Pushing on to 2010.

Do I make another promise to rectify this situation?

I know enough about myself by now to know that promising such things is a waste of time. I post here when I feel like it, as all bloggy-blogs seem to work (though I’m pleased the blogs I enjoy reading are updated by more less fastidious authors).

The nature of Wronglabel (as described, not prescribed) is one of sporadic information dumps, probably unrelated to anything that’s come before or anything to come. Perhaps that isn’t a bad thing.

Or, perhaps I’ll just scrap it altogether in the coming future, let the domain registration lapse and erect some new presence that is less blog-like, and more, well, arbitrary.

Who knows?

I’m a Republican because I believe in the free market and I don’t want anybody to touch social security. I’m on a fixed income and I don’t want any socialist bureacrats taking away my money! [sic]

“I’ve noticed over the years of reading books on the Holocaust and seeing movies that it’s always represented in the same way, which is historical or social realism,” Mr. Martel, 46, said in a telephone interview from his home in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. “I was thinking that it was interesting that you don’t have many imaginative takes on it like George Orwell’s ‘Animal Farm’ and its take on Stalinism.”

Yann Martel shits on Art Spiegelman’s head, looks down, realizes he shit on Art Spiegelman’s head and then does it again.

“You don’t have many imaginative takes on it,” Martel observes. He probably realizes MAUS exists, but that it exists in a still-marginalized medium and that he can, perhaps safely, get away with a blatant ripoff.

Except, as we can see in the image accompanying the Stranger’s article, Martel seems to forget that MAUS won the Pulitzer Prize.

I read MAUS recently. It was sobering and depressing to realize that I’d looked at the book for more than 20 years without reading it. It always looked like it would be worth reading, I just never got around to it until Monica bought it and it was sitting on my bookshelf, waiting patiently for me to pick it up. The books did not disappoint. If you haven’t read MAUS, I recommend going to the bookstore or the library and getting it right now. Read it with your kids, if you have them. Read it with your partner or your parents. It does a better job than most movies of dealing with the Holocaust–illustrating its brutal, methodical progression over the physical and psychic geographies of Europe.

As if, in any sense of the meaning of interesting, I’d consider any post of my own on this blog uninteresting. It’s not a stretch of the imagination to assume that whatever I decide to publish here I consider interesting in some way.

But did I really think I needed to call specific attention to that? To allow readers who stumble upon me, or visit in memory of some long lost post, the ability to filter by what I deem interesting?

If that’s the case, it’s a rather embarrassing category.

“I remember reading something he wrote. I think he thought it was interesting.”

Google’s got a slew of new features in their RSS reader. One, in particular, is the ability to mark a post with a piece of binary metadata: that you liked it. And beyond marking, you get to see via the others using Google Reader, who else liked it (and the names of any of your contacts who liked it).

Google stores metadata, then, about every entry that comes through their RSS reader. This isn’t a novel observation. Google stores just about everything that touches the internet in some form or another. But it’s a pointed reaffirmation that even the most subjective of information–something that doesn’t, actually, touch the internet, is of use, and is beginning to be tracked.

Prior to this feature launch, you could share an RSS item. Sharing, however, doesn’t imply liking.

And after sharing, you could comment on what you shared. All the easier to say, “I share this because I disagree so entirely with it. I loathe this. And I want you all, my Google contacts who also use Google Reader, to know that I loathe it.”

And after sharing with a note, other contacts were then given the ability to comment on a shared post. Which is great. But the data seems so much more interesting than something that should only be shared with your incestuous circle of Google Reader contacts. I’d want my comment to be piped directly to the blog posts comments. And I’d want the RSS feed for those comments piped straight into Google Reader’s comments view on that blog. Simple stuff here, Google! Get with the idiosyncratic program!

But the most recent feature, liking, is so mundane. It’s so bizarre to come to the computer late in the afternoon, open Google Reader, and see that somebody else, out there in the vast-but-quickly-shrinking-world, likes the blog post that I’m about to read.

What if I don’t like it? Will Google implement a dislike button for me? Presumably I could do this on my own–a Greasemonkey script for Firefox, in fact, that sends data about individual blog posts to a server of my own design. Users of the script would all communicate on a non-Google darknet, their distaste not even necessarily shared by others users reading the same post. But publicly registered distaste, no less–you’ll see that I don’t like this post, whoever you are. You’ll see it and you’ll know. 260 people liked it, 4 people disliked it. 4 rebellious hackers who are the only people to observe each others’ dissent.

Someone (probably many people) have already concocted Greasemonkey scripts to remove the display of people liking a blog post from Google Reader. For a moment I considered installing it, hesitating only because I seem to actually care about the opinions of unknowable people half a world away.

I mean, I’m reading blog posts, as it is.

If I see any strikers on my commute over the Golden Gate Bridge through Marin county, I’ll honk for ‘em. I really will.

By the by, when is Marin county going to shape up and allow a BART train to come up here? Sure, there’s infrastructural issues, but that hasn’t stopped San Francisco before.

I’d love to take the BART to work, so I wouldn’t just have to support their strikes, but could support their business, as well.

Isn’t it about time for one of these posts? You know the kind. And if you don’t, you will know it by the end, here. If you manage to stay for so long. Let’s see what’s happened in the past ten months.

Big things:

• Monica and I moved to San Francisco. Fun trip, came close to killing us on the journey, probably deserves a post of its own. We have an absolutely adequate place to live in the Laurel Heights neighborhood. Laurel Heights is some sort of new moniker for the area, I gather, assigned when Presidio Heights didn’t want their name being dragged through the gutters of Geary, or anything south of California, for that matter. But it does live up to its heights namesake, as we live on the third floor on top of a hill and can see a wonderful view of downtown, the Civic Center, the Mission, the Haight, with the bay behind most of that, and some beautiful parkland behind the rest.
• I got a new job. Working on Bioshock 2 at 2K Marin. Fantastic gig, fantastic people. Can’t say much more than that, other than to check the web and read what’s going on with the game. You play a big daddy–the first, in fact.

Not-as-big things:

• Yesterday, in fact, I ran the furthest I’ve ever run. Five miles. Five. Which doesn’t really hold a candle to Monica’s 11 she did yesterday, but still. Five, for me, is a lot. My body feels it today, too. Feels like my muscles are being reconstituted with death.
• Took a class on comic book scriptwriting, with Monica, down at SLG’s offices in San Jose. Great time, taught by the lovely Serena Valentino, and looking forward to writing more. Unfortunately now work is consuming most of my creative attention (which is merely an excuse), and so I haven’t written much recently. But while I was in the class, I wrote more fiction during that month-and-a-half than I had ever written before, combined. So that’s nice. Except that it was pure shit. That just means I’m getting closer to mining something that’s less than pure shit out of my fictional brain, which makes me excited to keep writing. ‘Cept for this work thing. !!
• House-sitted for family for a month while they were away hiking through Nepal and India. Involved caring for a dog, a cat and a bird, which makes it sound like it was some sort of Warner Brothers cartoon in the making–but I can assure you it was anything but. Or, if it was a cartoon, it most definitely was the mature, depressing kind of cartoon. Where the cat has a stroke and racks up thousands of dollars in vet bills, needs multiple MRIs and twice-daily drug delivery, and ends up losing so much quality of life that the owners put it to sleep a month after they get home. Brutal time. Not your fault, you tell yourself, the cat was old and lived a good life. But that doesn’t change that the poor thing showed signs of brain disease on your time.
• Monica doesn’t have a computer, so she uses my MacBook Pro, and I type this up on my fancy-pants new 13″ MacBook. That I bought one month before Apple refreshed their product line and introduced a 13-inch MacBook Pro. Should have read an Apple rumors site? Eff that poo. I’m happy with this machine. Not meant to play any games, though it’ll run System Shock 2 like a champ–which I’m playing again. What a fantastic game.
• We went to Wondercon earlier this year, that annual sf/comic convention at the Moscone Center. It was a blast. Looking forward to next year.

No promises this thing’ll remain updated. But I’ve got some public-facing writing in me, just dying to get out. So maybe this’ll be the venue. A sight better than making some new blog or whatever. I still do tweet pretty often, so that’s fun.

I will make one promise: I promise that, if I do intend to update this unruly beast, it’ll be sooner than ten months from now. Lest it be relegated to the coffin that is the internet archive.

I accept his challenge, and I look forward to utilizing language in a manner different than to which I am accustomed. I also expect a few slip-ups and will enjoy overanalyzing why I was using those words in those sentences.

This is a very, very good idea, and I’m surprised we haven’t seen more of this in other venues similar to Xbox Live. The only issue now is encouraging people to stop playing Halo 3 for just a few minutes come election day and actually go to their polling place.

I’m only being partly facetious. I hope that there’s an obvious option in the online registration that allows people to sign up for absentee ballots.