not falling down

Longtime ommatidiadvocate Tikitu de Jager wrote a great signoff story that you should go read right now! And then there’s this metatextual gem, from Rachel Spitler:

I once had a dream about catching up on Anacrusis.

In the first story, some curiously dorky heroes went on safari. In the second, they all got captured by the black-skinned “King of the Amazon.”

The third was from the viewpoint of someone’s stripped and bare bones, watching the king lounge in his giant throne and gnaw thoughtfully on a comrade’s femur.

It was awesome, but I also remember going, geez, isn’t this a little racist? Random tribal cannibalism? You really went there?

Then I woke up and realized it was me all along, and thought these words: WHOA, TWIST ENDING.

Thus concludes… DEFUNCT OCCUPATIONS WEEK on ANACRUSIS

Thus begins… DEFUNCT OCCUPATIONS WEEK on ANACRUSIS

Thus begins… VOCABULARY WEEK on ANACRUSIS

After seeing it on LJ a couple times, I put some stuff from my blogs into the I Write Like tool. Different NFD entries came back as Stephen King, Douglas Adams and (oh God) Dan Brown. Anacrusis consistently gets tagged as Margaret Atwood.

I was prepared to disclaim this whole post, but I cannot argue with that at all. “The world’s longest-running Atwood microhomage” is a painfully accurate description of Anacrusis. You win, Mémoires.

That is all.

Standard boilerplate about not necessarily buying everything in the article I’m about to link, but:

“Comments, at least on popular websites, aren’t conversations. They’re cacophonous shouting matches.”

Yes, yes, infinite yes. It’s an iron rule. I know they drive pageviews, but if your business model relies on sacrificing the level of discourse to achieve pageviews, you’re in a bad business.

I, of course, have cleverly routed around this problem by never becoming popular, but this is the reason I’ll never turn on the comments on this blog or Ommatidia. (I honestly can’t remember why they’re on at the CHK, but that website is not a sole proprietorship.) The technology of blog comments is a net negative for the human race. If you want to talk publicly about a blog article, do it in your goddamn blog.

One of my favorite things of the many, many I’ve stolen from Sumana is the notion that blogs get a “house style.” This, for the record, is the reason long works (novels, movies, etc) get capitalized but not italicized on NFD.

The main side effect of the Penny Arcade bump for Ommatidia has been a notification avalanche–via email or Technorati–of other people who have started (or were already doing) tiny story blogs in a similar vein. I think this is awesome, but honestly I lose track of which site is which, and even I can only read so much blink fiction in a day.

So here’s an offer: if you’re doing tiny stories on some sort of schedule, email me with a link and a little summary and I’ll add you to the directory page I’m putting together now. I am not promising to subscribe to all of them, for the aforementioned reasons, but I will go through once a month to check them all, maybe make a recommendation, and clean out the dead ones. (If you have emailed me about your story blog, and it’s still going, and you want it to be on the list, I would appreciate it if you’d email me again.)

Besides the obvious, I’ll start it off with just such a recommendation: The Two Minutes Project, comprising Two Minutes Less a Third and Chasing Concordia. Very short stories and very short songs! Read The Eternal Question if you need convincing, which you shouldn’t, dammit you have got to start TRUSTING me someday.

Kara and I are simultanublogging. It is a race to see who can post their entry first, and I am about to win it. Because Kara is not aware that it is a race.

This is ideally the only kind of race I would ever be in.