North East South and West

My intended schedule for comics is all screwed up.  The good news is, people outside of the friends featured in their delicate frames actually find them funny.  Not one but two people laughed uproariously at the last one.  It’s the truth, I saw it.  With my eyes.

Primitive, I know.

I’m once again sequestered in a conference centre away from my usual place of work, which makes writing uncomfortable to the point of impossibility.  I’m baffled by stories of men and women taking up their blogging habit whilst roaming the greater gritty world by way of their phones and pda’s and other instruments of  cavorting plastic magic.  Being uprooted to unfamiliar locales drives me to consider what’s around me and then engage it, while the act of writing is a more introverted and personal affair, something requiring time and space to properly focus.  It’s difficult to reconcile one with the other, so I tend to shut off the author in me and wait for the inevitable retreat to my lair.

Maybe I idolize the image of the ostentatious victorian hermit mode of authorship over the clean lines of motile electricity.  That’s certainly too classicist a model to follow, and though I’m not one of the hard-and-fast rock stars of the blogosphere, with their bizarre prescription drugs and fancy parties, it’s dangerous to acquiesce to habits without good reason.

In any case.  I swore to myself that I’d write, so here I am.

Truth be told, I’m spending more of my time reading and commenting than writing material of my own this week.  A sudden urge to diversify where my news was coming from led to nearly 20 new subscriptions in my RSS reader and a flow of information that used to be “a lot but surmountable” being transformed into “constant bloody barrage” caliber stuff.  I highly recommend The Economist’s full print edition feed, and question  why I’d ever purchase a paper version of this fine publication, as well as the Guardian and Herald Tribune.  The Wall Street Journal is only available in a tortuously limited free edition, and has sunk to the level of “chopping block” along with IGN’s uncomfortably eager reporting of what I can only assume is every new picture of video games ever posted on the internet, every day, all of the time.  Good lord.

Nietzche’s Zarathustra found enlightenment in knowing when to fill his cup and when to empty it, and I think I know what part of this cycle I’m on right now.  Those passages have stuck with me for a long time, hmmf.

I’m curious where you get your news from, or what you would subscribe to if you had the opportunity.  Let me know.