Now This Is A Crazy Person Blog Rant..

Watching Nova | Building the Great Cathedrals and boy, is it both interesting and horrifying. There is an excellent documentary here, really, the visuals alone should be unimpeachable: high def video tours of some of the most impressive gothic structures? A huge compilation of medieval scrollery? Shit son, slap a Ken Burns After Effects filter on that shit and call it a day. And yet this is unwatchable, an unfocused mishmash of the worst Discovery channel 'What Did Judas Iscariot Really Sound Like?' lowest common denominator-y and the DaVinci Code knockoff effects that are so popular in today's history docs.
Is this really how we understand the past now? Does our narrative of the past really require conspiracy theories and Tom Hanks looking like a sexually predatory freshman year literature professor? All the evidence would seem to endorse the conclusion, which is strange, because the last three or four years have been great for documentary filmaking. Actually the kinds of documentaries that the academy has been recognizing as of late (meaning, like, since The Fog of War in 2004 if memory serves) are contemporary issue docs; why public school voucher programs work, our country's health care system is broken, the bank bailout was engineered to increase bank profits and fuck everyone else, public school voucher programs are the devil, etc.
History documentaries, their subjects further from our collective immediate experience, their talking heads all academic rather than the worn yet fierce visages of the aged fighters of wherever, their audience more couchridden than politically engaged, have felt the tidal wave of popular demand for Dan Brown stronger than most.
"But what's the problem with there being unnecessary and frankly retarded stylistic flourishes in contemporary history documentaries?" I hear you, the non-existant reader, cry, "At least people are learning something about how, like, people went to the bathroom in biblical times or whatever." True, dear nonexistant reader, knowledge is good, really any amount will do, but here the formatting itself undermines that greater purpose. By appearing so similar to The DaVinci code or The Secret these documentaries lend a certain, I don't know, a 'credence by visual effect proxy'. You can't suggest that in aping the visual effects of these movies these projects are not trying to --in effect-- borrow against the 'reality' of these movies and trade on the audience's relationship to them. Using narrative fiction to illuminate reality is not the worst thing, and there are presumably good reasons to do it. For example high schoolers with less-than-entirely formed senses of history probably learn more from the emotional melodrama of Tale of Two Cities than from a survey course of late 18th century French culture. What's dangerous is the sense of using fiction as a context for historical fact rather than the other way around. "Historical" documentaries like this feed and endorse a culture of paranoia acceptance; seeing Did The Dead Sea Scrolls Predict The End of Days? every other day on the History channel normalizes something like Loose Change after a couple of years, both endorse paranoiac ramblings, disingenuous editing, and shithouse-crazy fringe conspiricists, and if one of them is still good enough to air on the History Channel...

I just hope this shit works

According to conservative estimates I enjoy making up, there are an estimated 133,000,000 blogs currently online. Out of those 133,000,000 how many are updated regularly? Blog inactivity stands at about 66% (or did, according to some slightly older figures). Which means more than a significant few of those millions are languishing in blog hell, stranded in 2002, never updating, still displaying observations about how the upcoming invasion of Iraq is, "like, so totally bullshit."

I speak from experience about this, as I spent my college years abortively starting and subsequently abandoning art blogs. It's an easy problem to fall into. You start off well enough, everyday uploading a new photograph of a different Japanese tea set, or a painting of a banana, or if you went to art school, the words "banana" or "tea set" hand drawn on heavy wove cream paper in an approximation of Helvetica. But soon you miss a day, or two, or three, or you wake up one day and realize that somewhere out there still exists a blog you started six months ago and haven't updated in five. And at that point your tour of blog hell begins. You can't bring yourself to go back to contributing, ignoring the conspicuous near half a year gap in your posts, but you also can't bring yourself to put the poor animal out of its misery, shivering doe eyed thing that it is.
Telling yourself that you owe it to yourself and, and damnit, you owe it to the blog, you weakly carry on with a few self deprecating posts about your lateness, convinced that the dedicated few pulling for Bobspot.blogspot to get back on track watch with baited breath. Of course unless your weblog specializes in niche pornography this hope is almost certainly in vain. And so, one day, ashamed, bitter, tired, old, your dreams turned to sludge like a clichéd metaphor in a Mickey Spillane novel, hunched over a computer you once shared so many hopes and dreams with, you sever your online connection with the world of men, and retire to a small town where you get a job as a line chef and think wistfully on what might have been.

The truth is it is hard to maintain faith in an endeavor like that if you don't think anyone's watching, which is probably a rapidly aging concept in the internet age. That we are increasingly a world of digital hobbyists means our web personas are becoming the more effective way not just to communicate but to contribute to culture in meaningful ways. In five years (less probably, I just don't want to undershoot) the idea of abandoning a twitter feed or tumblr page will be akin to packing up everything and moving to Alberta without telling anyone, in that it'll be considered rude and only assholes trying to make statements will do it. So in a way, we are living in the last foreseeable golden age of avatar irresponsibility. It is still possible to ignore your social media obligations, because for all the bullshit about social media and p2p marketing in the internet age, these things are not social media obligations, not quite yet.

And so, in the likely case that this effort goes the way of the 66%, or that I find I can't stick with preaching to an audience that occasionally reaches skyward towards the single digits, I would like you (the internet) to know, that if it ever comes to it, an' my blog's real sick, then I'll be the one to take 'em out behind the barn, on accountin' I can't stand to see it suffer.

Why is this the introduction to a blog where I plan on posting cartoons of people I see on the bus picking their noses? Well, I do occasionally find nerd theory interesting, and besides, I think that personality on the web should be fun to work with, and acknowledging the type of relationship you expect (or hope) to have with a medium should really be your first step in exploring it. Also, I suppose I realized I was going to need to square my relationship with my digital past before trying blogs again.

And this seemed a better option than burying my last blog in the ol' pet cemetery over yonder.

Because sometimes dead is better.