Visiting livejournal

1.Check out my new profile pic. Did I mention how I think Warren Ellis' Transmetropolitan/Doktor Sleepless series are awesome?
2.I haven't visited my own journal page on livejournal for so long I forgot how awesome the night sky skin was.

Despite my rather semi-persistent presence at the livejournal blog, this is probably the first time in months since I've actually visited the livejournal website and used the built-in blogging service. As you might have guessed from the tags that plagued my recent blogs all of my recent posts were composed on my blackberry and sent off via the posterous email service.

Part of the blame goes to the fact that I've been a little busy, with settling into  the new apartment (with roommates no less), the mess I have to resolve for my parents I won't go into here and etc etc, the usual requisites of living a normal, healthy life. Being able to post a thought or two while int he subway or waiting for my coffee is an invaluable perk that I need to make full use of. Yet that's not all. Most of my research/work/study at present time makes heavy use of my computer and I've been lugging around my trusty thinkpad everywhere, so if I was inclined to do some blogging at all costs I should have been able to manage it.  

When I'm writing something on the livejournal blog I'm usually doing it to vent off some steam and have fun while doing it. It's only that most people vent off steam by talking trash about their friends/families and I do it by talking about fiction/art/architecture/futurism and whatever that happens to require some cerebral function instead of the basest level of nausea-inducing rant that seem to permeate the personal blogosphere these days. It means the primary purpose of writing on the livejournal blog is to write, keeping my brain and fingers busy for any given length of time. It also means that I don't need to cite sources or link to other stuff on the net, post pictures of videos unless they are straight from my own blackberry (and yes, I can post them, I just choose not to. Maybe I should remedy that, given the cool events and things I've been seeing lately).  

On the other hand, my main blog over at wordpress had hardly been updated in nearly a month, and I'm still wrecking my head on how to convert the two lab sessions I had with the DIYbio NYC into blog posts, along with a plethora of half-finished drafts on and off the net that goes on to talk about all sorts of topics. The posts on that blog usually takes a bit more effort compared to the stuff I put on the livejournal blog, meaning I try to research the topic, gather some graphics and links, may some videos, all in all the stuff that most people expect in any proper blog posts that's over 500 words. I get about four to five hundred hits per month on that blog and it's been going steadily down for a while now due to lack of new content. Whenever I sit down to write down a proper blog post (using notepad++ and jdarkroom, both essential writing tools for anyone thinking of writing something at length without distraction-the choices were inspired by my good friend dracova) I run into a nasty writer's block. If I should somehow manage to drag myself to the tortuous process of writing blindly through the writer's block by using plans and outlines the product reads like a painfully dry, and worse yet terribly written lab report, something I'm not too eager to post on a casual blog with some technical/scientific bent.

Writing on the livejournal blog is usually easy. I more or less think something and let my fingers run, like playing a rhapsody on a musical keyboard. The end products are usually readable, and sometimes they even maintain a coherent theme throughout the rant. It's almost as if the generally low quality of the writing is covered by the fluid connection of the low-quality parts themselves.

With the 'real blog post' becoming increasingly harder to do and most of blog posts becoming something of an exercise out of boredom/collecting my mind before writing something really important, the need for me to be present before an actual computer terminal for writing blog posts falls drastically. Why bother myself with a large, clunky interfaces on a computer already burdened with running multiple simulation programs that pays my bills when I can simply type up simple text based blog posts on my handset without much difficulty, like playing a portable video game except that this is actually good for me on some level with something to show for it? Just tap tap tap, write down whatever that comes to my mind at the moment, and I have an instant blog post that can double as some sort of field report on interesting things that are happening right at that moment around me, like my experience at the NYU ITP summer show that demonstrated quite a bit of interesting art-technology constructs. 

And apparently I'm not alone in this lifestyle choice. According to the mobile-oriented news sites majority of the personal blogs being run in Japan are now written on mobile handsets (distribution rate of computers in Japan is surprisingly low, especially considering the level of consumer technology. Mobile handsets with advanced features however, permeate through almost every facet of their society with unlimited data services for cells being the norm in Japan and Korea for a long time now), with mobile-based video and picture edition softwares and location aware services being rolled out now. Some people would question the wisdom of typing up a blog post on handsets and their T9 input systems, but then those people probably aren't proficient in handling handsets anyway so their argument is moot. If the user simply wants to post a blog with simple video/picture captures around them with some words explaining what they are/formatting contexts, even the lowliest modern cellphone has plenty enough capabilities. And with most modern cellphones capable of playing internet videos, for casual users of computers (people who don't need top of the line workstations with dedicated GPUs and 8 gigabytes of RAM, which turns out to be most of them) mobiles are more than enough. The mobile-based computing in U.S. had been slow to take off only because of the aging infrastructure rather than capabilities of the machines themselves, combined with near-monopoly some corporations have over the telecommunications market (corporations stifling an entire generation so they can squeeze more money off of the population with outdated infrastructure is the reality, it's difficult to support pure libertarian ideals when corporations are this corrupt and incompetent, to the extent that they are beginning to make government regulators look good).

United States is still a very computer-based society, so I doubt we'll move on to the Japanese like mobile-centric society ever. there's also the fact that it is hard to create real content on handsets, at least not yet (though it will change very soon. Current generation smartphones already ship with video/photoediting capabilities/programming toolkits). Technology-wise, I think we are in a very odd stage where U.S. actually has a choice on where to go from here. Whether to take lead of the neglected parts of the market through reforms and innovation, or to squeeze out more dollars off of already struggling population for services that are barely 'good enough.' Yes, it is a choice, and yes, we didn't have it before.