Why I decided to stop posting to Tumblr

Internet, Uncategorized, , ,

With a presence on various platforms – here, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr – I’ve been wondering how to balance  them all without publishing the same stuff in every space. In particular, I’ve been wrestling with the question of how to get myself to blog more. If you’re a writer, you tend to write because you have something in you that needs to be expressed.  And writing it – as opposed to putting it in a song or delivering a monologue – is the best way to express it.

I have those moments and Twitter, for the better and the worse, is the way I usually do it.

For the better because, as an outlet, Twitter is immediate and anywhere, if my phone is available. The laptop doesn’t need to be opened nor do I need to bother with logging in to WordPress, writing a headline, etc. And if it’s only a thought then that’s just fine. No need to climb the hill of composing a full essay.

For the worse because, honestly, becoming a better writer and having some permanence to my writing would be nice. Sure, Twitter forces you to omit needless words, but really digging in on something and not having to scroll back through countless posts to find it would be virtues. How best to take the good and leave the bad?

The “if this, then that” statement I’ve come up with here is if I’ve got three tweets or more to say on a subject, then it’s probably worth a blog post. Not a blog post instead of tweets – and probably not a Storify of posts either unless I’m feeling lazy as that still leaves the problem of having work I’ve done locked up in someone else’s space – but a blog post after the fact, using Twitter as a first draft. Three tweets seems a good number because that’s around 50-100 words which could stand on their own or easily extend into 250 with a few additional thoughts (I’m hitting about the 300-word mark now, for instance). With WordPress’s app, I could even do most of the work on my phone and save it for editing later. This process seems like a good way to encourage blogging without holding myself back from tweeting on the regular.

Even a comment on Facebook might end up as a post, which is what happened when my browser crashed as I was leaving a comment on a Facebook link Marcus posted to his story. Jolted into a realization that I was once again putting a bunch of time and thought into creating work on a platform that wasn’t mine, I threw together a quick post, which got picked up here and here. It’s always the stuff you toss off in a hurry that ends up resonating. There’s something to be learned there.

Seeing what happened with that post was the last push I needed to officially step away from Tumblr. I started on Tumblr in 2008, but mostly used it as an RSS feed from my blog (this post was an exception) until I was canned from Playboy and then really got into it, mostly because I had plenty of time on my hands. The Tumblr bookmarklet allowed me to combine the speed of Twitter with the weightiness of blogging. I’d grab a quick pull quote from a piece and respond without the concern of 140 characters. Loved it.

After a while though the constant outages made me wonder if I was spending a bunch of time on something that was too ephemeral. The last one in November lasted two days and prompted my break. Even now, I tried to find a few posts of value there and got hung up on its lousy search function. (It’s 2013, Tumblr, why don’t you have a decent search function? Compare this keyword search on Tumblr with this search I ran on my Tumblr via Google.) Then I figured out how to create a similar WordPress bookmarklet and create posts like this and that was the death knell for my posts there. I’ll still keep an account there because even in the three-month break from writing on Tumblr, I still enjoyed reading posts from people I follow there.  But it will likely be little more than an RSS feed to this blog.

It just became too important to me to own as much of the work I was doing online as possible. I’ll still post regularly on Twitter because what it gives me is as great as what I feel I’m giving to it. Tumblr stopped delivering on its end of that bargain so I found another way to keep writing.

Curious though: Am I alone here? Have other folks who publish on various free platforms thought about any of this?

UPDATE: Kiyoshi Martinez posted a thoughtful reply to this post here – on Tumblr (heh). He cites the lack of maintenance, the reblogging and the inherent social networking features as reasons that drew him to Tumblr after a less than ideal WordPress adventure. On my Facebook page, Jaime Black praised many of these same features, especially Tumblr’s speed. All solid counterarguments and reasons why I was initially drawn to the platform.

Also on Facebook, I reiterated the outage-induced ephemeral feeling I’d been getting from Tumblr lately and John Morrison said he felt similarly about what he’d done on Gowalla and wondered if Everyblock fans were feeling the same way now, a point I hadn’t thought about until he said it.

And in case you didn’t see the pingback, Matt Wood had some things to say about the above. Interestingly, he notes his post was initially going to be a comment here but he decided to make it a blog post for himself, which echoes what I was saying above about wanting to have more of an owned archive of what I create online. (Incidentally, this also led me to create this page.)

If you’re interested in this kind of discussion, you should come to this event on Monday. I’ll be on the panel there and Jaime is hosting it so we’re sure to get into more of these kinds of issues.

 

If a hostage situation happens in Alabama, does it make a sound?

Media, , ,

My friend Marcus Gilmer has a thought-provoking piece over at the Sun-Times about the recent hostage situation in an Alabama bunker and the puzzling lack of wall-to-wall coverage:

It’s a tense, dramatic story, one that seems like it would captivate a nation just as it was captivated by stories like a girl who fell down a well. Had it happened in a large city – New York, Dallas, even, God forbid, Chicago – the coverage would be constant, a 24-hour surveillance with every media outlet descending on the city. A story that touches on all the socio-political hot points in the wake of the Newtown tragedy – gun control, safety of school children, mental health – would surely draw nation-wide, if not world-wide, attention.

But it didn’t.

The above story really happened and, for the entire week the crisis lasted, few Americans were aware of it at all.

Marcus’s point isn’t that there wasn’t any coverage of the story, just that the level of coverage is surprisingly low considering how many national flashpoints the story contained.

His contention – borne out of a firsthand knowledge of Alabama that comes from living there and then later seeing how outsiders cover the state – is that too many dismissed the story as one about “some crazy redneck” and didn’t recognize the underlying issues.

For my part, I saw near-daily coverage of the story in the beginning then it seemed to drop off for a couple days before ramping back up again. Even before reading Marcus’s piece – and you should read the whole thing because it’s smart – I thought the lack of blanket coverage might have to do with two notions:

* Putting the full-court press on a story like this with Nancy Grace calling for the kidnapper’s head and asking why authorities weren’t storming the bunker with guns blazing is the last thing you want to do when a guy is holding a kid hostage. The more pressure he feels, the more hopeless his situation is, the more likely the standoff will end in violence. Rampant media coverage is just the kind of environment to encourage that.

* We may finally be figuring out that creating anti-folk heroes out of mass shooters is encouraging more mass shooters as this video from 2009 describes:

Now, Marcus does acknowledge all this here:

One of the main reason little was said on-air about the crisis, particularly by local outlets, was at the request of local authorities because the kidnapper – Jimmy Lee Dykes – had a television in his bunker and could monitor coverage.

Admittedly, it seems a stretch to say the collective national media has suddenly grown a conscience after Newtown – especially after it made so many mistakes in its early coverage. But as others have said, Newtown changed the conversation – about gun control, perhaps about mental illness and maybe about media coverage. Still, with a life in the balance it may have been a bridge too far, too soon for the 24-hour punditry.

Whether it was a geographical bias or a new awareness of how  to cover violence, Marcus’s final points are irrefutable:

We as a nation have to be willing to face all of theses stories – Hadiya and Midland, an Oklahoma student’s suicide and gang problems in New Orleans – before we can hope for any meaningful change. Ignoring any aspect of this only hinders our ability to come to terms with what’s happening.

[SNIP]

For now, though, two men are dead – one an innocent man who tried to protect his charges and the other a kidnapper who met his end holed up in a bunker. All we can do is be thankful that the young boy, identified only as “Ethan,” has survived to celebrate his 6th birthday tomorrow, and continue to push the issue, to push for resolution, and to push our nation to have what will be a painful conversation but one that must be had. And we all have to accept responsibility in making that happen.

A few more words on 2013 Super Bowl ads and social media

Uncategorized, ,

This week, I participated in a live chat about 2013 Super Bowl ads and social media’s influence on them. Today.com writer Ben Popken and I discussed whether previews of the ads detract from the “big reveal,” why companies  spend so much money for a Super Bowl ad and how negative publicity affects ads.

As usual, I over-prepped and I had a few more thoughts that we didn’t discuss so I’m dropping them here.

Lots of television programming can be time-shifted; the value of them doesn’t go away when you watch them an hour later, a day later or even months later. You feel a little left out of the conversation but you get caught up.

Live sports events and awards shows, on the other hand, have way more cachet as they’re happening – both in social and offline. People move on from a discussion of these events much faster than, say, a show like Breaking Bad, which has so much time in between seasons that you can get “in the know” again and still be ready to go when new episodes start up again.

All this – plus a stat that says 36% of people will use a “second screen” when they watch the game this year – helps to explain why so many advertisers are going after the social media/digital audience in the Super Bowl this year: Lincoln had audiences help write its ad, Volkswagen created a teaser filled with viral video personalities, Psy is in a pistachios ad and Coke has an ad fueled by a real-time hashtag.

Advertisers want to say X people saw the ad or participated in the campaign and they want that X number to be as big as possible. It’s not enough to just get the passive TV audience, they want eyes from everywhere including those that are attached to an active social audience. The glut of post-Super Bowl ad conversation only room for the top 3 or best/worst ads. If you’re an advertiser, you don’t want to have to depend on making those lists, you want to get people talking about the ad prior to the game, during the game AND after. So a preview ad, the actual ad and a hashtag help to drive all that (it’s more complicated than I am making it sound but that’s the gist).

A few things I’ll be keeping my eyes on this year:

* Sexy ads are always a given (check out this list of racy ads; I’m quoted in the PETA discussion) but the real winners this year will be the ones where the sexy woman is the one controlling the action instead of being manipulated by it (as in this Fiat spot). I’m not sure, but I bet the Mercedes-Benz ad with Kate Upton will break that way.

* Shazam had a good 2012 Super Bowl but this should be the year it goes wide. They’ve been a bit quiet about their Super Bowl presence, which I don’t get at all so they may be going for the surprise factor.

* GIFs will probably jump the shark in 2013 but this year’s Super Bowl coverage will be lousy with them.

And some ads to watch for during the game:

The ads for Lincoln, Best Buy (with Amy Poehler!), Mercedes Benz (with Usher and Diddy) and Coke ads will all do well and as I said in the chat, the “Fashionista Daddy” ad will end up winning the Doritos contest. But the Hyundai ads will have a solid impact, too, even though they’re not flashy. The Flaming Lips song featured in one of them is aimed at the social media crowd and the Don’t Tell Mom ad has a nice punchline. The Soda Stream ad will likely make an impact, too, as they’ve had a buzz due to their first ad getting rejected. View them both here. Getting an ad in the Super Bowl definitely gives you some prestige so 2013 will be the year you hear about lots of folks getting one at home.

Other ads to watch for will be from M&Ms, Anheuser-Busch (featuring their famous Clydesdales), Chrysler, Oreo, Walking Dead, and Cars.com. None of them were previewed online except for Cars.com so they’re all hoping to make a big splash. Even the Cars.com ad preview played it close to the vest.

The ads that will probably end up on a lot of worst lists? Axe, E-Trade and GoDaddy. They’re all mining stale territory, though GoDaddy promises to redefine sexy somehow, which is totally what you expect from a Internet domain provider.

For a complete list of who’s buying what in the Super Bowl, check out this Ad Age list. Most of the previewed commercials are on this Facebook page.

OMIC roundup: Taken 2 edition

Comics, Fatherhood, Internet, Media, Music, Politics

Have felt somewhat creatively bereft this week so here’s a roundup on the topics this site’s most often devoted to:

Comics: Part of me still wants to reserve judgment on The Superior Spider-Man, the new Marvel title arriving in the wake of Amazing Spider-Man #700; a story arc in comics can’t be judged from one issue. But all my concerns about this new direction seem to have come to bear and a new one’s risen: the idea that Doc Ock is burdened with responsibility is jettisoned for a literal deus ex machina. I won’t spoil it here but if you thought Peter’s death lacked weight before… *

The other Marvel relaunch I checked out recently was Fantastic Four. I really liked where Hickman was going in the previous series so a Reed who charges ahead without considering his family first – or bringing him into his plan – is a step back. Again, we’ll see.

All this was enough to make me pick up last year’s Spider-Men crossover, which was excellent and touching and therefore recommended.

Fatherhood: Last night I watched Taken 2 while I assembled a small pastel table and chairs for Abigail – a gift from her grandmother. I’m sure many fathers mentally see themselves as Liam Neeson, willing to do whatever it takes to save their families from enemies both foreign and domestic. Let’s be honest though: Most of the time fatherhood means assembling a pastel table and chairs at 11pm on a Saturday night while you drink scotch, eat beef jerky and watch Taken 2. I am perfectly fine with this.

Internet: This video of a Fisher-Price record player spinning a bootleg “Stairway to Heaven” blew my mind.

Here’s the backstory (via @SennettReport).

Media: Alpana Singh is leaving Check, Please so the show is looking for a new host. This sentence from a report on the move caught my attention:

“The station hopes Singh will continue to appear occasionally on Chicago Tonight, WTTW’s nightly newsmagazine, where she answers viewers’ wine and beverage questions posed by host Phil Ponce in the “Ask Alpana” segment.”

Hopes? Has there not been a conversation about this yet? Is this high school? “Yeah, I know we’re broken up and everything but I’m really hoping we can still be lab partners without there being all kinds of weird vibes. I mean, she didn’t say we couldn’t so I’m sure everything will be cool. We’re adults, you know?”

Music: I’ve found Townes Van Zandt’s Live at the Old Quarter, especially “Two Girls,” to be revelatory. You ever hear something for the first time but find yourself able to sing along with it? I’d also recommend a listen to Taj Mahal’s “She Caught The Katy” if only to hear how much the Blues Brothers version nicked from it.

Politics: With so many problems facing Illinois, the possibility that the governor’s race will become Daleys vs. Madigans is profoundly depressing.

* If you don’t mind spoilers, this AV Club summary gives you the gist.

Collecting a few old things

Fatherhood, Media, ,

I spent the better part of the afternoon rounding up many of the media appearances and live readings I’ve done in the last seven years: WBEZ spots, Paper Machete readings and even a Chicago Tonight back in 2010. A few are missing because I haven’t had time to track down the audio –  the glorious fun I’ve had doing You, Me, Them, Everybody and the quick shots at 20×2, specifically. Eventually, I hope to add them all.

Doing so meant I finally got around to posting a couple old bits. First is “You’re Only Old Once,” an essay I performed at Tuesday Funk, my friend Bill Shunn‘s reading series at Hopleaf. I tend to do more personal pieces there and this one about approaching middle-age had been kicking around in my head for a little while.

Then there’s “Mark Wahlberg Hates America.” Claire Zulkey‘s Funny Ha-Ha was an occasion for me to go all out so I used a startling amount of vulgarity and then rapped a little. It’s definitely one of those pieces that’s better performed than read, which is why I hesitated to post it at all, but it’s also one of my favorites because it’s so ridiculous.

A disproportional response

Media, ,

Why hasn’t there been any kind of privately funded, outside investigation into the alleged sexual assaults committed by members of the football team? Why was there no private, outside investigation into Coach Brian Kelly’s role in the death of team videographer Declan Sullivan? It says so much that Te’o’s bizarre soap opera has moved Swarbrick to openly weeping but he hasn’t spared one tear, let alone held one press conference, for Lizzy Seeberg, the young woman who took her own life after coming forward with allegations that a member of the team sexually assaulted her. Swarbrick’s press conference displayed that the problem at Notre Dame is not just football players without a compass; it’s the adults without a conscience. Their credo isn’t any kind of desire for truth or justice. Instead it seems to be little more than a constant effort to protect the Fighting Irish brand, no matter who gets hurt.

via Crying for Manti Teo | The Nation

Mainstream sports media bears some responsibility for the propagation of the  Te’o story and plenty for the lack of coverage of Seeberg’s story. Read Marcus Gilmer’s post on the latter.

Also worth noting is something my wife said last night: The Te’o myth is the kind of news product that comes from publications that trim copy editors and fact-checkers.

Eventually you just drop off

Fatherhood,

It’s 11:14pm and Abigail’s been asleep for 45 minutes or so. This should not be the case. She should have been asleep for about three hours or so. I don’t think either of us do well when her mother’s out of town.

Here is a rough, annotated timeline of what happens when my wife is out of town for business or a girls’ weekend or even just out for the night.

8pm
“This is awesome. I am going to eat pizza and drink beer and play video games and watch movies Erin hates and stay up late.”

9pm
Pizza and beer consumed. Watch half of a movie that turns out to be terrible, spend 20 minutes looking through Netflix to find something else to watch and fail, read five pages of a book, check Twitter a thousand times then stare at the couch.

9:43pm
Have become significantly fatigued due to pizza and beer. Refuse to go to sleep early. Resolve to stay up until The Daily Show.

9:46pm
Text Erin: “What’s going on?”

10:00pm
Turn on The Daily Show, spirit renewed.

10:12pm
Pass out on couch

Somehow, when Erin – a woman who has no problem with me eating pizza, drinking beer, staying up late or watching movies/playing video games she doesn’t like so long as I do so in another room – is away I am driven by a desire to live the life I imagined for myself when I was 14. As if somehow my choice of food and entertainment choices is impeded through marriage. As if I would stay married to a woman like that.

I dislike it when my wife isn’t around for a night of two. I miss her. The house is really quiet. The bed’s too big, as Sting once sang.

And truth be told, the post-Abigail era has meant when Erin is out of town my magnetic north points upstairs to the little girl in the crib in the room at the north end of the house. There’s generally still beer and pizza but I never know if Abigail will wake up and need soothing to go back to sleep. There’s a sword of Damocles is what I’m saying. My priorities have changed.

Erin and I have jobs that occasionally require us to disrupt our lives at home. On some occasions, she carries more of the burden. On others, it’s me. But we’re lucky enough to be at jobs that appreciate the priority we place on family. So if sometimes it means one of has to be a solo parent, that’s the gig.

After an uneventful first night with Erin away, AG woke up at 6am this morning, yelling to be picked up. When things are in a normal state of affairs around here, she goes down around 730-8pm and sleeps until 7am. Don’t think I don’t know how blessed that makes us as parents. But this morning, I didn’t get my usual hour of prepping for the day ahead – coffee, news-reading, a shower, emptying the dishwasher and whatever else is easier to do with a sleeping baby – before Abigail is awake and demanding Elmo.

Tonight she was similarly stubborn. Took a good half hour to go down then was up here and there, requiring two sessions of in-the-glider cuddling before finally dropping off for good. Getting a toddler back into the crib after she’s fallen asleep on you is some Indiana-Jones-with-a-bag-of-sand stuff. I’m usually pretty good at it but she was fighting it tonight. Still outran the boulder though.

Yesterday my boss gently alluded to my two-night solo parenting stretch and I took the opportunity to assure her it was no big deal since I was quite the active father and not like those other dads who can’t be left alone with the kid for more than a few hours at a time because they get all freaked out about diapers and what have you. She hadn’t implied any of that but I wanted to let her know it all the same.

Hubris.

If you have a kid who blesses you with the regularity of schedule, you’ll likely get used to it. I know we have. But when your kid spends her first four months struggling with colic and reflux, you’ll always feel like that pattern is never far from repeating itself.

Abigail finally dropped off for good around 10:30pm. Maybe she wanted to stay up for The Daily Show.

It’s 12:27am. Erin just texted me: “Landed.” I’ll probably go pass out now.

Like I said, neither of us do well when her mother is out of town.

What heckling really means

Media, ,

I don’t envy what Patton Oswalt had to do at one of the best comedy shows I’ve ever seen.

[SNIP]

He was dealing with a very vocal heckler in the front row, and her extremely polite friend. This boorish annoying person had a gravely voice and a sharp temper, like she was the female equivalent of Frank from It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia. She shouted things that made absolutely no sense, constantly. Patton dubbed her, “Snagglepuss.

[SNIP]

“Fuck you,” shouted Snagglepuss, to which Patton remained adroit and shut her down. This repeated until Snagglepuss stormed off. The crowd cheered. Patton was our hero. It was hilarious.

You know what else was hilarious? When that guy vomited over the balcony at the Broadway production of Grace.I see virtually no difference between those two stories.

via Steve Heisler – The Chicago Tribune apparently thinks it’s okay to heckle comedians because…wait, what?

Please read Steve’s full post, a response to this wrong-headed defense of heckling in the Chicago Tribune by two critics whose work is otherwise thoughtful and considered. Steve dismantles each of their arguments, piece by piece. It’s a well-informed discussion of comedy from someone who’s been a comedian, critic and comedy producer.

My take? The Trib piece rests on redefining stand-up comedy as audience-participation improv. If you have to re-contextualize the art you’re criticizing then you’re no longer offering a criticism of that art. (“Hey, what if we wrote a defense of heckling?” “That’s so crazy, it just might work!”) It reads more like a creative exercise or editor’s folly than a serious examination of heckling.

 

Now playing: Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life

Music

I’ve always found it difficult to listen to an unfamiliar album and understand the complete statement the artist was trying to make with it when I’m already very familiar with some of the album’s individual songs.

Case in point: Songs in the Key of Life, which I just listened to for the first time, in its entirety.

Songs is one of those albums that impossible to fully understand with one listen. There’s so much going on musically, lyrically and emotionally that trying to absorb it all will probably require several listens over a few years in many physical spaces. Is this the point? In the span of a double album, Wonder is trying to explain complexities ranging from socioeconomic hardship, racism and love – of a man for a woman and of a father for his daughter – through funk, big band, gospel, pop and jazz. Themes are dealt with best in literature, and Stevie’s produced the musical equivalent of a great novel.

Yet just as I’d find myself following a line through the album I’d get distracted by the familiarity of “Sir Duke,” “Isn’t She Lovely” or even the strings and choral lines of “Pasttime Paradise” which countless listens of “Gangsta’s Paradise” colored over almost to the point where I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to hear “Pasttime” independent of its antecedent. I may also never be able to hear “As” without thinking of my wife. She loves that song like nothing you’ve ever seen. Literally. She has this whole dance she does with it, which she performed as we were driving down Lake Shore Drive earlier this week. It takes a while before you feel this kind of music in that way.

But again, that’s likely the point. Songs plays as a very personal album, as if Wonder isn’t so much creating characters and singing through them but speaking honestly from his heart. They’re composed specifically to make the listener put his or herself in the mind of the singer. The shared blame he lays at all our feet on “Village Ghetto Land” is as palpable as the nostalgic joy of “Sir Duke.” These songs came from years of living, in various contexts. Listening to them in a number of ways and spaces will likely be the only way to fully understand them, requiring the listener to bring as much of himself to the work as Stevie did.