Those things which do relate to blogging are now spread out across three different blogs.  See, I’m one of those annoying people who likes to compartmentalize things.  Often to a sickening degree.  Some of it comes from what procrastination in the guise of productivity.  But sometimes it really helps me to be able to sit down and block out a certain section of my mind to focus on.  Right now, this is reflected in three blogs that I’ve got up:

Fifty-Two Tuesdays (My Music Blog) – Wherein I post songs I dig, reviews of things, and anything else related to music.  Music is a huge part of my life.  I listen to it 8 or more hours a day, on average.  I think a great deal about it, and it helps me to have a place to write about it.

Shut Up and Hack (My Tech/Code Blog) – This is the newest of my blogs, and it largely grew out of two things.  One was that I was filling this blog up with nothing but politics and tech.  I was getting sick of politics, but I figured that if I was going to just blather about tech all the time, I wanted to do it in a blog with that as the stated mission.  It also helps that I built that blog with code-blogging in mind, and that informed layout choices as well as spurred me to track down and install some good code-oriented WordPress plugins.

The Blag Switch (Everything Else) – This blog continues to be more or less a dumping ground.  I’ve come to terms with the fact that this is one blog that’s not going to be purpose-driven.  I have principled objections to “Misc.” folders and it drove me crazy for awhile that that’s basically what this blog is.  That being said, it’s proved very handy to have a place where I can dump all the errata that pops into my head.

I’ve thought about starting other blogs (a philosophy blog and a gun blog, in particular), but down that path seems to lie madness.  As it stands now, I think that operating a blog for music and a blog for code while maintaining this blog as a place to dump anything else I care to seems like it works pretty well.  At some point in the future I may condense blogs or create new ones.  But for now, three seems to be doing the trick.

Honestly, it feels strange not keeping all my blogging in one place.  To have a blog is so often considered a binary thing; a person either has a blog or they don’t.  To have several feels both clinically compartmental and also remarkably self-indulgent.  But to roll all my writing into one blog feels almost unbearably chaotic.

I guess for now I’m choosing self-indulgence over chaos.

I’m not terribly handy with PHP/WordPress/CSS/etc., so getting everything straightened out may take me a little while.  In the meantime, any suggestions or feedback that you have would be most welcome.

UPDATE: Okay, this theme is more hideous than I gave it credit for.  The preview looked nice, but this isn’t what I’d hoped.  My artistic advisor (i.e. my art-degree-holding, image-editing guru friend Meagan) responded to it with abject horror.  There may have been disgusted dry-heaving involved.  I’ll change it momentarily.

UPDATE TO THE UPDATE: Okay, that’s much better.  A bit on the busy side, I like it otherwise.  Once again, comments are always welcome.

To tide you over until real content, here’s a video from the inimitable Merlin Mann.  It’s a send up of LifeHacker, which, while awesome, often verges on the ridiculous:

Merlin Labs! – 5 Surprising House Hacks! from Merlin Mann on Vimeo.

Go go gadget 0-based list!

0.)  So this blog’s been faltering largely because I’ve been focusing on Other Things.  Work’s taken up epic amounts of time. When I haven’t been working, I’ve been trying to get a thesis done and to study for my comps.  I WILL finish this M. Phil.  I will.  Period.  And so between Thesis stuff and work and daily chores and errands and such, time’s been scant of late.

1.)    And when I haven’t been working or thesising or studying for comps or doing chores and errands or sleeping, I’ve been totally addicted to Red Faction: Guerrilla on the XBox 360.  The single player campaign’s pretty decent.  Story holds no surprises for people who played the first two of the series.  (Other, of course, than the “what? I already freed Mars.  I have to do it again?” factor.  Seriously, guys, three revolutions is enough.  Let’s try to make this one stick, alright?)

What’s been particularly addictive, however, is the multiplayer.  The game-modes that make use of the destructive buildings make for a fun, variable game play experience.  The deathmatch modes are fun, but not particularly new.  Some of the maps have some balance issues (one, in particular, is a “first one to rocket launcher wins” sort of map), and some of the weapons are either useless or too powerful.  But really, the gameplay in all of the multiplayer modes is at least solid, and in some cases (Siege, in particular) pretty damned awesome.

2.)  Shooting’s flagging.  I don’t have the time or the money to be as competitive as I’d like, so I’ve scaled from “practicing for competition” schedule back to the “maintain high competency” schedule.  A couple hundred rounds twice a month.  I’m not going to win the Bianchi Cup, but I can keep them in the 10 ring at conversational distances just fine.

On that note, I’m going to be scaling my armory down a bit.  I now have one pistol (my XD 45) I can use for carry and the occasional competition.  And while I LOVE my CZ-75, I shoot the XD more accurately and not much slower than the CZ.  So while the CZ was originally going to be my competition gun, I think I might sell it off.  Similarly, I think my Heritage Arms .22 revolver may get sold.  It has been a lot of fun, but it was essentially an impulse buy.  I’d never shot a 22mag before, so I got it, shot it, liked it reasonably well.  Now it’s just sitting in the top of my closet.

Heck, I’m even considering selling off my Walther P22, which is a good little piece, save for the fact that it was accursed straight from the factory with sloppy sights and a magazine disconnect “safety”.

My Mosin’s down for the count with a crack in the chamber.  (And actually a piece of it missing that came flying out on extraction of a round.)  So I’ll probably break it down to parts, clean it up, and give it to my buddy Paul who has a Mosin.

Of course, if I get rid of all that iron, I’ll probably wind up immediately buying one of those new T/C Ventures in 30-06.  Seriously, those rifles are so sexy it hurts.  And they’re priced at just $500!  That is, if I can find one.

All of that would leave me with every piece I’ve thought might make up a well-stocked gun safe.  I’d have a good, reliable shotgun (Mossberg 590A), a carry pistol (Springfield XD .45), a militia rifle (Sig 556), a full power bolt action rifle (T/C Venture 30-06), and a .22 of some kind (Marlin Model 60).

3.)  Politics, politics, politics.  The health care debate is unfortunate in that it’s hiding some bigger debates we need to have in this country.  Many of them the sorts of procedural, metagovernance that gets ignored too often in favor of rabid, vapid DoSomething-ism.

Honestly, I’d like to give you an incisive, well-thought out rebuttal to the actual material of the bill as proposed.  But, like much of Congress, I haven’t read it.  I haven’t time.  Of course I have the excuse that I have a job.  That IS their job.  Of course, it’s not like they have time.  These days legislation is about DOING SOMETHING NOW NOW NOW OR WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE JUST FUCKING PASS SOMETHING ALREADY.

“Do something, even if it’s wrong” is all fine and good in one’s personal life, but it’s a shitty way to run a government.

So anyway, I’ll just leave you with two thoughts, one practical and one principled, on socialized medicine in general.  First, the inimitable P. J. O’Rourke who quips: “Think healthcare is expensive now?  Just wait ’til you see what it costs when it’s free.”  And on the principled side of things, I’ll turn the proverbial mic over to Marko Kloos:

“Health care is great, and I wouldn’t want to be without access to it.

But a “human right”?  Hippie, please.

I have no doubt that the owner of the thusly-stickered car considers him- or herself to be educated, informed, and thoroughly on top of things.  By proclaiming health care a “right”, however, he or she demonstrates a rather galling unfamiliarity with the nature of rights.

Let’s get the most obvious point out of the way first.  You cannot have a right to something that necessitates a financial obligation on someone else’s part. “

4.) I’m becoming increasingly fond of the topical blog format. I’m also becoming somewhat sick of my chosen-in-the-spur-of-the-moment blog title. I doubt I’ll split the blogs again, because really, if that’s the case, then where will it stop? I mean, I could easily have a music blog, a politics blog, a gun blog, a science/geekery blog, and a blog for everything else. And that thought annoys even me, and I love my own writing.

I think I’ll probably just play with the way I use this blog first. Probably rename it, probably start on the stylistic changes that have been LONG overdue. I’m currently in arears to my graphic designer, so I won’t be asking for any new graphics until I pay her what I owe her. Or until she agrees that me helping her haul her furniture into her new 3rd-floor walkup was sufficient payment.

5.) And now, off to Thesis work. I’m 60 pages in, with lots of material left on the cutting room floor, as it were. It’s depressing to think that I’ve got probably another 20 pages to go knowing that I very well might have cut that much, if not more, out. Still. Them’s the breaks I guess.

I leave you with this video of an absurdly awesome cigarette trick courtesy of a crazy old juggler:

Updated 2009.7.7: Somehow WordPress managed to eat the link to Marko Kloos’ blog post.  Fixed.

“Oh Lord of Hosts, who guided my namesake David’s hand so that he could put a rock right through Goliath’s pre-frontal lobes even though he played the harp in his spare time, I thank Thee that the readers didn’t see me do that.”

This got me thinking that it’s interesting to me that a media, namely blogs, that have long been associated with personal spleen-venting, are increasingly becoming sources for polished, focused commentary.  Some of the work (e.g. Kevin Baker’s uberposts) being done on them is downright scholarly.  We’ve reached a point in the development of blogs where expert writers such as Petzal and his coblogger Phil Bourjaily are using a blog as their primary means of communication with their readership.  Gone are the days (if such days ever existed outside stereotypes and media prejudice) where blogs were primarily the purview of personal screeds and mopes.

Blogging has entered the age where it’s become a legitimate channel for informed, expert communication.  What’s more, the experts are understanding their audience not solely as the readers of their books, articles, or columns, but as the readership of their blogs as well.

What does this mean for the Internet in general and blogging in particular?  I have to confess that I’m not entirely sure.  But I do think that it’s Real Damn Interesting.

I also have a follow up to my last post in the works, inspired by some remarks made by my friend Jon Dingel (whose Trade Diversion blog should be in the RSS feed of anyone even remotely interested in Economics).  I’ll try to get that done and posted this weekend.

In the meantime, however, here’s my new favorite limerick, courtesy of Michael Z. Williamson:

There was an old lady from Ryde
Who ate a bad apple and died.
The apple fermented
Inside the lamented
And made cider inside her inside.

Any favorite limericks from the audience should be posted to the comments.

In the meantime, if any of your comments fail to appear, or disappear, or I fail to respond, it’s nothing personal, just the blog being evil.

2.) If any rich admirers out there are wondering what to get me for Christmas, I’d like one of these in .300 Win Mag or this ludicrously nice amp or a copy of the Secret Museum of Mankind if you can find one.

3.) Well, my Washington State ballot arrived a couple of days ago.  (WA ballots are all mail-in.)  Which means I finally have to figure out who I’m voting for for President.  I still haven’t ruled out writing in one of the Roosevelts.