However, all is not lost! Tonight I have been goaded into action (more on that later), and so this post has jumped the (towering) queue.¹

Most of this blog's regular readers will be aware of my deep and abiding love for the Mountain Goats. I have tried once or twice to write explicitly about just what their music means to me, and why I hold John Darnielle in such high esteem, but it all becomes a bit frightening and superlative and I tend to delete everything and put something idiotic on Twitter instead. This new endeavour of mine should cast some light on the subject, because I am setting out to write something about every Mountain Goats song.

This is, of course, madness. John Darnielle can probably write and release songs faster than I can write about them, and he has an 18-year head start on me, so even if I stick at it for a silly length of time there is really no chance that I will ever "finish". This is strangely liberating, though. By beginning without ever aiming to finish I can simply, as they say, do the thing.

Two of my major inspirations, Emotional Karaoke and Pop Songs 07-08, have been linked over in the sidebar ever since I became determined to try this. Emotional Karaoke used the song as jumping-off point and its length as a constraint, and ended abruptly when the author no longer needed it. Pop Songs, on the other hand, took a more intellectual, critical approach (to the music of a different band, I should point out, but that hardly matters).

I don't expect to be like either of them. Semi-random selection will choose which songs I write about, and sometimes that will lead to historical research, sometimes metaphor hunting, sometimes a story about what happened to me one day and how I felt about it. I think by letting the songs choose what direction to send me in I will end up in unexpected places, and I hope that some of those places will be of interest to at least a few people other than myself.²

In the end I like writing, I like music, I like writing about music, and I really like the Mountain Goats. I mention this because of a recent comic by John Campbell of Pictures for Sad Children:

Oh, and what was it that finally pushed me into action? One of my Google Alerts led me to a post on a blog called Notes from the Flipside in which the author states his intention of doing a very similar thing! A part of me was embarrassed ("I still haven't done anything about my idea that was kind of like this, how embarrassing"), but another part was excited about not being the only person mad obsessed mad enough to embark on such a project, and about the prospect of reading along.

So between embarrassment, excitement, John Campbell, Merlin Mann, Pop Songs, Emotional Karaoke, and a whole lot of simmering adoration, I think I'm ready to get started.³

1. Can a queue tower? I think it can.
2. If it all becomes too alienating, perhaps I will move the project to a separate location, but I would prefer not to do that.
3. Of course, I still haven't actually started, but can you begrudge me a self-indulgent preamble? Of course you can't.

It's crazy, but the crazy ideas are usually the good ones.

My plan of action is:

First: Finish the small projects I've started and am now dragging my heels about finishing. I need to prove to myself that I'm ready to commit to doing something properly, and using a new thing as an excuse to abandon things that are no longer new is no way to prove anything good.

Second: Pin down the crazy idea, no matter how much it wriggles, and draw an invisible, indelible outline around it (leaving room for wriggling. I try to be kind).

Third: Test the waters and prepare the way.

Fourth: Make something amazing.

I'm not allowed to say more at the moment, because I have to complete steps 1) and 2) first. Crypticism tastes so good sometimes.

I am, however, still sick. I'm also working now, albeit less than full-time, and having to budget my energy fairly ruthlessly as a result.

Rewarding as it is to write in this blog, if I devote sufficient energy to it I am left with almost nothing for physical activity (extremely important), social interaction (ditto), and keeping my physical environment under control (very important if you are me, which I am).

So there won't be new posts here for a while. I'll get back to it when things pick up. Which will happen, because I'll be doing those important things that help with that kind of thing.

Nine times now, people have opted to subscribe to comments without entering their email address. Given that the text accompanying the checkbox says "Notify me of followup comments via e-mail", it is not apparent how these people (I assume they number more than one, but probably less than nine) thought their notifications would arrive. More importantly, the way the plugin manages subscriptions means that I actually can't remove the blank subscriptions, so they just sit there and aggravate me.

I have now reverted to the original comment verification settings of this blog, which require both the name and email address fields to be filled in. The email address will not be displayed to anyone but me, and obviously you don't have to use a real name or even a real email address, but until I can work out how to purge the subscription manager (or somehow be convinced that people are intelligent enough to do things properly) you will just have to type those extra few characters. If you use a sensible web browser you can get it to remember your details for you, so you only have to type them once.

While all this fiddling about was going on I also enabled an OpenID plugin, which allows you to link your comment to (for instance) your Livejournal or other-blog identity (and has the additional benefit of ensuring that your comment will not be marked as spam or held for moderation). I hope to improve the user-friendliness of this sometime soon, as its usefulness is currently not at all obvious. I do have the option of allowing OpenID-verified comments to be posted without a name and email address, but I think we can all see where that would lead. None of that!¹

Update, 01/07/09: Due to an unfathomable and unrelenting flood of spam comments on this entry only, I am disabling comments. Akismet is kind enough to catch all of them for me, but it makes wading through in search of false positives an impossible task.

1. Or any of the others!

I am looking forward to it. I am looking forward to it a lot. You wouldn't believe me if I told you how much juggling I have been doing with the programme and calendars and bits of paper to make a schedule that I can base my improvisations on.¹

Over the last few days I have been happily tapping away at the sort of end-of-year posts that are far more fascinating to write than to read (and most of them are about music). I have enjoyed writing them mightily, though, so I will make no apologies. Because I am a clever sausage (and WordPress is a cleverer one), the posts will automagically appear while I am gone.

And then I will come back, and it will be next year, and we will see what happens.

1. Or maybe you would. It is hardly a closely-guarded secret that I am a huge nerd.

Last.fm is a perfect example of a site that is doing it right. For all that iTunes records play counts and dates added and whatnot, all of that becomes useless as soon as a hard drive dies without the iTunes database being backed up properly, or when I use it on different machines that aren't synchronised.¹ Last.fm, though, provides me with not only proof of my listening habits (with graphs!), but also a whole lot of data about other people's! Combining statistics, music, and spying on people using the internet - could any site be more perfect? The Last.fm staff would probably call this "community-building" rather than "stalker-enabling", but to each their own.

To tell the truth, the social aspect of Last.fm has never really taken off for me (I can only keep up with so many social-networking-web-2.0-buzzword sites) but sometimes it's just what I need to save me from myself. Witness what I have been listening to for the last seven days:

In tangentially-related statistical news, I love all the intriguing information (and graphs!) that Google Analytics gives me for this blog. The vast majority of the search keywords bringing people here are, unsurprisingly, Mountain Goats related; this has also been bringing in the spam-bots, with a good 25% of spam comments since the blog's inception coming in the last week or so. There have been a few surprises, though, such as:

cack handed anathem
Not sure why two people were searching for this. I also don't know how they got to me using this search; I can manage it using "cack handed" +anathem, but the keywords on their own generate pages of results for "anthem" and "anathema". One of the internet's great mysteries, I guess.

exceptional skeleton price is
No idea why anyone was searching for this. Did they really expect the internet to tell them what an exceptional skeleton price is? And is that the price for an exceptional skeleton, or an exceptional price for a skeleton? Why did they even include "is" in the search?

gene wolfe john darnielle
I'm sorry, what? I don't even know who Gene Wolfe is. At least, I didn't until I looked him up just now.

Also, a map overlay showing what country visitors came from - and then what city, if I ask nicely - is just plain cool. So are graphs showing visitors vs. pageviews per visit, visitors vs. new visitors, and almost any useful or useless thing I might want to see. Nom nom nom.

1. Or when I finally find something to replace iTunes to my satisfaction and leave it forever. Any day now. Any day.

The more observant readers of this humble blog may have noted the complete absence of Project 365 pictures (indeed, of any content at all) over the last few days. While I continued to take daily pictures, it became (was becoming? has become?) increasingly clear that my current circumstances make Project 365 not only difficult but downright counter-productive. After a few consecutive 9pm realisations like "oh, it's the end of another day in which I did nothing but feel unwell and went nowhere but the next room, and I have to find something new to take a picture of", it gets to be a drag.

So, rather than turn something I enjoy into a obligation that rubs my nose in my misfortune, I have resolved to keep taking pictures of picturesque things as they present themselves, but to put Project 365 on hold until it can be what it should be: a way of recording something interesting that I come across each day, instead of a dreary search for something to photograph in defiance of the day's complete lack of novelty.

II. Needs Moar Words

When I started using this blog it was my intention to escape from the shackles of LiveJournal and start actually writing down stuff that I found interesting, without feeling constrained by the expectations of the disparate mob of family, friends, acquaintances and internet strangers that had gradually boiled down my LJ-voice to a flippant, ironic shadow of itself. Since this is strictly an opt-in business (and untainted by the social pressures of "friends lists" and the like), I feel safer in the assumption that anybody reading is either a) interested enough in what I might have to say to make the effort (however trivial), or b) if not, then certainly bringing their disappointment upon themselves.

All that is a long-winded way to work up to saying that turning thoughts into words and then sharing them with other people is something that I find rewarding, so I am resolving to knuckle down and throw off the inertia that has kept me from doing so for so long. I am also focused on returning to a more ert state in the real world, so here's to riding that wave all the way back to frequent(ish), enjoyable blogging.

III. Needs Moar Comments

For those reading this via the syndicated feed on LiveJournal, a reminder that it is fairly difficult for me to keep track of (or even notice) comments made directly on that feed, and they get deleted after a couple of weeks anyway. My attempt to insert a comment link in the feed itself has failed (due to the flakiness that Feedburner has been exhibiting since being acquired by Google, boo hiss), so for now the best way to ensure that I will see your comment is to click on the link at the top of the feed item, which leads to the post itself, and then leave your comment. We apologise for the inconvenience.

Postscript: If you enter your email address (which is not displayed) when you submit your comment, it will have a unique pattern-y thingy or your Gravatar if you have one! Isn't technology wonderful? If you don't trust me with your email address, your pattern-y thingy will be the same one that all the other distrustful folk get.