I was just reflecting on the fact that I have no one favourite song or artist — at least off the top of my head, but then I realized that there's probably some song on my mp3 player that has a number of plays ridiculously higher than the rest. I just have no idea which.

It'd be interesting to keep track of that sort of thing from an analytic perspective: how many plays and skips each song on your player or hard drive gets. Scores could be aggregated for albums or artists, and you could see if your mp3 player's random play really is rigged if the same song keeps getting plays in that mode.

It's too bad there isn't any way to embed that natively in the mp3 filetype. It'd need to have a way to detect being played by any kind of player, and even if you could, you can't really retroactively add filetype properties on a mass scale. The closest approximation you could get would be a program for your player or desktop that could aggregate your plays/skips between devices.

Of course that isn't to say it couldn't be a possibility for a future format like mp5 or whatever, but it's not like those guys are reading this blog.

Am I the only one who was really disappointed as a kid when I learned the actual swear words? What with all the secrecy from the parents and malicious superior glee from the older kids I expected them to be something that sounded like R'lyehian and physically paralyzed people where they stood.

Instead I got a handful of four letter words that just sounded silly and fun to say. Major letdown.

Here are pretty much all the features I find the most useful in conjunction with each other:

WordPress: Widgets, linkrolls, Akismet, pages, flexible layouts, PHP functionality, being able to save drafts.
Tumblr: Being able to reblog or favourite with a single click, entry queuing, special quick entry format for various types of media.
LiveJournal: Comment management (especially the expand script), comment tracking, tags management, simple user interface, easy to make straight HTML entries with nearly all element tags available, easily editable layouts, Firefox addons like LJlogin, mood and music meta.
Dreamwidth: Company ethics, community support, icons (and icon management oh man that makes me drool), journal importing, journal crossposting, separate subscription and access friend lists.
InsaneJournal: A zillion icons for free come on how could you not want that.

Some elements obviously overlap with each other, which is really just all the more reason to include them.

Get to it, web developers with obscene amounts of time on your hands! I know you're out there. I believe in you.


Honestly, using Tumblr will forever make me cringe a little bit. I find new reasons to hate the substandard level of usability every day. You can't center-align entry elements! WHAT MADNESS IS THIS.

I've noticed that I tend to work best when I'm working against something — a preconception, stigma, dissatisfaction, or even just a schedule. If I don't have anything to push against, I wind up having too many options to grab at and tend to just flail around all over the place.

Maybe that's part of why I'm having so much trouble with my art now. It used to be I'd draw during class, or use it as a brain break when I didn't feel like concentrating on homework, and it actually kept me very focused. But I can't do that at work, and I have precious few hours at the end of the day that aren't taken up by chores or being exhausted. I can't push against time, and so far pushing against myself has only resulted in self-flagellation that is digging me an inexorably deeper pit.

Clearly I need to change things and find a more tangible opposing force, if not a concrete goal. Something to either push away from or towards. The only question is what.

(On the upside I have friends and role models here, who are always a huge help and who I have been sorely neglecting and misusing. Hopefully I've started taking steps to change that.)

ETA: A big first step would probably be to stop thinking about art as work and try to view it as just fun again. Having to worry about people actually looking at my stuff and questioning whether it's something I can use to support myself has made me paranoid about everything I draw, and I need to remember that I don't have to show my sketchbook to anybody or post my every scribble online to be judged.

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Also, I spent well over an hour today trying to remember a word I'd been about to write and forgot because I was interrupted. Ruined my whole evening. I hadn't realized I was that neurotic about my vocabulary, Kinda scary.