Bloggenfreude (definition)

Taking joy in adding to the pain of others via exaggerated and even ridiculous online comments.
A portmanteau of “blog” and “Schadenfreude”

Consider:

• Whatever the latest Apple story is, the “Apple haters” dogpile on, tearing things down with increasingly ridiculous claims and theories.
   
• Right-wing pundits jumping on the birther “Obama was born in Kenya” bandwagon, even though probably none of them really believed the concern was legitimate.
   
• People ripping into Rebecca Black’s song “Friday”.  The lyrics might be simplistic and the Auto-Tune-ing a little bit obvious, but did it deserve that level of attack?  (Kudos to Glee for salvaging the song!)

Sure, when you feel compelled to comment on the latest trend or meme, you have to have your own spin, but if there’s truth in the Thumper Rule (“If you can’t say something nice… don’t say nothing at all.”), then there needs to be a corollary: “If you must say something mean, you don’t have to be meaner than everyone else.”
 

October, 2003–June, 2004 blog posts

I’ve finished incorporating the October, 2003–June, 2004 posts from my old “Bouncing Off the Walls” blog into this one, a whopping 64 items.  There were 202 items in the old blog, and I've now passed the halfway point in the merging process, moving in about 4 old posts per week.  (The Q3 2004 batch was the busiest, though, with 30 posts to merge in.)

In the process, I’ve re-edited all the entries, adding and correcting weblinks, clarifying text, and sometimes adding new comments.  Here are links to the 9 months covered, so you can read what I was up to back then:

October 2003 (2 items)
November 2003 (3 items)
December 2003 (5 items)
January 2004 (11 items)
February 2004 (8 items)
March 2004 (9 items)
April 2004 (9 items)
May 2004 (6 items)
June 2004 (4 items)

A few of the adult (sex-related) posts are on my other blog, here:

October 2003 (1 item)
December 2003 (2 items)
February 2004 (1 item)
March 2004 (2 items)
June 2004 (1 item)

What was going on in the world (and my blog) back this?  War in Iraq.  Janet Jackson’s nipple.  A bunch of “What Were They Thinking?” items.  And a little milestone in Massachusetts: same-sex marriage.

Between the two blogs, I’m now at 401 posts total.
 

April–September, 2003 blog posts

I’ve finished incorporating the April–September, 2003 posts from my old “Bouncing Off the Walls” blog into this one, 29 items total.  In the process, I’ve re-edited all the entries, added and corrected weblinks, and such.

Here are links to the 6 months covered, so you can read what I was up to back then:

April 2003 (6 items)
May 2003 (7 items)
June 2003 (5 items)
July 2003 (no items)
August 2003 (1 item)
September 2003 (8 items)

A few of the sex-related posts are on my other blog, here:

June 2003 (1 item)
July 2003 (1 item)

Between the two blogs, I’m now just under 300 posts total.
 

January–March, 2003 blog posts

I’ve finished incorporating the January–March, 2003 posts from my old “Bouncing Off the Walls” blog into this one.  (Actually, they were all from March 2003, when I started that blog, but I have it archived in 3-month chunks, so future incorporations will cover a quarter at a time.)  In the process, I’ve re-edited all the entries, corrected weblinks, and such.  I was pleased to find that very little in the way of revisions were needed, and I’m still happy with the politics-oriented stuff I wrote at the time.

For those interested in what I was writing about at the time (mostly What Were They Thinking? items and a number of posts about the then-new Iraq War), you can read them here:

http://soundskinky2.blogspot.com/2003_03_01_archive.html

A few of the sex-related posts are on my other blog, here:

http://soundskinkyer.blogspot.com/2003_03_01_archive.html

(Oh yeah, and the addition of those posts has put me past post #200 on this blog.)
 

New Companion Blog: Sounds Kinky-er

I’ve recently created a second blog, one intended to house posts with sexual and other “adult” content.  It is called Sounds Kinky-er, and you can find it here:

http://soundskinkyer.blogspot.com

Am I bowing to censorship demands here?  Am I making my blog over into something “family friendly”.  Um, no.  Look at the title of this blog: that isn’t going to change.  (In fact, no one has complained or commented on this.  It’s all my own decision.)

What I have found over the past year is that there are some sex-related and other edgy topics that I want to be able to write about, but which don’t fit comfortably next to posts about comic book movies and complaints about product design and thoughts about politics.  You could say that those don’t belong in the same blog as one another, too, but my real concern has been with someone visiting the blog via Facebook or Google, poking around, and getting a text-based eyeful of stuff that maybe wasn’t appropriate for them.

So I have found myself either jumping through hoops to making some content non-viewable (parts of my trip reports were colored to match the background, so you had to select the text to read what I wrote), and I have even refrained from writing about some topics.  Opening a new blog specifically intended for such topics — the new blog has a “This has adult content” front page warning for any visitor, which is enough to quell my concerns — will in theory free me to write on those subjects with more freedom and with less second-guessing of my content and word choices.

(But the new blog is not going to be loaded up with pics of naughty bits and perverse sex acts.  Sorry.  And it’s only going to be for the sex and similar sort of “adult” content.  Posts which deal with topics appropriate to adult-level maturity — including many non-sexual gay items — will stay right here.)

If you visit the companion blog now, you’ll find a number of posts which were originally on this site, ported over there.  As I add them there (I still have another couple dozen to go through at this point, including some trip reports), I’m zapping them here, leaving just the title and a redirect link.  A year from now, I’ll probably purge the stub posts from here, too.

I will still be posting links to new blog posts for both blogs to Facebook and other places, however.  I don’t want to make it harder for people to find my posts, just to make them more conscious of when the posts have adult content and able to opt out.
 

Crap crap crap (resolved)

Finally got all my old posts reposted yesterday, along with 50-odd new posts since then, including the full trip report from New Zealand (starts here; I still need to add links and fix spelling errors throughout it).  Did an editing pass on all the old posts, too, to correct errors and and updates.

In the meantime, I’ve created stubs for abut a dozen more posts to come, and I have a bunch of images of bad ads and the like to put up.  Once those are all caught up (hah!), I’ll start back in on the oldest “Bouncing Off the Walls” posts.
 

Crap crap crap

My old blog went bonkers.  Started giving errors every time I tried to post.  Tried unpublishing everything, no luck.  So I pulled off all the content (exported it) and deleted the old blog, and then created a new one.  But I can’t point it to the old location; something has changed with Blogger to only allow blogs at full domains, not leaf nodes.  (Suspicion: that change may be what broke the blog.)  So now I have to have it hanging from their free service until I can rig up a subdomain off my site, and I have to republish all the old posts (with the original dates).  Hours and hours of work, but at least I’m up and going again.
 

New blog

I’ve finally buckled down and done it.  Started a formal blog, using real blogging software (as opposed to maintaining it all by hand).

I have had two blog-like sites in the past, both manually constructed and maintained.  The first, from 1999–2000, was called “An Opinion About Everything” — so-named because someone in a mailing list flamewar once accused me of having an opinion about everything, as though that were a bad thing.  The second, from 2003–2006, was called “Bouncing Off the Walls” — it was at the site attached to my personal e-mail address, “rubberize”.

This blogging software allows me to backdate posts — perhaps controversial, but less so than with stock options — which I am using to bring in my posts from those other two pseudo-blogs and repost them here, in chronological order, while still being able to post new items as well.  (Some of the original posts themselves got updated at some point, so as best I can, I am posting them with their original dates, and adding notes at the bottom indicating updates.)

Despite backdating the entries to put them in the right context, I am not going to rewrite the entries.  What I originally wrote and posted for all the world to see (if they happened to trip over my site) should still be something I’m happy to have people read today.  (I had better be okay with it, since the web never forgets.  Anything I ever posted is archived somewhere.)  There are exceptions to that, though: (1) if I spot a typo or puncutation error or HTML coding gaffe, I will fix it; (2) if I had links to websites and those links are no longer valid, I will fix the links or remove them; and (3) if a removed link means that an entire paragraph no longer has valid content, I will remove the paragraph.

Enjoy, and please add comments where you like.

(Oh yeah, and comments: a few of the original posts had manually inserted comments added to them.  I’ll do something like that here, when I get to those posts.)

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Updated on July 22, 2007

I’ve now completed bringing over the posts from “An Opinion About Everything”.  The other blog will take a lot longer to port across.

Updated on July 29, 2007

As I’m starting to move through the old blog post, I see some items that are notes about pages I added to the other website, or “Hey, this is my 100th entry!” posts, which don’t have any content worth preserving. I’ve decided to not bring those across into this blog.

Updated on December 15, 2009

I’m slowly reposting everything another time following the re-creation of the blog.  This time around, I am allowing myself to make a few more adjustments to the content.  Entries posted years ago are still a product of their time, but I’m doing a few in-place edits for clarity, and sometimes adding new notes to the end of an entry.  I am also unifying the format for the update notes.

Long Dry Spell

Whoof.  It’s been a month since I added anything to this log.  Mostly, that’s because I’ve been busy: a trip to Kansas City, tax time, some deadlines at work, and a new boyfriend.  Time to get some more content in here.

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Updated on July 22, 2010

Later updates would be much longer than one month, so this seems so minor now.

The “new boyfriend” turned into a 4.5 year relationship, so that wasn’t so minor.

What I’m Thinking

I’ve just added a new page to the site, &#ldquo;What Were They Thinking?”  This features objects and advertising bits which make no sense, and which I thus find horribly funny.  I hope you do, too.<

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Updated on June 28, 2004

As of June 28, 2004, I have “remixed” the above sequence of pages into the main Weblog.  The original page will become defunct soon.  Here is the header from that page, explaining the purpose of the entries:

Remember the old ad slogan for Tylenol: “Nothing works better than Tylenol”?  Which leaves you thinking “So why use Tylenol if nothing works better than it?”  Every now and then I encounter similar objects and phrases, so I thought I would share them with others&hellip

God Help Us All

And with this, I’ve formally gone off the deep end and created a WebLog.  God help us all.  Every now and then, I visit other people’s WebLogs (like my friend Troy’s), and I finally decided it was time to put up a place where I can post my thought du jour.

This isn’t a journal (because I hate the word, and I’ll tell you why someday), and it sure as hell ain’t a diary.  Some of the content will have a political bent to it — given what’s in the news these days, can it help but be that way? — but I hope most of it will be lighter in tone.  Given the nature of the rest of this site, I’m sure a lot of it will have sexual overtones, too.  Titillate while you educate!

Time will tell whether I’ll update it daily or only once in a blue moon like the rest of this site.

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Updated on June 22, 2010

• Merged from old blog. 
• Looks like Troy’s old blog is now an online placeholder for his resumé and portfolio, and has not been updated since 2007.