Monday Morning Miscellany

Why save the scraps 'til Friday, eh? I wasn't planning on doing this but the day started with a flurry of weird oddities and peculiar news items and I didn't have anything much planned beyond the inevitable next post about Chimeraland, so why not?

I get my news, such as it is, from a variety of sources, the majority mediated by Feedly, the rss aggregator I swapped to when Google nuked their popular Reader service. People using their stuff and being happy with it has never cut much ice with Google.

Feedly was the best of a mediocre bunch, when it came to alternative options back then but it's improved over time. I'd be as annoyed now if it vanished as I was when Reader itself went. 

Luckily, there doesn't seem to be much chance of that happening. Rather, the idea seems to be to grow and improve Feedly's functionality, even in the free version. To that end, there's currently an effort going on to improve the accuracy of the algorithm that decides how to label things.

A few weeks ago I started to notice a pop-up on many of the feeds, asking me what the linked piece might be about. "Is this article about Entertainment?" the AI would enquire or "Is this article about video games?"

As you can see, that's not an easy question to answer. Or, rather, it's all too easy. Since almost all the blogs and websites I've fed into Feedly are focused on music or gaming, just about everything I ever see could reasonably be described as being about "entertainment".

Still, I do my best to help. I answer as I feel appropriate and Leo thanks me. Leo is the name of the AI, by the way, because of course it has a name. Leo tells me how sure it was about its choice before I came and put the seed of doubt into its silicon mind and then we both go on our way.

Sometimes the categories Leo picks are slightly off-kilter but usually by no more than a judgment call. Then this morning there was this:

Excuse me? Agriculture? How did Leo get there? So I put him straight. (See how I'm already anthropomorphizing the AI? That's what they want you to do...) Leo thanked me and let me know he hadn't been all that sure to begin with:

That's the lowest percentage guess I've seen Leo make. I hope I am making him smarter but I'm not so sure. He seems to be getting worse.

Of course, had he said "Is this article about Sport?" it would have seemed just as unlikely and yet it wouldn't have been all that far from the unfortunate truth. What the piece told me, when I finally clicked through to read it, was this: "St. Vincent, Honey Dijon, and TOKiMONSTA made exclusive David Bowie remixes for Peloton, the popular exercise equipment line. Their three remixes are being released as a celebration of Bowie’s entire catalog being available through Peloton to work out to starting on January 19."

It's tempting to say Bowie must be spinning in his space-grave but of course it's just the kind of thing he might have set up for himself. He was nothing if not unpredictable and he had a clear-eyed understanding of the commercial value of his work.

Moving on from one iconic singer-songwriter to another, the next news squib to spark up was the rumor (Nothing more.) that a new Lana del Rey song might feature in the second series of Euphoria. Just how in-demand do you have to be for a murmur of a single song that might appear on a TV show to make the news? Or how voracious is the demand for things to write about in our modern never-stop world?

Euphoria sounds like exactly the kind of show I'd watch if it wasn't on HBO. I'm currently subscribed to both Netflix and Amazon Prime and I'm actively considering subbing Disney+ as well but there's only so much money in the fun pot, not to mention only so many hours to watch tv shows.

Sounds like a great song. Looks like an intriguing show. Probably just going to go with the song for now.

Speaking of the interface between songs and shows there's also music and movies. Or the names of movies. I guess there's value in name recognition even if it makes for the kind of car-crash cut&shut that would give Leo concussion trying to categorise.

There used to be that trope in the eighties, where Japanese clothing firms would pump out tees with English language phrases seemingly pulled at random from the aisles of supermarkets, a trend seen in reverse, of course, in the mirror-trope of westerners tattooing themselves with unfortunate, misunderstood phrases in languages whose alphabets they couldn't parse. I thought we'd done with that.

Seems like maybe not but who knows? I'm trapped inside my own trope-shaming. I have no idea what Hyolyn's singing here. Maybe Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is wholly appropriate and insightful in the context of the lyric.

Hard to imagine and the onscreen English lyric translation certainly doesn't help, reading as it does, when it says anything at all, "Blah Blah". Oh, no, that's not fair. Once in a while there'll be a phrase in English and then the subtitles get it exactly!

Noting this is actually a cover, I was curious enough to check out the Lee Hyo Ri  original in search of enlightment. If the video's anything to go by the song seems to cover an invasion by space aliens with a dastardly plan to dance us all to death. Or something.

It's pretty good, anyway. Better than the cover. It does have a car in it, too, but it doesn't fly. It mostly runs into the back of the invulnerable singer and crumples. 

Which is what this post is about to do along with my grip on reality. Back to Chimeraland for some sanity, I think. A ride in a wheelchair pushed by a cat-bee seems almost quaint compared to real life.

Some Better Place

Earlier this week, Gevlon took it upon himself to analyse the outcome of this year's Blaugust as he saw it. He posted twice, first to assess the "long term effect" and then to see what blogs he could add to his blogroll as a result.

This caused a small ripple in the blogosphere, with Izlain, Rambling Redshirt and UltrViolet posting in response and a number of other Blaugustians leaving comments. Some seemed to take the Goblin's analysis to heart while others questioned both its methodology and accuracy.

I just thought he'd mistaken the basic purpose of Blaugust, which is a festival celebrating blogging and a bit of a talking-shop and meeting place for current bloggers. There was some justification for the confusion, since it's true that this year's event did also incorporate the New Blogger Initiative, which is intended to increase the blog supply for thirsty readers, something it's managed to do very successfully over the years.

Despite its undeniable success in encouraging new entrants and returnees to the form, the NBI has always had an extremely high drop-out rate. Gevlon's arch-enemy, Wilhelm, has occasionally analyzed the results, albeit over a much longer timeframe than the Goblin's: the number of blogs that survive, let alone thrive, is small.

According to Wilhelm's 2013 post on the fallout from the original NBI in 2012, of a hundred and ten participants, only thirty were still active a year later. Looking at those thirty I see just five that I'm still reading in 2018 - Why I Game, Ravalation (who hasn't posted for a while but was very active until spring 2018), Ald Shot First, Beyond Tannhauser Gate and Casual Aggro.

Five out of more than a hundred doesn't seem all that impressive but clicking through the links, sixteen of those thirty blogs are still online, if dormant. What's more, quite a few were still posting in 2016 or 2017, so they had a good run.

Of the rest, six go to dead links. That makes twenty-seven. The remaining three bloggers are still active but on different blogs.  

Game Delver is C.T.Murphy, currently blogging as "Murf Versus. Warp to Zero moved to Grimmash, although the last post there was in March this year.

That leaves White Charr, a blog that was technically still live in 2018, but only to point readers to a more active blog on Tumblr. That blog turns out to belong to no-one other than Aywren, longtime resident of my own blogroll, where she trades under the name Aywren Sojourner.

Meanwhile, back at this year's roundup over at Gevlon's, Narratess pops up in the comments to point out she, too, has more than one blog. Lots of people do. Well, lots of people might.

It's hard to be sure when bloggers either retain separate identities with the intent of keeping them secret or hive off different aspects of their blogging into silos according to subject matter. It's particularly difficult to keep track of who's still active when people move without leaving a forwarding address.

Gevlon himself dropped his Blogger identity after a crisis of conscience over supporting Google. He moved to WordPress but helpfully left his Blogger blog active with a link, which is what I still use to find him.

I currently have 175 blogs in my blogroll. I was going to cull them but until I hit whatever limit Blogger imposes I can't really see the point.

As is often mentioned, Blogger has the best automated blog linking out there. It reliably and faultlessly floats the most recent post of any and all of those 175 blogs to the top of the list. By leaving them all on there I can guarantee I'll know immediately if any of the dormant ones wake up.

That's a lot better than Feedly can manage, which is why, increasingly, I use my own blog roll rather than Feedly to keep up with what's happening in the blogosphere. I have quite a few non-gaming blogs in Feedly, though, which I would be somewhat dubious about adding to the widget on Inventory Full.

It's been noticeable of late that fewer posts are popping up in my Feedly feed. I've been assuming it's because of natural attrition. As a result of Gevlon's investigations and the surrounding commentary, however, I decided this morning to click on a few of the links that hadn't sparked for a while.

I began with a music blog I follow. It's called "Music That I Like" and it's by Everett True, a music journalist and sometime performer, who I first encountered in the mid-1980s, when he was writing and performing under the name The Legend. (Link very NSFW!).

The last post at Music That I Like was just over a year ago, when Everett was raving about the very wonderful Dream Wife. He'd seemed quite depressed around that point and I was wondering if he'd finally packed it all in for good but thankfully it turns out not.

Music That I Like may not have had any new posts since August 2017 but it has a twitter feed that's still going. I clicked on that and it magically transported me to Everett's new blog, How NOT To Write About Music, where the most recent post was...yesterday!

All of which suggests that, if you want to keep up with what's happening in the blogosphere, you need to pay attention and make an effort. It would be very nice if people always announced when they're taking a break and always left a change of address post up after they'd moved, but they don't. Sometimes you have to go look for them.

I guess now I should go click through all the blogs on my blogroll and Feedly that haven't posted in a few months or years to see if they went on to another party somewhere and forgot to tell me. It'd be quite a big project, though.

I've got a week off work in November. Maybe I'll do it then.

Do You Even Blog, Bro?

Comments are the lifeblood of blogging. I love getting them and I love making them. It's one of a couple of things saving blogging from being not much more than a high-tech way to keep a diary, turning the whole process into a strange kind of slow-burning conversation. (The other, in case you were wondering, is cross-posting).

Given the importance of comments, it's a great pity blogging platforms often seem to go out of their way to make posting them as difficult as possible. There are some blogs where I never comment because of the hoops I'd need to jump through and others where I only comment on rare occasions because it's such a pain to navigate the required permissions.

Granted, sometimes it's because I run NoScript in Firefox, but even if I switch to Chrome there are a few blogs that just defeat any attempt to communicate. All of which makes it particularly irritating when some faceless beaurocrat (hmmm... good character name...) decides to remove one of the few existing options that actually works.

I'm an undemanding user when it comes to software. Quite demandingly undemanding, in fact. I generally like to use the most basic versions, usually on the default settings. Once I've familiarized myself with an app it's very rare indeed for me to want to adapt or upgrade it in any way.

Feedly, for example, is always trying to nudge me onto the paid version by offering me things I can't do for free. It doesn't work because, if anything, even the free Feedly has more bells and whistles than I want or need. They'd have more success making some of the paid-for options mandatory for free users and then charging a fee to disable them - not that I want to give anyone ideas...

One of the great benefits of using Blogger over the years has been that Google mostly seems to have forgotten it exists. The downside, especially following the sudden and unexpected demise of Google Reader, is that it does create a sense of unease over Blogger's longer-term future. Other than that slight anxiety, no news is good news.

Unfortunately it appears that someone at Google wandered past the Blogger office this month, brushed aside the cobwebs, pushed open the door and decided, in their own words, to do a bit of "spring cleaning". That's management-speak for taking away stuff we don't - in their opinion - need and replacing it with stuff that - in their opinion - we do.

Most of it I'm not fussed about one way or the other. I'm surprised they're bothering to fiddle with Google+ integration, though. I thought everyone pretty much agreed G+ had been a complete washout and we were all just waiting for it to close down altogether. Then  again, perhaps changing widgets specific to G+ into more generic HTML ones is preparation for that very day.

As for the changes to localization, I never understood why my blog comes with a separate modifier for every national domain in the first place. Good riddance to that.

The change that does annoy me is the removal of support for OpenID. The justification given is that it had "very low usage"and I admit I don't use it often myself...but "low" and "not often" don't equate to "non-existent" and "never". There are a couple of blogs where just about the only way I've been able to comment is by using OpenID and I would guess at least the occasional person uses it to comment here.

All the changes, coming and going, are detailed in the Blogger Blog. Yes, Blogger has its own blog. How meta is that? I don't "follow" it. I barely ever look at it. It does, however, have a comment thread, where irony is raised to a new level.

As commenters line up to complain that recent, undocumented changes have removed the option to send comments to email, making it harder to purge comment threads of spam, The Official Blogger Blog's own comment thread itself is filling up with the exact same spam people are asking Google to help them avoid. Here's an example. I don't believe an actual, living, thinking commenter composed and posted the following:

"Hey, this article is really helpful to me thanks for sharing your intelligence with us. As a new member of this community, I needed these pieces of information.Getting Involved in Conversations can also make my communication skill better, nice piece of advice there. thank you!"

Or this one (link deleted but it was something about girls in bikinis...):

"Nice I am here for backlink exchange visit my blog and give some remarks with your blog url. I am coming to you within some days as this cooler".

The thread is stuffed with such gems. It makes me wonder; if Google can't even be arsed to purge their own comment thread of stuff like this, do they actually read any of it? Ever?

Anyway, if you rely to any degree on OpenID to comment on this or any other Blogger blog, consider yourself On Notice to find another means of making yourself heard. Also, in a revisionist move George Orwell would probably have appreciated, "all comments that previously used OpenID will be anonymized". You never said that, right?

From now on, according to Google:

"New comments can be posted either from a Google account or labeled as “Anonymous” on blogs that allow it."

Inventory Full does allow anonymous comments so at least there's that.

Here's hoping that after this brief flurry of activity everyone at the Blogger office goes back to sleep for another few years. If it ain't broke, as they  say...

Fiddly Feedly Fixed

Just a brief update on the Oh Noes! They killed Google Reader! panic of a few weeks back.

In common with a lot of people (three million and counting so far) I jumped to Feedly. I can't say I liked it much at first. The layout was clunky and far from intuitive. It worked, though, pulling everything smoothly and painlessly from Reader, so I stuck with it.

I forced myself to stop checking Reader and practiced going straight to Feedly. Just as well, because the other day when I went to the Google drop-down "More" menu from which I used to open Reader, Reader was gone.

So, I was using Feedly but not happily. Then two things changed. First, I got round to setting Feedly up on my 7" tablet. Wow! What a difference. Feedly on a tablet is just gorgeous. That whole "you're looking at a magazine" thing they were trying for, which looks just awful on a desktop monitor, works perfectly on the handheld screen. It feels so natural to use and looks utterly charming. It's a positive joy to use.

It's so enjoyable in fact that I was considering giving up blog reading on the desktop altogether and using the tablet even at home (currently I mostly only use it when out of the house). The problem with that would be commenting. I can and do comment from the tablet but I can't say it's pleasant so I tend to comment a lot less than I would if I was sitting in front of a real keyboard. Of course, that might be a good thing...

Then a couple of days ago Feedly issued an update for the desktop version, optimized for a range of browsers, which they said was in response to recent user feedback. Presumably from the those three million users they've gained from Google. I patched the new Firefox version and the result is that I'm now very happy indeed with Feedly.

The new layout is clean, elegant and eminently usable. I can see everything I need just where I need to see it, at a glance. Feedly is now not just a good replacement for Reader, it's a much superior product all round and I heartily recommend it.

I guess Google did us all a favor. Odd how ungrateful I feel.