Mystery of Blogspot / Blogger Anomaly Probably Resolved

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The reason some people can not leave comments on this blog, as well as other Blogspot based blogs, is because the commenting facility is broken under Google Chrome.

Go to another browser, such as Mozilla Firefox, and it seems to work.

What is weird about this is that Blogspot.com is owned by Google. You might expect that they would make it work with their browser.

The Standard Disclaimer

At various times when I write about topics far outside my recognized areas of expertise, such as the decline of the American Republic, I will make reference to this post, the idea being that it is a "standard disclaimer". Your mileage may differ.  CAVEAT EMPTOR.  That sort of thing.

One of the purposes of this blog is to express my opinion on a variety of topics, many of which are outside my formal areas of expertise. I recommend that you see these comments as the sincere, if sarcastic, statements either of belief, or disbelief, or anger, or dismay, and consider it warmup for a standup comedy routine that will probably never exist. Standup comedy, it would seem, is one profession where a layperson can express their rage about events in the world far beyond their ability to control or influence and far outside their recognized area of formal expertise.

Readers may notice that I fail to adhere to the rules of Standard Marketing and Self-Promotion in early twenty-first century America. I am somewhat self-deprecating on occasion. What I say about myself, my self-deprecating sense of humor, is certain to be used against me by some friends and acquaintances. It is a nasty world we live in.

I am a college educated (BS and some graduate work) American from the South, a third-generation agnostic Reform Jewish Democrat from Virginia, who has a (some will think) inflated opinion of himself. I have some credibility in the areas of visualization, synthetic imagery, computer animation both real time and otherwise, digital production, photography (computational or analog), simulation, visual effects, the history of computing and the Internet, and certain aspects about the history and circumstances of the Southern United States. I worked at the RAND Corporation when I was too young to know any better. I started using computers when I was very young long before that was common. I also come from that period when people did not have formal training in their field because very often the field was still being invented.

I had something to do with the invention of computer animation and its applications in the motion picture industry.  I have a technical achievement award from the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences. There will be some primary source material scattered in these pages for those who are interested in the history of computer animation and the history of Los Angeles in the 1970s and 1980s.

This is my standard disclaimer, or one of them. I hope you find whatever I write here to be entertaining, humorous, whatever.

Thank you.

More Blogging, Less Thinking

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This post has an uncertain lifespan. It is not clear if I will keep it online for the long term. I might just let it go out there for a few days, and then pull it back. We will see.

There are a variety of changes around here and they will be reflected in my blog. Those of you who seem to track this blog will notice a difference, and I wanted to both forewarn you and explain things.

The big idea goes something like this.

This blog was created and written in one stage of my life in order to achieve certain goals. For the most part, these goals have been achieved although of course there is much more to do. Although I did not write enough of the two books that are planned, I have certainly written enough to have valid writing samples. With a little luck, these longer term goals, for example, describing the early computer animation community of the 1980s in Los Angeles, will be expanded upon and will eventually make it into print. And hopefully several other themes will also get written, some of them may even get a lot of attention.

But in other ways, the blog has to change. First, the illusion of being self-supporting is not tenable. And it was this illusion that allowed me the freedom to write on certain topics at length. I will still do that from time to time, but not as much as before. Probably, I will be working under even more constrained circumstances. And these circumstances are fair. This is how the government and my peers treat people like me, and only the stupid or the criminally naive do not know it. Second, as time has passed, it has become clear to me that certain things that I took for granted, such as that our government was operating in good faith, or that people were my peers when it came to certain matters, have not turned out to be true.  Third, it is very clear that many people, even friends of mine, do not take me all that seriously, even though they may think that I am amusing from time to time.

The results as it applies to this blog is as follows. The posts will probably be shorter, more diverse in topic, less “reasonable” when it comes to strong assertions. It has been said about me that “I do not pull my punches”. What is odd about this is that in fact I do pull my punches, or at least I have in the past. Now, I am more likely to just tell you what I think if I believe that the evidence is obvious, and hope you can follow along.

There is a joke that goes something like “if you are going to tell the truth, you had better be funny, otherwise people will kill you”. I will try to remember this.

Also, when you have nothing to lose, why be tactful? The fact is, there are a lot of things about our society that annoys me. Why not discuss them? The fact is that I have been treated like garbage by my field, and it annoys me. Why not talk about it? What is the downside? Are people going to like me less? I doubt it. My friends already know (mostly) what I think, and the people who are not friends might be surprised by my reality, even in one case shocked, but that is actually something of a compliment for a blog writer.

At one point, I thought that through good work and patience, learning new skills, being polite, etc, I would eventually get some recognition, get some projects, demonstrate my more mature talents and so forth, but that did not work out. Today most of my friends who are successful play the corporate game (probably, in their estimation, to be allowed to keep being successful), so they are not going to help. If, then, as it appears, that whatever I do to fix this will not rely on the good will of my peers, or at least my colleagues if they are not peers, why not tell them what I think?

Hey, maybe it will even help. You never know.

Oh Oh, What if People Really Did Read My Blog?

One more time I have some evidence that people I know actually do, from time to time, read my blog. God only knows why they do this, and who they all are, but its completely frightening to think that people might actually read what I say here.

On the other hand, most of the people who read this blog probably are friends, or at least acquaintances, and in general, my friends are very smart people, even if we do disagree from time to time, or even if people have been known to jump to conclusions or misunderstand something I say.

It is true however, that since I come from a writing tradition that is very, very different from today's marketing oriented culture, and since I am known to be colorful and dramatic from time to time, people could get the wrong impression.  So I want to take this moment to ask everyone who reads this blog to recall that while I am trying to be helpful here, I am also trying to be entertaining.  So don't take anything too seriously except perhaps metaphorically.

Metaphorically, you can take pretty much anything I say at face value.  If that makes any sense, which I don't think it does.

Its Always So Depressing When the Russians Leave

I have mentioned this before, but it happened again. Every few months or so, maybe every 4-6 months, the Russians seem to come to my blog. I love them because my view count goes through the roof and I feel appreciated and loved even if it is fake, which it is. Or at least, almost certainly is. I suppose it could be possible that some Russian English class is using my blog as a way of learning eccentric English.

But probably, it is just some bot on a regular circuit based on some criteria that I could only guess at which hits my blog, extracts all the content as juice, and then goes away.

But I miss them, and I hate it when the blog goes back to its normal daily view count.

The Mystery of the Erudite Comment and Other Blog Notes

Every once in a while I get an indication that a far flung audience reads my blog. The evidence is nothing more than an erudite and informed comment by someone I do not know on the relevant post that the comment refers to.

Then nothing.

Silence.

How is it that the comment always seems to come within a month of my posting it? It is likely that the commentator has found the post from Google, in which case one might expect that the comment could come anytime, and not just immediately after I post it.

I am pretty sure that whoever is reading my blog, few of them are my “friends”. Every once in a while I get an indication that a loyal friend is reading, but mostly its just dead silence.

My conclusion from this is as follows: First that it is just happenstance that the comment came soon after I posted it. Second, that whatever value I get from this blog, and I do get value, is not because of my friends reading it. Whoever is reading it, if anyone, are probably people I do not know, for the most part.

The Russians are back and they are very welcome. At least someone is pinging my blog, whether or not anyone is reading it.

Nevertheless, I hope that it is a net benefit to whoever does read it and I hope they will continue doing so. The thought that people in my field would give a hoot what I think or how I am is idle fantasy, I am sure.

In other words, to any of you who are considering writing a blog: I encourage you to do so but not because of any short term benefit, or encouragement, or fame in this world. Whatever value it has, in the short run at least, involves your own moral improvement that comes as a result of making the effort and the hope that somehow this work will help make the world a better place, in the unforeseeable future.

Is Writing A Blog a Form of Therapy?

Before we go further, I want you to know what I think about psychotherapy, sometimes called talk therapy, sometimes called psychoanalysis although not as commonly today. I think it is mostly an entertaining mistake from the early part of last century, one part scam, one part Jewish intellectual disease, one part self-deception. (1) I have friends who are the children of very successful psychoanalysts and who have been in therapy all their lives and clearly it hasn't helped.

There are many kinds of therapy of course, and the kind I am being dismissive of is the one in which the patient talks about his life and the doctor concludes that the patient is hostile because he secretly wants to have sex with his mother.

But keeping an open mind, when I was in NY and consulting for Viacom, I decided to give it a try. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Besides, I had as close as I was going to ever have to a steady income, so now was the time.

A great scene from the President's Analyst (1967) right before he confesses to killing the Albanian.

Anyway, I tried it for a year and did get some benefit out of it although I did not realize at first what was going on. What happened is that I noticed that when I saw the therapist, I leaned less on my friends. I live alone and so other than talking to myself, the only way I can release certain kinds of stress, to share as it were, is to talk to my friends. I suspect my friends find this tiresome.  But when I was in therapy I noticed that because I could spew once a week at my therapist, that I did not do it as much to my friends and in fact that I was also a bit less neurotic in the workplace.

Apparently this benefit is sometimes called “Rent a Pal” and is not unique to me.  One is still as fucked up as before, may have as many neurosis or unrealized desires to have kinky sex or whatever, but at least one is not as compelled to blab about it to your long-suffering friends.

I wonder whether I am getting a similar benefit from writing this blog? In writing many of these posts, I get my entertainment by trying to find an amusing way to beat the shit out of things, events, concepts or people that annoy me. 

 I am in touch with my feelings so there are a lot of things that annoy me.

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1. There was a period of time, perhaps the 1950s or so, when between three apostate Jews we were able to fuck up nearly everybody in the world. The three of course were Jesus, Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. Technically, Jesus was an apocalyptic rabbi, and not really apostate.

Administrative Notes on the Blog Fall 2014

These are notes to myself and anyone else interested in the blogging process.

We are now a month or so into the third year of writing this blog and many things have been learned but nothing too unexpected. Many intermediate goals are proceeding along very well. Its probably my single most successful project of the last 5 years or so, take that for what you will.

The two things holding it back are my normal tendency to fail to be very organized in achieving long term goals and the amount of time to do a post when one is trying to be productive in other areas. These are not new issues, but I want to go over them briefly anyway.

The advantage of the blog process is that it can tolerate a “skip around and talk about whatever pops into your head” work process. It can tolerate a “five different posts in progress but this one is the closest to finishing so lets do it and put it up”. But there are other things in life that do not respond to this devil-may-care, gotta-be-free, seat-of-the-pants life style. These things may require a “do these five things by this date and three of those things are really obnoxious and not fun at all”, or may require addressing unpleasant topics or modest amount of confrontation. But in these tasks, failure to make the deadline (which may not even be explicitly known) or failure to do one of the five tasks no matter how well you did the other four results in a total wash.  It is as if you did no work at all. 

So the blogging process must accommodate these other, less forgiving projects.

The second issue is that a decent post is a solid 4 or so hours of serious work. Again not a surprise. Not all posts take this long, this post is taking a little over an hour. But in general my best essays, the ones that contribute the most value and are the most entertaining require many hours of thinking, writing, rewriting, some research, selection of visual materials, and so forth. This is the kind of work that a good client proposal might require or making some progress on a technical project that one has ongoing.

Anyway, it won't surprise you that it can be very hard to find those 4 plus hours when trying to make progress in other things, traveling to conferences, dealing with society, etc. Some days have at best one 4 hour period of dedicated work in it. Some days don't even have that.

So when you do not see a post, or a post of substance for a while, it probably has as its subtext that whatever is going on in my life is getting in the way of applying that serious time to finish or write a post.

A minor issue for the blog is that as it gets more material, it needs to be reorganized, with better choices of tags, various subject pages and so forth.  That project will be a little nasty, like cleaning the kitchen floor, and also like cleaning the floor, becomes more annoying the longer one postpones it.

The Mysterious Readers of the SIGGRAPH "Issues" Essay from 2012

I am ashamed to admit it, but I track my blog's page hits pretty closely.  Generally the numbers of hits is dependent on the recency of a post, and whether the post is serious or not.  The number of readers on any given day is closely related to the amount of effort I have put into it in the last 24-72 hours.

But every once in a while the numbers seem to jump, they double or triple out of nowhere and then return to normal after a few days. And what are they reading?

They are reading one thing: my SIGGRAPH “Issues for Discussion” essay that I wrote two years ago when I was late for SIGGRAPH but I was so frustrated with the whole affair that I felt that I had to do something, so I wrote that essay.

Now, a week or so before SIGGRAPH, the statistics on readership on that essay have gone through the roof. I wonder who is reading this? I wonder what they think? They probably think that I am an impractical lunatic because many of the issues are outside the normal agenda of an academic conference of this type. And I guess that is right. But for us, those of us who helped found the field, SIGGRAPH was always something more than merely another academic conference. In this we may have been deluding ourselves.

The essay was written two years ago. I have a dozen other essays on related topics but they do not get read as much.

I wonder who these people are? Do they like it? Do they hate it?

I have no idea, they are silent.

The essay in question can be found here:

http://globalwahrman.blogspot.com/2012/08/siggraph-2012-issues-for-discussion.html

First Observations about Blogging

I am enjoying the process of writing this blog, although I have barely begun to scratch the surface of the topics that have been selected for this venue/blog/channel.

The user-interface to blogpost.com gets a solid B+ and that is rare praise from me.

My first impressions are that writing a blog can be incredibly time consuming, and reminds me of preparing to give a series of lectures for the first time.  It forces you to organize your thoughts, but it is definitely work to do so.  So far, all posts seem to require at least two complete rewrites before they are presentable.

Now we begin the more interesting and challenging topics which will take at least a few years to properly explore.   As always we plan to be passive-aggressive in our approach.   It is unclear who, if anyone, will read this, but that is ok.