Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence?
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| High Concept Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence? |
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Thursday, April 08, 2004 The Pitch: It's like Social Commentary meets Flesh-Eating! O yeah, baby; I have braved the wilds of the Haloscan users forum and I have emerged victorious! Haloscan is one of those quasi-benevolent scams that hosts free commenting for their blogs (I'm assuming the scam is they get everybody's name, email and predillections while doing so), which is a truly cool thing. However, the tech support seems unaware (or else unwilling to face) the sad and simple fact that Blogger is to the new decade what AOL was to the last--it is the land of the never-ending newbs, from which info-zombies shamble, unable to have anything explained to them in tech speak because they don't know what it means.I was having problems adjusting the size and font of the comment and trackback links on my blog. Not surprising, since the forums are filled with people posting the same problem. Amusingly, the answer is almost always the same: "We've covered this already. Search the forums." You'd think that if this problem came up often enough that the admins didn't even want to copy and paste an actual solution, they'd put in one of their FAQs, wouldn't you? But of course, half the problem is, sadly, whatever the admins put in the FAQ just isn't going to make much sense to the one-stop blog-n-quick types like me who learned nearly nothing about their blogs. (I spent a little bit of time trying to make those side "Listening/Reading/Playing" bars I never update...and that are so buried under Archive links, I doubt anyone sees them--but I'm really just as much of a newb.) And that's not even counting the fact that Haloscan supports not just Blogger, but also iBlog, Movable Type, Diaryland, Pitas, Scribble, and etc., so there's probably not one standard solution. In the end, I found one answer (create a default font for your Haloscan script and put in your styles) that didn't bother to follow up with the point that you have to define the Haloscan script to that default. The answerer didn't bother because if you know anything at all about programming, that's just a "well, duh" point, too obvious to make. Thank God, farther back, a "well, duh" guy answered with a less elegant solution of putting font definitions right before your Haloscan script. And somehow, dummy newbie made the connection. ("Oh! Hey, look there's a little command defining the time to the time font! A-and there's the command turning it off!") So I have a nice, relatively non-kludgy solution to my problem. Which is great because when I install this commenting thing for real (on the CE Savage Critic bog that has to be created...), it will save a lot of time and embarrassment. You may have noticed my piquant shambling zombie metaphor above. This is courtesy of the remake of Dawn of the Dead which I just saw again, with Larry who was seeing it for the first time. I liked it so much the first time, I wanted to drag an old-school horror fan to see if they would like it. (Sadly, I wasn't able to take Tim when he was in town the other week.) It's a good film. It holds up under a second viewing, which I think is always the sign of a good horror film. Horror flicks are like soda pop--a lot of times when you come back, everything's gone flat--and this DotD, although no richer on the second viewing and admittedly flatter, has the good performances, the great soundtrack, and the dark humor, to keep the repeat viewer entertained. And for those who bemoaned the lack of commentary in the remake, I think there's just different material for comment. The first Dawn of the Dead is a particularly trenchant allegory of "white flight" and blind consumerism. The remake has that incredible first fifteen minutes where society falls apart in a way that feels very familiar to us post-9/11ers. Also, at the risk of giving things away, I, as someone unhappily following the rise of "fetal rights" in this country, noticed a caustic pro-family commentary in the Mekhi Phifer storyline this time around. It says a lot about this version of Dawn of the Dead that a metaphor-fetishist like myself missed it the first time around because I was too engaged in the characters. posted by Jeff Lester | 6:03 PM | |
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