

My Way glided to the large rack if Ways and I stepped backwards, off of it. It looked like today would be a pretty large shift at the Starbucks. Surprising, given the nice weather.

I passed a couple people talking, not to each other, and found my rented seat at crowded Communal Table Amalfi, but before I sat, I noticed the guest spot on the opposite side of the table was occupied by a young woman in her early twenties, or late teens. I paused, hopefully out of earshot and asked Me, “I thought my meeting was later?”

“No, your meeting was on for first thing. That is your potential intern, Mel.” The voice was almost too cool.

I turned and walked over to my seat. I purposefully did not make eye contact with Mel. Eyes are money, and I wasn’t about to give them to her for nothing.

I pulled the metal chair out and slid back in with it. For the first time, I made eye contact with her. Red hair, milk-white skin flecked with red and brown freckles, and pale lip gloss beneath two emerald-green eyes. She was either a boring naturalist, or very poor; perhaps both.

She returned the eye contact, awkwardly drinking it up. I greeted her, “Mel, is it?”

“Yes, Mr. Grayson.” Her voice was a little high, but not squeaky. I judged she’d do poorly on anything other than thought, or sight.

I looked down slightly, breaking eye contact with her, as anyone aught to do, before proceeding, “I appreciate your interest in the position. Your demo seems to show some pretty keen observations on your part.”

“Thank you sir,” she gushed.

I started to play with the table’s primitive touch menu. The kind of thing you do when you’re in a conversation, as it would be rude to appear undistracted. “Just so you understand,” I continued. “I have very strict rules about sharing face time with other people. I don’t want you to get the wrong impression about this arrangement.” I circled a few items on the menu with my index finger and have it a lingering glance until my interest in those products was recorded. “What I look at is what I show the world. I’m a tastemaker. My views go to my followers, their views to their followers, etcetera. You might say I get my living from my looks.”

I paused for a laugh but there wasn’t even an awkward pity-chuckle. I picked a half-caf, mocha, Mmm’Santoberry©, with a double-shot, and a Starbucks Classic II™ No-Butter Croissant. I watched my analytics in the very edge of my view show a spike at a few other Starbucks. Social tracking showed matching items being talked about in GLounges.

“Mr. Grayson, I know how valuable your time is,” she timidly confirmed. “That is precisely why I want to intern with you.”

“Yes, but just know, you can’t expect my interest. I give it if I feel like it, which means you must either earn me money, or be interesting. You are, if I may say so, nice, but a little plain. Why would anyone follow you?”

I could see her shift her weight in her chair, her right hand unwrapped itself from her left wrist and then her left hand grabbed her right wrist. Fidgeting is only endearing to a point. She spoke calmly, “I happen to be from Clearwater, Florida. Just on the lower border of the Southern wastes.” Now that had potential. “I have personal stories, anecdotes, about life on the fringe. I also happen to be a skilled nature photographer. Even with my old contact lenses, I got shots in the news.” She cleared her throat and went on, “The most interesting is my training in spreading social news.”

Now that last one was disappointing, and I didn’t mask it in my voice, “I’ll give you this one piece of advice, free of charge, news doesn’t make much money here. Sure the media companies do, but a Mom and Pop operation, like I have, is all about personal appeal. If you had done research in to me, you’d know you should talk to me about products. Referrals that can actually make money.”

Now she was moving her fingers up and down on the table, like insect mouthparts busily trying to eat the glass and polytexture surface. Her next words had some real passion, “Look, Mr. Grayson, I spent my savings on flying out here, getting an i, and sending out demos to anyone that would have me.” She had a little too much passion. “Look around, we’re at one of thirty tables in here, and that’s just this floor. Five floors of people talking about products, engineering mini-word-of-mouth campaigns, sub-lingering on coffee cups. You just happened to be the guy that took my interview this morning.”

I looked up at her and made eye contact again. My analytics showed that people were doing facial searches for her. I didn’t stop to look away though. Her verbal punch really dislodged something in me. She was interesting, the metrics confirmed it. Mel’s follow count had increased by three. They might not stay, but it was something. Then the barista came with my breakfast and we both broke eye contact.

Chapter 2: Us

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merlin:

It’s true.

I made a list in the shower one morning. I totally did.

Privately, I’m utterly obsessed with eventually being great on The Incomparable.

It’s ponderous.

Merlin is too hard on himself here. He’s since gone on to contribute to some really good episodes of The Incomparable. This one isn’t even a bad episode, nor my least favorite, by any stretch.

I feel for Merlin. Not that I have ever, ever, ever been a part of anything like The Incomparable, but I can identify with some of his regret here. I am actually deeply anti-social, but under the right (wrong) circumstances, I won’t shut up. There seems to be a tipping point in a conversation where it transitions from “excruciatingly difficult to talk” to words just falling out of my mouth. Sometimes I manage to catch myself on that last part, but that only results in me slamming the brakes on saying anything. Ideally I should be able to reach some kind of conversation-cruise-control where I am contributing just the right amount to a conversation.

Do you know what would be even better? To be the person that can wait on the sidelines and just pop in with that one really amazing thing. Scott McNulty often does just that on The Incomparable. He joked, in that Twitter exchange with Merlin, that he doesn’t talk. That’s not the case, he is simply very judicious with what he says. An example is The Incomparable’s I Look Forward to Ignoring Your Criticism, where Scott deftly swoops in and executes the perfect, show-title-worthy statement (you can tell it was worthy because it’s the title). His economy of speech is really something that I envy. Not because he says less but because when he does say something it is some kind of conversation concentrate. I have tried to do this, but this suppression usually results in me favoriting nearly everything.

I am really bad at this on the internet too. You may have noticed. After all, this silly blog does say “Rambling. On the Internet”, and does what it says on the tin. Even today, I kept butting in to Twitter threads and lobbing “witty” comments in to the fray, but why? Was I witty? Odds are I could have said 1/99^th of what I said.

Just look at me, now, taking something someone else said and then spewing out all these words just to circle back to it being about myself. That’s why I couldn’t bring myself to “reblog” Merlin’s post. But that’s what Tumblr is for, right? Theoretically, right? How could I pin this to his post? Does that mean I should have deleted this? The most economical thing would be to skip this post. This conflict between wanting to say all of this potentially-idiotic, self-centered crap, and wanting to say only important things that contribute to a conversation makes me anxious. And yet, here it all is, in this half-measure where I can whinge about my insecurities without bothering someone. That’s partially why I oscillate between sheepishly posting things on here (and TPS), and the other extreme of shoving links at people every time I think I may have something worth sharing. Do I want to be part of a conversation, or do I want the conversation to be about me? Truthfully, mostly column A, but some column B – and that freaks me out. There’s stuff on TPS that podcasters haven’t read because I don’t want to insert myself in to their “conversation”.

Merlin at least made a list to try and be better on The Incomparable. I don’t know what to put on my list, just all the things I don’t like. I should probably pick a narrower area to improve first.

Lastly, (finally!) if I ever spew a bunch of words at you and then clam up, refer to this. I may already regret how much I will have said before you do.