And the Daily Parker suffers. This is my 38th post this month, making June 2015 the slowest month on the blog since November 2010, the last month of my MBA.
Let's see if I can do better in July.
...and also preparing for a fundraiser at which I'm performing tomorrow:
And did I mention Apollo After Hours?
Six and half hours at Rockefeller Chapel, a Euchre tournament (my first—middle of the pack), a dinner party, and yet more rehearsals for an April performance all left my weekend kind of full. Somehow I managed to walk Parker enough times and to do laundry.
So, good weekend, full weekend, not exactly the Daily Parker's finest hour.
Regular posting will resume presently.
NPR takes a look at how the Internet never forgets and what that means to people who find themselves going viral:
Some unwitting meme celebrities embrace their fame. Earlier this year the Washington Post profiled Kyle Craven, more popularly known as "Bad Luck Brian," a meme about a boy with hilariously and often very dark bad luck. Craven, who was always a class clown, capitalized on his fame. The Post reports that between licensing deals and T-shirts, he has made between $15,000 and $20,000 in the past three years.
Others have tried to use their Internet fame as a catapult for an entertainment career. Laina Morris' picture is easily recognizable — the bulging, crazy-looking eyes and loopy smile made her best known as the Overly Attached Girlfriend who makes ridiculous demands and accusations. Morris has tried to create a comedic career out of her online celebrity. She has a YouTube channel where she posts skits, and a Twitter account.
But for others, it's a nightmare. Perhaps one of the most notable cases is Ghyslain Raza, "Star Wars Kid," who in 2003 became one of the first viral memes. This was before YouTube launched, and Raza did not even post the video. He simply taped himself doing Star Wars-style fighting for a school video club. His classmates secretly posted the video online, and it spread like wildfire. By the end of 2006, it had been clicked on more than 900 million times. It has more than 27 million views on YouTube and was parodied on Family Guy, The Colbert Report and South Park.
Oh, poor "Star Wars Kid."
My question is, how long until people adapt and wonder what was this "privacy" thing the old people keep babbling about?
After 15 years and hundreds of thousands of posts, Sullivan posted the last Dish entry this afternoon:
I hope that this fifteen-year catalog of insights and errors, new truths and old lies, prejudices and loves, jokes and intimacy, prescience and forgetfulness, will not be taken for anything more than it was, or ever could be. I hope we can all simply look back at the journey, and the laughs we had, and the pain we lived through together and the love that sustained us as a team and as a community, as we struggled together to figure out the truth about the world.
And yes, this was a labor above all of love. Love for ideas and debate, love for America, love for my colleagues, and love, in the end, for you.
I sit here not knowing what to write next. And yet, in the end, it is quite simple.
Know hope.
Earlier today he promised to leave the content up permanently.
The Dish has been my favorite blog for probably 10 years. I'm going to miss Sullivan and his team, and their 50-or-so posts a day. I may have more free time, but the Internet won't be the same.
Good luck, Andrew.
There have been interesting developments in two stories I've mentioned recently:
Otherwise, it's just work work work. But fun work.
Andrew Sullivan, one of my favorite bloggers, announced this afternoon he's moving on from blogging:
Why? Two reasons. The first is one I hope anyone can understand: although it has been the most rewarding experience in my writing career, I’ve now been blogging daily for fifteen years straight (well kinda straight). That’s long enough to do any single job. In some ways, it’s as simple as that. There comes a time when you have to move on to new things, shake your world up, or recognize before you crash that burn-out does happen.
The second is that I am saturated in digital life and I want to return to the actual world again. I’m a human being before I am a writer; and a writer before I am a blogger, and although it’s been a joy and a privilege to have helped pioneer a genuinely new form of writing, I yearn for other, older forms. I want to read again, slowly, carefully. I want to absorb a difficult book and walk around in my own thoughts with it for a while. I want to have an idea and let it slowly take shape, rather than be instantly blogged. I want to write long essays that can answer more deeply and subtly the many questions that the Dish years have presented to me. I want to write a book.
It's not clear yet what will happen to the Daily Dish, or to his staffers. I hope that he'll keep the enterprise running.
Daily Parker readers have no such luck: I'm sticking with it for now.
Pomplamoose front-man and Patreon CEO Jack Conte published a blog post last week discussing the economics of touring musicians. I commented here, both as a fan of Conte's and as a supporter of Pomplamoose (including through Patreon).
Within a few days, music critic Bob Lefsetz accused Conte of fabricating his figures, and also of concealing his role with Patreon. Master click-bater Mark Teo piled on, Conte responded, and it's now a standard Internet catfight.
I don't see the ethical problem here. I do see that musicians and other artists who make it, unless they vault over the middle, hard-working part of their career right into multi-millions, often get accused of selling out.
More later, when I'm not about to board a flight...
The modern Daily Parker started in November 2005. Since then I've posted 4,376 entries, averaging 1.32 per day—though, for the past 48 straight months, I've averaged more than 1.32 per day, with pretty high consistency:
The green line is the 12-month moving average, which I have (alas) brought down most of this year. The red line is the raw mean, which, because of mathematics, has gone up every month since December 2010.
Is there a point to all this? Nope. Not at all. It's just a testament to a habit of writing.
Only a little, it turns out. I'm in the second of three weeks without travel, but I'm back on the road for the first two weeks in December. I even have to miss a concert, which is a bad thing, but it's because I'll be doing a technical diligence in freakin' Paris, which est pas mal. I'm also going to see about taking a quick side-trip to London, which, given the agenda for the diligence and flight schedules back to the U.S., might not make a difference as far as my work schedule goes.
I've also noticed that I keep missing posts on Saturdays. Not sure why; possibly because I've had a lot going on during the week, and Saturdays have been a little more vegetative than expected.