So today, an essay on blog writing and what to, and what not to do.
Apply the same censor to log posts as you do to usenet posts, or e-mail, or something that’s not going to be able to be retracted once posted, in particular, if you feel the need to blog when angry, by all means write the entry. Then, after a few hours, calm down, reread it. Then reread it as if you were one of the people mentioned in it. If at this point you still stand behind every word you say, post it. Then start suffering consequences.
Because last week, I made a post that was angry. At the time, it looked like a well-reasoned article. It wasn’t. The primary things I was, and am, angry at in general, are the elitism of LiveJournal, The stupidity of suing someone who guessed your file layout, and the moral high-ground of “Comments are soooooo 1999, we’re beyond that” that I’ve seen under towing the entire debacle of comment-spamming. Yes, it irritates me because I would like people to be able to respond without their own blogs.
Yes, I completely misread Sarabian’s comments on the subject. Then I tried to apologise for the above, and sounded even worse. If it weren’t for my general editorial policy of not deleting things, I’d be tempted to delete the entire post and pretend it never happened.
Except it did. It did, and has done, in a way that has assisted in causing Sarabian to stop writing and, more importantly from my point of view, to refer to our friendship in the past tense. This means that someone who has, to give one example, e-mailed me a warning because my site was broken (in the roughly 30 seconds between me taking down one design and uploading another), whose site development I have been following with interest since he owned Worldsphere.co.uk, and with who – along with Aquarius and other people – I have sat up drinking vodka and Dr Pepper until three am, during which they sang the edited highlights of Buffy the Musical at me… hasd isassociated himself from with purely by words spoken by me in anger, and stupidly.
For the above, for accusing him of elitism and other such rot, none of which he deserved, I unreservedly apologise, and beg forgiveness.
I’m in Nottingham this weekend, expect no updates. My contract with work has now officially been suspended for “probably just a week”, last day is Monday. In conclusion, life sucks.