I’d meant to kick off this year on Blam’s Blog with optimism by displaying the
soup can.
You may recall the concept if you’re a longtime reader. And if not, or really either
way, you can scroll back through its dozen or so appearances here — several of which mention its ancient origins via the eminent and prolific Mark Evanier at News from ME. (I did swap in the bottle of Devil Tylenol from Hell that I cobbled together for a friend a couple of times, and the can also went up on a few occasions, transiently, in
the sidebar.)
The idea is to exhibit said can when there will be little or no other content for a while. So why optimism? Well, I’m hoping that material gets published regularly enough that any break merits calling out.
Vintage Radio: Jakkapan via Adobe Stock. Composite: BSL.
I’d really been hoping to announce on the blog’s birthday a couple of weeks back
that it would finally be returning to a regular flow of content.
That last word has devolved into a rather hollow one, with page impressions crucial
to ad revenue and much of social media — be it a business model unto itself or engagement in support of personal or corporate branding — driven by a mantra of continuing to feed the beast lest attention slip. I remember when it was a marker of value and productivity: “This boxed set / omnibus / deluxe edition is chock full of great bonus content!” I’m optimistic that the aggregated material here provides value to anyone who stops by and pokes around even if my productivity took a serious dive
years ago.
I recently got back to cleaning up old entries and lining up enough new ones that it made sense to me to celebrate at least a soft revival in some retrospective posts. You can guess how that went by my tone right now. Which doesn’t mean the aforementioned stuff won’t see the virtual light of day once I’ve proven to myself that a reliable, consistent schedule can be achieved. I hain’t given up yet.
Related: Welcome • The Slog • Blest of the Bog
A very long time coming, I Have Issues has gone live.
Kind-of. I’m stretching the definition of “live” there. Right now all you get is a logo
and tag line, plus — maybe, depending on the results of my internal debate over whether it adds value or subtracts from the minimalist placeholder — a brief mission statement. But at least the URL works. I registered the domain a while ago now and have been planning the site for more than a decade.
With higher priorities commanding my attention, even as older posts slowly get refurbished amidst ongoing technical problems, new content here will continue to be sparse at best for some time — meaning the soup can is long overdue for display. Not the greatest way to mark the blog’s anniversary, but that’s the way the cookie crumbles... or at least the way to cooking Campbell’s. Please check in every now and then.
You might have noticed that content around here has been sparse to nonexistent
lately.
The reasons for this are, unfortunately, manifold. I spent much of last year setting
up Adventures in Comicology, a website meant to archive my past writing on comics and steadily stream new material to boot. Posting here on Blam’s Blog in 2013 fell markedly in number from previous annual totals — just under one flipping half of 2012’s high-water mark — and even though I’m working to resume the flow this week I’ve only managed to reach a baker’s dozen posts for 2014 thus far. I’d honestly be fine with that if technical problems, along with the inability to properly deal with those problems due to other life stuff, hadn’t ground progress on Comicology and related projects to a halt. While it’s bad enough simply not being able to put in as much time and effort as I’d like, it’s way more frustrating to put in considerable time and effort
yet have so little to show.
More pressing matters will continue to demand my attention in the short term, but hopefully by summer’s end you’ll see activity pick up here a bit. Another, more detailed status update on all things me will be along when that happens.
Cover detail from X-Men #141 © 1981 Marvel Comics.
For some time now I’ve been planning to add a Wordle graphic to the blog. The one below, set in a font called Enamel Brush, has at this writing just been slipped into the sidebar between my general and exhaustive lists of post labels.
Wordle is an online application created by Jonathan Feinberg. You enter a bunch of text into its box and it produces a nifty “word cloud” out of that, customizable in typeface, color, and (to an extent) layout, with the size of each word or phrase based on the frequency with which it appears in the source.
The bad news is that it doesn’t work quite as easily as I thought it was supposed to work.
Along with my verification-word definitions — like yesterday’s — I’ve made a small running thing out of sharing weird search terms that Blogger’s Stats info says lead people here.
My first such post was in January; the second one, in April, was titled after one of those oddball terms, as is this one. To cut to the chase: I can’t find a record of joker lice being a thing, in Gotham City or anywhere else.
A dozen more strange — or in a couple of cases, strangely mundane — search terms, some of which totally befuddle me not only inherently but in how they led people here:
15-year-old with a fencing sword
action figure rod stewart
business team with laptops in the white cubes
I dreamt the other night that someone who’d offered to subsidize my blog to the
tune of about $20,000 wanted to back out.
My blog in the dream wasn’t quite this blog; it focused more heavily on analysis of TV series the way I’d actually like to but don’t have time for, episode by episode, as Nikki Stafford has done most notably with Lost. This benefactor was upset that I wasn’t covering an obscure-to-me British show — I want to say Time Bandits, had there been
a spinoff of the movie, although it might have been something similar that really exists and which only my subconscious remembers. I countered that what I was covering, Fringe and stuff, was the sort of thing, as with Lost and X-Files and Star Trek in past years, that people seriously glommed onto and discussed. We fought a bit, physically, and I told him that I was happy to return his money.
Just then, naturally, Johanna Draper Carlson approached me on behalf of a group of her friends who, based on a movie they’d seen, needed to acquire both a longsword and a dagger hidden far away. She knew that I could fly in my dreams and she wanted me
to fly her to the dagger. I obliged.
Related: HIVE Minded • Dream a Little Dream of Meep • Of Was and When
I’ll get to the Jack Kirby of it all in a moment.
Splash panel of The Black Racer from The New Gods #3 © 1971
DC Comics. Script, Pencils: Jack Kirby. Inks: Vince Colletta.
Letters: John Costanza. Colors: Unknown.
Decades before The Late Show was the title of David Letterman’s CBS alternative to
Jay Leno, it was the rather generic name of wee-hours broadcasts of old movies on local TV stations. The phrase also came to be used, with morbid punnery, for the Oscars’ familiar montage of industry folks who’d passed away in the previous year.
I am now on Twitter.
I’ve just sent the 20 characters above as my first Twit, in fact. (Like I said a couple of posts ago, I can’t accept “tweet” as either a noun or a verb when it comes to Twitter. It’s not called Tweeter. It’s called Twitter and so using the service is “twitting” or Twittering and the messages are Twits or perhaps Twitterings.)
My Twitter handle is @BrianLamken. I found out quite a while back that @blamken
was already taken; I rejected @blamsblog or something else along those lines because that would look weird when people use my handle to refer to me as a person — “still waiting for @BrianLamken to show up” — and @BrianSanerLamken is too long.
I don’t expect to Twitter out many Twits of my own for a while, although enthusiasm may get the better of me. Eventually I’ll be promoting the blog and other stuff when
my online activity increases, fingers crossed, and I’m sure that the more I follow other people on Twitter the more I’ll want to join the conversation. For now, I’ve signed up mostly in the name of checking out the feeds of friends and acquaintances and folks I admire without having to click through from their own websites and such to catch up.
I won’t make any promises but if you follow me I will very possibly follow you.
Related: @ Work • Spamalittlemore • Uh-Oh
I don’t usually have much good to say about the service that hosts this blog. To be
fair and give credit where it’s due, I’ll repeat that in addition to being free — without requiring advertising of any kind, a big plus to me — Blogger’s spam filter works very well. Frankly, I can’t recall a single instance of ’bot messages getting through
since I opted to turn off word verification on comments earlier this year in the wake
of the service’s switch to a much uglier, more onerous CAPTCHA format.
While the blog has in fact been getting more spam than it used to, all of that spam is getting queued up in a virtual folder to await my attention as it should. It seems like more spam comments made it through in the past, too, which leads me to suspect that in a rare instance of foresight Blogger worked to shore up its filtering in anticipation
of users ditching verification after the recent change.
Most of what got through were strings of Chinese hànzì characters that translated to
a vaguely poetic phrase and linked to sites featuring images of scantily-clad women if not outright porn. And porn is, no surprise, still the #1 destination for most of the spam that the filter catches, but for every few “comments” that nakedly hawk pics of nude celebrities there’s one that pretends to be actual conversation with poetry of its own — in English; often broken English to be sure, yet therein lies much of the skewed poetry.
“You can definitely see your expertise within the paintings you write,” one especially lyrical slice of spam read. “The world hopes for more passionate writers like you who are not afraid to mention how they believe. All the time go after your heart.”
I was almost touched.
Early this year I wrote about the most popular search terms that lead people to Blam’s Blog and shortly thereafter shared some of the weirder ones. It’s time to share again.
Like I said then, I started checking my Stats page randomly throughout the day after getting consistent chuckles from the kind of off-the-wall phrases that you only see in the Stats page’s Traffic Sources section fleetingly, usually in the “Now” view, by dint of their very strangeness; things get more normal in the “Daily” view as a search term will have to be entered multiple times to rank as one of the ten strings logged there at any given moment, and by the time we’re up to “Weekly” it’s such comparitively mundane stuff as the Muppets or Superman covers or the surprisingly popular Geoff Peterson.
I find that the funniest searches tend to fall into at least one of three categories: very specific; almost impossibly broad; and totally bizarre in juxtaposition. The phrase used for this post’s title is the first and third of those. What in the world could that be? My own search for “Imperceptible Sally” yields no clues. It doesn’t hit on the name of a blog, a book or TV or movie title, or even a band name — although it would be a great band name. The graphic that it picks up from this blog appears in my post “Foyer, Guns, and Honeys” (which looks at its predecessor in St. John’s experimental line of Picture Novels, It Rhymes with Lust) and “Sally” is elsewhere on the page in my list of labels. [Note: The cover is no longer in that post and my list of labels is no longer on every page of the blog.] Of course now that string appears on the Web, atop this post — for apparently the first time, as Googling it with quotes around the words returns nothing — without being of any help. Them’s the breaks.
The word-verification system isn’t the only thing that Blogger has changed lately. I’ve complained to the service — with no acknowledgement so far — about the new stand-alone comments page as well.
For one thing, it’s ugly.
For another, users can no longer subscribe to comments from it for the particular post that it covers.
For another still, the Preview layout is now crazy, although in Google’s Chrome browser as opposed to Safari it’s at least easy enough to bump up the page size to sidestep the wraparound bug.
Last week I switched from the stand-alone comments page to comments embedded on dedicated post pages, but that approach has its own issues. So today I switched again to the pop-up window, something that I’ve always found awkward yet might be the least of all evils — which is itself an ironic phrase to invoke given the mantra of its parent company. One can only assume that Blogger has its best people ignoring these problems. You’re welcome to share your own preferences with me, as fellow blogger or reader, either in a comment or privately via E-mail.
[Update: While all of the above still holds in terms of my frustration, the blog is back to using the stand-alone comments page for now.]
Blogger has apparently switched wholesale from its old style of word verification to a much uglier CAPTCHA format that I’ve seen elsewhere and which I’d always been glad I didn’t have to deal with on Blogger blogs.
As my mother is fond of saying, “Oh well...”
I’d hoped to have more up today to mark the blog’s third anniversary. My actual
first post (“0”) — which set the tone for much of my blogging by complaining about, you guessed it, trouble blogging — went up three years ago December, but my first substantive post (“Welcome”) got published on this date in 2009. For its anniversary
in 2010, I published my inaugural State of the Blog report (“The Slog”); while I planned to follow that up annually, I had to defer in 2011 due to my grandfather’s sudden illness and passing soon after, waiting another six months to take stock of things (“The Clog”). Nothing so dire has kept me from completing another update, thankfully. A cold percolating all week long has roared up with a vengeance and made it even harder to concentrate on stringing together the words than usual, however, so like the title
above says...
I get a kick out of discovering what searches lead folks here. While I’m always
curious to see the individual Posts listing in the Stats area of my Blogger control panel, even more interesting to me than what pages of the blog are visited most is how people are landing there and why — at least as much as one can hypothesize from the how.
Very often, I have little to no idea how a given search relates to what Google turns up, like so:
{craving for a holiday experience}
The above showed up this past December, and I found then that a Google Image
search for the string would return the picture from last year’s hodgepodge dispatch on The Hulk, Evan Dorkin, and Twitter as a representative of the blog’s archive page for April 2011. It’s a mystery to me what the person(s) who input that string hoped to get, but despite their obvious curiosity over the image (since they did click on through) I doubt that they were looking for a doodle of Marvel’s jolly sullen green giant. Most folks apparently don’t know (or remember, or care) to use quotes in their Google searches when searching for a specific phrase — which I admit may not have been the case here — so, although pages where the words appear in close proximity to one another may show up higher in the search returns, a search will eventually turn to pages where the words may be scattered about in unrelated contexts.
Hello! Are you looking for this?
Photo detail © 2010 The CBS Corporation.
I’ve kinda rigged the question by providing that pic from the set of CSI, since Alex Carter’s name was the most searched-for string leading folks to Blam’s Blog last year according to Blogger’s stats analysis.
I figured some levity was in order after the mishegas regarding my computer, and so too the blog, lately.
The above is from the Joy of Tech strip that runs on the Geek Culture website. (I’ve
long since learned that being a tech-head is no guarantee of a clean, well-organized, easily navigable website that won’t assault you with ads or a host of clashing typefaces ’n’ stuff, but I’m still amazed when tech-head artists’ websites turn up that way.)
25 years after Crisis on Infinite Earths, DC Comics is doing what many fans and creators felt it should have done back then: making a clean break with the continuity it’s rewriting, streamlining, and/or leaving behind entirely by starting every pertinent series over with #1.
This isn’t the post where I talk about that rapidly approaching “New 52” initiative from reading and retailing perspectives, however. Nor is it the post where I go all retcon scholar by tracing the history of DC’s reboots, reimaginings, and reintegrations from the establishment of the Multiverse, through the 50th-anniversary event that could not long ago be shorthanded simply as Crisis and which had its own 25th birthday last year, on to Zero Hour and the dithering recent run of Infinite Crisis, 52, Countdown, Final Crisis, and, yes, this thing that’s come after Final Crisis. Rather it’s another stopgap post where I tell you that that stuff is on its way, fingers crossed, as quickly as possible, but, alas, not necessarily — oh, the irony she hurts — in time.
On this blog’s first anniversary in February 2010, I gave a State of the Blog report
— coining it “The Slog” by contraction due to technical problems and vandalism that had rendered dealing with Blam’s Blog more of a trudge than it should be.
The post was as much about why I hadn’t been writing, and why I’d resumed, as it
was about where the blog itself was headed. A couple of Mini-Slogs came along later
in the year, even if neither really had any more to say than did the usual periodic complaints about various gremlins (now their own blog label) that have kept me from being productive here. I’d hoped to have thoughts on the blog’s present and future when its second anniversary rolled around six months ago, but life — which, as John Lennon reminded us, is what happens while you’re busy making plans — got in the way, partly in the form of my grandfather’s passing. What follows is very like what I would have said this past February except that certain deadlines are now ever closer upon me, so many posts backed up in the pipeline, making the current state of the blog less a
slog and more of, well, a clog.
