Finale (National Poetry Writing Month)
Well, that didn't go the way I planned ...
The normal Wednesday night reviews went until 4AM, which carpet bombed a long day in meetings on Thursday and a busy night with the family ... meaning I missed a day. Given that I started 2009 six days late, I don't feel that bad, but clearly my summary and recap was woefully premature. Like the tortoise and the hare, I lolly gagged and messed around and stumbled so close to the finish line that it's stupid.
Also funny, there are five Fridays in April, and I claimed my haiku series for my wife was four parts. Hahahahahaha! In the words of Bill Simmons, the moral, as always, is "I'm a moron." At least part time.
My misstep is even more frustrating because this blog may go on a very brief hiatus. Tonight's the last night that Blogger will allow FTP service, which means that once that goes, I'm gone. I won't be hosted by Google (I don't trust their cloud happy philosophy) and I won't give up the hard-won control my current domain and host provides. I blogged for years without a blogging service/engine and I am inches away from having FTP on my phone. I may try to do something with the Wordpress server that my friend installed since this stylish design house is freaking the theme for me, but until it's running, it's vaporware. I'm very confident the theme will be properly freaked and all the goodness of being good will, er, be all good.
If this is goodbye for a week or three, it's been a blast. Now -- two poems to close out NaPoWriMo 2010!
I cannot move any faster than this
My pace determined by some circumstance
Each step is vital and cannot be missed
Too much at stake to leave something to chance
I'm working just as hard as I can now
Focused on keeping steady as I go
A long time before I can take a bow
So many things can interrupt the flow
The truth is I have faltered in the past
but now sustained with never ending glee
good love, manifested in wife and kids,
and no one can take that away from me.
Won't complain as I nod and try to rush
If you ask me, I'm ready and I won't be crushed.
"Sonnet: How Long Is That Gonna Take?"
By Hannibal Tabu ... and, of course, the final haiku for my beloved bride ...
dance pretty sister
motion grace passion grooving
light lives in those smiles
"African Class"
By Hannibal Tabu,
with apologies to Sananda Maitreya Dude, I'm tired. Tabu out.
... I solemnly swear to always treat this roof like my daughters and raise it ...
Playing (Music): "Not Afraid" by Eminem
NOTE: Since this blog is automatically imported into my Facebook page, I apologize if you comment on it and I don't respond, as I am taking a sabbatical from social networking for 2010. So me not responding is not personal, I just won't see the comments ... until 2011. Maybe. Also including this disclaimer on blogs, but you're welcome to go to the blog itself and speak your mind, as I may look there ...Labels: blogging, creativity, daughter, family, fatherhood, haiku, napowrimo, poetry, wife, writing
Mobility
This blog is brought to you, live and direct, from my new Nokia N900 smartphone. My bony backside posted on the dusty red front stoop of my home, an "app" (in my day we just called it "software") called MaStory providing the gunsight for these ballistic syllables as I freestyle phonics directly from me to you.
Some don't get why a phone so powerful was needed. This morning while my infant daughter slept snugly strapped to my torso, I installed a Debian Linux package so I could rum a full featured word processor called OpenOffice, giving me full compatibility with those helplessly trapped on Massa Gates' plantation without letting actual software from Redmond into my life. Open source and as free as a Black man can hope to be in the western world, I now enjoy 40 gigabytes of digital domination on my left hip, from mp3s transmitted on an FM radio band to cropping photos and removing red eye.
The reasons why are myriad and mystifying. With two kids, breaking out the MacBook Pro is often logistically challenging and 181 grams is easier to carry and store than 5.9 pounds. As a journalist (of sorts) the concept of shooting 5 megapixel photos, editing them live and posting them with accompanying explication is an intoxicating whiff of the ultimate scoop. Again, it comes down to freedom, the ability to do where before "doing" took some ... well, doing.
So maybe more blogs, yes? Let's see what happens.
Watching (kids): playing with dogs and scooters in familiar drivewaysLabels: blogging, family, freedom, life, technology
"... fame, fame, fatal fame ..."
As part of my ongoing preparation to be the keynote speaker for Blogworld 2012 (joined on stage by Erick Sermon and introduced by Jenny "The Bloggess" Lawson ... what? It has to be true, it's on the internet already), I agreed to be the subject of a new interview at a site called Blog Interviewer.
You're probably asking yourself, "What the hell do I care?" Well, this part is what is considered a call to action for you: If you'll note, there's a voting button (thumbs up/thumbs down) in the upper left hand corner, and it will enhance my prestige and therefore help in making an all-around more interesting presentation. Plus, it takes all of two seconds to vote and confirm, no giving them your email or what not.
 Vote for Hannibal Tabu's Soapbox as an awesome blog! DO IT!
So, if you'd be so kind as to click here and VOTE for me (and my blogs -- it actually represents The Soapbox and The Hundred and Four, so it's like two votes jammed into one), I'd be ever so grateful.
Playing (Music): "I'm You" by Ne-YoLabels: blogging, blogworld 2012, cheap publicity, interviews, shameless pandering
People Everyday (plus a round up of what else is going on)
The Aeron chair reclines easily, the lumbar support just beneath the swing of my shoulder blades, and another workday moves by with glacial surety. Two bright rectangles beam light at my glasses-framed face, while a third dark rectangle waits for me to figure out what to do with it. Super Bowl memories drift in from neighboring "bull pens" where corporate-minded suits converse, vying with the tapping of computer keys and the incessant clicking of mice (digital, not rodents).
The sixth person I know tells me, " I know you are on a social media sabbatical, but Facebook is not the same without you." I chuckle, oddly noting that Twitter was harder to kick, given it ability to supply me with new data and new reference points. No, I'm right in believing that I need the time to cut external input for a while, give my own processes time to marinate and mix before unleashing the next salvos of content on an unsuspecting world. Oddly enough, I already know what my first tweet will be when I'm back on January 20, 2011 ... and I may tell somebody, if asked properly.
I have a bit of an addictive personality, so I've switched a fraction of the energy that used to go into incessantly checking my status updates to Google Reader, which is ironic given some of the ways I've been talking about the Mountain View company these days. Google has, however temporarily, given me tools to maintain some of my broadcast desires during my sabbatical -- I used to keep a lengthy text file full of links for my own reference on an SD card, but with the demise of my last smartphone that's been harder, and here's Google Reader to help me keep track of these weird links, and in public too. Who knew?
To be honest, given how twitchy Facebook Mobile was getting in making me log in twice to see my notifications, it's a little harder to miss than open-armed Twitter, which often held a less fleeting degree of discourse. Not to say I don't miss the good features of sharing on Facebook, but it's a more distant ache. Oddly enough, not even three weeks into the vacation from social networking, I barely feel the twinge, and I'm even able to walk away from my nicotine patch-esque applications of email and Google Reader for long stretches of time on the weekend. Who knows how uninformed -- and productive -- I'll be in a few months?
I can't wait to find out.
In other news, here's what I've been doing that you might have missed:
- My lengthy blog against cloud computing where I come down hard on Android phones, non-local productivity apps, distributed entertainment media and the idea of trusting somebody else to babysit your stuff.
- Every week I do comic book reviews for this site called Comic Book Resources, and I post commentary tracks almost every week after I've had a little more time to reflect, adding back stories and what have you.
- Finally published a long-forgotten blog giving my position on abortion.
- As noted, I'm sharing links with Google Reader so you can see where my mind is going. Hm, I gotta include that link on the front page of my website ...
C'est fini.
Playing (Music): "Dream Shatterer" by Big Pun, who died ten years ago yesterday
NOTE: Since this blog is automatically imported into my Facebook page, I apologize if you comment on it and I don't respond, as I am taking a sabbatical from social networking for 2010. So me not responding is not personal, I just won't see the comments ... until 2011. Maybe. Also including this disclaimer on blogs, but you're welcome to go to the blog itself and speak your mind, as I may look there ...Labels: blogging, comics, social_networking, work
Cloud Cover: This is probably my fault ...
Given how much time I spent developing my case against cloud computing and talking about Google and their momma, I suppose I shouldn't have been too surprised when I saw this ...
Google will no longer allow FTP publishing on its Blogger service beginning March 26. Hh. What a coincidence. I use FTP to publish both of my blogs (including this one), through Google's Blogger service (I started last year, after resisting blogging engines for a long time and only using MySpace's blog because I used to be very active there). I set up a client site and even my wife's blog that way, because I believe people should run their own servers (and I'm no fan of Google's hosting).
That said, I like lots of things about Google. The search engine's top notch, the Google Reader has helped me organize my info gathering (and sharing it, as seen on the Hundred and Four pages). Their efforts to get further into my life, however ...
So now they're striking back. Oh, sure, it's likely not a personal move against me -- I'm not that much of a narcissistic megalomaniac to think they spotlighted me for this -- but the time and energy I'm gonna have to put into integrating Tumblr or (heaven forbid) Wordpress into my own site ... gah, it makes my sphincter tighten.
Yes, I appreciate the irony of having a cloud-based link feed (which is as much a set of bookmarks for me as anything else) and posting this "stop hitting me, Google" blog through Google's blogger engine. Such is life in the future -- wrapped in irony and smothered by circumstance. Another project for my disturbingly brief weekend work time ...
Playing (Music): "Jump" by Paul Anka from his Rock Swings project
NOTE: Since this blog is automatically imported into my Facebook page, I apologize if you comment on it and I don't respond, as I am taking a sabbatical from social networking for 2010. So me not responding is not personal, I just won't see the comments ... until 2011. Maybe. Also including this disclaimer on blogs, but you're welcome to go to the blog itself and speak your mind, as I may look there ...Labels: blogging, cloud, google, narcissism
The Erick Sermon of Blogging
The brown-eyed bandit can't stand it ...
I've decided that I should be the keynote speaker for BlogWorld 2012. It should also be held in Los Angeles, since I don't really have much interest in domestic travel (unless they hold it, say, somewhere really fly and they'll comp my whole family).
Anyway, yeah, I should be the keynote speaker. The topic of my speech will be a closely guarded secret until I step on stage, when the screen will light up with the display for it. It'll be awesome.
Why should I get such a huge stage from which to speak? When there's Huffington and Guy Kawasaki and Koz and even The Bloggess, why should they invite a guy who only had one book on the market as of 2009 and works on a website for a major nonprofit in a wholly non-creative capacity? The reason why is because, basically, I'm the Erick Sermon of blogging (and the whole internet, really, as I've done it all from telnetting into MUDs to building the bricks that make the web to doing tech support at Earthlink).
How so? Like E-Dub, I've got a respectable underground following (in both urban music circles and comics) but have rarely penetrated the mainstream. Like the Green-Eyed Bandit, I've gone gold but never platinum (at one point, I estimated that around 50,000 people a week read my work between the community newspaper I ran and two web columns, and I have more than 204,000 blog views on MySpace alone, which is none-too-shabby). Long before anybody ever put together "word" and "press," I was writing a weekly summary of my dating life called "Love Notes" on my Geocities site (which has now even mostly disappeared from the Wayback Machine), as far back as 1998, writing the pages individually in raw HTML and frames for the love of pie, much like Sermon put it down in the formative days of hip hop. On the strength of my opinions alone, I've been hired by not one but two major pop culture sites (two years at Underground Online and many, many more at Comic Book Resources -- much like Clive Davis' J Records brought on Def Squad. Don't even get me started on all the places my work's appeared, from Morphizm on out. I have a MySpace user number in the low six figures (the higher the number, the later you got on board), I was on Friendster before it invented the fail whale, and I'm all over Twitter like Jack Nicholson's all over 27-year-old starlets and bad calls at the Staples Center. All of that's similar to how many hits and stars have seen Erick Sermon's influence on their way to super stardom (despite the disturbing fact that my 19-year-old brother thought the only "hit" he'd ever had was "Music" after seeing it on the TV show Platinum -- which got a bad rap, by the way, no pun intended). Like the E-R-I-C-K, I've said things and done things some might think are wrong and I'm still here to tell the tale.
Dude, I'm kind of a big deal.
So I need a few more feathers for my cap and then they'll have to pick up the mickey fickey phone and dial. I'm working on two at once as Director of Online Marketing for Stranger Comics (the website's coming along, kids), which I'll have some more news about soon. I'm also throwing down in a major way here and on The Hundred and Four. It should be fine.
This is where you come in. You're reading this blog, so either you hate my freaking guts (which I'm totally cool with, by the way) or because you think my writing's pretty cool. Or you could be an ex stalking me, or some other type of weirdo stalking me, or in some very rare and unusual cases, you're somebody who dated or wants to date somebody I know and think that following whatever I write will give you some insight into them. Strange but true, it's happened, which reinforces my basic thesis: if you're so dope that you can make other people you just know parenthetically more visible on the global information marketplace, like semen on a blue dress, you're kind of the business, joe.
In any case, it's your job to a) get Blogworld 2012 to Los Angeles and b) get me put on as keynote speaker. As a reward for doing this, anybody who shows up at my keynote in 2012 and references this blog, I will take your email address and contact you so you can either get a hard or soft copy of an exclusive short story from my fourth book (which is about 25% written before I realized I needed to finish some of the other books first) The Last Testament, one that has never been seen by anyone outside of my disturbingly small "read this and make sure I'm not a complete hack" group of professional writers and editors.
My job? Continuing to support my brand position and drivin' y'all crazy with the stuff coming out of my brain.
We can do this! Let's get it crackin' and I'll see you at the LA Convention Center in fall 2012!
Playing (Music): "Bad Habits" by MaxwellLabels: awesomeness, blogging, blogworld 2012
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