Meet the New Blog. Same as the Old Blog.

Fact is, this is kind of a risk for me. One of the reasons I never went for a real blog before now was the whole Comments thing; I've seen too many bloggers ranting endlessly in the wilderness, day after day, the same fat goose-egg of "Zero Comments" lurking beneath each post to underscore just how little anyone cares. People told me I should run a blog, and their arguments were sound-- but I had no desire to advertise my complete and utter irrelevance with an unfilled comments queue. Nor did I wish to draw attention to my insecurity by explicitly disabling comments. The ol' newscrawl was a good compromise: if people wanted to comment, they could damn well write me an e-mail.

And they bloody well did. And I've been falling behind in my correspondence ever since. So now I can either continue to fall behind, or resort to one of those lameass form-letter responses-- or lighten up on the Comments issue, so that folks have an alternate avenue of approach and I can answer the same question once instead of many times. So that's what I'm doing. This is the New scrawl. And I promise to be be every bit as lackadaisical in its upkeep as I was with the other one.

But if I don't get any comments, the whole damn thing is liable to come down. I have a fragile ego.

It's up to you.