To the people I referrred to in Outrage over Pete Townsend, who are busily debating the story over in the discussion area of my Pete Townsend reviews Kurt Cobain's diaries entry, I feel that I should pass along this report from the Smoking Gun, which lends at least some credence to Townsend's vapid-sounding defense that he was conducting ill-advised research.
But what of the other viewpoint, that he is merely one of the many people on the Internet simultaneously drawn to and repelled by images of transgressive or otherwise taboo sex and/or violence?
Because he condemns something does not necessarily mean that he is not at the same time a consumer of it. We have Marianne Faithfull's word that he's not a hypocrite but what is that worth?
Will Pete be the O.J. of the pedophile set?
categories: x-syndicate
12:15:49 PM 
say what []
For readers of my X-POLLEN blog via (an RSS) news feed, which includes LiveJournal friends reading the xpollen user Mark Pasc setup for me, I apologize for the way the feed just resent something like seventeen recent posts.
I just made a minor administrivial change to this blog's archiving nomenclature. Posts are now stored in calendar directories (YYYY/mm/dd, of course, so they sort intuitively) with the filename for the single-post archive file constructed from the entry title, which makes the raw URL a tad more comprehensible. This replaces a serial system in which a typical post would be called /000171.html or something like that.
The new format rides on the URL, saying "this is a post about whatever_the_filename_says posted on mm the ddth, in the year of our Lord 20YY). The old one said "this was xian's 171 post (give or take 40 or so comments and who knows how many deleted drafts)."
But this is inside baseball.
And completely irrelevant to LiveJournal users, who ordinarily don't have to deal with URLs like that and see my blog as one of their friends in their own personal design.
What I'm more concerned about is that I hope MT did not take it upon itself to delete the old-form addresses for the first 56 posts or so, as that would of course break any external links pointing into the site. The storage hit is minor to accommodate duplicates of those original posts, though there's a chance of splitting subsequent followup comments before old and new locations, so may I should think about using symbolic links or mod_rewrite to redirect incoming links set to the old, serial URLs.
What is annoying is that I specifically declined to "rebuild" the static site Movable Type's becaused I knew I had to work out a backup or migration plan for the address changes and had not done so yet (in my lurching, hurry-up-and-wait progress). Still, it seems that I goofed or MT took it upon itself to regenerate the pages, at least for the RSS news feed, so that's why I'm worried.
In the worst case, if MT munged the old URLs outright, then I may have a tedious cleanup job ahead of me. If both versions coexist, then I can work out a better solution in due time.
At this point even my eyes begin to glaze over.
Recommended Thursday morning pickup: Patti Smith doing Land of 1000 Dances (sort of).
A passing police siren summons up a strange being dragged away from my computer door knocked in dystopian fantasy image momentarily, before it is dispelled by a feeling of "surely not here."
"Divine to define, she's moving to divine. So say so. So say so."
The Great Curve, Talking Heads
categories: metablog movablefeats x-syndicate
11:19:18 AM say what []
