Flying Gogoplata

These are the Top 10 search queries bringing people to my blog:

1. naked joke (17 hits)
2. naked joke of the week (12 hits)
3. naked sorority girls (2 hits)
4. nakedjoke (2 hits)
5. “drawing lines in the sand” and facebook
6. berkeley student ventrilo
7. braid video game thoughts
8. choked unconscious bdsm
9. daily naked joke
10. do you have habit of sleeping naked? joke?

Other notables include:

• henderson castration tool
• juan bahena (?)
• naked girls cat walking
• things to fuck
• why sorority girls ignore me

So obviously the new name for my blog was a poor choice, and not JUST because it’s an awful, awful pun. I’ll be changing it pretty soon.

I’m not sure how I feel about it. It’s probably best that other people do this kind of stuff for me. Let me know what you think.

I hereby claim this blog as my blog within the world of Technorati. See my Technorati Profile for proof. ::Miniature flag of me here::

Apparently comments were broken. I’ve disabled the javascript components of comment posting and it seems to have fixed the problem. That will have to do until I get the urge to troubleshoot the theme.

This is primarily because I haven’t written anything in quite some time. This is secondarily because I have spent so much time tending my blog software that I am currently out of the mood to write about the thing I wanted to write about.

But for those of you who care, I’m now running on WordPress 2.2.1 (the latest stable version). I have also modified all my feed links to default to the Atom format. For those of you who prefer atom, you can now just click on the provided links without having to know the magic url incantations. RSS2 is still supported, and to find that link, replace “rss2″ with “atom” in the feed links.

As you may have noticed, I have a habit of breaking promises I make on my blog. The most recent post came about a day late. Nonetheless, I’m going to strive to get three fairly substantial works up per week, roughly corresponding to Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. See you all tomorrow.

I’ve been completely unsatisfied lately with how little I have been writing. One thing I loved about the Blogging DeCal was that it actually forced me to write something on a fairly regular basis. So in an attempt to get in the regular writing habit again, I’m going to try to put myself on Penny Arcade’s schedule: updates every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Hopefully I’ll find something interesting unrelated to my personal life to write on that frequently.

I just upgraded to the latest WordPress version 2.2. As such, you may have noticed some down time and weirdness with the look and feel of the site. Further complicating things, the OCF will be having scheduled maintenance at 8:00 pm tonight. I’m sure none of this really matters considering how little I have actually been posting. Nonetheless, I may not be back up until tomorrow. Please pardon my dust.

As I have mentioned before, I have been getting recent insight into my audience by using Google Analytics. Though for the most part it is exactly how I expected, there are a few…anomalies I had certainly not expected to see. For instance, a significant portion of my incoming referrals originated at the OCF Blog … somewhat unsettling considering I hadn’t been terribly kind to them recently. But a bit more unsettling was the number of search engine hits I was getting for search queries like “facebook selling user information” or “facebook platform hoax selling.” GAH! Both of those are page 1, and that last one is third from the top. Though I haven’t gotten terribly many hits from these kinds of searches, I feel the need to disclaim myself for these topics. I am in no way an authority on Facebook’s terms of use or other legal documents. I do not work for Facebook or represent Facebook’s stances on anything in any way. Though having said that, I still think I’m right about what I wrote.

Seeing my audience start to grow beyond my local community (and into southern Canada apparently. Huh?) has put a bit of the fear of God in me. I had always intended my blog to be a bit more commentary and criticism of things like art, software, technology and such. The course’s posting requirement has brought up writing that is a lot more personal than I had originally intended. A friend of mine recently commented to me that the blog has a lot of potential for the easy publication of a very professional writing, but that it also maps on to a very personal writing space that makes it difficult to fight the urge to make it your personal diary. I’m thankful that I had been forced to write so frequently as I now have the confidence to consider a broader audience in my writing. With that in mind, I hope I will be able to move out of “beta” in the near future and move into a professionally minded writing release cycle. This, for me, requires the discipline to be very selective in my writing without ceasing to write altogether.

It has come to my attention recently that running a search query for “sorority blog” on some search engines, my blog comes up on the list of results. I feel an urge at this point to explain myself and my particular depictions based on some of the feedback I have received from my local audience. Then again I don’t think I’ve written anything worth apologizing for either. I have two sets of pieces in my “Sorority Girls” category: those addressing my experience in the History of Information course and those addressing my relationship with Kappa Kappa Gamma. The former was fairly insincere snobbery and the latter was a sincere reach-out.

Looking back on it, I probably would not have written or titled the first two pieces the same way if I were writing them now. I’m on this stint of exploring stereotypes and trying to expose them wherever they come up, but there’s a large part of me that wants to believe there some validity or justification to subscribing to these stereotypes over others, as these boys and girls (as these societies are undeniably structurally gendered) collectively represent a society of exclusion that I try to actively work against in the communities in which I’m involved. And there is also something about the sorority girl stereotype that makes it easy to explain the different modes of discourse between a Cognitive Science and a Mass Communications major that the nuances in the modes of discourse don’t reach without much more effort.

However, it is obviously hypocritical to then ask my house mates to drop those same stereotypes and biases for the purposes community building with our neighbors. In my attempts to give the benefit of the doubt I think I may have inadvertently reinforced some of them to my local community. At the same time I’m still not entirely sure a large chunk of my intended audience was ever reached to begin with. I am still happy with what I wrote in the last two pieces, but I would have liked them to hold more weight in the real world.