Selective Amnesia There was a point to this. But I forgot.

Too many drafts, too few posts.

This morning, I was wondering why I haven’t been blogging with the same intensity and frequency as when I began. And the answer to that is so deeply profound, it will shake the very foundations on which the edifice of blogging is built.

You see, blogging is supposed to be spontaneous, impulsive, spur-of-the-moment and other synonyms of the word. It is also about democracy of opinion, of publishing and such like. You know, every asshole and his opinion and things of a similar vein. So you have too many blogs and too many opinions in one blog. So that leads to a kind of fatigue. And then there are cliques and cartels and groups.

Oh, err, the answer to the question.
Yes. Why haven’t I been blogging? Because of WORDPRESS, that’s why!

Let me explain. I have too many drafts.
You see, every time I think up a post, (which happens far more regularly and often-er than you’d think), I write it. I actually do. And then I hit, here’s where reason and logic fails me in coming up with an answer, I hit the save-as-draft button. And therefore, one more post goes into the deep-dark-gloomy regions of wordpress. From which I cannot rescue it.

Yes, WordPress is to blame. WordPress prevents me from blogging.
You know those big walk-through aquariums? The ones in which people are in a cage and the fish swim about freely, and laugh at the pointing humans? You can see the fish, the fish can see you. But you can’t touch each other, nor talk (if fish could talk). There’s absolutely no way the two of you can ever establish a communication channel.
Fish are drafts in WordPress. Everytime I log in, I can see the drafts. WordPress taunts me with it. It gives me a beautifully underlined, blue coloured link to the draft I can, in theory, edit and publish. But clicking on that link only will wreck eternal damnation upon me and, here’s the second place logic and reason fail, you.

Yes. Drafts are not supposed to be reviewed and published. Drafts will stay drafts no matter how many times you try and edit them. Drafts will forever be unpublished. It has been designed that way. Cosmic law.

More evilly (on wordpress’s side), it is far easier to save a post as a draft than publish it. It is true. The save button is big, bold and a convenient tab+enter away. The publish button is regular sized, non-bold. What’s more, it is two tabs away and hitting enter doesn’t activate the button. It merely laughs at you for a space of few seconds and goes back to clipping its toe nails.

And when you do manage to overcome lethargy and evolution and actually move your mouse (and cursor) and click on the Publish button, you get a connection time-out and or a 404. Not to mention 10 years in the slammer for violating cosmic law.

TO illustrate, let me list the drafts I have been staring at for over a year now.
1) The follow-up to my old Marriage futures service
2) A series of satire called the Theatre of Dionysus
3) A critique of AK Ramanujan’s translation of Red earth and pouring rain
4) Urban violence and its implications for moderns Indian metros
5) A deconstruction of Illayaraaja and Vairamuthu songs
6) Multiple, many many stories of, about, for, in Madras

SO you see, it is not easy to blog. Not when the very tool that lets one blog doesn’t, well, let one blog. Keep that in mind the next time you criticise me for not keeping up the tempo.

(P.S: This post almost nearly went to the draft-hole. Only a critical deadline at work, 4 days of pending jobs and my boss’s repeated complaints that I have been neglecting my work (the one that pays my salary) ensured this post saw the light of your monitor’s CRT. Or LCD for those who like to keep up with yesterday’s technology.)

Status reports/Admin notes

Point #1: Google Adsense has been banished from this blog. Henceforth, no ad will interrupt your reading experience. Unless you are reading about ads, that is.

Point #2: Other bits and pieces of code that used to clog sidebar/comment area and the unnecessary badges that made my sidebar bling-er than the worst hip-hop artist have been summarily exiled.

Point #3: A combination of time crunch, writer’s block, ennui and other Anglo/French words have made May and June dry season in terms of blogging. I am ashamed of myself, really. I averaged only 4 posts a month. I don’t know if things will improve, but at least I have realised a problem exists and have identified causes. So.

Point #4: I don’t know. I just think four points a post is good numbering.

Sometimes, you can do nothing but nod your head.

Commenting on my old, old post about Chennai vs. Bangalore, Ankur, who it’s obvious is 4m Bangalore, says this:

Madras is for working class.here the poverty is higher than in Karnataka.people are just movie freaks and fan clubs.TN itself,people are happy with some liquor or a cinema.while in karnataka,the lifestyle is different and people are richer.also karnataka is not like TN where tamil unites people.kannada is spoken widely only in mysore,bangalore,hubli-dharward belt.marathis are more in northern karnataka esp belgaum etc.while Kodavas,Tuluvas populate mangalore and Madikeri areas.the linking language is kannada as far as i know.

this makes kannadiga’s accepting northies and others without any problem.infact native kannadigas knows hindi/urdu,tamil,telegu apart from kannada.there open heartness yielded Bangalore recommended for any foreigner or northies when coming to south india.

Tamil Nadu/Andhra is poor people with a bad mentality to loot every other one who reaches their.even the cleanliness is not there for these people.
for chennai,if ur ready to bear the tamil and their customs.it is a heaven for u with that cheap living expense compared to any metropolitan city.

So,apart from kerela(i visited thrice cochin,kottayam),karnataka is the wiser option for any one from any place.
well,kerela is such a nice place and the language is similar to tamil,but i can understand many words because of sanskrit it contains.also kerela people are more open minded,they speak hindi(horrible) which atleast helps in communication apart from english which even a villager knows!bad-there is no big city in that state.I liked the people in kerela.especially the girls are soo cute n nice to look.

What to say, Ankur? You’ve single-commentedly (to coin a word) achieved what many, many bloggers have only aspired for. That of leaving me speechless, at the pure brilliance and cold logic of your comment.

I’m 1337 after all

If you are reading this, congratulations, Chandrachoodan.
I was fucking done with SpamKarma and Gatekeeper. And so were all you good folks. Which meant only one thing – Akismet. But since Selective Amnesia, till 2 hours ago was powered by WordPress 1.5.2, I had to, well, kiss Akismet bye bye.
So, on the spur of the moment and all, I upgraded to WordPress the shiniest, the latest, version #2.3.1. And installed Akismet. And a few other little bells and whistles which you shall see over the next few days. There was one major fuck up when I ran the upgrade, due in large parts to my hastiness and some to my stupidity. But using a special technique known only to me, I managed to not only find out what went wrong, but rectify it also.

Let it be known: I’m 1337!

Incidentally

Year #5 begins for Selective Amnesia. I was supposed to debut a new design and new other stuff today. But we all know how that turned out.

Overheard in Karama Centre, Dubai

‘pdaathu na pdaathu thaan’