The title of this post might be a good title for this blog, not to mention countless others. When I pulled all the content over from my obese XML file which bore every post and comment from the previous host I was on, I was only able to copy chunks at a time; 50 or so at a time, I guess. That took a little while, but it was worth doing, as everything is Back As It Should Be. However, in the process, I got to glance over the titles of all the posts I’d written on this weblog over the last two+ years.
And… yech. I wrote all that? For what? Now, partly this is just the common trait of being one’s own worst critic, partly it’s because some of my views have either changed or softened in the last few years, partly it’s just… well. I observed a few things that embarrassed me about my own posts (to the point where I questioned, a few times, whether I really wanted to save all this dreck for posterity), so here are a collection of thoughts, conveniently phrased in the form of Old Testament commandments, a la Scroobius Pip, or, if you prefer… Moses:
- Thou Shalt Not Say Things About Opposing Political Viewpoints that you would not also be willing to say to someone’s face if that person happened to be of that persuasion… and a friend. That is, people we disagree with are still people.
- Thou Shalt Not Peruse Digg And Del.icio.us for the sole purpose of finding some neat thing to put on your blog with a two-sentence summary, the same two-sentence summary (basically) as you will see on five thousand other blogs.
- Thou Shalt Not Parrot the exact same thing as some other large herd of the “blogosphere” is saying, the only difference being that you happen to be saying it on your website.
- Thou Shalt Not complain, whine, moan, and/or sulk in public.
- Thou Shalt Not Write about what does not interest you.
- Thou Shalt not write about movies, books, games, software, comics, memes, etc, unless you have an actual review or meaningful insight or opinion to put forth.
Hrm. Some of these I have violated worse than others. Some (the complaining) I have (hopefully) done very rarely, because I don’t really like seeing that sort of thing on a weblog.
