Empty RSS Feeds

Years and years ago, when Google killed its feed reader, I set up Feedly to keep track of blogs. It was already late into the slow death of personal blogs, and now the links are silent, or eaten up by squatters. I would love to time-travel back to the era of moral panic over the Internet Being Forever and let everyone know that the Internet disappears more quickly than we want.

There's no good reason to revive blogging, because its value was in conversation, and the few conversationalists still online have mostly moved to Twitter or Facebook or Instagram. I assume the rest, the ones who disappeared, fell silent for the same reasons that I did: privacy issues, the messiness of trying to talk about parenting older children without throwing those children under the bus, maybe just being pulled along by the tides of the Internet.

I love that I was part of a measurable moment in the history of the Internet. I regret that most of that history will be poorly written by people who can find a lot of information about Dooce but not much about all the spaces that have disappeared. It bothers me that the folks who held on the longest will shape the narrative of what we were all doing, when their embrace of branding and scheduled posts and bullshit was never the point for most of us, and maybe even part of the reason why we left.

Happy New Year

We are still here.

When Bill Watterson came out of retirement

Bill Watterson made a surprise appearance this week in Pearls Before Swine. You can read a report at the Washington Post about how it happened, or read Stephan Patis describe the collaboration in his own words.

Here are the links to the comics:

2 June 2014
3 June 2014
4 June 2014
5 June 2014
6 June 2014
7 June 2014

A beautiful day for a wedding

And the grooms looked even more amazing.

Revisiting

I'm in a west-coast city for my third visit. The first was in 1996 during a west-coast camping trip. The second was in 2005 for a professional conference. Now I'm here for a wedding.

How is this visit different? I'm thinking more about how little I remember from previous stays. I'm wondering whether it matters that so much of life slips away. I'm noticing how northern towns on water share common traits -- pine trees, houses built above harbors, the cry of seagulls -- and how much I enjoy those traits.

I'm enjoying returning to a place with Calder after so many years. I worry sometimes that we will be bored with each other, after the kids are gone, but then we get away and I realize that won't happen. It's also nice to have built so much of a shared life together, even if neither one remembers very many of the details anymore.

End of an Era

Blockbuster is closing its doors in January.

We have slow enough Internet service that streaming movies was never as good an option as DVDs/Blu-Rays. And we'd signed up for Blockbuster mail service long enough ago that our plan was a crazy-good deal: three videos at a time, each of which could be exchanged for a new on in store. They'd ship another when we returned the store rental.

It was an especially nice treat for our annual road trips, because we could get three movies for the road and then return them -- without late fees -- when we came home.

Yes, we have taken to using Redbox a lot more lately. We've streamed a few movies using Amazon Prime and our ancient Wii console. We've even bought a movie or three on iTunes, and once, we even downloaded using our Satellite TV provider. I guess Netflix will be getting our business, now.

I'm going to miss those grungy, run-down stores.

Recent Movies

We stopped doing family read-alouds last year, but we now have a weekly tradition of movie-watching. Last Friday, we watched Ocean's 11: by our habits, it was another Matt Damon movie (we watched the entire Bourne franchise over the course of several weeks). We've also been watching a lot of Tom Hanks movies. He seems to spend a lot of screen time alone, trapped -- physically or metaphysically -- or trapped alone.

We've let the kids see three R-rated movies, all this year. First, Argo; then (and these were both accidents of a kind: I hadn't realized they were R-rated) The Breakfast Club and Die Hard. I very much regret the extreme violence of Die Hard and we had one person walk out of The Breakfast Club during the panty scene.

Last night, we watched the middle hour of Forrest Gump on broadcast TV; tonight, we watched the first hour. They blurred all the beer and cigarettes. No one liked anything having to do with sex. The violence in Vietnam barely fazed them.