I have six or seven blogs I intend on doing. A hundred stories or more. And now, now my manager at work tells me it's okay for me to blog about using Python for web development, and to show the recursion technique I use for turning HTML into Python (instead of the other way)... I'm allowed to problog my code, so long as I don't give away any crown jewels. I have more stories to write, and my blog titles include "Peasant Girls," "Writing as a Spectator Sport," "Texas Polygamists," "The Abortion Artist," "Thinking About Jim Thinking about Rape," "Antitheism," and "Plot? What Plot?"

Oh, and part one of my presentation, DWIM: Do What I Mean HTML Templating Using Python.. But that'll be going on my yet another blog, ElfSternberg.com. Announcements forthcoming.

Damn, I owe y'all another chapter of Sterlings, don't I?

If you want to see what I've been doing this week, and why I've been so quiet, you can check out my latest polisite, Friends of Tina Orwall, (and that means another blog entry for the coding blog, "Using Wordpress as a CMS for Political Campaign Websites"). Omaha and I just finished it last night; now it's up to her press people to populate the page engine. I need to find a way to automate the Page Views exclusion system. What do you guys think of the design? It's pretty routine, but I think it balanced nicely.

Really, the art was the hardest part. I'm so in love with my Wacom pad it's unnatural.

If only I didn't have a life. Well, if tomorrow's weather is crappy, I'll spend it writing and cooking. If it's nice, I'll spend it riding my bike and falling further behind.

Tags: blogging, life
Current Mood: annoyed

Professor PZ Meyers of Pharyngula fame, was in Seattle last night and attended Drinking Liberally, the left's attempt at a free-wheeling, open discussion where alcohol is consumed and Scooter Libby is griped about.

The Seattle branch of DL seems to consist of four factions: old political hands who haven't adopted new media, who sit around at a table and gripe about all the new technology that's making their lives more confusing; political campaigners looking for fresh bodies and contributions to their various causes, who move from table to table; political bloggers who sit around at another table with their laptops open discussing ways of making political blogging more effective, and finally political blog readers who form a penumbra around that table and pick up its emanations.

(The thing I've always found remarkable about the liberal vs. conservative thing is that conservatives, in my experience, read more and think more deeply than liberals, but because of their discipline they tend to be think along narrow channels and are frequently wrong about the problem they address; on the other hand, liberals by dint of their inherent messiness tend to have a better picture of the problem and will come up with better short-term solutions, but those solutions will inevitably have to be revisited in the future precisely because they're short-term.)

PZ Meyers created a new table: the Science bloggers (and his fans). I was the token "science fiction" blogger. The conversation was long and typically free-wheeling; we did a lot of griping about the fact that the Discovery Institute was just about a mile away, and wondered if we could entice Casey Luskin or Jonathan Wells, or any of their cronies to come on doubt. They'd probably be afraid that PZ was ten feet tall and breathed fire. There was a lot of conversation about science blogging in general, and whether or not the "conservative" science blog, Scientific Blogging, was in any way a threat to Seed's Science Blogs, which was somehow perceived as being "too liberal," apparently because there are non-Christians blogging there. (The "conservative" site is remarkable mostly because it really does have to swallow its pride and admit, yeah, no science actually comes out of the DI, and all of the biology done today relies on evolutionary theory.)

PZ is a suprisingly calm guy (I'm pretty sure that's Coke he's guzzling there), although he can get animated when talking about the frustrations he feels with the encroaching alternative reality of the DI and like institutions. His daughter, Skatje, who will probably never live down the "Oh, the Huge Manatee" post she made last year, is the young woman hiding behind the dark "no paparazzi" glasses. She kept peeking over them.

Anyway, it was a pleasure to meet him and the other Seattle-based science bloggers and their fans.

Tags: blogging, life
Current Mood: happy
Current Music: Fort Minor, Feel Like Home

Ms. Althouse actually responded in my blog that my recollection of an incident that happened last December at a Liberty Fund dinner, and she's correct; I did overstate her reaction. You can read Ron Bailey's account as well as Ms. Althouse's response to that account to get a truer picture. I apologize for any misrepresentation.

The thing that strikes me most obviously is that Althouse hunted down this blog to make her point. Which makes the point I made last December:

What gets me most, though, is in reading Althouse's second response, I had the curious feeling I had read this before. Often. Too often. On Usenet. Because Althouse has reached the stage in a Usenet writer's life where she just can't let things go. She has to refute, point by point, line by line, sentence by sentence, everything Ron [Bailey] said, repeating herself over and over because she thinks we didn't get it the first time.

Ms. Althouse is an object lesson every aging Usenetter has learned at one point in his or her life: people will say stuff about you, and you just have to let it go. Life is too important to waste on this kind of stuff.

Never has that been more true than now. I have a readership that is below a thousand people: you guys are friends and family. She's now trolling through technorati and google for her name, trying to sustain the frission of argument.

I appreciate her trying to set the record straight, but really, coming to this blog to do it is just a waste of time, especially for an "A-list blogger" and law professor. Even one who's also a self-described diva.

Tags: blogging
Current Mood: amused
Current Music: Laurie Anderson, Smoke Rings

Well, it looks like there's another blogquake going on. Six Apart's crack legal team has succumbed to vigilante pressure from the outside world and is now tracking down every LJ in which the user has one of the following (or a synonym for one of the following) in the "Interests" list: child abuse, human sacrifice, kidnapping, killing, murder, paedophiles, paedophilia, rape, and beating people up.

I doubt they're going to come for me; none of those particularly float my boat. But it does mean that Six Apart is now taking an active, editorial interest in what you write, which is different from LJAbuse's previous interest only in what you do. Six Apart's abuse policy has now become editorial: your blog is no longer your own, but is now jointly managed by you and the legal team of Six Apart, which may decide without warning to terminate your account.

The thing that irritates me most is that they're going after fiction writers. Despite the disclaimer from LJ abuse that they're not going after fictional accounts, it's become clear from the ongoing discussion that some user accounts have disappeared because they were the fictional journals of fictional, villainous characters.

Sigh. The only question is: when will the Six Apart legal team get its act together and start going after all "questionable" content? I mean, I have "sadomasochism" as an interest (no, really!?) and that's illegal in Massachusetts.

If LJ becomes a Disney Gated Community, I'm so outta here, whether they push me or not.

Tags: blogging
Current Mood: annoyed
Current Music: Jethro Tull, A Gift of Roses