I haven’t read Mashable in a while, and for whatever reason, decided to re-add it to my RSS reader.  Within about five articles, I suddenly remembered why I stopped.

First, half of the articles were link-bait about various {Apple_Product}-killers.  Like there was an article about how damn neat HP’s new “answer to the iMac” was, despite the fact that the last iteration of the iMac came out in 2009.  But the tipping point was this article about how “curators” are the new creators, which makes no sense, but it makes total sense because in about ten seconds, everyone’s going to be trying to get rich quick fucking around on Pinterest.

So I unsubscribed, and then a day later, The Awl published this great article: http://www.theawl.com/2012/06/you-are-not-a-curator-you-are-actually-just-a-blogger which sums it up exactly.  This.  Times a million.

I started using the web in 1991, when it consisted of nothing but the office hours and phone numbers of everyone in our computer science department.  By 1993 or 1994, there were a few thousand web sites, but something like one percent of them were actual dot-coms, because you couldn’t buy anything online, and putting up a web page for your company wasn’t a requirement.  The ISP floodgates hadn’t been opened, so for the most part, all of the content of the web was academic, either universities or people who went to universities.

I remember though, in the summer of 1994, being amazed that some high percentage of web pages out there were nothing but lists of links to other web pages.  This was before blogs, and most home pages were nothing but a big list of what was cool on the web.  This frustrated me, because I was just starting as a writer, and I wanted to do something different.  I wanted to actually create content, but I didn’t know what.  I was obsessed with Coca-Cola and created this Coke web page, wrote a FAQ and a timeline of the company.  I guess this is when I discovered I’d rather create things, but it also made me aware that there was a huge industry in people who would simply list the things they liked.

And this became a big business when a couple of guys at Stanford decided to publish their own web directory and turn it into a company.  There weren’t search engines yet, just these lists of links, maybe organized into categories or some other taxonomy.  These guys named their company Yahoo! and suddenly this hobby of making lists of links became the industry of Web Portals.  In the mid-90s, sites like Lycos and Excite came online, and this concept of writing content that wasn’t content became Serious Business.

There was content creation at that time; all of the news organizations were trying to figure out how to dump stories from dead trees to something that would drive traffic.  And then online ads started, and online shopping, and then pictures and video and you know the rest of the story.  But at that time, from maybe 1995 until the bubble burst, Web Portals became huge.  If you had the right kind of tie and haircut, you could walk into a venture cap firm and tell them you were creating a Web Portal, and they would hand you a seven-figure check.  All of the ISPs came into being: AOL, Prodigy, CompuServe, Netcom, and all of them wanted some kind of portal to hang in front of their users.  Back then, you paid by the minute to use the internet, and they wanted to you fall into a deep hole of news articles and bulletin boards and online recipe books and whatever the hell else would cause you to turn off the TV and get locked into “CyberSpace”.

So I’m at the bottom of the food chain at one of these ISPs, and that cycle I saw a few years before of content versus linkers was huge.  I chipped away at my own web pages, but I also saw a world of Grade-A douche nozzles who went to the right Ivy League school who were suddenly “Changing The World” by “Building The Information Superhighway”.  They weren’t creating anything; they were shaking the right hands and wearing the right suits.  They were creating nothing but houses of cards, and every person and their brother suddenly thought, “hey, I can’t create shit, but I can cash in on this.”  And when everyone tried, they all pulled out a card from the bottom of that house and it collapsed.

These cycles repeat themselves.  Blogging was “invented” in the early 00s, and there were a chosen few who actually created things, wrote stuff, but the bulk of people didn’t create; their blog entries were just links to other blogs.  Twitter started, and then a huge plurality of Twitter traffic became nothing but people retweeting what they saw that was clever.  Same with Tumblr.  Same with Pinterest.  The line between creating and curating got blurred, until the curators thought they were the creators.

It always reminds me of when I worked at software places where the marketers said they “created” a product, when I knew they didn’t write line one of code.  They may have helped define what went in the product, but it was like going to McDonald’s, ordering a #2 with no pickles and a Coke, and saying you “created” the meal.  Curators get the credit.  And they get the money - when a site like, say, BoingBoing reposts a bunch of stuff they find on the internet and run ads at the bottom, they aren’t slicing up that ad revenue and giving it back to their sources.  Yes, they have to power the servers and pay the web developers and ad sales people and it takes work to find the stuff to post.  But I’d guess that the curator is making the lion’s share of the profit.

A lot of this may sound like sour grapes, and I guess it is.  I became a creator because I had a certain personality, a certain temperament.  Maybe I had the creativity too, but it was mostly because I didn’t have the extroverted personality that made people pay attention to me in some Don Draper-esque way.  I was the opposite of that, which is why I kept to myself and created.  And I guess if I was the opposite of me, I’d have the skill-set to sell ice cream to Eskimos, or sell a web log filled with things people should read to a bunch of people who have 8.6 billion things to read a click away from them.

At least I’m not an actual Curator, a person who went to school for twenty years to learn how to run a museum, who suddenly had every idiot out there looking at wedding dresses online saying they were a “curator”.  Right?

Okay, time to go post some cat pictures on Facebook.

Back on April 11, 1997, I had a stupid idea.

I used to write in these journals, spiral notebooks, every day.  I started doing that in 1993.  I never wrote stories, and it wasn’t a diary either - it was some strange mix of both.  But any writing I did there was trapped forever on paper, unless I transcribed it, which I never did.  So my thought was to move some of this to the electronic world, to create a public web page where I posted some of these entries.

Jorn Barger coined the term “blog” on December 17, 1997.  They didn’t become popular for a few more years.  Livejournal started in 1999; so did blogger.  This diary project of mine was born before anyone knew what the hell a blog was.  I’m certain some other site influenced me to do this, and I didn’t pluck the idea out of thin air, but I don’t remember what I was reading on a daily basis back in 1997.

I did everything in emacs back then: email, book writing, usenet news.  I bugged my friend Bill Perry for some elisp help, and he wrote a little thing that would let me hit a magic key combination and open up an html file with today’s date as the filename.  So I’d hit Control-x Control-j, and the file ~/www/journal/html/041197.html would magically appear.  I then hacked out a C program that I could run and generate an index of all of these pages.  There was no database, no themes, no CMS.  This was five years before wordpress was a gleam in Matt Mullenweg’s eye.  It was rough, but it worked.

So on that Friday, I posted my first entry here.  Back then, this project didn’t have a name.  I called it “the journal” for a while.  It eventually got the name “Tell Me a Story About The Devil”, which has its origins in a Ray Miller story.  The name “The Wrath of Kon” is a more recent change.

I always hated the word “blog”, though.  There was this whole journal or diary movement in the late 90s that everyone has forgotten, and all of a sudden, blogs were “invented” in the early 2000s.  That meant I had a good five or six years of entries, when all of a sudden, everyone and their mother was a “blogger” and started getting book deals and money thrown at them.  So yeah, I was bitter.  But I kept at it.  Now, I don’t give a shit about the term “blog”.  I have bigger fish to fry.

There have been many changes over the years.  My Rube Goldberg mechanism would break on January 1st every year, and I slowly duct taped more functionality to the system, adding a bit of CSS, a comment system, and eventually ditching the entire thing for wordpress.  The page originally lived at speakeasy.org, and moved to 34.216.9.77/journal in 1998.  I eventually dropped the /journal part.  The content also slowly changed, moving from diary entries to stories to news to travel reports and back again.  I never had a solid theme, but I think that prevented me from painting myself in a corner.  I think if I originally would have only blogged about the books I read or a quest to collect every Atari cartridge, this would have died a long time ago.

So.  15 years.  1149 entries.  I think the last time I was able to calculate a word count, it was something like 650,000 words, and Infinite Jest is something like 460,000.  I did a book that collected the first three years, the Seattle entries; I keep thinking about a book that collects some of the best essays of the last dozen years, but I’ve got something on all four burners right now.

Anyway, here’s to fifteen years.  I don’t know many other sites that have been around this long.  I wonder where things will be in 2027.

I wasn’t set to go down the military history wormhole and start reading books about Iraq, but while I was going through one of the Henry Rollins journal books, he mentioned Buzzell’s memoir, and I picked up a copy.  Going into it, I knew nothing about it, none of the background, his history, and I never read his blog.  I didn’t know if he was a staunch anti-war type, or a flag-waving republican.  I didn’t even know if he lost his arms and legs from a car bomb, or if he was now a regular commentator on Fox News.  All I knew was that Rollins liked him, and the book was well-blurbed.  Even Vonnegut gave it a good blurb.  So I was hoping for the best.

Then I started the book, and found out that he’d kept a blog during his time in Iraq, and this was a book made from the blog, and my heart sank.  I hate when people repackage blogs into books.  One reason is that blog to book people rarely repeat their performance; they’re almost always one-shot wonders.  And I love to be proven wrong by this, but it’s just an issue with the format.  You put your all into a blog, every part of your life, and you only have one life, so you only get the one book.  Sometimes you get a follow-up, but it’s always the same book, the confusion and the grind of the post-blog-book world, dealing with publishers and press and all of that junk we don’t care about.  I especially don’t like the blog-to-book when I’ve already read the blog in question.  It’s like getting a greatest hits album from a band that’s got every single song you already have from them, and maybe a shitty live version of the one song you can’t stand to listen to anymore.

And yeah, part of my hatred for this is jealousy.  I’ve been blogging since 1997 here.  I did put out a book of the first three years of blog posts here, and nobody bought it.  I think I could probably get a decent book out of the thousand or so entries I have completed here, but I doubt it would sell.  And yeah, you’re saying, “but Jon, you didn’t go to Iraq and get shot at.”  No, I didn’t.  But it isn’t about the action as much as it is the character presenting it.  Buzzell presents himself in a way that makes him very likable to a certain segment of the population, and that translates into a story that people can relate to and that people will follow.  My likability… we’ll leave that for another discussion, although I think you know what my perception of that is already.

All that aside, the book is interesting because it’s hard to figure out who Buzzell is.  He’s this sort of boomerang kid, a former skate punk not into going to college and not into the popular scene like the rest of his high school.  He’s not pro-war or anti-war, but decides to enlist because it’s better than sitting on his parents couch or doing a data-entry job for nine bucks an hour.  You get the idea now that anyone volunteering for the army at a time when it was almost a guarantee to get sent into war was some bible belt Republican who loved God, guns, and George Bush.  And Buzzell shows that this isn’t entirely true, that you could come from some other background.

The story continues through basic training, on to a Stryker brigade at Ft. Lewis, up near Seattle.  A Stryker is a big 8-wheeled combat vehicle, way bigger and more armored than a Hummer, but not as heavy or treaded like a tank.  He worked as an M-240 machine gun operator, first as the guy hauling the ammo, then working up to the guy actually firing the thing.  Buzzell’s writing is solid; his two main influences are Bukowski and Hunter Thompson.  He only has some of the fluid poetry of Bukowski at his best, and it’s not the kind of rapid-fire manic energy Thompson wields, but fans of both authors would settle in well with his prose.  I think the unfortunate part of this blog-t0-book thing is that his earliest posts were not as polished or refined.  It seems like he just started to find his voice by the end of his time in Iraq.  So the additional stuff he wrote afterward, and any articles you find of his post-book are much more excellent in style and quality.  But the writing is solid enough, and it reads fast, so I appreciated that.

The politics of the book are mixed.  In some ways, it seems like Buzzell would be the typical W-following line-toter.  In other ways, you’d think he was some Berkeley radical anarchist more interested in throwing the system.  It’s hard to tell where his loyalties lie, and I have no problem with that, because I’m the same way.  I think if you adhere to the far left, you’re going to have problems reading this, hearing about shooting people and the implied cultural insensitivity here, like Buzzell’s insistence on using the term hajii to refer to any Iraqi people, which some would consider derogatory.  It’s probably a bit too war-porn for the die-hard Nancy Pelosi fan.  On the other hand, it probably contains way too many f-bombs for those of you who read the bible six times an hour.  (That’s a constant complaint in other reviews, and I honestly don’t give a fuck if he uses the word or not.)

Probably the one criticism I had about the book was that in places, the writing just showed us things, and it didn’t tell us about it.  I mean, it seems like, as an Amazon reviewer put it, he started with 50 pages of blog posts and pushed it out to a 350-page book.  And that’s fine, but there were times when he could have told us more about how he felt, or how things really looked.  Like, in the epic firefight scene that’s the keystone to the whole book, there are monumental things described with a single sentence.  Like, “The Pepsi bottling plant across the street was all up in flames.”  That’s it.  You could write at least a paragraph if not ten about the surreal situation of growing up drinking soda and then having that childhood image of the Pepsi logo transplanted to this giant factory in flames, the sounds of the timbers crumbling, the glow of the glass and plastic melting en masse… whatever.  He did a good job of documenting what happened, but didn’t cover as much how those things made him feel.

And maybe that’s deliberate.  I mean, the picture he paints is that he’s this tattoo-covered, party lovin’ dude that uses blackout drinking as a stock response to almost anything, suddenly thrust into war.  Maybe having feelings about the action goes against this tough warrior persona.  And maybe that’s why people identify with it.  I mean, nobody asks Chuck Norris how he feels about punching a guy in the throat, and more than a few people love them some Chuck Norris.  But I look back to some of the military memoirs or creative nonfiction that I like - for example, Tim O’Brien - and they add this third dimension, which makes you feel more like you can relate to the tension and drama.  Maybe he hasn’t had time to contemplate what went on. O’Brien wrote his books years after returning from the shit, and he had the distance; he wasn’t liveblogging the Vietnam War as it happened.  That’s why I’m curious about Buzzell’s act two, what comes after this book.

And yeah, full disclosure: I published John Sheppard’s verisimilitude work, Tales of the Peacetime Army, which I liked a lot more for the depth of the writing, although it wasn’t about the war of the moment, which is probably why it didn’t sell.  (I’m not trying to snake-oil you into buying a copy - go read it for free at the above link if you want.)  John also wrote the most excellent In Between Days, a novel about returning from Iraq and dealing with PTSD and the bleakness of America these days, which I keep saying is one of the best books I’ve read in a long time.  But it also didn’t sell.  (Maybe John needs to get some tattoos and do some blackout drinking.)

All in all, this is a decent and quick read, although it made me have more questions than answers when I finished.  If you never read the blog, and you’re into reading military history, it’s worth a look.  It’s a good book.  Not great, but good.

This is the 1000th post in Tell Me a Story About the Devil history. When I started this experiment in 1997, I never thought about how long it would be around or how many entries I would amass. But here I am, with a nice, round four-digit number to stare at, and maybe I feel some sense of accomplishment, but I mostly think that I still need to write more.

I was a bit curious about word count, so I did a dump of the posts from the database and found that from April 11, 1997 to yesterday, I’ve written about 950,000 words here, which makes sense, seeing as my goal is about a thousand words per entry.  If you divide that up into 400-word printed pages, that’s 2375 pages.  In comparison, the bible is just under 800,000 words, and War and Peace is about 560,000.  The longest book I ever wrote was Summer Rain, which was about 220,000 words.  The longest book I’ve ever read is probably Infinite Jest, which is something like 400 or 500,000 words.

When I started working on this journal, the word blog had not been invented yet. There were a few people doing online journals, and I vaguely remember scattered pieces of them in my mind, bits of peoples’ inner self.  Web rings were really big back then, and I spent some time wandering through those, trying to find like-minded writers.  The mommy blog was not big yet, and neither was the “I graduated from an Ivy League school and now I’m an office assistant” journal.  LiveJournal was a couple of years off, and wordpress wouldn’t be released for another half-decade.  When you did stumble upon a journal site, it usually belonged to a pretty hardcore, dedicated person writing, and the entries were usually longer and more meaningful.  You had to know how to write HTML by hand, and you had to have an account somewhere other than AOL, which eliminated 90% of the online population.  But that type of writing reminded me a lot of the personal zines that came out in the 80s and early 90s, the punks and artists who chronicled their life experiences in little xeroxed books. I always dug that kind of writing, the Cometbus type of zine, and I tried (and failed) to do that on paper.  That’s one of the reasons I started this thing.

I’ve gone through many iterations of the technology used here.  First it was individual posts in HTML, with a shell script that put together an index in a different frame.  (Remember frames?  Ugh.)  Bill Perry helped me with some elisp so I could sit down at emacs every day, do a C-c C-j, and enter my text into a buffer.  For the first few years, I actually telnetted to pair.com, who host 34.216.9.77/, in Pittsburgh, and entered the text there.  Then everything moved to my home machine, at some point when I was in New York.  And then I got rid of the shell script crap and went to PHP.  And after years of ragging on Wordpress, I finally broke down and switched over a couple of years ago.  So everything looks completely different, but all of the old entries remain.

I published a book that contains most of the first three years of this journal, located here. It’s a bit of a hard sell to convince people to buy the paper book for twenty bucks when you can read everything here, and I think the best writing I did was after those first years in Seattle.  But I really wanted a paper copy of all of it, so there it is.  I’ve gone back and forth on doing a second volume of the later stuff, but it’s a huge task, and I’d have to pare down things, as most print-on-demand book binding will only let you do about 800 pages, which is a few thousand less than all of this.

This project was never my life’s goal, and I never set out to make it my sole output for writing.  I never developed a gimmick, and I never thought that if I blogged enough, I would sell a movie idea or get a meeting with someone about a book deal.  None of that stuff existed in 1997, and by the time people were getting famous by blogging about their cooking adventures or their sexual escapades with government officials, I already got jaded on the whole thing.  I always wrote here as a way to warm up to my actual writing, the books, the zine stuff, the short stories.  And I have not been doing as much of it lately, but it’s still an important distinction to me.

I’ve recently started going back to my old entries, because none of the pre-wordpress writing had titles, and I feel a need to get everything titled and tagged, and maybe remove the absolutely dead stuff.  And I’m almost embarrassed by the earliest writing, but there’s some great entries from the mid-00s when I was really firing on all cylinders.  I wish I could write like that every day.  I wish I could write like that today; I feel like taking a nap instead of writing this up.  And I would, if I didn’t have half a kitchen in boxes right now.

So anyway, there you have it.  Thanks to everyone who has read regularly, left comments, and helped me keep things going here.  I always appreciate the input, and I’m glad someone out there does read this stuff.  One of the things that saddens me even more than the fact that the long journal entries of people’s inner conflict have been replaced with 140-character descriptions of people’s lunch and not much more is that people seem much less connected now than when I started this.  I mean, I remember a lot of detailed exchanges with the people I used to read, and it seems like that has all gone away.  I’m hoping it’s a cyclical thing, and someday people will want to respond to emails with more than five words again.  Who knows.

Anyway, thanks again, and here’s hoping the next thousand come easier.

No, a piece of rogue malware did not hit my site. I finally threw in the towel and switched to WordPress as the back-end of this site. I got sick of all of the duct tape maintenance keeping this thing going, and I wanted it to not look like it was created in 1997 (which it was). So here we are. This is still in shakedown mode, so there will be lots of bugs and omissions and other errata. Please leave comments and let me know if this works for you and if it’s more or less readable than the previous version.

I have not imported over any archives prior to this year, and it looks like this will be a monumental cut-and-paste task. I will (famous last words) get to it eventually.

No real news to report right now, and I am in a hurry to finish lunch and get out the door to the grocery store.  I have been busy writing something, although I don’t know what it is.  I’ve also got a “must read immediately” queue of at least four books that are burning a hole in my pocket (mixed metaphor, sorry.)

OK, more later - hopefully this will be more conducive to shorter “blogging” posts mixed within the other longer bits.  I know I hate “blogging”, but I always have quick thoughts or riffs that are too long for twitter and will go stale before I get a spare hour to mess around on here.

BTW create yourself an account and log in - anyone with an email address can comment, but I’ll be going password-only for some rants that fall into the blood and money genres.  (No, not Wall Street vampires.)