Cat in a Hammock: Updates of a Miscellaneous Nature

Just because I love this Motif

Greetings patrons of the Clinkening, after the mad rush to finish the baffling pop songs list, as well as nearly having an aneurysm having to talk about Sandi Thom, I figure it's time for the emanation of a new hopefully regular feature to the site: We follow the lead of cats, the Internet's most popular animal, lie in our hammock and just relax, reflect and meditate on the world around us.

The internet told me all cats are philosophers too.

So yeah, this is some kind of comments section where rather than me ranting incoherently and ignorantly about pop music, video games, the art world, literature, popular culture as a whole, politics et al, I'm going to talk about stuff that happened on the site itself, which admittedly will make this a rather short entry most of the time.

First things first, I got a little bit of feedback on probably the biggest thing I've done in terms of personal projects for the internet, and I think both of them are the most popular posts I did for the sites, and thank all of you who read it and said nice things about it. The criticism about it mostly stemmed from people confused by the concept, or that certain songs were missing that perhaps should have been there. The idea wasn't that they were bad songs, although a lot of them were pretty bad songs but that it was songs that by the logic and conventions of pop music should not have reached number one, and then I'd try to explain why that was the case, what was in vogue or the hidden value of a song which most people dismiss as tawdry, pointless or whatever. A couple people missed that, thinking that when I put Rage Against the Machine as the top I was making an attack, when really it was the opposite, but that's all in the article. The other issue I got with that was how vicious I was about Sandi Thom's I Wish I was a Punk Rocker (With Flowers in My Hair), and whether I was just being a literalist and nitpicking a song because it was overplayed to a ludicrous obscene extent, or of course taking everything too seriously. Should say, my issue is less the sentiment and more the fact it was a wilful act of deception on the part of Sandi and the major label she signed with an anthemic war cry for stupidity. I'll stop because I'm not going to have the rest of this contaminated with me ranting about Punk Rocker for two thousand words again. It's finally out of my system, and I am emancipated from this most crippling of songs.

The other thing about it was that, somewhat encouragingly I got quite a few more views than I had done for anything else I had written previously, by a considerable margin, which shows me of course that the way to attract readers is with effort, research and complaining about bad pop songs. Lesson learned, and so every two weeks or so I'll try and get a bigger project done, I've got plans for the next one, but I'm not sure if that'll be what I'll do next.

The next thing is a somewhat belated explanation of why there's such a big gap between my work in march and now, since then I've graduated so I get to put B A (Hons) in front of my name like the pretentious arse that you have already figured out I am, so now I've been working on that, and the tempestuous move from being in the education bubble, to attempting to acquire enough funding for a post-graduate degree without the lifeline of the student loan to rely on. It'll be tough, but then isn't the point of toughness in life to test your mettle, to see if you want it enough? I've been complacent a little bit, succeeding but not as much as maybe I should have, so time will tell what I become. Ironically enough I started The Clinkening as a way to work on and test my writing dexterity and improve my writing style, hopefully to the point where I might find myself funny. Not got there yet, but the more I do it, the more people message me out of the blue and say I did well. Early days yet, but really I'm doing this really as much to test myself as anything else, and if it entertains other people, then that's superb.

Final thing is the whole nature of blogs. I really like blogs, over social media gimmickry like the 140 characters of Twitter and the minefield that is Facebook, primarily because I tend to like to spread out my thoughts, elaborate in a way you can't with Twitter. They're all useful for their own purpose, like a post-it on a door compared to reading a newspaper or picking up a novel. They do all have the positive of letting you have a connection to your audience that could not be anywhere near as direct if this was a printed piece, and that is something I enjoy. I love reading criticism and feedback of all kinds, so I guess that's what this final pre-amble is about. I've one of those Twitter thingies (@huggydave), so if you're into somewhat dull shorthand discussion and learning when my updates are, following me on Twitter might help that. Otherwise, there are comment boxes below etc. and my email's a gmail account so it'll be directly connected to this blog account or something.

Thanks for reading and the like, see you next week with more Cat in a Hammock.