Almost There*
One of the earliest blogs on the internet that I was aware of was Instapundit, written by Glenn Reynolds, professor of law at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He started the blog in August of 2001, just as the form was beginning.
Instapundit had multiple posts on most days, mainly linking to news articles and political analysis from a conservative point of view. I would frequent his blog, among several others—all the more so in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. I was working as a freelance translator at the time, so spending time online waiting for jobs to come in was something of a job habit—and hazard.
The internet was still relatively young as a medium, and blogging was the latest fashion picked up and obsessed over by traditional news outlets, still yet to be upended and revolutionized by the new medium themselves. Nevertheless, even though I liked Reynolds’s posts and links, and while I agreed with most of his opinion statements, I only followed his output for a few weeks or months at a time before even his short comments became more than I wanted to read.
I am a fickle news consumer, I suppose. I eventually tire of just about any media product. At some point, I feel like I’ve gotten the idea, and continuing to read is akin to watching a dead horse get flogged. I don’t have any particular gripe with the author, the points of view expressed, or anything as substantive as that. I just get tired of the familiar and want something else. And the internet has facilitated this attitude more than any previous medium. In every medium before it, and in the social settings of the home or the workplace, we’re stuck talking with the same people. We have a pretty good idea of what they’re about, where we agree and disagree with them, what we can and can’t comfortably discuss.
But on the internet, we can just move along and find something different and more appealing. The internet unleashes our curiosity completely. It promises us something new and different every day, something more compelling and exciting. It has allowed our minds to wander, our focus to shift and evolve. (In some cases, the evolution has led to deepening obsessions, but that would be the subject of a different post.)
All of this is a big wind-up to say that this blog in newsletter form has run its course as a six-a-week daily, after almost 300 lashes to the equine carcass. It doesn’t really serve much of a purpose for me to belabor the same material again and again. Everyone following along already knows my obsessions, opinions, and so on. There’s no point in repeating it all daily. At some point it’s just tiresome and boring to everyone, including me.
Hence, rather than send this out as a daily newsletter, I aim to schedule daily open threads for us to keep commenting. Commenters can get to them by checking the front page here after 6:00 a.m. eastern time. That, after all, was the initial idea of this page anyway: to allow commenters from The Dispatch to have a familiar place to gather and chat, to engage in badinage.
The emailed newsletter will be sent once a week, which should be plenty enough—if not overkill—for those already familiar with the expressed viewpoints. To be honest, finding different items to present and opine on is time consuming and a bit too online for me at this point. But the comments are what this was about from the outset.
So for anyone wondering where the daily newsletter went, especially as a link to comments: just go to the site for open comments daily from now on.
*Number 300 comes tomorrow: It will be a musical interlude—I think: haven’t quite decided yet.
NBC News: "The world's oldest shoes? Sandals found in bat cave are thousands of years old, study finds"
Which is more jarring? Batman is thousands of years old or that he wore sandals?
PS: I never even asked if this was a volunteer job ( which I assume it is) or if you got paid for it...lol..it is a government position I think.