I’m a Gryffindor!

I’m a Gryffindor!

My blog-rate has slowed way down since summer star…

My blog-rate has slowed way down since summer started. One reason I haven’t been writing in my blog is that I’ve been writing about blogs. I’ve got a rough draft of a paper available here.

Comments are of course welcome. I don’t expect to be picking up the pace to more than one or two posts a week on this blog for a while though, there’s also the need to get something tangible done this summer.

Daddy, what did you do during the boom?

Ah, the acrid stench of nostalgia. Now I should get around to explaining that link from two days ago.

Well, I spent the dot-com years in graduate school. I entered grad school under one President Bush and exited under another. There are good reasons to suspect those who have given up a decade to pursue a single degree. I avoided this stigma by working as the Managing Editor for a monthly philosophy journal. I was also seriously fired up about this whole emerging internet thing.

When I first started at the journal we had Hyundai computers with like 286 processors on them. You couldn’t get a full line of text to appear on the screen at the same time because the display font only came in one size. (Think about that for a second, it gets more confusing.) Nonetheless, it was clear that the ways that ideas were disseminated was about to change radically. The year before, I had started my own first contribution, developing a page on the old University of Chicago Philosophy Project called Chomsky for Philosophers. My thinking was two-fold, I needed to know about how this web thing worked and I didn’t know enough about Chomsky’s work, so I thought I could compare the two, so why not combine the two. Of course, I had no idea what I was doing, but I didn’t think anyone else did either. This was an ongoing project most of the time that I worked at the journal, and wrote my dissertation, and helped care for my son, and commuted from Worcester to Boston. All of these things, combined with a complete lack of understanding of how corporations worked, meant that whatever thoughts I may have had on philosophy and the internet would remain starry eyed speculations for the moments before I fell asleep on the train each evening. This were often WIRED-powered dreams, HOTWIRED powered dreams at that. I have no idea of when I started developing a Suck habit but it started early and lead quickly to a habit that included Word, Feed and Salon.

The story of Suck chronicled those years nicely. The great Polly Ester columns in my opinion, she hit her stride with this inquiry into Jon Katz’s crack smoking habits. Who is John Katz you might ask, that’s easy, he’s a guy who was immortalized as a crack smoker in filler. These started when I thought that writing about Kant was a good idea. Smoking Crack may have been a better idea. It probably wouldn’t have been as expensive. Eventually I escaped from grad school when suck was running great pieces by Ambrose Beers and Peter Bagge when I made my final escape from grad school.

Just in time for it all to evaporate, suck in reruns only, feed gone, word only a memory, and the future of internet publishing transmogrified already into something else altogether.

hey look a test, a meme even

I’ve made something of a habit of not posting results of various tests taken on the internet to this blog, but this one involved all sorts of inscrutable abbreviations and a really long test, so I figured what the heck, ahhh, the things I do for science.

In typical fashion, I think the entire exercise has raised more questions than it answered, particularly about guids [sic] and wether or not have I’ve set this up correctly. People take these tests to discover more about themselves, since they tend to increase my general sense of confusion (or wonder, take your pick), tend to stay away from them. That and I don’t need any help appearing self-conscious and somewhat dorky.

The one noticeable thing about the test is that I scored “high” in every are but two, neuroticism and conscientiousness (low) and the latter is the category that measures, among other things, how much worth one might find in scoring “high” on a series of tests.

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Overview: This post is a community experiment with two broad purposes. The first is to create publicly accessible data about bloggers’ personalities, which may have sociological value in addition to being just plain fun. The second is to track the propagation of this meme through blogspace. Full details and explanation can be found on the original posting: http://pixnaps.blogspot.com/2005/06/meme-worth-spreading.html

Instructions (to join in the experiment):

1) Take the IPIP-NEO personality test and the Political Compass quiz, if you have not done so already.

2) Copy to the clipboard that section of this post that is between the double lines, and paste it into your blog editor. (Blogger users may wish to use ‘compose’ mode to preserve formatting and hyperlinks. Otherwise, be sure to add hyperlinks as necessary.)

3) Replace the answers in the “survey” section below with your own.

4) Add your blog information to the “track list”, in the form: “Linked title – URL – optional GUID”.

5) Any additional comments should go outside of the double lines, including the (optional) nomination of bloggers you wish to pass this experimental meme on to.

6) Post it to your blog!

Survey:

Age: 36
Gender: Male
Location: Kent, OH, USA
Religion: None
Occupation: assistant professor
Began blogging (dd/mm/yy):

Political Compass results
Left/Right: -4.00
Libertarian/Authoritarian: -5.28

IPIP-NEO results

EXTRAVERSION: 73 (high)
Friendliness: 40
Gregariousness: 57
Assertiveness: 56
Activity Level: 52
Excitement-Seeking: 97
Cheerfulness: 85

AGREEABLENESS: 72 (high)
Trust: 91
Morality: 54
Altruism: 46
Co-operation: 51
Modesty: 42
Sympathy: 90

CONSCIENTIOUSNESS: 23 (low)
Self-Efficacy: 12
Orderliness: 36
Dutifulness: 57
Achievement-Striving: 59
Self-Discipline: 14
Cautiousness: 12

NEUROTICISM: 56 (average)
Anxiety: 30
Anger: 46
Depression: 62
Self-Consciousness: 60
Immoderation: 68
Vulnerability: 66

OPENNESS TO EXPERIENCE: 88 (high)
Imagination: 91
Artistic Interests: 63
Emotionality: 68
Adventurousness: 66
Intellect: 88
Liberalism: 76

Track List:
1. Philosophy, et cetera – pixnaps.blogspot.com – pixnaps97a2
2. Majikthise – 6ea37d10-e9b9-11d9-8cd6-0800200c9a66
3. free the turtles – BSlgY7j9EzQJ
4. (add your entry here)

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