Tag: blogging

With the
translating help of Juan Cuadra, a shortened version of
this post did
appear in the Spanish newspaper La Voz de Almeria. Juan
graciously send me the whole newspaper, probably hoping to prepare me
for my stay in Granada!

After a
long period of sickness and frantic writing, I may just have the energy
to start blogging again on a regular basis. For starters, I re-opened
this site for (human) comments. Bots will find it hard to enter the
required 6-character code, transcribing the phonetic data. So for
example, if you see something written like ‚”upper-eye six upper-eye
upper-en upper-are three” I hope you will understand that you are
expected to enter the code I6INR3. If you encounter problems with this
plugin, please email
me.

What would you do if 80% of your blog is owned by the
_companies_ of your Ph.D. students? First, try to talk them into
selling some of their blogshares back to the public. If this fails,
threaten never to post on your blog again until the share-price has sunk
deep enough to force them into selling. If this fails also and if you
see that the price only goes up no matter how long you remain silent, it
is time for more drastic measures. Luckily, blogshares allows the owner of a
blog to issue new shares, thereby flooding the market and stabilizing
the price. I was forced into this twice this week (the two horizontal
lines in the diagram) : on monday I issued another 5000 shares dropping
their 80% to 40% but today they acquired again 50.1% forcing me into
issuing another 1000 shares… Clearly it would be fun if more of
you out there would be buying shares of this blog (I will stick to the
1000 shares I got by claiming the blog) but I will keep on issuing new
shares whenever one player acquires more than 50%. All of this
blogshares-stuff is a bit surrealistic. In less than one week the
share-value went from 0.76 to 62.73 and the total value of all public
owned shares from 0.00 to 377383.00 and at best I wrote one reasonable
post in the same period. Oh, the stress of having to maintain an
acceptable level of postings in order to preserve the property of the
shareholders of your blog…
As if this is not enough, some
bloggers start feeling guilty because they cannot maintain their rhytm
of updates in times that they feel sick or tired. Here's what Bitch Ph.D. wrote yesterday

I think I need a break from blogging. Well,
actually I need a break from a lot of things, but blogging is optional.
Plus, I really just have nothing of substance to say right now. I hate
to be all drama-queeny, and fuck, maybe I'll change my mind if the
meds kick in tomorrow. Though actually I think they're working in
that I still feel shitty and anxious but
it's—just—manageable enough for me to function at a sort
of minimal level. Or maybe that's a placebo effect. Who the hell
knows.

Anyway , the point of this post other than to just
say I feel incredibly shitty is to be giving myself public permission to
be a shitty blogger for however long it takes until I actually want to
talk again.