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As regular readers know, I’ve gotten a new WP blog at http://yuzutea.net/log
I’m not really sure what I’m going to be doing with this log, yet, but it’ll probably stay around.
Perhaps the reason why I am so ambivalent about this conception of the Third Artist is that I don’t like the elevation of SF above other genres. As I said in my discussion with Limyaael, all genres need to change and revitalize, otherwise they risk irrelevancy. Mystery, Romance, and Fantasy are also, in their modern forms, relatively ‘new’ as publishing categories/genres. In fact, even though mystery is maligned as formulaic, it is perhaps one of the newest genres, depending on how you define it. Obviously crime has always existed, as well as the need to control it, but there is obviously a reason that the genre burst upon the scene and became massively popular. And it’s not as if mystery, either, has remained static: just as in the fantasy genre, there are imitators and innovaters. The problem of the Third Artist is endemnic to genre. Perhaps the commentators feel that it is especially relevant to science fiction, though, because hard, realist SF is the ‘ideal’ form of the genre, and such realism is supposed to be highly mimetic, perhaps even journalistic or pseudo-historical, not deliberately ‘fiction-like’ or intertextual, whereas one can say that fantasy is supposed to be inherently ‘intertextual’ if you count mythology and folklore (ancient or modern) as texts. And so with fantasy, it’s a more ambiguous matter to differentiate unoriginal, boring referentiality from transformative, original referentiality. However, I think this is more a quantitative than a qualitative difference. Read the rest of this entry »
I actually really like wordpress. I like the interface, I like the themes, and I love the customizability. I’m just not really sure, though, how to promote my blog, because currently it seems more like a collection of random things. I can’t really remember how I used to do it in the old days; when I joined, people had extensive blogrolls and such. So there was a visible audience.
Also, someone was suggesting that some people perhaps get together a group blog and post their greatest hits, but why not instead just post excerpts and link back to their respective blogs? That seems to be a much more efficient way to build a hub of readership.
There’s a book going around now that alleges that Web 2.0 is socially destructive because blogs undermine traditional media and Wikipedia is oft inaccurate and prone to abuse. Some parts of this argument, as regards news and information, do have some validity, I think, although generally the book is not being embraced, unsurprisingly, by the blogosphere. Read the rest of this entry »
