Jeffro’s Car Wars Blog

You know its got to be bad if Scoble stops blogging….  When the little feed that occasionally pops up through out the day on my system tray began to be noticeably light on tech news, I had to wonder if maybe a nuclear bomb had gone off that I hadn’t heard about.  This was only a short while after he’d pronounced newspapers dead; maybe the media cabal had conspired to silence him….

It turns out that he’s stopped blogging for a week as an act of solidarity with a fellow a-list tech blogger that’s received several disturbing threats on her blog and elsewhere on the web.  (They’re pretty disturbing; don’t look unless you want to be grossed out.)  That’s shouldn’t be that surprising– but what really makes it scary is that the wacked out stuff is coming from, apparently, other well known tech bloggers….  Perhaps what’s most surprising about all of this is that it is in fact… uh…  surprising.  If we’d just paid attention to Clay Shirky, though, we’d have known all along that A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy.

(It amazes me that Shirky had written this as far back as 2003.  His speech is the only thing that makes sense out of the 25 years of technological development that I’ve witnessed first hand.  This is definitely one of those cases where reality is stranger than science fiction.)

Folding this in with my Traveller gaming, I’m going to play blogging in the far future as being one of those forbidden technologies that are outlawed and restricted the same way that robotics and psi research are.  It’s not that nanotech and blogging can’t exist… it’s just that any culture that goes too far with this stuff just mysteriously annihilates itself.  Whether the technologies are that inherently volatile or whether there are mysterious forces that want to guide civilisation along certain predetermined “tech trees,” it is not known.  But the information technology of the Third Imperium is strictly organized along the Encyclopedia Galactica approach.

Wil Wheaton’s now reviewing the first season Next Generation.  (Thanks to GundamPilotSpaz for the info!)  It’s moderately funny stuff in places, but I like it because he really articulates all of the things that stink about the series in a such a loving way.  It’s an impressive feat.  (Also, Wil Wheaton played Car Wars… and was probably designing cars between scenes during the filming of the show.  You’d know this stuff if you’d read Dancing Barefoot.)

It’s somewhat depressing to me how this guy’s career has turned out.  I get the impression that he sorta left Next Generation because he was a hot property at the time… but then ended up going nowhere.  Now he’s married a divorcé, plays poker competitively, and blogs about his geekiness and how great life was when he was a teenager.  According to Wikipedia, his column in Dungeon magazine died, his column for the Onion has stalled, his book sales tanked, and he’s even had to post a huge online apology to his parents after going ballistic on some random topic.

I’d love to see Wil turn things around… but the whole wistful melancholy bit wears thin after a while.  I mean… I’m an aging nostalgic geek blogger… if life sucks for Wil Wheaton, then what’s it gotta be like for me?  I don’t want to think about that!

If you want to see someone that can pull this sort of thing off in a much more positive way… cruise on over to Dave’s Long Box.  This guy is insanely funny.  You have to be careful where you read his stuff because you will bust out laughing.  (I think so much of the guy, I even tried in vain to imitate him a couple of times.  I don’t come close, but I figure I get some leeway if I’m picking on George Lucas.)  I’m glad to hear that he’s going to be posting more regularly again.