As has been the case since 2015, I’m having a little difficulty writing, mostly because of current events. It takes me longer to read the news, and longer to process it.

But there were also things going on in my personal life that made everything more difficult.

On top of real-life-outside escalating and dialing it up to 11, I was unemployed for a stretch leading into a much longer period of being severely underemployed, and I had to move twice in 10 months. I used to live in an intown neighborhood where I could walk to grocery stores & restaurants with easy access to transit when I needed it. Now I live out in the suburbs where I can actually afford* rent.

(*sort of) (I still feel like I’m being gouged by a cartel of local landlords)

So. I have felt a bit lost, “at sea”, and that’s even before you add on the successive annual burning of ever larger dumpsters as the splinter timeline we’re all stuck in attempts to single-handedly prove a multiverse by presenting a reality so ridiculous that this can’t be the ‘real’ real.

I can’t disengage from the world and just live in my bubble (even if it’s a comfortable little bubble with books and tea and beer, occasionally I have to go outside to resupply all three). Politics seems to have taken over my poor Twitter account, but I don’t want politics and activism to take over my life. I certainly don’t want to spend (additional) hours every day soaking up just how terrible the world is to then distill and bottle it all up in blog posts. So this likely won’t end up as a political blog, even if my interests—like urbanism, affordable housing, and best uses for public spaces—occasionally intersect.

So what do I write about?

A blog about entertainments and fan-stuff seems a bit… Well, what’s the analogy to use here? Whistling past graveyards? Fiddling while Rome burns? A frog just trying to enjoy his hot tub? But even if some people find it ‘inappropriate’, we have to hold onto the things that make us happy, the ‘normal’ things. We can celebrate works that are creative. We can have a little fun. So maybe my thoughts on comics and games and movies are still relevant, and still worth sharing.

What can I give the rest of you, at this moment, that will help? And is that ‘thing’ or topic or thesis (whatever it ends up being) within my means and my skills?

All questions rhetorical. Or more accurately, they’re questions I need to find the answer to myself

For the time being I’ll be continuing the stream-of-consciousness self-examination style for a bit as I get back into the habit of daily writing for public consumption. I’ll probably also start something longer (longer than 500 words anyway) and if that takes a shape I like I might even share. And I suppose if I can’t overcome either the writer’s block or the doubt, if nothing else maybe I’ll have more to say about that.

So I could probably start this post with a conjunction like ‘So’, an attempt to imply an ongoing dialogue and to evoke the hoary old trick of in medias res, to rather capably demonstrate (in one sentence) why I need an editor. And I could compound that sin (if it is a sin) with a sentence packed with even more parenthetical asides—which don’t always need parentheses, mind you, I know several ways to ramble—and it is this tendency to ramble and to try to commit to screen my thoughts more or less exactly as they form, multi-threaded, throwing off tangents, phrases spliced into a glue-laminated beam of a sentence with not just too many adjectives and adverbs but whole modifying clauses in a style that starts out with me thinking I’m clarifying my points and making a better argument but which ends up being muddied and exceptionally difficult to parse. ¹

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I have other doubts about my writing, but this matter of ‘voice’ cuts across a lot of the rest.

Having a distinctive voice to your writing is a good thing, mostly. If you have a knack for comedy, or for making complex ideas clearer through simple folksy analogies, or for eviscerating a target with insults without the crutch of profanity, that distinctive voice will help you build an audience and might also shape the topics you write about.

Depending on your chosen topics, though, writing in a ‘voice’ might be a drawback. If your writing is meant to introduce an unfamiliar issue or to persuade, an overly conversational tone either makes you easier to ignore, or puts ‘cracks’ in your writing that gives trolls in the comment section obvious places to begin attacks.

I found my voice in writing blog posts, 500 to 1500 words at a time. I refined my style on Twitter, where my projected persona is jaded and snarky and brilliant (your perception might be different from my intent) but only when I can restrict myself to a single tweet. As soon as I try to use that platform to “write“ [“Hey let me expand on this, might take more than a couple tweets. Thread, 1/x”] I will recommit all the crimes I’m guilty of when writing blog posts. This makes sense; one of the original descriptions of Twitter was a ‘microblogging’ service, so if you take the ‘micro-’ out, you’re just left with a hard-to-read piecemeal blog. ²

I’m a bad writer. ³

It’s not that I’m a bad writer, in as much as my syntax is technically correct and my diction is usually on-point. My preference for a ‘spoken-word’ style, though, for words as they might be delivered live, in a performance, can make my written words harder to read. And while my word choices are… fine, I also lean heavily towards the pretty, sparkly, & infrequent when a plainer word would do, and do more work.

If these blog posts were scripts, meant to be read—by me—then all the commas and asides and emdashes and the incorrectly-used ellipsis⁴ in the line above (and most of my writing) can be read as mark-up, code for the performance, letting me know where and how long to pause. I used to think of this as excusable, normal even, me speaking directly to my audience, but that’s an after-the-fact justification: I touch type, not super fast but fast enough, and I am in fact speaking these lines as I write – to myself in my head, not out loud, but until I wrote this sentence it wasn’t something I was conscious of. Now I’m never going to be able to forget it. In fact, after 20 (25?) years of doing it this way, I don’t know that I could do it any differently without specifically learning “writing” as a new skill. ⁵

A conversational style or written voice is best when employed in one of two ways:
First, where we agree (or I assume we agree) and a quick recap of the subject is all we need
& Second, if I am relating a humorous anecdote where the exact phrasing and the pauses and the rhythm of the joke are important to the eventual delivery of the punch line.

I don’t want every blog post to read like a joke⁶ and for the most part, I’m not going to assume my audience agrees with me. What kind of makes me sad is that this ‘conversational’ style (not pioneered by bloggers but widely adopted) is now used by some fairly toxic political writers—online, on social media, by niche publishers who call themselves ‘news’—who use it as both a knife and a shield. “Of course we all can agree” is the sneaky-snake-oil-slick way to introduce some poison and “well you’re taking me out of context” follows as the obvious defense, even though no context was given. Just the assumption that “we” (for however they didn’t define ‘we’) all “agree” allows them to talk to the in-group while coasting under radar: a nod to the people who have the unspoken context and a dodge for the rest.

Blogs are personal, even now. ⁷

Well after the blog-as-business-model has both failed, and evolved; well after the endgames for Gigaom and Gawker; well after Verizon basically bought up every not-quite-failing content farm and rolled them into Oath; and now, where you don’t necessarily think of outlets like Engadget, HuffPo, Vox, Polygon, Ars Technica, Gizmodo, or The Onion as blogs [yeah, they’re blogs] or even necessarily bookmark-and-visit any of these sites daily, since you get your links from social media or aggregators.⁸ Blogs are personal, and more present than you realize.

Social media is built on the old Live Journals and Web Logs: a post is something you write to Facebook or a picture you upload to Instagram. Twitter, as noted, was a ‘blogging’ platform; Medium tried to be Twitter but longer (and a lot of other things) but Medium is perhaps most notable as a blogging platform for people who really only need to write the one, long blogpost.

The bones and the idiolect of ‘blogging’ are all over the web and have largely overtaken traditional media, at least in online translation. A ‘post’ is an article; news articles have comments; and news articles are dated, tagged, archived, & linked to. Online newspapers and newsweeklies are blogs now, despite themselves.

We’re surrounded by blogs and yet it feels blogs are dead. If I might be allowed poetic license for a bit: corporate ghosts are animating the corpses of what used to be individual, personal blogs, stealing the topics and mission statements but lacking any warmth or life.

But, call me a romantic or a nostalgist, the old blog format is still good for something more than just its building blocks, taken by other media. So long as it is still sort of affordable for one person to buy a domain name & web hosting, with easy CMS tools like WordPress, or combined platforms like Squarespace (and future competitors for both), there will still be blogs and bloggers. If you have something to say, you should still be able to find your voice.⁹

Just don’t plan on getting rich. A blog, by itself, can’t support you. Same as it ever was, you’ll need something else (merchandise, historically and most commonly, and with Patreon as a new-ish source but not significantly different from PayPal aside from the agreed-upon monthly billing aspect of it) – Despite how corporate-and-business blogging can seem to be these days, for a lot of us—who still do this casually because we want an outlet for words—it’s a hobby paid for by the day job. It’s not a wide open frontier anymore, there’s no get-rich-quick or getting-in-on-the-ground-floor left.

Just words and people to read them. Just the outlet, and a voice.

.:.

##¹⁰ ¹¹

¹ If I had an editor, the advice would probably be to cut this intro. or tone it down. or streamline, clarify & move it, if it had a point to make.
² another paragraph that could be cut, no loss. additional sin count: two parentheticals, reliance again on italics and on single- and double-quotation marks to enforce a voicing of the line that probably only works when I’m reading it in my own head, a ‘quote’ dropped in without context with the assumption the reader will understand this is supposed to be a typical ‘thread’ tweet intro, a [*shudder*] semicolon, and a point that does not necessarily follow the paragraph above. not that it has to, but again, a paragraph that could be cut
³ “see, this would be the better line to lead this article with”
⁴ originally just intended to mark where words were intentionally omitted (elided) from a quote, the dot-dot-dot of the ellipsis are now read by most as a long pause, and is used as such in most scripted/novel dialogue and in transcriptions of spoken word. an intentional pause. but unless this entire post is meant to be a transcription of a speech as delivered the ellipsis is technically incorrect in this particular written context.
⁵ editing. I think they call that skill editing.
⁶ at least not yet. I may get there.
⁷ ooof. bad transition. honestly this should be a separate article, not an add-on to a essay on personal written ‘voice’. Give me three paragraphs, I’ll try to ham-handedly tie it back to the blog title.
⁸ this isn’t actually a sentence, just 3 similarly formatted sentence fragments and a 4th fragment that is different enough it seems like a conclusion but there’s still no SVO to start diagramming this sentence on, just 4 adverbial clauses. It only works because it’s anchored by the short sentences immediately before and after
⁹ told ya. took five paragraphs, but booyah
¹⁰ the double-hash is a proofreaders mark to signal a page or section break. I’ve been using it for that purpose in my personal drafts for decades and at some point I don’t quite recall exactly when I began using it in blog posts on the regular as well
¹¹ endnotes aren’t going to be a thing. it’s a one off that worked in this particular post, I don’t plan to make a habit of this.

I still don’t know what I’ll be talking about.

On the last iteration of the blog [now found at archive.rocketbomber.com] I started with the vague idea that I might generally cover sci-fi—hence the name, RocketBomber—but over time I ended up digging into ebook sales, tried to track digital sales more generally, took off on a three year tangent on bookselling, and mopped up the last year or so of blogging there with some linkblogging and music essays.

I don’t feel like taking any of those topics up again.

If I look at the sorts of news sources that I subscribe to, and what I’m currently reading, and the stories that I share on social media, that may give us a better idea of the sort of topics I might fall into later.

Urbanism:

Cities & Living. Neighborhoods, how they live, grow, and die, and the related issues of gentrification, zoning, walkability & transit, affordable housing, and changing demographics including the growing aging populations

The Future of Energy:

As the now-4-year-old Onion headline succinctly puts it: Scientists Politely Remind World That Clean Energy Technology Ready To Go Whenever. Electric cars are part of this, but that’s not my beat. I’d rather look at how materials science is changing solar panel efficiencies and costs, how house-scale battery technology is improving, how off-the-grid and small local grids might develop as alternatives to long-distance transmission, and the other odds and ends of the new energy sector.

Design:

Not gadget design, & not necessarily industrial design, and while I’m fascinated by the design of spaces, I hesitate to call it interior design.

Working Spaces, particularly things like open floor office plans and why they are evil, standing desks and other alternatives to the table-and-chair norm, shop spaces and work benches, organization of all types (because I recognize my own lack), and generally any space where we work – even kitchens, labs, classrooms, and factory floors.

I might get distracted and chase design down a rabbit hole, which would lead to considering Restaurant & Bar spaces; Creative Retail; Halls, stages, auditoria, & performance spaces; Galleries & Museums; Libraries—damn but I do love libraries—
But it’s the working space, from corporate offices down to individual corners, that I might try and write about first.

And also designing for accessibility, which is cool.

Pop Culture?:

Fandom is turning toxic in odd corners and I’m not sure I want to open that can of worms. But I do like comics, comic art & sequential art, and I might succumb to the temptation to write about them, or their adaptations into media other than print.

Also: I still love science fiction. The blog is still called “rocket bomber”. It might come up.

& Storytelling:

The art and craft of writing, and storytelling – on the page, in games, on screens, & the nuts and bolts of practical modern myth-making

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That’s five pretty big targets. I might find something completely different down the line. And even though this isn’t a Diary Blog, I’ll be starting with some more personal posts until I find my feet (and my voice) and get into the habit of blogging again.

I’m just going to head this off, well before I put the paddles on either side of the cold dead heart of this blog and shout ‘clear’:

Comments are closed.
Comments, for this iteration of the blog, were never enabled.
(Comments are trash, never read the comments.)

If I post something here that you feel you must comment on, I’m not going to make you type in an email for verification or log into Disqus or go to a bespoke forum site or subreddit – just, find me on Twitter. Twitter has a wonderful system for, [*cough*] …conversation, and sadly enough I’m almost always logged in over there, so that’s the best way to comment. To me. Directly.

Sadly, this means your immortal words will not live on my CMS, forever inscribed beneath this or any other blog post, for later readers or for search engines to find. No “this is really more of a statement than a question”. No “I tried to follow this recipe but I subbed pasta for the rice, chicken for the beef tips, and anchovies for the Sichuan peppers and it came out Awful!”. No spam, no links, no SEO, no ‘well, actually’, and no drama. No. Comments.

This is by design, and since I’m the person paying the hosting bills, it’s a policy that will not change.
Thank you. And if this is a deal breaker for you, well, at least I’ll know it’s because you dislike *my* words & voice (& rules) and not because of something toxic in the comments.

Here’s a short guide for those of you buying gift-like-objects from online retailers this December, assuming you need the item before 24 December for whatever reason (I don’t judge) and you’d like to know how long you can window shop in the local stores, draining the lifeblood of physical retail, before you just buy it from Amazon.

I’m pulling dates mostly from the applicable Amazon help page, “Holiday Ordering Deadlines for the U.S.”, while making some allowances for weekends — I know Amazon (or rather, the USPS on behalf of Amazon) makes Saturday and even Sunday deliveries now but we probably shouldn’t count on everything running smoothly this month, shipping-wise, and there might also be reasons you’d rather have an item delivered to your workplace rather than your home. I’m padding in a day or two where applicable for similar reasons. Another thing to remember is that for most small items (smaller than a hardcover book – which would include CDs, small electronics, jewelry, and the like) the ‘final mile’ is going to be covered by the local mail carrier no matter who the shipper is, as the US Postal Service has deals with Amazon, FedEx, and UPS. If you have concerns about parcels in your mailbox, or use a PO Box or otherwise might need an extra day, it’s something to consider.

And so:

For standard ground shipping (5-6 business days) which is also Amazon and many other online retailers standard ‘free’ shipping option, you should order no later than Wednesday 13 December to anticipate delivery before Friday the 22nd. Amazon’s cutoff date is actually Friday 15 December, but remember – it takes time for most non-Amazon retailers to find an item, box it, and get it into the hands of a parcel delivery service. The longer you wait the more you tempt fate and are subject to the random predations of the logistics gremlins. Personally, I’d order before noon on the 13th.

If you have Amazon Prime and can take advantage of free two-day shipping, I’d recommend ordering no later than Tuesday 19 December. Again, I’d try to get an order in before noon. Amazon’s cutoff for two-day Prime shipping is actual 22 December, but first off – that’s a Friday and you are now putting a lot of faith in overloaded delivery services to get a package to you on Christmas Eve, and a Sunday on top of that, and I don’t have that kind of faith. Unless you plan to rely on miracles, I’d stick with Tuesday as your strong cutoff for anything but an extra, last-minute stocking stuffer.

For orders headed to Alaska, Hawaii, or other American outposts not covered by ‘standard’ standard shipping, you should place that order on or before Monday 11 December.

11 December is also a pretty good soft deadline for most small online retailers, especially companies you have no previous experience ordering from, or that are located on the other side of the country from you, or that are actual physical shops that just happen to do a little online on the side. This is 10 business days, but only after including the Monday you order and Friday 22 December, which as noted above is sort of the shipping deadline. Ideally, you’d want to get the order in by Wednesday 6 December, which will give the shop 2 days to get that onto a truck, and the shipping service two full weeks to lose your package, find it again, and finally get it to you.

If you are ordering one-of-a-kind items from a maker, crafter, or artist, either direct or via a service like Ebay or Etsy, I’d go ahead and order that tomorrow. Tomorrow, in this case, is Monday 4 December, but you likely aren’t reading this on the 3rd. You want to give this person (who, after all, has to fulfill holiday orders while doing their own shopping and xmas prep and dealing with whatever crises in between) as much time as humanly possible not only because it’s a thoughtful and kind thing to do, but also so that you don’t have to play the evil villain later by sending a dozen emails with variations of “OMG STILL HAVEN’T RECEIVED PARCEL!!!” when the seller can’t really do anything else because it’s up to the logistics gremlins at that point.

All that said, for Etsy and the like you could probably consider 11 December (that’s a busy Monday right there) as the ‘hard’ deadline for orders, if the seller has some sort of notation in the item description that stock is on-hand and ready to go. Anything custom or that has to be assembled, and yeah, tomorrow would be better.

& If you miss any of these deadlines?

I wouldn’t sweat it too much. You can always go by whatever is listed on the retailer’s website – they’re all going to have their own, different, drop-dead dates. And of course, you can always pay for next-day or overnight shipping, with some caveats:
1. it takes time to find and box things, so that’s a day
2. it takes time for a parcel service to do a pick-up, or for an underpaid, hassled employee to drop it off at an office. An overcrowded, holiday-peak-shipping-rush office full of other cranky people. So that’s another day. and
3. it’s the holidays so there may be stuff on your end, or some kind of missed connection with the delivery driver, that delays it even further.
The other thing to keep in mind is that ‘next-day’ and even two-day shipping is often hedged with the “delivery on or before 8pm” nonsense which gives the shipper a lot of wiggle room but might also complicate things. So even if you pay for overnight shipping, it might still take as long as three days, worst case.

Noon, Wednesday 20 December, would be my recommended hard deadline for any online order, and I’d go ahead and opt for expedited shipping at that point.

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I hope you find this info and my suggestions helpful, and if your preferred vendor is Amazon & you wan’t to help me out just a little: please visit this landing page [https://www.amazon.com/shop/matt_blind] over on Amazon before you do the rest of your shopping. There are a couple of gift suggestions there, and if you click the links I might see some commissions. Thanks!