Category: about nfw

Nothing leads where I expect

When I started News For Wombats, I expected to be writing slightly different stuff than I did at Footnotes on Epicycles (my old blog).

I thought I’d post about politics, but I haven’t.

The present scene is alternately too depressing and too crazy. One example of a post that almost happened: I was struck, in the aftermath of Charlottesville, that the New York Times could still whinge about Trump’s “moral standing as president.”1 I mulled it over a bit before posting, Trump doubled down on deferring to racism, and then the Time’s understatement seemed hardly worth mentioning.

I thought I’d write more capsule reviews, but I haven’t.

For example, the Netflix show Iron Fist is almost unwatchable. I ultimately soldiered through so that I could pick up the continuity of the Defenders. The biggest problem with Iron Fist is that the action scenes are terrible. I don’t just mean that the martial arts are technically poor (which they are) but also that they fail narratively. I am fine with fight scenes in old Star Trek episodes: Kirk takes out aliens with hammy rabbit punches, but it comes across that he’s supposed to be pretty good at punching. Silly fight choreography aside, the narrative is clear. In Iron Fist, Mister Fist is thrown around by even mook-level bad guys. The show doesn’t let me the viewer know that he’s supposed to actually be good at this.2

Hey, now I have written about those things. How about that?3 Continue reading “Nothing leads where I expect”

This post is a test

I find that I’m more productive when I’m blogging regularly, although the causal connection is unclear. Maybe I blog more because the stars are aligned properly for me to be productive. I think that at least sometimes, though, the act of working out my ideas in a blog gets me thinking in productive ways.

Several times recently, I’ve thought of things that I wanted to blog about while walking around but didn’t write about them when I got home. Again, the causation is unclear. One factor, though, is that my old blog is running on archaic, unsupported software. Another is that nobody comments there any more. Most discussion seems to have moved over onto Facebook, but Facebook is no substitute for blogging. Although there may be more attention and comment on a post when it happens, the post gets buried. Instead of crystallizing a moment of thought, the post and the whole conversation around it are impossible to find a month later (unless Facebook’s cryptic algorithm promotes it to the top).

Last year, I set up a WordPress blog to ameliorate these problems. I never really moved over to it, but today I finally sorted out a plug-in which should post to Facebook when I post at the blog. This very post is a test of it.