I'm not only severely behind in my blog reading since the move, but also in reading the magazines and papers to which I subscribe. Among them is the Comics Buyer's Guide, so I didn't see the recent column where Heidi "Ace" MacDonald talked about blogs. Therefore, I kept out of things when the comics blogosphere went a bit ballistic over a few sentences in that column. (Yes, my political blogger friends, there's an active comics fandom blogosphere now. Yes, my comics blogger friends, there are millions of blogs out there that aren't about comics. Or even politics. :) ) Well, now Franklin Harris and John Jakala, among others I'm sure, note that Heidi has responded to their outrage or disappointment or offense taken on behalf of others (if you don't think your blog is "really dopey" then she's not referring to you so chill; if you do think your blog is "really dopey" then fix it and stop whining that she noticed). Of interest to me:
What I wrote in a newspaper with no online outlet doesn’t matter to the blogosphere. That was for people who read CBG. Only the bit quoted out of context online is what matters online...Do I hate blogging? Of course not. I’ve been doing it since 1993. Do I hate bloggers? How can you hate half the human race? Do I hate the comics blogosphere? No. Why then the "dopey" comment? Cuz some of them are. Come on. I find it amusing that everyone thought I was talking about them in the dopey part and NOT the part where I praised blogging.I'm sure semantic quibbles will follow - after all, even I kind of go "well, no, blogging is a very specific kind of one-to-many forum, done in a certain way using certain tools, it's not the same as hosting a Delphi forum or having a web page" - but the point is, it's all of a piece when you get right down to it. I've been doing one-to-many communication since I was 13 years old, passing around story pages in class and taking on 150 penpals, then graduating to zines and apas and mailing lists and Usenet and message boards... only the tools are different. And there's probably the same amount of signal-to-noise ratio on blogs as on any of these other self-published communication methods (I was going to say maybe the noise ratio was a bit less with zines 'cause people aren't going to waste money printing and mailing out dopey stuff, but then I thought back and, oh yes, many of us did). I'd like to think Heidi, with whom I've been friends for years, reads and enjoys this blog; if she doesn't I'd probably be disappointed but it's not going to shatter my world. Everyone has their own tastes. I'm not competing with the other bloggers on my blogroll, many of whom I readily acknowledge write a whole lot better than me. If I'm competing at all, it's with that writer who passed around stories in class and had penpals and published INSIDE JOKE. Who has, on occasion, been kinda dopey. And that's okay too.
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