Tag Archives: laziness

A momentary lapse of blogging

Been feeling a bit overwhelmed by the day job lately – which always translates into a complete lack of interest in writing about anything related to the Web and other media – so the blog has been a bit quiet. But also, I’ve found myself using Twitter (follow me here) to talk about damn near anything that comes to mind. It’s strange: I’ve never really felt compelled to divulge a lot of personal details here, but apparently I have no problem spilling the minutiae of my life, 140 characters at a time. So having that as an outlet has probably resulted in less verbiage here as well.

So in an effort to get some momentum going again, I’m running a “best of” older OMIC posts. Enjoy.

Open letters to a guy at my gym, Marilyn Manson and Nine West.

80s metal, starring White Lion and Lita Ford

The day I decided to stop being quiet about my faith.

A deconstruction of the announcement that a guy in a Filipino Journey cover band would be the new lead singer of…Journey.

Is Amy Winehouse authentic? Related: I did not meet her at a Lollapalooza after-party.

My issues with R. Kelly, Parts 1 and 2.

1000 words on The Ultimate Coyote Ugly Search.

Avril Lavigne is not “sexy.”

Wood-Tang and I break down Kanye West’s Graduation album.

Don Henley is a douche.

The time I offered free non-alcoholic beer on Craigslist.

Thank you for your patience

In a bit of a hiatus right now due to an abundance of personal matters to attend to, and a rediscovery of The West Wing reruns on Bravo. Hoping my holiday break from work allows for a bit more reflection and commentary here.

UPDATE: I’d like to make it clear that “an abundance of personal matters” is just end-of-the-year tasks, trying to get back in shape, and spending more time wrapped around the Mrs. Nothing worrisome there.

I'm a judgmental S.O.B.

Earlier this year, I picked up a bag of mail from the place I was living at a couple years ago. Along with discovering that I’d somehow been subscribed to New York magazine, I found that a few publicists didn’t get my forwarding address and a few promo CDs were waiting.

One of the first posts I ever wrote here was about using context clues to determine whether a band sucks or not, specifically the name. (Note: the following pertains only to how I determine whether I personally will enjoy a band’s album NOT whether the album has a certain artistic merit. You can only learn that by actually listening to it, though some professional music reviewers seem to disagree.)

In any case, “The” bands automatically start off ahead of the game, IMHO. No matter what follows the “The” you’re pretty much guaranteed a band that is trying to move you in that classic three-chords-and-an-attitude way, rather than trying so hard to prove its artistic worth that it gets swallowed up by artifice. Oddly enough, the exception to this rule is The The.

I’ll also confess that album art plays heavily into my pre-listen consideration. That sounds horrid, I know, but somehow I’ve developed a finely-developed sense for this as most bands attempt a visual reflection of what their albums sound like.

Cases in point were two CDs from the aforementioned pile that I set aside without even giving either a listen, based solely on the album art. I won’t mention the artists because I realize it’s patently unfair to slag a band this way without listening to its music. (Again, even though I have full confidence in using this system to judge music I like, it’s not a guarantee that the music won’t be enjoyed by someone else. Plus, there’s a big difference between music I like, and music that has artistic merit otherwise.)

This isn’t an argument against ugliness, it’s an argument against artifice. But just to be certain, I just grabbed both out of the circular file and did a little research. In looking each band up online, I’ve discovered the artist whose cover is an arty photo illustration of his face has a MySpace page whose most recent blog entry is titled “Competition to win Sony Video Walkman” while the other – whose cover is a hummingbird with peacock feathers floating in an invisible cube over a Dali-esque ocean – has a bio that begins “Born in Seattle in 1998 at the tender age of intent…”

I feel pretty confident that I am not missing anything here.

What's going on

Ugh, the guilt of a neglected blog.

I’m in another one of those phases where I’ve got a handful of half-finished posts sitting in draft, and can’t work up the nerve to attack those pesky, unworkable words and fashion them into fully-grown expressions. Also, 25 in 12 has hit a snag because of a book that I flat-out hate, but am determined to finish.

So, as usual, when all else fails, I talk about work.

TOC is running a month-long feature called Date Our Friends. It’s easily our most ambitious online project ever, and is my brainchild so I’m hoping it comes off. Two weeks ago, we asked readers to write in if they wanted to date one of our four friends. This week, we reveal who the daters will be, one each day. Next week, we’ll be posting video excerpts from their dates, and asking readers to vote on whether they think they’ll make it to a second.

The funny thing about all this is that yours truly will be accompanying these folks on their dates (dates don’t videotape themselves, you know!), which I am sure won’t be awkward at all. Ahem. This whole project is either going to be a smashing success or massive disaster. Either way, it ought to be fun to watch. So check out the feature each day at timeoutchicago.com/dateourfriends for the next couple weeks to see our updates.

Also, TOC now has a Twitter stream. It’s still in a soft launch right now, but feel free to follow us as we post updates on interesting articles, as well as goings-on within the TOC offices. We’ll be giving it a big push just prior to SXSW, as I’ll be posting daily updates to the TOCblog, and tweets to the Twitter stream.

There must be some misunderstanding

The Trib’s internet critic, Steve Johnson, doesn’t always have a firm grasp of the issues he’s writing about, but this non-tech-y post really takes the cake:

Jennifer Love Hewitt is protesting unhealthy women’s body expectations after allegedly unflattering bikini photos of her were published on the Web. We’re with you in principle, Jennifer, but isn’t insisting on your blog that you are still a “size 2” part of the same problem?

Sorry, fella, but the reason why a woman like Jennifer Love Hewitt needs to point out that she’s a “size 2” is because someone ought to recognize the stupidity of criticizing a woman for being “fat” even when she is, in fact, a size 2. In doing so, she draws attention to the hypocrisy of expecting a woman – any woman – to keep her body looking the same at 28 as it did at 18.*

I know it’s supposed to be OK to mock someone because they’re pretty and famous, but that doesn’t always make it right.

Speaking of not understanding the Internet, there’s this story from Michael Booth at the Denver Post:

The dirty little secret about the wildly popular Craigslist is that one click away from its home page are some raunchy and often deeply offensive forums inviting blatant racism, rants and sexual kinks.

That’s a secret?

While Craigslist guidelines threaten to cut off users who post offensive or abusive material, in daily practice the site’s handful of full-time employees can’t keep pace flagging and removing rogue entries.

True enough. In fact, that was the exact reason why Craiglist objected to a lawsuit filed against it last year.

This lawsuit ignores the essential nature of craigslist, demanding that we cease treating our users with trust and respect, and instead impose inappropriate, mistake-prone, and generally counter-productive centralized controls…controls which would actually be less effective in catching discriminatory ads than what we have in place currently, and which would vastly reduce the number of legitimate non-discriminatory ads that the site could process.

In fact, it’s up to USERS of Craiglist to flag those posts, not the employees. As Booth acknowledges at the end of the piece:

Buckmaster said user flags result in millions of postings wiped out each month, from about 30 million monthly entries.

Not that it stops him from engaging in a little fear-mongering, including raising the possibility that “your kids” are probably exposed to every manner of filth.

‘Course maybe they’re the ones flagging it all as inappropriate, which ought to make you pat yourself on the back for some good parenting skills.

* This graf originally appeared on the TOC blog, but I was still irked at the end of the day and needed to further vent.

Giving you something you can feel/read

As is obvious, I’m not always able to throw down substantial posts daily. But I was inspired by Whitney’s Lolla updates at Pop Candy and Matt’s recent addition at Wood-Tang to add Twitter updates to the OMIC blog. You’ll see them in the right rail under “I just thought of something…” which is a quite accurate way of describing those mini-brain explosions. Hopefully, it will give you daily readers of this blog (Hi, Marg Hicks!) a reason to continue checking in.

Why I haven't been blogging

Truth be told, it’s been longer than I realized. I figured it’d been two weeks, turns out it’s been three.

I was on a bit of a roll, and started some other posts but nothing was really catching fire. I was afraid of falling into one of two blogging traps:

1. Being repetitive
2. Being boring

So I waited for a bit, until I felt like there was something I really wanted to say. Unfortunately, my waiting period led to the third trap: not updating your damn blog.

Therefore, I’ll be getting up a bit early, and blogging in the mornings. Writing’s a discipline, so it’s probably time to start showing some.

More tomorrow. Promise.

In the meantime, some thoughts from me off the TOC blog on the closing of Filter in Wicker Park and the Crossroads festival as well as proving that I am more powerful than the vernal equinox.

Oh and speaking of which: shhh…keep it quiet for now.