LURKER AMNESTY WEEK 2012 IS UPON US!

Just because I like to have a sense of who exactly I'm writing for—especially in this age of reading material in one place and commenting on it elsewhere—I'm declaring  what began this morning at 12:01 a.m. to be LURKER AMNESTY WEEK 2012!

If you're reading this and comment all the time, skip the rest of this post. (Which isn't most of you anymore. Where have y'all gone, my regulars of yore?)

If you're reading this and have never commented, feel free to leave a comment. (And an explanation of why you've never commented, if you'd like. Lately I get the sense it's because no one else is commenting, so it'd seem strange to break the silence by commenting.)

If you're reading this and have never commented and would rather not comment, feel free to send me an email at allmynamessquishedtogether at gmail dot com. Or via Facebook, where I can be found by unsquishing allmynamessquishedtogether.

If you're reading this and have never commented and would rather not comment and don't do email, then I'm not even sure how you're reading this, but feel free to contact me via whatever medium is valued by your people. (I hear ravens are in this year.)

You need not use your real name or even your regular pseudonym, but please do give a sense of who you are, how you got here and why you've stayed, so that I might make this place more hospitable to good folk like you.

You never know, I might be inclined to TAKE REQUESTS if I knew who wanted me write about what around here.

Comments

[pseudon mousie]

yay, comments qua comments.
I lurk because I am typically not interested in commenting!
My all-time favorite moment in this blog remains the hypothetical students writing essays about how "Alan Moore wanted Batman to punch a guy in the face so he told the artist to draw Batman punching a guy in the face." I think I have repeated that sentence, with insufficient context, to most of my friends.

Also, I read your Doctor Who posts (the Weeping Angels one most memorably) before I got into Doctor Who & it was very interesting to re-read them afterwards.

Also I liked the bit about when the library applied multiple thousands of dollars to your fine, although I can understand it was probably not as entertaining to you.

Also, I have in fact read Ulysses (on a dare) and I have completely failed to recognize the plot for at least two Bloomsdays now, which shows how much I "understood" it. I wasn't a Narrative-in-any-media major...

Thanks for blogging!

[John]

Been a reader for a while now, don't quite remember how I find the site. I typically refrain from commenting in blogs, as I find by the time I've put together a coherent argument together in my head I no longer have the motivation to type it all out. As far as other content goes I wouldn't mind a post on your blogging process. For example, how much time does it take you to write a post? Where do you find things to write on? etc..

[GDad]

Comment once in a while, but one time, my comment disappeared, so I got sulky. Mostly, I blame it on the fact that I usually read through RSS.

[Roy Rogers]

History PhD student, here. Been reading for about 3 or 4 years. Came here initially through Edge of the American West, I think. It was a longish time ago so it is difficult to remember exactly.

So: longtime listener, first time caller.

I seldom comment on any blog I follow for I seldom have anything intelligent/valuable to add.

I am a big fan of your work here & out in the rest of the blog world.

[SEK]

Natilo:

I had to give up Unfogged for Lent a few years back and never could get back into the swing of it. (Actually, I just got far too busy at work to follow threads, and felt that my two comment contributions just weren't cutting it. Plus, the visual rhetoric posts take a long time to compose, which is why I'm getting around to the season finale of Mad Men three weeks after it aired.)

Rich:

In part, though, it's that the core content here is more didactic now.

That's absolutely true. As I was trying to compile the list of "Best of..." posts, I realized that the majority of them were didactic, which is just the way my interests have slid over the past few years.

Your intent clearly has and had nothing to do with that, but the prevailing atmosphere can't help but affect how your posts are read.

Agreed, with one addendum: as they became more dull to write, they undoubtedly became more dull to read. I think my drift into the visual rhetoric posts can account for much of that.

HP:

if you felt like breaking down latter 20th c. Italian genre film directors, I'd love to see your take on Mario Bava or early Dario Argento

If I had access to their catalogs, I certainly would. Sadly, the legal means of acquiring them are either unduly burdensome -- driving to UCLA's film library, spending three hours signing papers about what I will and won't write about their films, etc. -- and the illegal means, well, needless to say there aren't a lot of copies floating around out there. I could write about Blowup because I happened to own a copy, but if I don't, I'm out of luck. (There aren't any decent video stores in Corona, that contributes to it. When I was in Portland, I went to one whose name I can't remember, but whose selection I'll never forget. Sigh. If only that job hadn't evaporated.)

[SEK]

John:

As far as other content goes I wouldn't mind a post on your blogging process. For example, how much time does it take you to write a post? Where do you find things to write on?

At this point, it's a slow-and-steady process. I watch something, capture stills from it; contemplate the stills, re-watch the episode; formulate an argument, try to organize it in a manner that's furthered by the visual evidence; etc. So as for how much time it takes for me to write a post, that's hard to pin down, but I will say that the visual rhetoric posts typically sit in a draft folder "fermenting," you might say, for a week or two before I finally publish them. (And yet they still contain stupid mistakes of fact and spelling. Go figure.)

That said, I still write for an hour or two every night, it's just that not everything gets published like it did when I was a younger, more naive blogger.

As for where I find material, well, much of it is from my own syllabi: with the exception of Mad Men and Game of Thrones, all those posts were modified versions of my lesson plans for a particular week. In other words, I try to integrate my professional obligations into my normal life half the time, and just write about whatever generally interests me the other half. For example, I've got numerous half-written posts about episodes of Doctor Who, Sherlock, the most recent Sherlock films, House, etc. that worked perfectly fine as lesson plans, but which I haven't had the time to turn into coherent blog posts.

GDAD:

Comment once in a while, but one time, my comment disappeared, so I got sulky.

Blame TypePad. They've upgraded the commenting system five times in the past five months, and one of the reasons I did this Lurker Amnesty Week was to make sure that people were still able to comment if they wanted to, or whether they'd tired of writing words into a digital abyss.

[Gospodin Dangling-Participle]

I'm here because your posts are generally thought-provoking, or funny, or both. Chiming in on the love for the visual rhetoric (both video and comics); this is my first exposure to it, and it's fascinating. I'm especially taken with the _Watchmen_ posts, because I love to read Alan Moore and it's amazing to watch you pointing out what he's doing.

I don't comment because I came of age in the USENET era, and there's a little voice in the back of my head saying "This comment will cost hundreds if not thousands of dollars to send. Are you sure you want to post?" And generally I do not burn to share my VITALLY IMPORTANT OPINION on stuff.

So, yeah, love your stuff, but I'm going to continue being quiet about it, if that's OK.

[Adam Dunn]

Helpfully, I can't remember how long I've been lurking or what first lured me here. I stay for the visual rhetoric, about which I otherwise have not the foggiest clue, and the less-baffling rest. I'm a - no, have finished being a - PhD student in political theory/philosophy in the UK.

[Zach]

I particularly like hearing about how you're a vortex of misfortune -- a lot of the visual rhetoric posts go over (or more likely around) my head. They're interesting, but I guess I never learned to read films that closely.

Zach
SILVER SPRING, MARYLAND

[Zach]

And I was thwarted on my first captcha attempt by one of those long S's -- you know, "In Congrefs blah blah blah..."

Zach
SILVER SPRING, MARYLAND

[Daniel]

English lit. student here found his way via Ads without Products back in 2008. I've enjoyed immensely digging into the archives and especially the glances back over your shoulder at your grad student self.

Can't find any excuses for not commenting. The conversations that sparked up here (one that comes to mind was on Nausicaa) have made some of the reading that I've most enjoyed.

Anyway, keep up the good work so I can keep shamelessly cribbing from your visual rhetoric posts

[Anna]

Hope I didn't miss all of lurker amnesty week as it's past midnight. I used to read Edge of the American West, and followed a link here (probably the office sex). The posts I enjoy the most are the ones about your real life. I don't comment because I'm shy.

[Big W]

I don't know how I got here. I lurked regularly for a while, then wandered off. I lost my bookmarks for a while. I was working on my dissertation in philosophy and looking for a job while you were working on your dissertation. Maybe that's how I got here? Probably why I left. I seem to remember some posts about dissertation writing, or not writing. I don't know why I come around, but this does not bother me. Well, the obvious: smart, funny, often surprising. Beyond that, I don't worry about it. I have a friend who can tell you the genealogy of every punk band from the late-70's onward. He's developed an elaborate taxonomy, can name the order, family, genus of every band. He could write a book on music, if he were the kind of guy to write a book. It would be a good book, too, but I wouldn't read it. I like to tease him, to tell him he might like listening to some of the music once in a while. He gets annoyed, but I tell him that sometimes he should just put needle on the record and turn it up.