So, is this a photo blog now or what?

I suppose I fancy putting photos on the blahg—and by extension, the act of taking the pictures in the first place—because it serves as a nice contrast to the jaded and somewhat crass elements found in the written pieces; sure, I put some modicum of humorous spin on those, but the photos strive more to find beauty in the world rather than poking fun at how much it sucks. They’re what maintain some shred of humanity in all of this, and apparently I consider that to be somewhat worthwhile.

Ultimately, the blahg fails because I’m not as optimistic as one needs to be to make blathering on about one’s self interesting in and of itself. And the irony (I’ll dare to use that term here) of the situation here: I’m not talking about my life, per se, but about some version of it; paranoia about most people I don’t know was already resident in me makes me perhaps subconsciously guarded.

The photos don’t quite prepare an unwary reader for the written stuff, and perhaps seem incongruous in light of the general tone of the text in the non-photo posts. The “rules” would dictate that I have two separate blahgs, one for the rants/ruminations/diatribes and one for the pictures. However, given that I have a hard time getting my readers to check out the one site I do have here, I’m not sure it makes sense to expect they’d check out two (and we know that were the content thusly segregated the photo one would be infinitely more popular). Heck, at this point I think the sweetness (so to speak) of the photos cuts the bitterness of the text to make the overall site more tolerable, but I think the contrast works both directions; it’s all good and well to look at semi-interesting pictures, but that’s more akin to eating dessert every day without having eaten anything more substantial.

Of course, what dispels whether the long-rambling-text posts or the just-a-photo-and-caption posts is the superior part of the site is analyzing what proves to be the posts that get the most comments: short, mostly despondent rants with no attempt to be funny at all. Those are the most emotionally charged pieces, and hence they elicit the greatest impulse in the audience to reply. However, those perhaps are made more effective by virtue of their contrast with the longer pieces and with the non-textual pieces; they would lose their impact were they all I posted.

(Yes, I’m treating getting four people to comment like it is somehow an impressive amount. When I sent out Dougression emails, I would get more replies in the first few hours than I can get from something that is theoretically available to the entire web-enabled world. Popularity is relative.)

This is the World Wide Web, where some of us put stuff and pretend the rest of the world gives a crap.

It’s not that different from life outside.


Enjoy the pictures, everybody.