UAQ

When “About” isn’t enough about, there’s the Un-Asked Questions. There’s actually real information in there too.  I’ll update with any real questions not already covered.

OK, so… “Un-Asked Questions.” So how is there anything on this page at all?

Because my blog, that’s why.  I wanted to, and I wasn’t about to wait for actual questions.  I’d be old and bitter before my time.  Just play along, willya?

Uhm… sure.  How long have you been doing this?

This is the first Q&A ever for me.  As for the actually blogging thing, it’s been a good run so far.  You can judge for yourself: the Original Hive archives are here.  After nearly six years I needed a break, and decided to make it clean and complete.

Not much of a break.  What, a month?

It felt like longer, to be truthful.  I’d been slowly burning out for a long while.  If you look at the archives in the old place, you’ll see that I was actually down to posting once every week or every ten days, while my co-blogger, The Barking Spider, took on the lion’s share of the writing.  There were months where he’d outpost me 3-to-1 on my own blog; that’s good for keeping people happy with content, but bad if I want to keep in practice.

You can’t really tell the difference.

Don’t be snarky, imaginary questioner.  I could tell – I was getting dark and grouchy and all weird … well, more weird.  (I’m not normally normal anyway.)  I was looking at the blog as a chore instead of an outlet, and resenting every post, and feeling selfish and bitter about the whole situation.

The other thing was that my blog’s overall focus changed a great deal.  This is NOT a comment on The Spider, since we’ve been friends for 20+ years – I’m grateful that he stepped in when I asked and I felt badly that he was losing his outlet – but I wanted to refocus the blog to be less about purely political topics, and more about the variety of things I’d been used to writing.

So there are these categories.  One of them is “politics.”  Hmmm….

Well – I don’t want to turn into McLaughlin Group or anything, but sometimes it comes up.  Usually, though, I make a larger point through the topic, so it will be “politics” and “culture,” or “politics” and “nitwittery.”

But you repeat yourself.  Heh.  Anyway, a lot of those make sense, but – uh – “the Sisko is angry”? “Can’t ignore my techno”? “The good kind”?

Well, I am sometimes too clever by half.  Here’s the explanation for those categories that aren’t self-contained and fairly explanatory:

• can’t ignore my techno – anything techie or mechanical such as Internet issues, gadgets, cars, new inventions
• geekerie – sci-fi, fantasy, or other niche enthusiasms, which I may or may not personally share
• o for a muse of fire – my own parody, satire, fiction, or creative work
• reading, writing, rhyth-m-ic – items ABOUT things I’m reading or writing (including poetry), rather than stuff I’m writing
• the good kind – things about my friends
• the Sisko is angry – things that tick me off

Oh – I begin to get it.  You like quoting stuff.  You say “O for a muse of fire” or “the Sisko is angry” instead of just saying what you really mean.

Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra!  I mean… yes.  But I’m not trying to confuse anyone.  It’s just that most of what I see reminds me of something I read or saw once.  And that’s one of the main reasons I need a “geekerie” category.

And you also have a hockey thing – but no other sports… at least, not here, though I see it on the old blog.

I’m a hockey fan first.  (Islanders brand – accept no substitutes!)  If I ever do mention the others, I suppose I’ll need another category.  Hopefully I can come up with something suitably deprecating for the New York Mets (sigh).  I try to keep most of my hockey stuff over at Lighthouse Hockey, however, where I post as “mikb”.

Hockey and geeking doesn’t make much sense.  Hockey players beat up geeks, don’t they?

Not generally.  Sure, some hockey players are just jocks, but most of them tend to be very cool people.  They have to deal with their own goaltenders, after all, and it’s a position that attracts a lot of oddballs, and even the occasional geek.  (Yours truly is a goaltender – shocka!)

So besides hockey and sci-fi, I have these enthusiasms… for quoting stuff, of course, but also for reading, for nostalgia, for statistics (especially regarding sports), and for chess (but less than formerly, due mostly to time constraints).

If I wanted to argue with you or something, how do I do that?

Comments are open on my posts for two weeks, after which the spambots figure out a way to get past the defenses.  I can also be reached via email: nightflymail -AT- gmail -DOT- com.  I don’t have a comment policy per se because I’ve never needed one.  In general, act like a guest ought to: be polite and watch the cussin’.

You can also catch up with my Twitter feed, now that I have one, by clicking the “Twitterpated” link on the main page.

And who are you, anyway?

Nobody in particular – nobody you’d have heard of, anyway.  I’m 35-ish, married, we have a dog.  You won’t be getting many photos of the family, except for me and the dog, because we’re the only two people in the family who don’t much mind.  I enjoy my pseudonymity, so I won’t be talking at all about anyone’s employers or that sort of thing, but there are a few folk who have met me in person.

Anything else?

A few basic things.  First, I reserve the right to change my mind if I think I ought to – so while gotchas! are fun, you won’t necessarily win points with me by saying stuff like, “But you said X about Y back on Z, you SOB!”  I may have.  And if I was wrong, I’ll usually say so.  It’s already happened during the half-year I’ve already been doing this; I posted an update but let the original stuff stand so you can think it out for yourself.

Second, I don’t mind if you think differently or act differently, or if you tell me so.  I do my best to play by my own guidelines, so I’ll treat you as a good guest even if you want to dispute.  But the key word is “good guest.”  We all have the right to not be convinced.  That is not an invitation to name-call or condescend.  Repeated assertions without evidence aren’t going to convince me either (the other commenters can decide for themselves).  And I am the ultimate arbiter of what goes around here.

Third, if you pause with your mouse over links and pictures, there’s usually a pop-up joke or snark or small aside.  Not always, but very often.  It’s fun!  It amuses me, anyway.

Fourth – visit the links on my sidebar.  A lot of those folks are, indeed, the good kind.  Others are really good at making you think.  Some are just entertaining.  A few of them are all of these at once.  Give them a reading, and hopefully you find a new favorite stop.

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