Now what?

The attentive member of the VCA will have noticed the melding in of the Grinwout’s posts, which I think I threatened to do, or at least mentioned I was contemplating. Here’s the story.

I like doing CL, obviously, and have little problem filling it up with stuff during the season. The stuff that I fill it up with is, obviously, debate-oriented, although I have been known to go off on tangents, some more tangential than others. It’s one thing to write up a history of art as narrative (“Caveman,” of course, which I still love) and another thing to write up my personal experiences going to Disneyland. Still, it’s all of a piece, and once you start down the road of regular blogging, you write whatever is foremost in your mind at the time. During the summer, I wish I was at a Disney park, and there’s no debate going on, so there you are. No one ever complained, so I kept at it.

I’m quite satisfied with the readership numbers for CL, which are tracked for me by Google. Plus I know there’s untrackable subsidiary readership in RSS feeds and the like, so as far as I’m concerned, I’m reaching a number of people that makes it worth bothering in the first place. While I do write this because I like to write, I wouldn’t do it if there weren’t people who wanted to read it. Instead, I would do something useful like buy a high-end PC and play online games in my spare time. Or watch more TV. Or raise chickens.

I did at one point develop the habit of RSS reading, concentrating on debate-related materials, which I then, via automation inherent in Google’s Reader, posted over to what I called the Coachean Feed. I did this for a while, getting myself into the habit of following and organizing feeds, but without a lot of traction as far as readership. For a while I merged the Feed into the CL blog, and got a couple of complaints, and stopped.

Meanwhile, for the DJ, I wanted to create content to support the series I publish, and began blogging there, eventually evolving into an annotated link blog. I did this independently for months to prove that it could be done, then for a while did it on the DJ website. Unfortunately, the supporting materials on the website (marketing stuff) never materialized, and the DJ website people wanted something different, and there you are. (Actually, the DJ is getting its act together, and doing what I wanted them to do in the first place, so it may be panning out in the long run).

Because I was doing so much Feed/Blogging on entertainment subjects, I lost the time to do the Coachean Feed, plus Google’s Reader was modified so that the automatic part wasn’t working the same, so that fell by the wayside. Meanwhile, I so got into the habit of the entertainment feed/blog, that when the DJ cancelled it, a few weeks later I started it on my own. I figured I’d keep it separate from CL, and therefore baptized it Grinwout’s. I created a Twitter account which got direct feeds from the blog as they were written, and kept it as a separate entity. Eventually I created a Facebook page for it as well. The thing is, the Grinwout’s type of content has sort of become something I do, for whatever reason, but mostly because I like doing it. It gives me a chance to write about other things, and to explore videos and music and stuff that I like doing. It has become part of the Menickean mental makeup slash output.

The problem was that having it separate from my main line, which is CL, seemed to be more trouble than it was worth. It’s a secondary brand, so to speak, and doesn’t have the oomph to allow it to stand on its own. And why should it stand on its own? After all, it’s still all Menickean crap. And CL, for better or worse, is Menickean crap from top to bottom. More Menickean crap would seem to fit right in.

So, the plan is to merge Grinwout’s and CL. For the time being, G posts will be written by Grinwout’s, and CL posts will be written by me. I’m stopping the @Grinwouts and eliminating automatic posting to Twitter, but I will kick myself in the pants and use @jimmenick to support Grinwout’s publishing. And I’ll let the Facebook page I created for Grinwout’s languish; it’s not hurting anyone, after all. I realize that if you really want to get stuff out there, you need to connect every which way, but I’d rather use FB for my own personal stuff, at least for now. We’ll see.

If all of this annoys you no end, keep it to yourself, you spalpeen! Who needs you and your negative worldview? Otherwise, let’s see what happens. It’s the beginning of a great adventure, as Lou Reed would put it.