Sunday, September 10, 2006

Hmph

It's an overcast and occasionally rainy day here and I hereby declare myself to be "The Loneliest and Grumpiest Person in the Universe".

If you try to dispute that title, I will fight you.
To the death.
Don't cross me, motherfucker.

;)

Yeah well. Maybe I'm exaggerating. And you can't dispute anything here anyway because commenting is still turned off. Every time I publish a new post I have to ask whether to turn comments back on again, and so far the answer continues to be No.

If this is annoying, I'm sorry. You could argue (if I let you) that I'm under some obligation to allow commenting, just because this is a blog and commenting is an accepted and expected part of the blogging process. And to that I'd say: Well, yes. Fair enough. There's some truth in that.

On the other hand, I could also say this: It's my blog and I'll be a bitch if I want to, baby. If you don't like it, you could always go away, couldn't you?

I used to love comment conversations. For a while it was my favourite part of blogging. But now the idea of having to respond - whoever comments, whatever they say - makes me feel sick, and one of my personal rules about blogging is that comments do require replies.

For a while I considered making this a private blog where only the people I already know could comment (a pleasant scenario, ideally). And this is an alternative made easy by the new Beta Blogger, by the way: I just tested it on a throwaway blog. You can restrict readership to invitees, and Blogger will even email the invitations for you. But the catch is that all such readers must have Google accounts or they will only be given temporary guest entry. (The Google account will soon be required of all Blogger account holders, did you know? The new Beta system - requiring a Google account for login - is voluntary at the moment but will become compulsory "after a couple of months".)

A private blog though? In the end I think there isn't much difference between that and emailing, so what would be the point? Plus the idea of restricting readership to a select few seems simultaneously rude and disappointing, like imposing a strict dress code on the door when you're really quite fond of the riff-raff:

[Image removed because it infringed upon the copyrights of others.]
Gary Larson. The PreHistory of The Far Side: a 10th Anniversary Exhibit. Kansas City, USA: Andrews and McMeel, 1989. ISBN: 0836218515, p.60.

So. Anyway.

Does this post have a point? Well... errr, no. Apparently not. Comments are still turned off, but you knew that already, didn't you...

Hmph.