Archive for the 'ALON' Category

I wanted to wait a day or two with this to avoid being in the embarrassing situation of posting a serious post right after announcing my exit. But I’m dropping off the blogosphere, entirely. I’ll keep reading a few blogs, comprising a subset of my current blogroll, but I’ll probably not comment except by email, and certainly not keep posting here or on Appletree.

The one exception is that I committed to hosting the Carnival of the Godless here on April 1st, and I intend to stick to that commitment. So this is actually my penultimate post.

Everything I said in my almost-exit post still holds, except that this is final. I’ve gotten my book count from 6 to 9 since I last complained about not reading, and frankly those last four days have felt so good, so relaxing, that I almost feel dumb for not having quit earlier. I’m not going to Yearly Kos or any other blog-based event, unless it’s non-boring (i.e. unless it shows me the back of my own ear).

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As I said in my previous post, I’m becoming increasingly sure dropping out of the blogosphere is a good thing (well, after I finish the posts I owe people). As such, I see no reason to attend Yearly Kos, which means I have a $100 registration for the convention that I have nothing to do with. At least I haven’t reserved a flight ticket or a hotel, which would cost me another $739.

It goes like this: if you want to attend the convention, feel free to use my ticket. It’s only $100, down from $225 currently available. I burned $50 on it yesterday at a fundraiser, but that out of my own personal stupidity, so there’s no point in inflicting that cost on anyone else.

So you can freely get a ticket from me for less than half the minimum price. But the catch is that usernames for convention registration are based on email addresses, so there’s no way for me to transfer the registration to an account you solely control. I can give you the password and promise I won’t reset it unless you ask me to, but I can only give you my word.

So a possible solution is that I’ll give you the password and you’ll pay me only once you’ve received your badge at the convention. Once you have a badge, even if I shut you out of the account it won’t matter.

Any takers?

I’m seriously contemplating dropping off the blogosphere. At the very minimum, I’m going to start purging the big bloggers from my ‘roll - there’s never any good discussion on most of them anyway - and concentrate on talking to people who actually take the time to listen. Because, frankly, there’s no point.

A blogger can have forty times my traffic and still be politically irrelevant. The supposed purpose of political blogs is to exert influence; a good rule of thumb is that if your name isn’t Markos Moulitsas, Josh Marshall, Glenn Reynolds, or Michelle Malkin, you’re failing to do that.

I suspect there’s an underlying “It’s fun” reason for every blogger - it’s certainly there for me. Not being a real masochist, I can’t in good faith call the ritual that is participating in any of a number of low-grade echo chambers as fun. The people who run those echo chambers don’t want discussion; they want fellation. I can understand how the notion I’m willing to do that can arise, since after all I used to be in a fairly long-term online relationship, but I don’t do that anymore; any blogger who wants me to fellate her needs to first know me in real life fairly well.

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My book, Eternal Night, is finally edited in such a way that it’s readable. Before I send it to publishers, though, I’d like to run it by anyone here who’s willing to read it and comment on it. Please don’t post it publicly; I want to try publishing it on dead trees. If you think it’s bad, say so. Frankly, I think “You shouldn’t ever write fiction again” is more useful advice than “oh, it’s good” with no specifics.

As a reminder, the plot is about religious nationalism, defined loosely by Dominionism in the US, Islamism in the Islamic world, Hindutva in India, and so on. As Dominionists threaten to win the 2020 Presidential election in the US, in which case they’ll be able to pack the Court and roll bills through an obsequious Congress, the protagonist is drawn into large-scale conspiracies to keep them out of the White House.

This eventually becomes a political pissmatch between a secular liberal and multiple religious fundamentalists attacking him on various grounds… and at the same time, an Islamic superstate and a Catholic one are coalescing in the Middle East and Latin America respectively, and China and India are turning to naked aggression to fulfill their national ambitions.

Any takers?

We’re under spam attack, and I’m looking for ways to delete 100 spam comments all at the same time.

As an emergency measure, I’ve enabled comment moderation. The rule is that you must have a previously approved comment to be allowed to comment freely. I’m not sure whether it’s backward-compatible with comments that accidentally made the moderation queue without automatic moderation. If you find that your comments take too long to get approved, comment on any of my threads, and I’ll get an immediate email alert on MSN. I’ll remove the moderation feature before I go to sleep, unless a) the spam attack continues, and b) all the regulars have gotten at least one comment each approved.

This is a temporary measure, which will sunset when the Patriot Act does. Thank you.

Update at 02:55 PST: I’m going to sleep without removing comment moderation. I’m sorry, but there’s just too much spam, at maybe 50 spam comments and trackbacks per hour. The good news is that This Old Brit, the only legitimate commenter since I put up moderation, cleared it without problem.

In the future, I’ll try modeling my relationships on the following observations from days like Valentine’s:

1. There’s a pandemic virus that blooms only 2/14 and destroys every relationship, unless it’s treated with cordiform chocolate.

2. Flowers are a convenient way of expressing anything without having to go through the trouble of saying it in a touching and intelligent way.

3. The reproductive organs of plants are an aphrodisiac. Those of animals are disgusting.
4. Buying your partner gifts on any of 364 days of the year is optional. Buying gifts on one specific day is mandatory.

The first Carnival of Mathematics is up, after over a week of begging, whoring, bidding, and pimping. Most of the posts are purely mathematical, but some are about social attitudes to mathematics, and, in addition, Tyler has a great post debunking a creationist’s bad math.
Go read.

SoapBlox is a community of progressive blogs including many state-based ones - e.g. New York’s is The Albany Project. However, Maryland isn’t one of the states included, and now that Bruce is looking to expand to a diary-based system, he’s looking for someone to run a Maryland chapter of Daily Kos.

This puts me in an peculiar spot. I would like to see a Maryland Scoop-based site develop for the purpose of liberal community building. I would like to participate in such a blog as a regular commentator, cross-posting my material there as appropriate. On the other hand, if such a progressive Scoop-site blog is not going to be formed, I would like to make Crablaw Maryland Weekly into a Scoop site to allow commentators - predominantly left-libertarian but NOT exclusively so - to post diaries routinely and to allow a formal comment ranking, etc.

What I don’t want to do is to restructure my site to Scoop at considerable effort only to wind up competing with a Maryland Scoop site run as a progressive community center. I also don’t want to shoehorn Crablaw into being that progressive community center. I respect the progressive firebrands at MyDD, but stand to their ideological right on many money issues to some extent. Essentially, I wish not to attempt to be a Maryland-based, Scoop-platform MyDD “mentee” site nor to compete with such a Maryland site.

Although the system he’s mentioning is Scoop, people without the technical knowledge necessary to operate it can use Soapblox or, if they don’t mind unreliable databases, the even simpler Drupal, which powers UTI. I was going to use Soapblox for this site back when I toyed with the idea of having my own web address; I might even switch to it if my traffic gets high enough, or if my book gets published.

I lost my debit card sometime this weekend. I’m getting a new one by 2/12; on 2/13, I’m reserving a flight to Chicago and back and a hotel room at the ridiculously expensive Hyatt Regency. If anyone’s looking for a roommate, give me a shout and we’ll work something out.

In the unlikely case I get two emails and don’t respond to the first before reading the second, priority will be given to under-18 people who need someone over 18 to check them in. People shouldn’t have to wait until about a week and a half before the convention to get a confirmation that they can make it the way I did last year.

Mark Friday, February the 9th on your calendar, folks. That’s when the Carnival of Mathematics goes up on Abstract Nonsense. If you have any submission, or want to host the carnival at a later date, email me, and preferably include the words “Carnival of Mathematics” somewhere in the subject line, in case I have to rescue your email from the spam filter.

Tentatively, the carnival is supposed to be fortnightly, but if I get too many hosting requests, or there are too many posts per two weeks, it’ll become weekly. Similarly, if there are too few posts or hosting requests, it can become monthly.

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