Sentential Links #237

Yeah, I missed last week, and I didn't even post my standard "Sorry, no sentential links this week!" disclaimer. Sorry about that...but here we go again.

:: Overall, I have to say that I like Oklahoma in general. (My life's travels have never taken me to Oklahoma. Maybe someday....)

:: So from now on, I think this is going to be part of my personal branding, right up there with "an analog guy lost in the digital age." (OK, this is pretty "meta" -- I'm linking a post of Jason's in which he links me, after I said something about him on Facebook that he liked. The brain hurts....)

:: December 9, 2011. When asked about the ongoing fiasco of the show’s pre-production, Bono says “Spider-Man? I’ve never heard of Spider-Man. What does he do, then?” Bono gets violently angry when people suggest he is in any way involved with the show, that he knows who Spider-Man is, or that he was having an affair with the late Tracy Maclough. Glenn Beck devotes a week’s worth of episodes of his show to Bono’s connection to ACORN.

:: The fact of the matter is that tyranny is a serious problem, and it calls for serious solutions and serious responses. The idea that the common man is going to use small arms to fight off a modern, 21st century military organization is ridiculous. And the idea that there’s going to be widespread household ownership of the kind of anti-tank missiles and other weapons you’d need to fight such a war is also absurd. In the real world, people stand up to tyranny with nonviolent tactics of civil disobedience that let protestors fight for the loyalty of the security services’ rank and file. (I've got to say that I agree with this. I all in favor of the Second Amendment and gun ownership if that's your thing -- I personally want nothing to do with guns, but I personally want nothing to do with broccoli, either. But whenever I hear someone actually saying that guns in the hands of the people are part of what keeps government at bay, I just shake my head.)

:: I had exactly two female characters in twelve years of roleplaying and none of them lasted very long. My gamemasters don't even ask anymore when it comes to character creation. I've been told several times that people can't imagine me playing a female, even by people who haven't played with me long. So why exactly do I do it?

:: Margaret Brundage is one of my all-time favourite pulp artists. (There's some wonderful pulp art reproduced in this post! Quite a bit of it may not be work-safe, but do look. M.D. Jackson runs a great art-based blog.)

:: If you can't get a good photo of a great blue heron in Florida, there is something wrong with you. But you can get wonderful photos of all kinds of much scarcer and shyer birds at Viera Wetlands, and the photographers all know it.

:: I don't know what I want Facebook to be now. I can't not be on it. There are people who contact me only through Facebook. There are favorite small businesses and organizations who publish their news mostly on Facebook. And BEJEWELED. The hooks are in.

(OK, on the last one, since it's an interesting topic: What I find interesting is how little overlap there is between people who are FB friends, people who read the blog, people who look at my Flickr photos, and people who follow me on Twitter. There is overlap, but I'd say the majority of FB friends I have who are friends or acquaintances in real life are folks who never, ever read the blog. Even when I set up the blog to ping Twitter when I post, which is then cross-posted to my FB wall, only a small number of my FB friends will actually click the link to read the blog post.

I have a pet theory -- a hypothesis, really -- no, even weaker than that, let's call it a "conjecture" -- that maybe Mark Zuckerberg thinks that privacy doesn't really matter because, for 99% of human interactions, nobody cares. Here's an example: except for maybe three or four people, none of the folks I'm FB friends with by knowing them from work has ever seen me outside of The Store, so they've never once seen me not wearing my work uniform. Of all those, only one has looked at my photos there and said, "Wow, you wear overalls a lot!" The only FB friends I have that read the blog are folks who I met online, or, oddly enough, people I knew from high school or a couple of college friends, and even they don't comment on it all that much. I've pushed my own personal envelope quite a bit on what I figured I could post that might cause someone to comment or ask "Hey, what's that about?", and I've come to conclude that unless you get way out there into "Too Much Information Land", people just aren't that interested. Or they're not that bothered by it, or their reaction is to note it and move on without comment.

So, it seems to me that my online life, spread basically across four main areas -- Byzantium's Shores, my Flickr photos, Facebook and Twitter -- tends to auto-compartmentalize itself, without much help from me. The areas where I get the most reaction or comment are the blog and FB; I've always been a little bummed that my Flickr photos don't get much comment at all, and my Twitter activity is probably a little too sporadic to really become reliable. But in general I find that I can occasionally post about things that I otherwise was once reticent to post about because I can, after years of doing this, be fairly confident that there's not going to be much reaction at all.

None of which is to say that I'm comfortable about posting everything, because I'm not. There is a great deal of personal stuff in my life that will never, I promise you, get posted here. And I think that's how it should be.

And now I'm not sure if that made any sense at all...hmmmm....)

Anyway, more next week!