Though the current project started as a series of posts charting my grief journey after the death of my mother, I am no longer actively grieving. Now, the blog charts a conversation in living, mainly whatever I want it to be. This is an activity that goes well with the theme of this blog (updated 2018). The Sense of Doubt blog is dedicated to my motto: EMBRACE UNCERTAINTY. I promote questioning everything because just when I think I know something is concrete, I find out that it’s not.
Hey, Mom! The Explanation.
Here's the permanent dedicated link to my first Hey, Mom! post and the explanation of the feature it contains.
A Sense of Doubt blog post #3612 - Crash Dive: Go Deep, Run Silent, Get it Done
So if you have read my blog before, even a little, you know that I glean a great deal of content from one of my top five favorite authors in all genres: Warren Ellis.
Warren writes a chatty, warm, thought-provoking newsletter called Orbital Operations, you can subscribe here:
Letters about the creative life by Warren Ellis, a writer from England. Was this forwarded to you? Subscribe here.
I can call him Warren because that's how he signed an email when we chatted a bit. Just because some people accuse me of being too familiar with people I don't know. I wouldn't say I know Warren privately, despite a couple of emails in 20 years, but I know his public persona from his newsletter, which comes out weekly on Sundays, and sometimes he shuts it down for a while.
It's been shut down for about a month.
I expect to hear from Warren soon.
His description hear of a run silent/run deep scenario resonated with me. Often to get a lot of work done, I have to shut out all distractions, all other tasks, and then bear down and barrel through until I am done.
Like Warren's issues with his weekly newsletter pulling him out of his work zone as a story teller, my blog similarly gets in the way of my productivity in other arenas. Unlike Warren, I have never shut down the blog since I started the daily regimen back up in 2015, after a year off since the the conclusion of the t-shirts blog daily schedule in March of 2014. As of July 6th this year (2025), I will have maintained a daily posting regimen for TEN YEARS straight, and as of now, I do not see myself stopping any time soon.
That said, I do fall behind. I am behind right now as I type these words for this blog entry, dated Tuesday, January 7th, and it's Thursday January 9th right now. My days behind record is 13 days, which was back in 2022.
This days behind thing and other blog stuff is described here:
I have put systems into place to prevent myself from falling 13 days behind ever again (I hope).
I have "Low Power Mode" into which I shift the blog when it needs to run on auto-pilot, sharing reprints (there's currently 3611 posts available to reprint), a simple share (as opposed to the usual share of someone else's writing when, like here, I add commentary), and my THAT ONE THING feature, which is usually some image and then just a few remarks about it.
Sometimes I also put the blog in vacation mode, which means I pre-publish a week or two of posts and don't always push them to social media as they publish. But they are still published and the daily regimen is preserved and continued.
One thing I have learned that puts me behind is scheduling an entry that's going to take a fair amount of work, thinking I will have time to do that work, and then I keep NOT finding the time. That's why I am behind right now as tomorrow (yesterday in reality) by the date of this entry is David Bowie's birthday, and I want to share a lot of Twitter posts about that, wishing him what would have been a happy 78th birthday. But it's one day. I will have that posted soon.
I have learned to derail -- as in remove from the schedule -- posts that are not getting done and may not get done, which is why I have two dozen or more posts that keep being pushed back from when they are scheduled, some have been in the works for years, which in many cases, makes them much less relevant.
This delay method is much the same as how I compose my master to do list in categories: immediate must get done or daily tasks, short term goals, long-ish goals, and large projects for "some day."
Like how I decided to sit down and do this now. I prioritized things that I can do later and moved this task into the NOW position. I want to catch up on my blog before a meeting in about 45 minutes.
Anyway, read Warren's smart post and his shared links via Michael Moorcock (whom he calls Mike) for GETTING SHIT DONE.
Thanks for tuning in.
Emergency Power
Orbital Operations for 16 June 2024
OPERATIONS
CRASH DIVE
I have written scripts, outlines, development documents, notes, plans and schemes, and reconstructed the patio area for my exercise. I’m not even going to list everything that’s going on in sekrit PROJECT CODENAME form.
I need to finish off what is probably a couple hundred pages of stuff in the next three weeks. Almost all of it is expanding detailed notes into script or rewriting extant material, but that’s obviously still a lot.
I love writing these letters, but, as I’m sure I’ve said, sometimes I have to crash everything off. Doing them pulls me out of the zone of pure storytelling life, and sometimes that’s okay, but I don’t have the spare time to take breaks for a few weeks. Just executed another contract, and I have a couple of hard deadlines for the end of the month, and I’m now in active development on a crazy thing I’m doing with a new friend, and… well, more stuff.
I’m in my happy place, but I can’t be distracted now or I’ll blow deadlines and let people down.
The lesson for creators here is maybe that it’s okay to down-periscope, crash-dive and make your mileage underwater. There is a sense that one has to be always visible on social media or some other internet instance, especially in times when going dark for a week means a lot of people might instantly forget about you. It’s a fast and shallow world. This is your reminder that it’s doing the work that matters, not doing the dance.
I have a feeling that it was Mike Moorcock who once commented that the person in the bar who tells everyone that they’re a writer probably isn’t a writer, because a writer would be somewhere writing. And Mike used to write a book a week, so he’s allowed to make the observation.
(He once said to me, “I used to have a great time during the good times,” and famously knocked out at least one of his fantasy novels to pay his Harrods food and sundries bill.)
- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2501.07 - 10:10
- Days ago: MOM = 3476 days ago & DAD = 132 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
A Sense of Doubt blog post #2932 - New Peter Gabriel - "Panopticom" - Music Monday for 2302.27
It's March 13th as I post this. That's stardate 2303.13. That's a new days behind record, sadly.
Between work and then getting a terrible stomach flu, I have been either too busy to devote time to the blog or too sick. And, for the record, though I was going to go to school and hold exam sessions that I am not required to hold, I chose not to go, less because I am still not feeling well but because my wife has contracted the stomach flu evil thing, and I am staying here to care for her.
Given all these problems maintaining my blog schedule makes me question the good sense of attempting to maintain a daily schedule that I cannot always keep. Makes sense right?
And yet, I do not always fall behind, or at least, I do not keep setting new records of how far behind I am on the blog work. Still, one would think I might abandon the daily schedule.
And yet, also, I am not giving up. I will catch up again.
Actually, I have the next six posts already "in the can" as they say in the music industry, and so I can get closer to current pretty quickly.
After all, my goal is to get caught up, get ahead, and have the luxury to produce some original work more often and make the blog more sustainable.
In any case, now, new record. Given that yesterday's post has been published for some time though I am just now pushing it to social media that one does not count. So, starting from today's post, new record:
new record = 15 days behind.
Today's the 27th and tomorrow the 28th, so two days in February, and then 13 days in March (as I am very close to publishing time on the day I write this), and so by my count that's 15 days.
I am happy with this post.
New Peter Gabriel music is an amazing thing. Very cool. Peter Gabriel has been one of my very favorite artists since buying his first solo album without knowing much of anything about it or him and falling in love with "Solsbury Hill." This purchase came during my post-finding-of-Pink-Floyd exploration into other artists, which included Bruce Springsteen, David Bowie, Gary Numan, Kraftwerk, Kansas, the Cars, Steely Dan, Talking Heads, Rickie Lee Jones, and additional Pink Floyd.
This is the first of the new songs by Gabriel that was released in January. There have been two since that I will surely feature separately, later this month (to get current), and then I can re-post them all monthly along with Gabriel's on the full moon schedule.
Panopticom (Bright-Side Mix) by Peter Gabriel, released on the full moon 6 January 2023. This is the first song to be revealed from the album i/o.
The Bright-Side Mix is by Mark 'Spike' Stent and the track is accompanied by a cover image by the artist David Spriggs.
Written and produced by Peter Gabriel, Panopticom was recorded at Real World Studios in Wiltshire and The Beehive in London.
‘The first song is based on an idea I have been working on to initiate the creation of an infinitely expandable accessible data globe: The Panopticom,’ says Gabriel. ‘We are beginning to connect a like-minded group of people who might be able to bring this to life, to allow the world to see itself better and understand more of what’s really going on.’
Musically Panopticom drives along powered by the engine-room of long-time collaborators Tony Levin, David Rhodes and Manu Katché, underpinned by haunting electronics from Brian Eno. Additional backing vocals from Ríoghnach Connolly of The Breath. The lyric is, in part, inspired by the extraordinary work of three groups, Forensic Architecture, Bellingcat and the Gabriel co-founded pioneering human rights organisation WITNESS.
The release of Panopticom on the full moon is no coincidence and in true Gabriel fashion the approach for i/o will be a little different from the norm. The lunar phases will guide the release plan in 2023, with a new song revealed each full moon.
‘Some of what I’m writing about this time is the idea that we seem incredibly capable of destroying the planet that gave us birth and that unless we find ways to reconnect ourselves to nature and to the natural world we are going to lose a lot. A simple way of thinking about where we fit in to all of this is looking up at the sky… and the moon has always drawn me to it.’
Each new release of music will come with a specific piece of art, ‘we’ve been looking at the work of many hundreds of artists,’ says Gabriel, and Panopticom features the work ‘Red Gravity’ by David Spriggs.
‘It was the theme of surveillance that connected me with the work of David Spriggs because he’d done a piece relating to that. David does this amazing stuff using many layers of transparencies so you get these strange creations with a real intensity to them. Part of what he does is imagine what art might look like a few years in the future and then try and create accordingly and I think he’s done that very successfully in this particular piece.’
The Panopticom (Dark-Side Mix) has been released today, 21 January, on the new moon.
The plan is for all the songs from i/o – that are released each month – to come with both a Bright-Side and Dark-Side Mix, with releases on the full and new moons. This Dark-Side Mix is by Tchad Blake, who previously mixed Peter’s Up album.
Peter explains things further:
I’m lucky to have two of the world’s best mix engineers; Tchad Blake and Mark ‘Spike’ Stent, working with me on the music from i/o. Rather than choosing only one of their mixes to release I have decided that people should be able to hear all the great work that they are both doing.
I intend to ask them to mix each month’s song, with Spike’s mixes being called the Bright-Side and Tchad’s the Dark-Side. Whether you hear the Bright-Side or the Dark-Side first will vary each full moon, depending on the order we decide to release them.
I know this amount of detail is not for everyone, but I hope those that are into their music production will enjoy their different interpretations – pg.
Peter Gabriel's Full Moon update for January 2023, where he discusses the launch of Panopticom, the first track to be taken from the forthcoming album i/o.
Listen to the full track Panopticom (Bright Side Mix) here: https://lnk.to/PG21
‘The first song is based on an idea I have been working on to initiate the creation of an infinitely expandable accessible data globe: The Panopticom,’ says Gabriel. ‘We are beginning to connect a like-minded group of people who might be able to bring this to life, to allow the world to see itself better and understand more of what’s really going on.’
Written and produced by Peter Gabriel, Panopticom was recorded at Real World Studios in Wiltshire and The Beehive in London. The track is accompanied by a cover image by the artist David Spriggs.
- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2302.27 - 10:10
- Days ago = 2796 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
A Sense of Doubt blog post #2891 - Why Blog? - SoD Reprint of #2037 from 2020
As I write these words, it is January 25th as I prepare to send this blog post back in time to January 17th, which for those like me who are math challenged puts me eight days behind, which is not my record.
Record days behind is THIRTEEN as revealed in this post:
I just made a category: "Blog record Days Behind" category to track this number of days behind thing.
I originally created this blog to go with a presentation I gave at school on use of blogging in education.
For me, that's mostly show and tell. I always loved show and tell.
So this post that I am reprinting is kind of a conglomerate of different bloggy things that I had done that felt worth sharing as I discussed different ways I use blogging to learn and ways I use it to share what I have learned (sometimes that's teaching and sometimes it's more like show and tell).
This reprint just rose to the surface of some searching by random chance and so as part of an effort to catch up to current, here it is.
Thanks for tuning in.
Originally published on Tuesday, September 15, 2020 in the following:
A Sense of Doubt blog post #2037 - Why blog? Blog Matters - Blogging Presentation for LCC In-Service
Welcome to my presentation about BLOGGING and it use in education.
As described here:
I will probably tell the longer version stories of my blog work later in this presentation; however, to start it's important to know, three bloggy things:
1. SENSE OF DOUBT:This is my main blog. As of this writing, I am on post #2037. Though I started the blog in 2007, my posts were very intermittent until I started making daily posts on July 6th, 2015.
2. 365 T-SHIRTS:Prior to taking up a daily broadcast schedule on SENSE OF DOUBT. I posted daily about t-shirts from March 22, 2013 through March 21, 2014: that's 365 days.
3. RANDITION SWOOM: My failed attempt to be a "content provider" and monetize my blog with Google Adsense.
WHAT'S A BLOG?
The word "blog" comes from the original "web log" as in an online journal.
I am not going to talk much about Word Press, though it's a great platform to use. The main benefit to Word Press is being able to host it on one's own site, which has been a goal of mine for a few years (both my own site and migrating from Blogger to my own Word Press instance).
This presentation contains three parts:
Part One: Why blog? How will it enhance your career goals as an instructor? Part Two: What the blog looks like: tons of examples Part Three: How to create a blog with Blogger part of Google's Product Suite
WHY BLOG? - Blogging demonstrates a commitment to lifelong learning. - Blogging is publishing and thus a professional development activity. - Blogging can be used to enhance and support instruction in many ways in all disciplines. - And blogging is just FUN and as my students will tell you, I am always trying out the FUN in the key of FUNK (the FUN in FUNKY).
- Blogging demonstrates a commitment to lifelong learning.
We are committed to teaching our students to be independent, empowered lifelong learners.
Isn't it incumbent upon us to model that commitment in our own lives?
There are many ways to show students what lifelong learning looks like, but one way is maintaining a publication presence that demonstrates our own self-education, Blogging is a great way to publically display our learning.
I frequently explain on my blog that it is not my teaching but my study (though sometimes IT IS my TEACHING very directly).
What I write here is not my teaching, but my study; it is not a lesson for others, but for me. And yet it should not be held against me if I publish what I write. What is useful to me may also by accident be useful to another. Moreover, I am not spoiling anything, I am only using what is mine. And if I play the fool, it is at my expense and without harm to anyone. For it is a folly that will die with me, and will have no consequences.
As such, my blog is all about the things I am interested in. I group my subject matter into categories.
FREQUENCY
One of the most abundant categories is comic books (285), but there's others that are over 100, such as computers (153); Warren Ellis, from whom I cribbed the "not my teaching but my study" line (106), science fiction (160), women in music (129), science (118), politics (140), David Bowie (114), and even school (195).
Skewing these numbers is the fact that they include the unpublished as well as the published blog posts but it is a very fair depiction of my main interest categories.
Though I do care about LBGTQ issues, Antisemetism, and opposing violence, there's other factors operating in why I posted 114 times about David Bowie and only 21 times about LGTQ issues through my current 2037 SENSE OF DOUBT posts. If I started a daily LBGTQ post as I did a Daily Bowie post after the British artists died in 2016, I would probably have over 100 posts about homophobia, trans rights, and gay pride. SHOW THE LEARNING
What is true is that when I want to learn something or have learned something, I make a blog posts for it.
Case in point, this blog post.
But also demonstrated in so many of the 2000+ posts not just on this blog but the 365 on the t-shirts blog. I love learning. I am always learning, and I like to share what I am learning.
Or when studying MATHS (as the Brits say), I had a COOL study room with a separate monitor in SANGREN HALL at WESTERN MICHIGAN UNIVERSITY, and I would camp out and study (and hold teacher office hours for any students who needed to chat). Often my posts were short -- because, studying! -- but I would insert things to remember, such as derivative rules and the unit circle.
I remember coming home from work one day, and my wife had been watching some great TED talks. She insisted that I sit down and watch videos by Jill Bolte Taylor and Susan Cain. I did, and they became part of this post:
I have lost count of the number of times I have recommended those videos to friends, family, colleagues, and most of all students. Sure I could just share links, but my blog post features a quick one link way to share, a page that contains additional content, and the possibility that the person will continue to explore my blog after consuming the content on that page.
This BLUE BLUE post is just one example of many. If you're learning, the content will come.
- Blogging is publishing and thus a professional development activity.
At various schools, for which I had to log so many professional development activities per year, I always listed my blog as it is considered publishing and a daily blog is too much of a commitment not to list in professional things I am doing.
I AM A WRITER WHO WRITES
I am a writer. I was a paid and published writer long before I was a teacher, as I wrote a column on magic performance and magicians for the local paper -- The Richland Journal -- from 1978-1980 and published in various magazines devoted to magic and magicians (you know, like Houdini and not like Aleister Crowley).
Thus, blogging came naturally to my wheelhouse because by the time I started I had worked in journalism since 1994 writing news, features, and arts reviews as well as a column on comic books from 1995-1997. I also wrote for research book companies, trade magazines, and assorted other book publishers.
As a writer and a teacher of writing, it was important to me to be a teacher of writing who is also an active writer who writes and publishes not just someone who claims to be a writer and never or rarely publishes.
RE-PUBLISH
At one point in my blogging regimen, always on the lookout for more posts on a daily schedule, I started re-publishing some of this content from my days as a journalist, though I still have so much more content that I have not shared.
Furthermore, if my blog supports my teaching, demonstrates my lifelong learning, and shows off some original writing, then I feel strongly that it counts as a professional development activity.
Granted the content on my blog is not ALWAYS original because I do a lot of sharing. I must do sharing if I intend to keep up a daily schedule and some dedication to substantial content every day.
Also, granted, some people are not teaching writing, but most disciplines consider writing and publishing as a professional activity that everyone must do. People from all disciplines can use a blog to enhance their professional development.
Lastly,WRITING SAMPLES.
As I apply for jobs, I have used the blog to collect writing samples to share with prospective employers and have plans to (someday) do some other kinds of writing (like technical writing) to show what I can do.
For instance, I created a WRITING SAMPLES category (linked there), which contains five samples of writing that shows a variety of my skills, starting with a writing self-inventory.
- Blogging can be used to enhance and support instruction in many ways in all disciplines.
I am going to give a full tour of this idea in my WHAT TO BLOG part when I show tons of examples.
In short, a few ideas here.
As stated before, I wanted the blog to be a work of a writer writing as much as possible. One thing I tried to do early on was reviews of things, mainly things I was reading, such as books like
Between 1954 and 1956, more than half of the comic books on the newsstand had disappeared (Hadju, pg. 326). The number of titles dropped from 650 to 250. By the end of 1955, EC discontinued all its comic books, keeping only Mad, which became Mad Magazine, since magazines were not subjected to the same regulations as comic books by the CMAA. Five other publishers went out of business completely: Star, Sterling, Toby Press, United Features Syndicate, and Eastern Color. "Everybody was punished," said Carmine Infantino (who died last year as I featured in my T-shirt blog in shirt #20 devoted to the Flash). "It was like the plague. The work dried up, and you had nowhere to go because comic were a dirty word, You couldn't say you were a comics artist, and you had nothing to put in your portfolio. If you said you drew comic books, it was like saying you were a child molester. It was a nightmare, especially for a lot of people who got into comic in the first place because, you know, that was where we could go" (as quoted in Hadju, pg. 326).
And yet, Mad Magazine survived the tumult and even thrived as the few comics that remained held their ground awaiting the resurgence that would start in 1961 with The Fantastic Four. Robert Crumb expressed the power of Mad well: "it was really the coming together of everything that was great in EC and some of the other comics before the Code... Here was a publication making fun of highly respected American institutions in the square, military, post-World War II environment and doing so in a crude, weird way... It countered all the stifling, goody-two-shoes fifties-propaganda totalitarian vision that was put forth in the media, the schools, and everything. A big part of its appeal to me is that it was so strange and esoteric and outside of this mainstream" (as quoted in Hadju pg.333).
or comic books, which arrive at the store weekly, reviewed each week:
First up is the new "Ms. Marvel." The Marvel Comics Company must renew trademarks, and with the previous Ms. Marvel (who has been known by many names) taking the mantle of Captain Marvel (a smart move given her history), it's time for a new Ms. Marvel. Nerd magnet Stephen Colbert satirized a reaction in a link farther below, shared by Charles Skaggs.
FROM WORD OF THE NERD ONLINE (see link):
Ms. Marvel will center on 16-year-old Kamala Khan, a Muslim-American teenager living in Jersey City, New Jersey. Like any teenager, all of her opportunities are in front her and she is full of potential, but her parents’ high expectations come with tons of pressure and has led Kamala to carve out a future that she has little interest in.
“At her core, Kamala is just a 16-year-old girl, exploring the many facets of her identity when she is suddenly bestowed with super-human powers that send her on the adventure of a lifetime,” says Marvel Comics Editor In Chief Axel Alonso.
The series, and its central character, are brought to life by an all-star creative team, led by acclaimed novelist and multi-Eisner nominee, G. Willow Wilson (Air, Mystic, Alif The Unseen). Her writings about modern religion have appeared in such outlets as New York Times’ Magazine and The Atlantic. Critically-acclaimed artist Adrian Alphona (Runaways, Uncanny X-Force) brings his vivid artistry to the project capturing the vibrantly rich and kinetic world in which Kamala lives. DAILY IS TOUGH ON ORIGINALITY
It's not possible to maintain a high-output of original content on a daily basis. In fact, I read too much to even keep up on book reviews let alone comic books. Though I do keep my GOOD READS updated.
DIRECTLY ENHANCE INSTRUCTION
Over the last five years of doing SENSE OF DOUBT daily, I have decided to directly enhance my instruction by composing assignments, lessons, and supplemental material right on the blog and sending students to my blog to view the material. As I stated before this has the added benefit of encouraging them to look around and explore if they are interested. If not, then not.
For years, I made my blog a thing outside of my teaching jobs. I talked about it a lot, described new posts to students, and encouraged them to go check out my posts, including links in emails and announcements, but I never REQUIRED them to look at the blog.
However, in the last couple of years, as I have used the blog more and more to share essential content, I have more or less required them to look at it.
Obviously, the teaching of writing is best supported by creating written things for students to view.
Of course, my posts are about WRITING and the teaching of writing, such as a series on writing persuasive essays, the cornerstone of composition classes, culminating in a post collecting past posts and my new video series (urging students to also subscribe to my YOU TUBE channel):
However, I have also shared computer science and math content on my blog, which is much the same as what teachers of those disciplines could share. More examples in my examples section, but here's one. For instance, when learning things about math, short math puzzlers and lessons are great ways to enhance study of math and/or science.
In addition to directly supporting instruction, all the additional information and learning support the direct instruction well much like my past recommendations to students, such as "hey I just created this cool post on Gödel and Time and the Modern Mind, with some original content and a great deal of sharing. Check it out."
I use my blog to collect videos or host cool videos that I want to share with students, such as MATH:
Sometimes, with the first link, I share A WHOLE BUNCH OF VIDEOS in a single blog post, or, as in the second link directly above, I share just one video (actually three but fewer than the Calculus one).
I vet the videos and often curate contents, directing students to the best and interspersing other lessons and comments.
As you can see, you can INSERT the videos in the blog page itself for direct access, which is what I have done with the videos I have created as a way to collect and manage them outside of YOU TUBE or CANVAS.
AND PSYCHOLOGY
And as for even more disciplines, as I teach some psychology in my English classes, here's one example:
I am adding this note after the presentation before re-publication for 2009.15 at 10:10 a.m. Pacific.
Proving my point about narcissism, I neglected to add how I have used blogs as assignments for student's to share their work with me, each other, and the whole world via the Internet.
Students start to think more about audience and how their writing will be perceived once it could be read by literally anyone, even people far away they do not know, have not met, and likely never will.
This reality sunk in with me early in my years as a journalist when, in a restaurant, I saw someone reading something I had written in the newspaper. Suddenly, I was interested in checking the circulation numbers versus the number of actual readers within that circulation versus those who might actually read what I read, or even part of it, and that last number was still in the thousands.
My blog views are not so high. I joke that I have two readers, one of whom is my wife's aunt, whom I have never met, but who loves everything I do. The other should be someone closer to me, like my dad, my sister, my wife, my best friend, but none of these people have time to read my daily meanderings. I feel blessed and honored when anyone reads anything I post at all let alone comments on it (PLEASE LEAVE ME A COMMENT!!). My all time page views in thirteen years of writing this blog and five years of writing daily are just at 203, 139, and many of those are web-scraping bots from Russia and China. Last month, I had 2343 page views. My high for the month so far is 253 views on September 8th. The WEEKLY HODGE PODGE scores the best each week with 79 views so far since Saturday.
Even so, I do think about audience and mention you readers when I am not writing directly to my Mom in HEY MOM. I found that my students thought about their readers as well in new and different ways than work that never leaves the class room.
Most often, I have used blogs to have students post self introductions of themselves to me and classmates, like these:
Iman Ayad - Concordia University student - Fall 2018
In many semesters/quarters, I have had students use the blog that they set up to share several other assignments, ongoing journals about their research project and related studies, and reading journals for Humanities or literature classes.
As some faculty colleagues brainstormed in the presentation session, the blog would be ideal for an ongoing semester long project in which a journal is a good fit or final presentation, the results of which, once made public to the world, could be of use to people at other schools who might find it in a Google search.
Also, sometimes, I post excellent student work to my blog (with permission), such as here... okay I lied. I can't find any links for that. But I know I have done it.
In short, lots of ways to deliver instruction TO STUDENTS and to receive submissions FROM STUDENTS.
OH and before I forget, the blog is a much better place to stash videos that I want to show in class as my YOU TUBE playlists are a vast overgrown, wilderness AND Google does not provide a quick way to search playlist by name.
So, things like this (which if you have not seen it, this video is GREAT):
It never hurts to take a break for fun. Though I write about comic books all the time, there are also cartoons or shorter form comics that regularly make an appearance on the blog, such as
Or just a video clip from Looney Tunes that I chose to show in class one day because it is sort of about pronouns, and so why not make it a blog post and then I can always find it quickly and easily:
My parody of people use GO FUND ME and other similar trends for reasons I find dubious at best.
me and my wife in Scotland in May 2015, Crieff, Scotland
Or my ongoing series about THINGS THAT SUCK (or THINGS THAT PISS ME OFF), in which one of my favorite things to do is to analyze signs that just don't make sense.
I over hear someone say that comic books have been going downhill for the last ten years in the Longview game store, and I vehemently disagree, and so I write this:
To help me manage, the rigors of broadcasting posts on a daily basis, I invented weekly features that I could depend on for content or bump from the schedule when the world presents something more pressing, like today is MUSICAL MONDAY but more on my shenanigans to post this blog entry AND a Musical Monday later.
MUSICAL MONDAY
I love music.
As my students will either woefully attest (those who leave in their ear buds as I soundtrack the start of class) or jubilantly (what is that track you played to start the break?), I have always played music in my class rooms, going back to the late 1980s when I started teaching and lugged a BOOM BOX into the class room and played early PE (Public Enemy) and was told "that's not music" or "shut that S%^$ off" by students that about ten years later are listening to Eminem.
And so the longest running and least bumped weekly feature is MUSICAL MONDAY in which I feature SOME MUSIC each week, either some new ambient purchases, a single video/song, or a mix that I will play in the class room. I have made so many music mixes that I made a post last year of the best of the best and a separate list of school ones.
My initial idea was to reserve a single day each week to post some new and original fiction or poetry work, which has proven to be challenging (mostly impossible), though I have written ABOUT story plans, such as
So, if you have been on social media for a minute, you know that THURSDAY is THROWBACK THURSDAY.
This seemed like a good feature for me because initially I planned to just post a photo and a little bit of text each day -- K.I.S.S.
The fact that the average blog entry is probably well over 500 words and takes multiple scroll pushes on the wheel to get through the whole thing is a testament to my own peculiar illness of overdoing it, overwriting it, over-committing to it, and never being satisfied.
As my students will tell you, it's very true that when I die they will carve into my head stone near where some of my ashes are buried the phrase:
CHRIS TOWER, HE WANTED MORE
So, I started THROWBACK THURSDAY as one does with a photo and some text.
And then, I abandoned the THROWBACK THURSDAY angle and made it THE WEEKLY HODGE PODGE or gallimaufry, which is word derived from the French for "stew," like hodge podge comes from the UK and Nova Scotia for mutton soup but is a jumble, a mixture, as the Taoists name it: the ten thousand things.
Lately the HODGE-PODGE has become an outlet for my activism about the Covid-19 pandemic, the 2020 election, Black Lives Matter, Police Brutality, and whatever else I dump into it each week (Baseball, space news, or when GEORGE RR MARTIN will finish the fr**t b&^%ling sixth book THE WINDS OF WINTER).
When the pandemic began and we were in quarantine at home, shelter in place, stay home; stay safe, publishers could no longer publish comic books that are published and released to comic book shops every week.
And so I took my frequent posting about comic books to remind readers to support local businesses, especially comic book shops, but also to remind my self to take time for my number one selfcare activity: sports on the TV and reading a stack of comic books!
Now, for months and months, there was no sports unless I wanted to play old games, which I did sometimes. I say "play" as I am reading comic books so not quite "watching"as using sports as comforting and nostalgic background noise. Football is best for this ambience as there is so little action and many many breaks between minimal action.
And so, because I am quite insane, in addition to my daily blog post for HEY MOM (more on this below), I started posting a DAILY BOWIE feature to commemorate my favorite musical artist and keep this up for 70 days straight and 82 days in all.
If you choose to make a blog and use BLOGGER, there's all sorts of doodads and gadgets you can add to the design that will appear on every page.
Here's a quick rundown of what I have populated on SENSE OF DOUBT:
Top, banner explanation of the blog and its name
link to the first HEY MOM post
"hello, what's this" cool image
list of my other blogs
graphic link to the ELECTRONIC FRONTIER FOUNDATION
another image: COSMIC THRILLS!!
mini-bio
picture of SATCHEL
SENSE OF DOUBT STATUS NOTE
a blog about a former job
my logo
explanation of my logo
the video from which the blog SENSE OF DOUBT gets its name
link to my tumblr
link to my GOOD READS
another image: THING-O-RAMA
List of blogs I like to read
more "about me"
blog archive by date
labels (also called categories) sorting blog posts by topic
a link to a blog I liked
my first name in Japanese
another cool image
followers (hey, FOLLOW ME!!) :-)
HOW I STARTED BLOGGING SO MUCH
As stated previously, I started blogging in 2007 thinking a couple of things. I wanted to set myself a frequent writing practice, which then was weekly on Friday afternoons when I would find myself alone in the house, which was rare at that time. I tend to write better in solitude, though like all of you, I so rarely get solitude.
I started SENSE OF DOUBT as my main blog. I also started another blog, RANDITION SWOOM, which to this day has just one post.
On SENSE OF DOUBT, My first two blogs posts are these:
Both articles were nicely and encouragingly rejected, but the second one about misogyny in the NBC show HEROES has enjoyed 2375 views in thirteen years, the most of any post of mine ever. And I don't think that's all readers interested in feminist analysis of TV.
My first six years of trying to blog were sporadic and unproductive, especially once I got married in 2009 and my free time became a more rare thing.
I was cleaning stuff out of my parents' house as they were set to move to a smaller place, and I noticed that I had A LOT OF T-SHIRTS. Knowing I wanted to do more blogging and failing to achieve my goal (because, you know, LIFE), I had the idea to count t-shirts with the blog. What if I took a picture of myself with the featured t-shirt every day and wrote a little about it, would I have 365 or fewer? (Or more?) Answer: more, though I did buy a couple of dozen during that year.
I dismissed the idea as narcissistic and self-indulgent.
If you have spent a minute on social media, you know how it feeds narcissism and the overly self-involved, traits I am trying to discard and yet have in abundance.
I decided that no one would want to read such a thing and that I probably didn't have time for it anyway.
And then two months later I found out I had prostate cancer. A week later, at the comic book shop, a t-shirt arrived.
Suddenly, the idea to do this blog seemed much more appealing not because I didn't still think it was narcissistic, I did, but because I no longer cared what people would think. I had cancer.
And so I began daily broadcasts of blogs about t-shirts and what the t-shirts mean to my life.
I tried to keep up with a WEEKLY PRODUCTION on SENSE OF DOUBT after doing daily, one would think that would be easy after doing daily posts (and really, I wanted to do two-three a week).
Not so much.
With the pressure off, it was difficult to keep to the schedule.
Two days later, I decided to carry on my conversations with her with daily blog posts with a feature called HEY MOM that I continued daily for three years and 1096 posts.
So as I have revealed over and over, I post daily.
Though I am clearly quite insane and have killed millions of brain cells with my punk rock lifestyle until I was 75 years old.
Many of you may find weekly to be an achievable goal, and especially one that allows you to post a lot of original material.
However, it may be more useful to just post whenever you want. If you have three instruction related things to post in a single week and then go a month with no posts, your blog may well still be useful and a good resource.
I like daily posting because I want to be producing something for myself and my interest on a daily basis, and even though I struggle to write a lot of original content daily, I have to put something together every day, even if it's a share, there's always a few words of my own original content in each post every day.
It's a writing practice.
EXERCISE.
"Do or do not. There is not try."
WHAT TO BLOG? - WHAT THE BLOG LOOKS LIKE
WHY BLOG AND NOT USE PAGES IN CANVAS?
You can do pretty much everything with a Canvas page as I can do with this blog. Others, like my colleague Amber Lemiere, post using a web site (WEEBLY).
The main reasons I can think to suggest using a blog are the chance for additional exploration of the entire blog or other blogs and clicking on all the gadgets and things as well as storing material outside of Canvas.
I may not "own" my content as Google hosts it for me on BLOGGER, as I have mentioned, it has been on my to do list for a while to export all my content to my own domain name and host it all, from now on, with WORD PRESS and then archived out of Google, I do truly own it, control it, and can access it without GOOGLE's help. Also, because Google is migrating all of us BLOGGER users to a new interface, which I hate, but I will spare you that rant.
Also, copyright. I do not think AT ALL about copyright. We all share things on social media without any compunction about copyright. In many cases, content producers encourage you to share their creations because this is how they go viral. And since I do not make any money from my blog or use any advertisements, then I am also insulated from any copyright infringement if someone were to come after me, and no one has.
QUESTIONS??? Open thread!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! OR JUST UNMUTE MAKE A BLOG
A live demonstration.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ - Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2009.15 - 10:10 - Days ago = 1901 days ago +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2301.17 - 10:10
- Days ago = 2755 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
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