Disembodied Thoughts

Saturday, April 16, 2005

This New Thing

I've been meaning to start a blog for the past year at least - I finally felt inspired to do so today. Susie Bright's blog has been a big inspiration. I'm still not good enough with html to fix the rather generic-looking backdrop, unfortunately. I tried altering the background color and got nowhere with it.

What to post about? I'll probably be discussing a fair amount of political stuff and might come across as having a libertarian or even conservative bent. (I'll cop to the former, but not to the latter - I think of myself as more left libertarian - in other words, I consider personal freedom and autonomy to be critical, but actually do give a shit about something other than my pocketbook, a quality lacking in all too many 'libertarians'.) That has more to do with the fact that I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, which means I come across poorly thought-out, ignorant, and hypocritial examples of left/liberal/progressive ideas on almost a daily basis. If I lived in the Bible Belt, I'd be more focused on that variety of bullshit.

Other than that, science, photography, cinema, and comics are all things I'll probably be posting about, and probably should, as these are least things about which I have much more positive things to say than about the political issues of the day.

A point of departure - is blogging even a worthwhile activity, at least for those of us who aren't well-known authors with an audience hanging on our every word? Do our opinions contribute to the discorse of a democratic society or just add to the cacophany of a media-saturated culture? Is a blog the Pet Rock of the Millenium? Is anybody even reading this?