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Thursday, June 28, 2007

They're Dropping Like Flies

At the current rate, we're gonna be needin' a Post-"Post-Judd Alliance". Peter Burnet hasn't posted since March, David Cohen "is now on hiatus, perhaps permanently", and Brit's dropped out of The Daily Duck (and then there were three) and is working to "recover" his (blog's) identity. My my, hey hey, it's better to burn out than to fade away, but Howard and I'll just keep pluggin' away, Great Guys is here to stay (though there sort of used to be eight of us, so even we've been sort having a bit of an attrition problem over the years).

Fortunately, Thought Mesh has woken from a recent short slumber and The (not quite) Daily Duck is sure to continue to be prolific with Hey Skipper promising to be "back in a couple weeks". And I'm just getting revved up, so

8 comments:

Susan's Husband said...

I can't believe blogger makes you type the CAPTCHA in order to do a preview. That's really annoying. It's even more annoying when combined with the fact that you can't log in except by posting or previewing.

Anyway, I was quite bummed about Mr. Cohen going dark. I understand though — regular contribution can become quite draining, especially when dealing with contentious issues. I am lucky to be blessed with very natural level of ego and arrogance which helps me keep on.

Unknown said...

The Daily Duck will trudge on. I added staff to try to get the posting level up to daily, but I may need to rebrand the blog. But "Bi-Weekly Duck" just isn't as catchy.

It's good to see Great Guys is off hiatus, though I've neglected to drop in as of late. Now with the thinning of the herd, I'll come by more often. Steady as she goes.

Bret said...

susan's husband:

Probably one of the reasons I've always enjoyed David Cohen's posts and comments is that he seems to take everything he writes so seriously and puts so much thoughtful energy into it that I find it very stimulating and even enlightening. He generally achieves a level of thoughtfulness that I could never attain, even if I had his innate ability and intellect, because I don't/can't take it all as seriously as he seems to take it.

I guess the dark side of that is that taking it all so seriously and being so invested can be more draining and lead to blogger burn out. Hopefully, he'll recover.

Also, sorry about blogger's preview clunkiness. Not all of us are capable of writing our own blogging software, you know.

duck:

The raw number of posts at The (not quite) Daily Duck is almost enough for daily non-weekend, non-holiday posts, at least some months. But oroborous posts many items at once and then nothing for weeks. If he spread out his posts, you'd be close enough to daily output. I'd prefer that, since it's easier to follow and comment on one post a day. But obviously, I don't want to cramp his style, so I'll take what I can get, even if it does come in waves.

Oroborous said...

I too would like to post one hopefully-interesting item daily, but unfortunately that's not a tempo that fits with my available time. (And motivation).

It is something that I aspire to achieve, let us say, and hopefully it'll be a bit more even by this fall.

David said...

Thank you for noticing. I'll probably be back in some form. My going dark is the result of a bunch of stuff, but primarily two things.

The immediate trigger was figuring out that a number of commentors at Bryan Appleyard's blog were 9/11 Truthers. I get that on the Internet no one knows you're a dog, but there really have to be limits. This puts the limits of rational discourse in clear perspective. If we're not going to convince other people, then we must be writing for ourselves.

Which brings us to the second point. Going over the BrothersJudd archives, I discovered that some of things I wrote over there, particularly in the comments, were really good. I mean, professional grade thinker / advance the sum of human knowledge good. I haven't written anything that good, other than limericks, in years.

So, if I'm doing it only for myself, and I'm not doing it as well as I could, I really need to rethink the whole thing and either shut up or develop some new paradigm.

I'll let you know how it turns out.

Oroborous said...

We do convince other people - just not all of them. Or even most of them.

Bret said...

oroborous has it exactly right. I think that you can only influence people on those subjects where you have roughly similar views. You can move their opinion just a scootch. And it requires a lot of repetitition over a long period of time.

But if you move their opinion a scootch, then maybe they'll move someone else's opinion a scootch and ultimately your writing will have a cascading effect.

That, I think, is the best you can hope to do. If you drop out of the game, then you're guaranteed to have no effect. However, if you don't enjoy the process, it probably isn't worth it. I like writing - I find it helps me organize my thoughts and is somewhat therapeutic.

I also really enjoy the conversations within the post-judd alliance.

Oroborous said...

I also really enjoy the conversations within the post-judd alliance.

Me too. Unlike Bret, (at least, according to his mission statement), and maybe David, I'm not really out to change the world through blogging.

I just like the conversations, the occasional jousting with the odd Leftist, and most of all, the serendipitous nuggets of knowledge or insight that get thrown up by participants, bloggers and commenters alike.