CUE BLOGWIDE STRIKE ACTION

(Many people want to know: "Are you kidding?  No new posts until five hundred comments?"  The answer: I am not kidding.  There will be no new posts until there are five hundred comments on this thread.)

There will be no new posts on Acephalous until there are 500 (five hundred) comments on this one.  The person who posts the five hundredth comment wins the honor of suggesting the topic of the subsequent post.  Any comments containing the number four, a dollar sign or the open bracket/fancy-open bracket will not count toward the total, as those keys are missing from my keyboard.  Suggested discussion topics can be found below the fold.

• Possible reasons for this BLOGWIDE STRIKE ACTION.
• Potential topics for my next post.
• Whether there should be a mandatory word minimum and/or maximum for it.
• Which suggested topic could do the most damage to my academic career and why.
• How much easier it would be to reach 500 comments if LCC commented here.
• The weather and how nice/terrible it has been lately.
• Whether this is a strike-action or a hostage-taking.
• The possibility that 500 comments will not be written, and I'll be forced to either 1) write them myself or 2) close shop.
• Whether comments violating the spirit of the strike/contest should be counted.
• The fact that I am the author of a study.
• The fact that in the '90s when Kurt Vonnegut lived next door to Keith Hernandez, Vonnegut would greet him with a hearty "You're Keith Hernandez!"  They would often discuss Hernandez's favorite writer, Victor Hugo, and his favorite Hugo novel, The Toilers of the Sea.
• Rich's pre-suggestion: "Look at this horror. Do clients of sex workers really base their reviews on, in part, whether the sex worker has a Ph.D.? That seems exceptionally perverse. When I was a grad student, the local free paper had a long-running sex chat ad with some line about "We will talk about any subject", and so of course someone joked that he should call and ask about a problem with his dissertation. But in this case, maybe it really would work."

Comments

[Rich Puchalsky]

13. Luckily, most blogging platforms are becoming more supportive of the comment-as-blog. It is now becoming standard for each one to have its own link. It is less common, though useful, for each to have its own number. They are less often dumped wholesale and lost than they used to be.

[Rich Puchalsky]

15 (-1). And now, since I have to work, that concludes this run of the advantages of comment-as-blog. I think that I hit most of the high points -- perhaps there was a bit less about the pitfalls of "trying to build up a rep" that commenting largely avoids. Still, I think those are the basics.

[Scott K]

Well, I'd be lax in my duties if I weren't to post at least one comment to bring about the Return of Acephalous. :)

[Vance Maverick]

"Scott K", you sound suspiciously like a claque.

[Rich Puchalsky]

OK, I've run out of the type of energy needed to work, and the rest of my family is asleep. And I come back to see one additional comment? Sure, Scott, Atrios and Unfogged get 500 comment threads, but that may be a local rather than global capability.

Well, if you're going on strike, I might as well fully set up shop in this thread. Two of the disadvantages of the comment thread as blog are that one's writings do not have titles, and they are not all in one place. I might as well ensure that this thread will eventually get to 500 by commenting with a link to each comment that I make elsewhere, with a title, a sort of trackback for comments.

If anyone else wants something more interesting, they can comment on the sex worker Ph.D. article. I would have thought that would have been a sure comment-getter. Didn't Bitch Ph.D. once think about being a prostitute? In a not-forced-to-by-economic-necessity kind of way.

[Karl Steel]

Whether comments violating the spirit of the strike/contest should be counted.

What's the spirit of the strike/contest? Have to determine that first, yes? Which means, I suppose, determining your motivation. Others have suggested motivations, but I wouldn't dare to suggest for fear of violating your secret, lurking rules.

[Rich Puchalsky]

Scull-Bashing: the final fragments?

[Rich Puchalsky]

Denialists at the deathbed: pitiful crossed-out one-to-three

[CR]

I have this sense that I might have really troubled a few people with that comment that I wrote in the interminable thread about grad student blogging. I still think I'm right. I'm thinking about hanging it up too. It feels very stale to me, all of this. Just saying...

[Rich Puchalsky]

15. If you ever get tired of it, you never have to announce that commenting is getting stale. You just stop.

[Rich Puchalsky]

Cockburn's weird contrarianism: (bad Chris, no comment links)

[Nate]

Scott is the winner's suggestion _binding_ or will you merely take their proposal into consideration?

[Rich Puchalsky]

Footnoted in the future: hey, it's the first cross-Acephalous link

(I don't think that's against the spirit of the strike/contest.)

[Rich Puchalsky]

Some people ruin everything: performance artists outdone

[Joseph Kugelmass]

Rich, I think what you're doing is very brave. Scott, I think what you're doing is very understandable, since I did something very similar, though in my case it was more Werther than Germinal.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Sisyphus: Yes, a sympathy strike is required, lest you be branded a scab.

Rich: You're doing the Lord's work here, but you can't do it alone. We need everyone to pitch in and help.

CR: You're pitching in to say you don't want to pitch in. I'll file that under "V" for "Victory."

Nate: It's binding.

Also, Rich has stated many times that he can't be a blogger himself; this thread's proving the existence of another sort of blogging, though ... a pseudo-blogging, which exists only in comments and for comments. I think we're witnessing the birth of a new paradigm.

[CR]

(clarification: I didn't mean this in particular or SEK is stale. I meant the bsphere, our part of it, in general, or so it feels to me...)

[Gary]

I'm exhausted at the moment and have to save my remaining energy to watch an NBA playoff game (and curse that damned Steve Nash repeatedly), so I can't offer anything more than the fact that this comment does its own small part on the road to 500, meaning I have accomplished one thing today that doesn't involve bankruptcy appeals or insurance policies. Way to go, me.

[geek history]

Why do I have so many papers due at the same time? Do professors have meetings with much maniacal laughter and phrases like "and they will cry" and "let's act like we think they have nothing else due but our paper"?

And is it a bad sign when one Professor suggests 'administration change' before the final because the final was scheduled at 830 in the morning for a 930 class?

And we could have a blogstrike until someone buys us all wrists braces for the carpal tunnel we all have.

[geek history]

Rise word count rise! I command thee!

Dammit where the hell is that demon to sell my soul to when I need him?