When you go to a music store (for those of us who still buy compact discs), do you shop by date? Walk up to the “New Music” section and purchase, say, the new Neil Young disc, a recent version of Wagner’s Ring Trilogy, a Britney Spears’ latest, the newest speed metal offerings and a just-reissued boxed set of gospel standards all at once? Would you never buy a Beatles or Stones disc unless it was one of those remastered versions you found on the “Just Released” shelves?
Of course not. You don’t shop art as you’d buy milk or meats. Or at least you shouldn’t – if you’re sane. So why do so many people do it online?
Sixty percent of the Net being filled with “expert” advice on how to “Master Online Marketing and get paid six figures!” or “Maximize your social media for optimal business networking!” I run across a lot of articles discussing how to write a “successful” website. The main thrust’s always the same: “Post as much as you can. Post new material all the time!” “Make it pithy and constantly update!” People have died of heart attacks trying to maintain ridiculous posting schedules, working around the clock without sleep. And for what? To satisfy an asinine paradigm – a terrible mass production business model borrowed from the old line media.
Whether something’s “new” or “breaking” is a concern for newspaper writers seeking scoops. There’s no reason on Earth a website creating general entertainment bits or comedy should feel any obligation to flood its pages with constant new material. If what’s written in the site is written well, and timeless, the site should work like a book. The reader can click in, scan the volumes of text and read what he or she likes. The only reason website content producers feel the need to crank out “New! New! New!” shit every day is because they’ve decided, for reasons beyond me, to compete with the 90% of bloggers who do nothing but grab hot stories, comment on them and link other comments about it from people in their network of friends. That’s not an audience – that’s an echo chamber. And lumping that stuff in with actual writer-created material is a horrible confusion of content with amateur editorializing.
Consider Cracked, a comedy website I wrote a piece for a while back. The stories on Cracked written in 2007 are every bit as funny as what was written yesterday. Yet I’m willing to bet most people stumbling across the site today will only read the most recent articles, what’s still linked on the front page. And rather than digging through the archives they’d complain or go elsewhere if new material wasn’t posted on the face page every day. As if comedy has a sell-by date – that a list of the World’s Most Disturbing Sex Toys would have been hopelessly unfunny last March or this coming September but is pitch perfect hysterical and uncannily prescient in May.
What would happen if everybody posting material online suddenly stopped tomorrow? Suppose all the studios quit making movies, musicians stopped putting out songs and publishers stopped printing books? Would there be nothing left for us to read, listen to or watch? Obviously not. The back catalog of art on the planet’s deeper than the Marianas Trench. It stretches thousands of years behind us and if you started absorbing it all today, relentlessly, without sleep, and you lived to be 100, you’d still only ingest a small fraction of what’s available. And yet here we are – almost all of society fixated soley on what came out this week, if not yesterday, this morning or within the last hour.*
There’s an idiocy behind this immediate attraction to the immediate, and it’s the same idiocy that causes us to only shop through the new releases at Blockbuster, as if a movie that came out three years ago has somehow rotted into obsolescence in the intervening thirty six months. Art doesn’t age. Sure, it gets dated a bit in terms of cultural references and scenery, but a good book, movie or article today would have been a good book, movie or article last year or thirty years ago, and it’ll be good next year or thirty years from now. And there’s no reason the Internet shouldn’t work exactly the same way.
So what’s the cure? I think a simple shift in terminology. That we stop calling sites like the ones here at Rudius, or those like Cracked or Bitter Lawyer “blogs.”** Start calling them what they are – “websites.” And make that the default term for every site that creates its own content. Leave “blog” to the link-dump sites, the Perez Hilton and Gawker wannabes and people posting “Have you seen THIS in the news? This is what I think about it! And check out these photos my new exotic fish!” exclamations. (“I call him Panther, ‘cuz of the stripes!”) Approach the content producing sites like books. When we find one we like, maybe stop, slow down, read the back catalog. Take it as a collection of essays, a running memoir or the written equivalent of stand-up comedy.
See, there’s a load of killer material online. But if we force producers of original content to crank stuff out at a furious pace to compete with the chatter of every neophyte gossip columnist with a WordPress page, the quality goes down the shitter. And the more material we consume in “executive summary” bits, the less our attention span, and the weaker our powers of critical and analytical thinking.*** “New” and “good” aren’t automatically synonymous, and if we let the Internet turn into a Cult of the Immediate, which is where Web 2.0′s emphasis on minimalist yawps over detailed or contextualized expression is taking us, we’ll get the same thing we have at Barnes & Noble – thousands of choices of lackluster books on the same limited, trendy topics clogging and crowding out thoughtful material. We’ll have allowed the old media strategy of foisting mass amounts of questionable new product on consumers to keep them buying incessantly to infect the mew media landscape. And give ourselves an even more staggering case of Attention Deficit Disorder.
Most of our lives are spent grappling with, fearing and resenting deadlines. Why limit the material we read for pleasure with artificial ‘freshness’ criteria? There are pages behind the face pages of websites, and all of the material’s free. Why pinball around cyberspace, conditioned in the crassest Pavlovian sense to only consider what’s “NEW”? Whatever we think we’re missing, this is the Internet… If there’s a monkey typing out the next War and Peace on a Blogspot account somewhere, it’ll still be around tomorrow, next week and forever after that.
______________________________
* It’s as if people don’t realize “New!” is often just a cheap, easy way of differentiating the common thing they’re being offered from the thousands of other things already out there exactly like it. Beyond discussion of emerging technologies and breaking news stories, is anyone saying anything hasn’t been said somewhere else before?
** Though Bunny’s site may have “blog” in the title, it’s anything but one.
*** Chief among the myriad bad management policies leading to the collapse of so many banks and corporations is the obnoxious, imperial belief of many managers that all they need to understand any issue, however complex, is a bullet-pointed “Executive Summary” of its elements. Look at the history of flame-outs like Stanley O’Neal at Merrill Lynch and James Cayne of Bear Stearns and you’ll see people hopelessly unaware of the nature of the businesses their companies were engaged in at the street level. Any fool buying a house in the last five years could see that underwriting standards had all but vanished. Except, of course, the fools at the helm of many banks reading executive summaries from lieutenants telling them everything was fine.
You went the thinly-veiled-rationale-for-my-recent-lack-of-posting route, eh? Classic choice.
PL: You’re getting more cynical than I am.
Actually, this piece was supposed to be a goof about dope legalization. Then I ran into a bottle of Hendricks’ Gin last night and polluted the Christ out of myself. The dope piece will have to wait a few days because the jokes I had in my head before last night are now terribly, irreparably degraded.
It’s really good gin. Tastes like flowers and cucumbers (that should be a bad thing, but it’s not). I liked it so much I decided to write a piece on gin.
BTW, this piece is courtesy of Chimay Blue. Tasty shit.
You made it on the front page of Hacker News – never thought I’d see these worlds collide.
PL: I did. I’ve been linked there before. But that is flattering. The people there are brilliant. The dude who runs that project is a hell of a smart cat – scary smart.
The only reason website content producers feel the need to crank out “New! New! New!” shit every day is because they’ve decided, for reasons beyond me, to compete with the 90% of bloggers who do nothing but grab hot stories, comment on them and link other comments about it from people in their network of friends.
Funny you should say this: D.G. Myers just posted an essay similar to this one but on the subject of books blogs and what they should cover. Her answer–and mine, since I wrote Blogging and seeking out what should be remembered in response–is that bloggers should try to find something useful in the vast pile rather than ceaselessly promoting whatever is new.
PL: Shit. Another monkey typed the same thing I did! I’ll check that out. Thank you. I figure a lot of people have been thinking this for some time. The situation as it stands is silly. The Net’s turning into a cesspool of rapid fire echos, with a decided turn toward servicing most prominently the lowest common denominator. That’s a natural market phenomenon, of course. But we ought to talk about these things, so that people can breathe a little and think, “Yes, I’m not alone. Someone will offer a sensible alternative.”
Awesome! First Comment!
PL: Where shall I mail the Turtle Wax?
Largely irrelevent yet hilarious from wikipedia’s ‘infinite monkey theorem’ page you linked to:
“In 2003, lecturers and students from the University of Plymouth MediaLab Arts course used a £2,000 grant from the Arts Council to study the literary output of real monkeys. They left a computer keyboard in the enclosure of six Celebes Crested Macaques in Paignton Zoo in Devon in England for a month, with a radio link to broadcast the results on a website. One researcher, Mike Phillips, defended the expenditure as being cheaper than reality TV and still “very stimulating and fascinating viewing”.
Not only did the monkeys produce nothing but five pages consisting largely of the letter S, the lead male began by bashing the keyboard with a stone, and the monkeys continued by urinating and defecating on it.”
PL: I was looking for video of the Simpsons’ scene where Mr. Burns rips the page from one of a thousand monkeys typing in his basement and reads, “It was the best of times, it was the ‘blurst’ of times? You stupid monkey.”
As a metaphor for humanity, particularly right now, the theorem just can’t be beat.
This I know – he’s our investor :). I’ve actually tried submitting some of your stuff before (I post as fallentimes), but none of it ever stuck.
You should comment there when you get a chance. Sharp wit and cynicism makes for good conversation.
PL: His wife wrote a great book: “Founders at Work.”
I predict you’ll do well.
My stuff’s a bit acidic for a lot of sites, but thanks. Now I know who was linking me there. I think it was probably your posts that I saw.
I wrote a sketch of a drunken evening in your area yesterday. A story about how I very much did not get laid and wound up trudging around a snow storm loaded and half-frozen. Opener: “That corkscrew drop into Logan always feels like a rollercoaster.”
I expected coming here to see something new and left wanting to re-read ten percenters. I’d read it but I gave your book to my friend that graduated law school. At least I think he graduated. I can’t be sure. I’d text him but I lost my phone somewhere in or on the way to Mexico. Long story. Keep ‘em comming. Faster! Faster! Faster!
PL: You can still read that? I can’t read much of it anymore.
I’m doing shorter stuff for the summer, dude. Got to write a book. One needs $$$ to live, and books give advances.
This reminds me Google Wave almost?
PL: I haven’t seen that yet, but if its what I think it is, I’ll probably wind up addicted to it – the same way one can’t help but view the carnage of a horrible car accident as he passes.
Is someone trying to justify their newly announced decision to post less?
Good good of explaining the inherent evils of things like radio stations that only play the shitty “newest hits” songs and “authors” like Dan Brown who make piles of money by writing some crappy book that makes piles of money because it found its way onto the bestseller list or Oprah’s book club. I think everyone who in any way works with art should have to read stuff like Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy before they’re allowed to be any kind of artist or critic. I don’t know if that’s stupid or not but fuck it, I’m drunk.
Cheers,
Geoff
PL: Cynics… You’re worse than me. Actually, I wrote about how I plan to post more frequently, but with shorter material.
But no – this subject’s been in my head since last year. The general “soundbite-ism” of our entertainment, from singles overtaking albums to shit like Perez Hilton becoming huge to the amusing, but often disturbingly narcissistic shit on Twitter, to the “self help” book phenomenon have drawn a picture of an increasingly impatient and quite self-absorbed consumer public. I hear all the content sellers at newspapers and bookstores and record companies whine about how they can’t get the broad Internet audience to buy shit and I think, “How CAN’T you get this audience to buy shit?” All you have to do to hook the most recidivist, impulsive consumers is:
a. Tell them something they want to hear (insert name of book plagiarizing “How to Win Friends and Influence People” with a spin addressing new technologies here);
b. Make it short and exceedingly simple to digest; and
c. Give it a snappy title.
As to music, Rivers Cuomo said it nicely: “Timbaland knows the way to reach the top of the charts/Maybe I should work with him to perfect the art.” Nickelback’s a best selling rock group. Nickelback.
I’m actually one of the lucky people. The Rudius set-up is non-traditional. People here seem to digest things in whole, more than I’d expect. Now I have to get back to writing about why gin makes dull people interesting, and gives you next day breath like an evergreen air freshener.
A year and a half ago, I wrote a short essay about the perils of this recency focus: http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2008-January/000878.html “Reddit: ‘merely a collection of trivia, narrow, shallow, and sensational’”
There are a variety of pragmatic reasons for preferring the new.
As someone pointed out on Hacker News, you can talk with other people about it.
Because the web’s naming of documents is fairly fragile, new documents have working links; older documents tend to be full of dead links.
Recency is a fairly good approximate proxy for frequency. An article that gets read 1000 times a day is much more likely to have been linked from somebody’s blog today than an article that gets read 100 times a day.
PL: I had a paragraph in the piece about how immediate material is attractive because it can be shared with people, used as a basis for conversations like new movies. There’s another side to that coin, however, which is that people creating it are constantly using the immediacy to keep your eye on what they’re pushing, which may detract your eye from something more substantial.
Is there a reason something read 1000 times is better than something read 100 times? The Velvet Underground sold maybe a couple million records total. Creed sold 22 million. Which was better? The Net has the capacity to give the consumer more power over the product and yet in terms of reaction to speed of production and branding power, we do the kneejerk things we’ve done in response to traditional media in years past. Perhaps it’s just human nature.
I think this was explained best in the Billy Joel song, “Entertainer”.
Verse 1
“Today I am your champion.
I may have won your hearts.
But I know the game,
You will forget my name,
And I won’t be here
In another year,
If I don’t stay on the charts.”
PL: If there’s an honest mini-market governing which comments get the most readers, this will be the most read. Hell, it’ll be read more than the post spurring it.
That doesn’t absolve you, however, from being a Grade A prick for sticking that rotten fucking song, with that horrendous keyboard melody, in my head. There’s a place in hell for your kind.
I blame the “New!” obsession for studios getting away with these fucking awful “Scary/Date/Epic Movie” movies that are made entirely up of “Remember that thing that happened 2 weeks ago? Well here it is again! With an ad for Subway sandwiched in there! LOL! PUN!”
Used to see it back when I worked at a rental place. Swarms of people herding around the ‘new release’ section, and on the odd occasion when someone asked me for my recommendation of a ‘good’ film I’d point out a classic usually in one of the old bargain areas for a cheaper price, and they’d give it a funny look as though it was tainted by age.
PL: The phenomenon is most notable, and least sensible, with movies.
I like the “Scary Movie” stuff, but you’re right. Franchises are usually terrible. It’s rare when something like “Batman” bucks the usual trend with them. But don’t expect anything to change in a market like this. Sure bets are the only bets people are making right now and even if it bombs in the theatres, franchise flicks often at least make their money back over time. Comic-book based movies have been a Hollywood cash cow for what? Thirty years now?
Aces.
Once again.
Golden post, blog or whatever the hell the kids are calling it. Admittedly, I have to read slower and go back and re-read a few paragraphs, I am conditioned into quick and easy news/blog/internet drivel consumption, this is not that same old shit and if you do it once a week even better. You constantly hit on the things that are going through my, and countless others heads, we all need to unplug and slow down. The endless stream of New! be it content or bullshit internet articles/products is the result of too much information to fast, it no one’s fault but the consumers demand that burns us out, as a consumer and creator of content, it is a constant struggle to be topical, interesting and actually accomplish something in words and pictures that you think will hold other and yourself on the site and keep them returning. I could see seriously mental and health related issues from doing this for an extended period.
Fuck it all.
But you can read more of my rants at my new blog:
http://Infinite_Monkey_Theorem.wordpress.com
huzzah!
PL: The problem is one of unfettered market forces operating in vacuum where faster = more market share. Inevitably, the content degrades to the simple grunts and nods that attract the broadest audience. You might say that’s always existed in commercial media, but never at a speed with which the process operates in cyberspace.
“Give the monkeys crystal meth and we’ll get the book faster!”
“What book? People seem to like the random streams of characters just fine.”
“So we’re not doing a book?”
“Well, yes, we are writing a biography of Mr. Pebbles over there–”
“Mr. Pebbles?”
“Fifth male in from the corner… The one working on a Macbook. He was voted most lovable on America’s Favorite Chimp Authors last week.”
“When did we get a show?”
“What is this, last week? You’re the one who needs that meth.”
Wow.
This post initially ended with me calling Target Pharmacy for my Wellbutrin refill, but after reflecting on it for a moment, has now lit a fire under my butt to stop worrying about what everybody else is doing and concentrate on producing some content that might be worth re-reading in a month or two.
It has taken me a long time to discover that the immediacy of blogging has rather predictably led me down the primrose path of half-assedness.
Er, I guess what I mean, is, uh, So Long, and Thanks for the Kick in the Nads? Uh… that’s not exactly it, but close enough (for a commment…)
PL: I say try for this. Instead of doing something that would be played on the radio right now, shoot to create a thing that has little tether to the fleeting landmarks of the moment. Hank Williams’ songs will be sung in 2050. So will Jerry Garcia’s, Cole Porter’s and Hendrix’s. They wrote about broad, universal topics. If you must write about something in the instant, like the article I wrote here, I say take a position on it standing for a broader proposition. There will always be a dispute about whether we should have more or less art pumped into the marketplace. Hence, this thing has a little more long term resonance than it would had I written it as a reply to some article by Seth Godin or something I saw in “Wired.”
Its true. I recently read P.J. O’Rourke’s ‘Modern Manners.’ It was written in the mid 80′s. I think the references to AIDS and crack in relation to politics are probably funnier now than they were then. Also, the skewering of the wealthy is just as funny now. The truly wealthy never seem to change all that much.
PL: That’s the one gem in his catalog nobody ever reads, and that’s a terrible shame. It was dated in the 90s when I read it and I found it every bit as funny then as you found it now.
It sounds like you are complaining that blogs generally have to post frequently to be popular and that’s a lot of work… You’re right. Alternatively, stick to posting high quality material whenever you feel like it and get linked by bigger sites.
BTW, people definitely prefer new release music/books/movies over back catalog stuff. People don’t enjoy that stuff in an isolated hole, they like to share their experiences with peers. Most people who love Harry Potter wouldn’t do so if their friends weren’t reading it. It’s not that they are soulless followers, part of the fun is having a shared fantasy experience.
People aren’t idiots or insane. People like what they like for reasons.
PL: I’m not complaining. I have the luxury of readers who seem to go through my back catalog. I’m saying that an emphasis on constant new production leads to a decrease in the quality of what’s produced. It’s been proven that multi-tasking results in degraded decision making. Multi-tasking in content production creates a marketplace of half-thoughts, asides and incomplete considerations all competing for limited space at 100 mph. Viewed from a distance it’s a mass of white noise, a lot of repetitive white noise at that.
There’s no reason art cannot be enjoyed both individually, on its own merits, and as a communal social thing.
You wouldn’t read Harry Potter but for the fact that it allowed you to have a shared fantasy with other readers? Has the book no independent value as a piece of writing? I don’t care for that subject matter, so I haven’t read it, but people I know who have say Rowling is objectively a tremendous author. I’ve read criticism claiming she’s among the greats in the way she weaves an incredibly complex plot together while keeping the story moving at a high rate of speed.
Was that you announcing a new book in a comment?
PL: Dude, I’ve been announcing I was working on one for weeks. A prequel.
There’s also a paperback of the first book coming out in the fall, with an amusing new cover and tag line. I’ll post that soon.
Hey, we like our opinions fed to us in soundbites and snippy little quips that we can repeat to our friends and pretend are our own inventions. We’re the new generation of short-attention spanned idiots who are too busy reading blogs to think about what they’re saying. I easily read 30 – 40 blog posts from all over the internet in a day and forget them within seconds, because all they’re providing is a few minutes of amusement before I grow bored and I want more NEW. Although, if I do find something I really like I’ll go through the entire archive in one sitting, all the Rudius sites for instance, or Cracked. But I always want more NEW from these sites… and now that I’m typing this comment I completely understand your point about quality vs. quantity.
Good post.
PL: Thanks. On the quantity v. quality thing, it’s kind of like sex. A string of “she’s hot after a six pack”s will never equal that rare, “Wow, she’s got a body like Adrianna Lima.”
Of course you want more NEW from these sites. So do I. But I think the schedule of when NEW comes out from them should not try to compete with the rapid fire NEW that Perez Hilton or [insert Gawker copycat here] spanks out every morning.
The free market’s a great thing generally, but in matters like art (and health care) you run into its gross shortcomings. An across the board emphasis on speed above all else commoditizes the craft and pushes it toward a lackluster product servicing all at once. And let’s face it – all audiences are not created equal. Try to serve them all and what you create will be robbed of personality, ow wind up aimed at the lowest common denominator.*
As to the social bonding element of internet content, I remain Luddite in my belief that while the Net may create connections, it will never come within 1000 miles of replacing the bonds people make in actual bricks and mortar friendships and interactions. There are many exceptions, no doubt. But “social media” is a bit more ambitious a term than the phenomenon deserves.
*A lot like zero tolerance policies in the law, which err on protecting the dumbest in the group from his own stupidity at cost of the remaining group’s civil liberties.
While I totally agree with your point on the over-hype of ‘new!’, I think there is a difference when we are considering a broad category (books, movies) or an individual website. There is essentially no end to the possible books out there you can read. Same goes for movies, and possibly some large collaborative websites.
When it comes to individual websites like this one, it doesn’t compare – at least not for faithful readers. Any time i find a website that I enjoy, I start going through the back catalogue (or often, I’ll go back and start at the beginning, then read my way to ‘now’). but then I run out. So for the occasional visitor, it’s enough to say “Hey! Go check out the old entries!”, that won’t bring them back a second time.
Any writer who wants to have steady, regular readers does need to have some sort of regular updating schedule. Not multiple times a day, and not as quickly as possible – I also agree that I’d rather wait for quality than get frequent drivel. But the author who goes weeks to months without posting anything loses readers, because they lose interest in checking for something new that never arrives.
PL: Do you give up on a show you like when it goes off season? I think people should view the Internet along something similar to the same lines as they would television. Perhaps it’s impossible because there are too many choices. Or perhaps its just because there hasn’t been a categorization of the Internet by quality or type of content. If it could be broken down into channels and a TV Guide offered for it, rather than having goofy narcissists competing with Andrew Sullivan, the emphasis would be less on quantity of material and more on quality, or at least type of material. A person could go to a dependable guide and find types of sites, with quality ratings, listed by their categories. That might help.
Never forget, I am retarded. I totally forgot about that. This better be some Formula One writing, none of this Nascar business.
I think the Mormons and other polygamists have it right. What if you could have 73 Adrianna Lima derivatives? Does that make any one of them less special? Probably. Especially if you have the source.
OMG, it’s just like that show Kings. OMG OMG. They, like, sent the whole population to their homes and made them light a candle in their windows so when people woke up they knew which house the people with the plague died in because their candle would still be burning. It’s so sweet it makes me want to shit exploding kittens.
I still don’t think you’re a real person, by the way. You have to be some entity top five firms dreamed up in order to make the awful tedium of the work seem the slightest bit appealing to keep kids coming back to have all those awesome law school stories.
I had my buddy Tank go to Tucker’s Law School Speech at UCLA. He offered some interesting critiques but ultimately walked away with a desire to go into JAG. I believe this desire has yet to manifest for a variety of reasons I can’t seem to recall at this time. All I know is he got Tucker to sign that book and I sent him there in the hopes that he’d go to BUD/S like he always said he would. Didn’t happen, but that didn’t surprise me. What did surprise me was that when Tank mentioned that I was in BUD/S, Tucker actually wrote something marginally positive on the flap of paper. Really, can one say “BUD/S” enough. The answer is shit-pussy.
Tell me, you talked with the guy on the phone before you signed up for this site, right? Is his voice really that nasally? Does he actually have a lisp like some say?
My apologies, this is getting long and ramblly. I have tight writing deadlines to uphold and need to meet with, uh, people. For those… mortar connection… thingies. I trust your book will be rife with insight into these connections.
PL: I think you’re mixing up Mormonism with the Islamic “72 Virgins” thing. No big issue there, as both are fictional, but one should be careful not to confuse the Lord of the Rings books with Harry Potter. Best to keep those fantasies straight.
Oh, I’m real. And I’m out there, smiling.
I have spoken with Tucker at length and I don’t recall anything meeting that description. But if you want to watch him, just check Youtube. You can see his speeches all over the place. I assume you want me to relay something odd about a discussion I had with him. Fact is, he was always direct, which coming from my business I found pretty goddamned refreshing. He’s exactly how he appears in his speeches.
Whaddya mean you don’t fuckin’ like Billy fuckin’ Joel. He’s from fuckin’ Lung Guyland like me!!
PL: “Your sister’s gone out, she’s on a date
You just sit at home and masturbate
Your phone is gonna ring soon, but you just can’t wait
For that call
So you stand on the corner in your New English clothes
and you look so polished from your hair down to your toes
Ah but still your fingers gonna pick your nose
After all…”
After all what? What? It’s maddening. Torture (and I’ve sent the bastard at least 100 letters asking over the years… and not one reply from the prick).
Welcome to Costco, I love you.
I know you were talking about gin (and Hendrick’s is great) but how do you feel about bourbon? I should be more specific – bottom-shelf rot-gut bourbon. I killed some Ancient Age the other day that was surprisingly smooth, but my favorite has to be Old Crow. Mark Twain drank it AND it’s the inspiration for the name of the only bluegrass band I listen to. In my opinion, you can’t enjoy good booze unless you appreciate bad booze.
PL: I have nothing against Old Crow, Early Times or even Banker’s Club bourbon (if Banker’s Club makes a bourbon). My college experience was all Jim Beam, and it’s nothing but lush memories of the witty banter that comes from splitting a handle between five or six friends. The repartee infused with that insights only arrived at on the twelfth shot, fourth bat hit or half eight of fungus – fount of existential enlightenment that combination always was… The brilliance of those moments, how much we learned, how much we grew, made full use of and appreciated the value of the Liberal Arts experience… I get misty to think of it.
But I’ve been swilling the high end stuff for so long now anything less than Maker’s won’t cut it for me on the rocks. Vicious habit. Stick with the cheap stuff. I could have had a bigger German car if I’d saved what I’ve spent on high end whiskey. One of those big ones the little guys I used to work with used to drive. Maybe with an “Esq.” license plate.
I kid. Spend it all on whiskey if you like. Life’s short, and economically speaking, the Russians are on the beach.
Hendrickson’s:
Bought a bottle out of curiosity; tried to make martinis out of it, yuck. Left it at a friend’s house on purpose because it was in the fridge for 6 months, they loved it with tonic. Ever since I talked to those friends I’ve been thinking I’m missing something. I guess it isn’t good for martinis? Maybe I’m just a bad drinker or have a bad palette.
Chimay Blue:
Whether the Blue, White or Red (blue is my favorite), it’s best out of the tap. Divine.
PL: The Hendrick’s has an odd flavor. Sweet and it smells exactly the way they say it does – like rose petals. Nevertheless, I loved it. My only complaint is that it went down way, way too easy with just a drizzle of tonic (I think it’d make a perfect martini and plant to do exactly that with another bottle of it this weekend). Tasted like soda, and I paid for the excessive consumption the next day.
I hate Twitter. I don’t give a fuck if you “Had a great sandwich!” or “Going to bed… so tired!” Have a point, topic, link to a monkey pissing in his mouth, etc. Who gives a shit about the mundane details of anyone’s life? I don’t post “Just took a nasty morning shit from cheap domestic beer and Taco Bell.” All this is going to do is denigrate our social skills to sounding like toddlers. Soon we’re going to see updates or twats that say things like “Pretty birds!” and “Airplane!”
I do love when people broadcast their mental breakdowns for everyone to see. I certainly can’t look away from those trainwrecks.
PL: Twitter will be dead soon enough, and I think it’s demise will reflect two things:
1. Even the fiunniest users don’t have the creativity to do a constant Henny Youngman act all day, every day; and
2. Even the most shallow, narcissistic twits will eventually want substance in what they read.
To me there is nothing better than discovering someone’s site/blog that is awesome and then spending the next week reading through their entire back catelogue. Makes for a quick work week, but a horrid time when timesheets are due.
PL: Aren’t those assholes finally getting rid of the time sheets? How narrow, rigid and uncreative does one have to be to not conceive an alternative model that would make the firms even more money?
“New” is the bell that makes buyers salivate. Marketing is about the numbers, and the numbers are about buyers taking action. If you’re seeing a lot of “New,” it’s because it has been shown to make people buy.
The problem is, that once it’s all over the place, it’s already obsolete. The point is lost. But most people don’t get that….you know, the ones full of hope for a better future so that they can buy a book about how to make $1,700 a week “just by posting links on Google.”
“New” isn’t about marketers. It’s about the consumers on both sides; consumers of marketing techniques (you know…that guy’s boss who wants historical proof that what he’s about to do has worked so he doesn’t lose his yearly jelly-of-the-month-club bonus) and consumers of marketers’ products. Next week, it’ll be something different, and that something is what’s working now.
Of course, then you could just say it’s a psychosocial issue and that people should get their heads out of their asses…generally speaking.
PL: Precedent’s what you’ve got when you’ve got no creativity.
I am extremely happy to have stumbled upon this article. I have been vigorously attempting to promote my own website for quite some time now and one of the most consistent “tips” come across is to “post articles as frequently as possible to maintain readership.” This logic rubbed me the wrong way because for a few reasons. One, I hate feeling rushed, two, I have a life and it is difficult to write new, funny material on a multiple times per week basis and three, I don’t want the quality of my entries to decrease while the feelings of urgency decrease. Not to mention, as you mentioned in this article, some of my personal favorite entries I have submitted are rarely read currently due to not being “fresh.”
Anyways, I totally agree with your logic here, and for what it’s worth, THANK YOU for writing it. Contains THE best advice I have read related to the aspect of maintaining a successful website (which is pretty legit considering I have read countless articles pertaining to this issue.)
Holy shit, my comment was bombarded with typos. I didn’t notice this until after I submitted it. Here is a revised version of my comment. Feel free to delete or not approve the first one. :)
I am extremely happy to have stumbled upon this article. I have been vigorously attempting to promote my own website for quite some time now and one of the most consistent “tips” I come across is to “post articles as frequently as possible to maintain readership.” This logic rubbed me the wrong way for a few reasons; one, I hate feeling rushed, two, I have a life and it is difficult to write new, funny material on a multiple times per week basis and three, I don’t want the quality of my entries to decrease while the feelings of urgency increase. Not to mention, as you mentioned in this article, some of my personal favorite entries that I have submitted in the past are rarely read anymore due to not being “fresh.”
Anyways, I totally agree with your logic here, and for what it’s worth, THANK YOU for writing it. Contains THE best advice I have read related to the aspect of maintaining a successful website (which is pretty legit considering I have read countless articles pertaining to this issue.)
I agree with this one, especially in regards to a topic that many people dont consider: History. I majored in history in college, (a choice I now question daily) and I am used to reading books written with some degree of quality. However, when I go to a book store, I see “new” books published on things that are talked about in the current news; the Iraq/Afghanistan conflicts, Michael Jackson, etc. and they all have one thing in common: They are rushed and lack depth. In order to make a profit, writers and publishers will crank out some book about a subject that is current and new. Hardly anybody had heard of the Taliban pre-911, but after we went into Afghanistan, suddenly there were about 5000 new books about the history of the Taliban or Afghanistan. I was like the rest and didnt know squat about those subjects, so of coruse I was curious. The thing that really made me question these rushed publications is a book written on the second Iraq war, that was to be a detailed account of the war from start to end. The end, however, was once the standing Iraqi army was beaten. Case closed. Fast forward years later, the conflict is still going on, although with a different style of warfare. My point is, I agree with you on how why this “new! new! new!” craze is moronic. It forces writters and all artists to do trendy substance lacking pieces which people caught up in the craze absorb and forget about an hour later.