FB and E@L and Blog

A rough guess. Mmm, say, 97% of the crap E@L posts on Facebook he should be posting here. It's the stuff he USED to post here. (And LOOK, he using capital letters instead of the full suite of his HTML HTML HTML HTML HTML tools for astounding typographical legerdemain.) He once would have posted here.

For the life of E@L, he don't know why-y, but it's less and less frequently that he can get into the long-winded mode he preferred back when he was writing... here. Sometimes he'd sit down to start with some words floating out there - an idea, a feeling, a thought bubble, an article in the NYT - and then he'd think of the many hours it would take him to get his thoughts out of order, to make himself seem confused, and to wrest from the clarity of his expressions at least six types of ambiguity - id est, to the E@L rambles that you, his long-gone readers, once appreciated, or claimed to. He'd be up 'til 3 (it's only 1;15 now), rewriting, reposting, looking for funny pics.

Not to mention carefully going through the post to insert ellipses (is that possible?) and to mix up leeters like as ifm cuondt; ptye.

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Fuck Facebook. It's ruined E@L's blog. Cut, paste, insert witticism, post, return, LIKE!

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And ditto goes for any fiction stuff, or even any reworking of the Bruce / Expat-Angst / Gone-Troppo type material. He just can't start. He can't concentrate. [And fuck! About four devices just went *ping* because someone has made a move in WWF.]

It's all too big. There's so much effort that needs to be made, there's so little belief that whatever might come of it, it would matter at all, let alone that it will be any good or that anyone would care.

(No, that is not a plea for people to contradict E@L and say, "Oh, but we care!")

And there's seems to be so... little... time.

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Ah, perhaps he'll stick to Facebook after all. Instant gratification. Epigrammatic, telegraphic.

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Or perhaps this post is un cri de couer from the worn sleeve that... his damaged heart... from... Yep. Or maybe an ejaculation of intent from an erstwhile impotent soul, an afflatus of aspiration/inspiration, a clearing of the enthusiasm pipes...

So, he has a week in the middle of nowhere (Lampang, Thailand - yes! E@L's thoughts exactly), let's start again and see if we can't revive the philosophically ailing output of

E@L

BFs on FB v BS on Blogger

I'm getting sick of Facebook. Your posts are so ephemeral and your messages transitory, so easily lost or passed by as your wall slides down and down with all those new Brain Farts of your half dozen friends and those of your 500+ acquaintances (FriendsTM) whom you can't figure out how to block.

Hence I'm blogging a bit more. Farting my brain in the blog's general direction instead of towards those empty-headed animals, those food trough wipers on FB (no offense intended - it's a Python line).

Sure the pleasure and strengths of FB are multitudinous - you can organize big parties, you can... organize small parties, you can steal brilliant links from other people and hide their link so people consider you amazingly eclectic and impressively intellectual in your browsing habits. It always helps to have Professors or people with a PhD or three as FriendsTM (or even as friends, so long as they post interesting stuff you can steal on FB) for this purpose.

You can catch up with the people from primary school and high school that you thought stank or had runny noses or were gay or - now you realize - either dyslexic or autistic and not stupid or incredibly shy, or you can annoy those people whom you thought liked you but didn't really, they were just being polite.




Most importantly, should someone you know or have met or who knows someone you have met or who has met someone you know, should they (all or one) manage to pass a hat's worth of attention over your latest BF on FB, they can provide instant feedback.

Yep, comments and, most importantly, the 'like' button are key.

We all want to be liked. Being liked is nice. It's warm, it's fuzzy, it's an affirmation of the worth of your person. It provides meaning to the current existential hollow of despair and anomie that your fleeting appearance in this vast, indifferent and unimaginably old universe might have triggered in those few brain cells that you can manage on your own.

And some of your friends and even your FriendsTM can be bloody smart and funny (the PhD ones mostly). You can banter back and forth, which is also a great way to fill in those empty office hours between clocking in and clocking out. Of course you could SMS your banter instead (we are talking CLOSE friends here, those, other than 250 hookers from 4FoW or Bangkok or HCMC, who have your number), but that is more expensive and even though your buddy who works in the SMS industry would be smiling, your boss who pays the phone bill every month might not.

If it was a pain to generate a comment (please type the letters as you see them) or if the 'like' button didn't exist, would FB continue to thrive?

Or maybe it's all just superficial and arbitrary. Or maybe it's because a lot of friends miss my best stuff because they are out partying instead of being at home working on their novel blog posts because they don't have a) bronchitis, b) a twisted ankle from tripping over on an icy street while jack-assing around after the pub shut skiing, c) food poisoning from that horrendous flight in Delta business class (I had 4 seats in economy going over, that was MUCH better) d) conjunctivitis again still, etc...

So I'll probably be doubling up a bit on both FB and Blogger for a while, till I see which is the more satisfying (read affirming - where is the 'like' button on Blogger? Wordpress has one.) Yes, yes, I know I could link my Blog posts as Notes on FB, but that didn't work the last few times I tried it, plus I don't want to link them that closely anymore for ludicrously past-dated privacy concerns, as some people from work have slipped into my FriendsTM list.

So expect more activity here and expect more comments and presence, on my part, on YOUR blogs, which my dearest FriendsTM, I have been sadly neglecting...

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OK, Chinese New Year resolution out of the way, now let's get back to surfing for weird porn.

E@L