Stop Visiting My Blog Wednesday, December 03, 2008

You may have noticed a tapering off of activity on my blog. This is due to the usual reasons (other obligations, holidays, and personal projects) as well as to a significant shift in my online activities. I no longer post links alone since I can now share links much more efficiently through my shared items on Google Reader. For those of you who failed to notice the RSS explosion, go sign up for Google Reader and read this blog via my RSS feed. I have a few other changes coming soon that I'm not ready to announce quite yet, but really, people. If you're not using a feed reader, you're living in like 2005 or something. Remember 2005? The people hadn't been plundered by our politicians yet to the tune of $4 trillion dollars? Good times. Back then, we thought that launching war on a methodology was the depths stupidity and greed.

500 Friday, March 21, 2008

This is the 500th post on the Red Bull Diary, and the blog's three-year anniversary was the first of this month. It's amazing how much has changed since March 1st, 2005. Thanks, everyone, for reading.

My Blog's New Look Tuesday, November 13, 2007

My blog has been around for two and a half years now with the same look. So I decided to update a little bit to highlight some of the better content (note I didn't go so far as to call any of it "good"). For those of you who may be reading my blog via a feed reader, please stop by and let me know what you think.

New features include:

• A prominent link to the Friday Free Games
• The convenient Free Game Search box,
• A fixed-width layout to provide a more consistent look, and
• A super-cool watermark of the twin bulls

One thing that I let go with a little bit of sadness was the quote from The Last Unicorn that has been at the top of the blog for the majority of its lifetime:

When the wine drinks itself, when the skull speaks, when the clock strikes the right time, only then will you find the tunnel that leads to the Red Bull.
—Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn

I put it there to illustrate that the "Red Bull" I was referring to was more mystical-bad-ass-animal-that-eats-unicorns and less kitschy-marketing-for-an-energy-drink. Actually, the story behind the name is a bit more interesting than that, but that's a story for another post....

Anyway, I replaced the quote because it didn't provide the visitor any sort of context for my work, and arguably just confused them. Instead I opted for a sort of rambling description of what the blog is all about, figuring that this would help a new reader understand where I was coming from. So I lose a few nostalgia points and hopefully may gain some stickiness. But we'll see how it goes.

Any and all criticisms, witiicisms and atticisms are welcome.

LibraryThing: What I'm Currently Reading Tuesday, September 25, 2007

I have a new feature on my blog, driven by a site called LibraryThing. LibraryThing is one of those newfangled "Web 2.0" sites that allows you to catalog your entire library of books. Another way to use it is to keep track of what books you have and to help find other users who are into the same thing. I plan to enter books as I begin reading them as a way of keeping track of what and how much I'm reading and as a way of communicating with my readers so as to spark discussion.

At the bottom of every page on my blog, you'll see a section below the place where I'm showing my favorite songs from Pandora. This new section is entitled "LibraryThing: What I'm Currently Reading". The leftmost book is what I'm reading right now, and proceeding to the right from there is a look back through the last five books or so I've recently read. The books link to Amazon if you want to check them out or find out more.

So, at the time of this writing, I'm reading a biography of Aleister Crowley, entitled Do as Thou Wilt by Lawrence Sutin. I have wanted to read this biography for some time, but hadn't because when I started reading it some three years ago or so I lost it. I received a new copy as a gift sometime later but have only gotten around to reading it now.

I'm sort of amazed at how this biographical work has illuminated the actual content of Crowley's incredibly obscure, mystical writings. Crowley approaches his topic with a sort of brutal arrogance, never bothering to explain himself, refusing to slow down, and generally taking the attitude that it's not his problem if the reader doesn't follow. There may be something to this approach, especially if you're so that only the determined few can penetrate your work, but I admit that Crowley's ravings made little sense to me at all when I read them. But Sutin has provided a number of key historical facts to put the writing in context and already it all makes much more sense. For example, when Crowley talks about "Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel", he's borrowing a phrase from The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abra-Melin the Mage to mean gnosis or knowledge of divinity. It makes his writing far more understandable.

I'm barely 100 pages into the book, but I can already heartily recommend Do as Thou Wilt to anyone who has ever wanted to read Crowley and actually understand him. And I want to hear about what you are reading.... I'm always looking for recommendations!