Some Words » Bloggers

Blog Spam

Bottle Imp — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 22:54:40 +0000

What people don’t get to see when I’m not updating is the hilarious spam that I get to delete. It’s been what kept me logging in, intending to post, for so long. It’s like constantly generated low grade performance art. Does faintly gratifying people’s egos really get it through that many filters?

Boing Boing in Decline?

Bottle Imp — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 09:41:29 +0000

From time to time, I lament that Boing Boing no longer seems to be bringing me the amazing and absurd at quite the clip that it used to. They even seem to have dropped the “A Directory of Wonderful Things” slogan I recall them having. There is a stead stream of guest bloggers and the “wow, I never would have imagined that” moment seem farther and farther between. Meanwhile the political stuff I agree with but am annoyed by how they present continues to increase. Also, the steampunk stuff that isn’t steampunk has been on the rise. It is at this point that I remind myself that I am friends with a man I can only call the one man Boing Boing. Sadly for the world, he does not have blog, but I’m friends with him on Facebook, and that means my feed brings me weird and wonderful things.

For example, because of this man, I saw this particular video long before Boing Boing found it, and without all the weak sex jokes in the comment thread.

Anyone who doesn’t know Wizard/Casaubon is missing out. I leave him in his semi anonymous state because he always worried about getting a teaching position if his name got out. If I was on a hiring committee, I’d want to know that my life would be 100% more interesting with him around. Of course I didn’t say better… We can’t have him getting an ego.

P.S. Wizard, if you sent me an animal carcass in preservative fluid like you suggest you might send people in your January Christmas gifts note… lets just consider this whole note as a case of it being opposite day.

The Distant Cocktails

Bottle Imp — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 17:55:02 +0000

Normally, I find cocktail menu postings frustrating. From time to time, one of the cocktail bloggers I read will post the specialty cocktail menu at some great bar, and I sit there gnashing my teeth because I’m not in that city, and probably wouldn’t be able to get there any time soon. On top of that, I am taking out loans for school, and so I wouldn’t really be able to spend the eight to twelve dollars plus tip if I was there. (For some reason this ruins the fantasy more than not being in the same city.)

There are exceptions, it is true. A while back Jamie Boudreau posted a cocktail list for his new digs. I was actually able to make his “La Bicyclette” and it was quite tasty. Also Seattle is close enough to Portland that I could think about going there. Much of the rest of the menu involved things like chamomile-infused scotch, which I’m just going to have to hope I can get to the bar for, because the applications do not justify me making a batch of that.

Wednesday was the second time I’ve not been totally frustrated. Check out this cocktail menu from DOSA on Fillmore in San Francisco. Much farther away, but for some reason totally inspiring instead of dispiriting. I don’t think I have the ingredients to make a damn thing on that, but makes me want to play around with recipes again, which I have been hesitant to do since quitting my job and taking out loans. Interesting liquors also cost a bunch more in Portland. But when finals is over, it may be time to try out a few ideas again.

Billmon Real Gone

Bottle Imp — Fri, 29 Dec 2006 04:10:03 +0000

For the moment at least. His site is even down. One thing I noticed while I was poking around though, the reverse of the server he’s hosted on has pernod in its name. That doesn’t have anything to do with his coming back or note, but it did make me chuckle, just a bit.

Floating Deadlines, Hours in the Day

Bottle Imp — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 20:22:47 +0000

One of the hardest things, I think, when trying to write while holding down a regular job, is holding yourself accountable. I’ve set many goals over the past few years. Few of them have been met. It might be that I was setting my sights to high, it might be that I’m lazy. I’m not sure which it is. I think part of it is that sometimes I sit down, start to write, and the world falls away for a while. I come back a couple of hours later with somewhere between one thousand and four thousand words from that. Generally speaking I find it better when it’s less. The few times I’ve done four thousand words in two hours it has not been very special. Anyhow, I’m digressing, those times when I just sit down and write are great, but I have the attention span of a lemur most of the time.

To this end I’ve tried setting myself a goal that has a solid deadline, 60,000 words in the main project by the start of 2007. I then figured out what that meant on a daily basis, and set up to track how I was doing against that number, so that if I fell behind I would know how much slack I needed to pick up. So far it has been… less disappointing than other methods. As an experiment in productivity, I will have to wait until the new to see if it bear fruit.

On an just slightly related note. 43folders makes me wonder what the balance is between being productive, and just thinking about being really productive. At least I’m thinking.

Kos

Bottle Imp — Sat, 11 Nov 2006 08:53:23 +0000

Every time I’m about to stop reading kos entirely, he does something like this which, while a little cornball, gets the point across. I could almost hear De Niro jumping onto the slackline as he says, “We’re all in this together.”