importing content to Dark Entries, the new NorsePlay, & the closure of GooglePlus.

While I could vent for a whole entry about Google's short-sighted betrayal of millions of loyalist users in closing GooglePlus this April, I've contacted the owners with solid advice to keep their underappreciated but quite good online network up, and signed a petition, which is the best follow-through I can do.



Lacking an established VR-based Internet 3.0 site to setup a cyberhome on, I've decided to instead take a break from social media until new acceptable networks have improved structures for interactivity, custom fine-scalable filtering tools, and most importantly permanent nodes for users & their content. Until that evolves, I'm instead using my already established & dependable blog for my online presence.



Words aren't going anywhere no matter how sophisticated digital expression gets.



Thanks to the Google Plus Exporter (so much gratitude to coder Alois Bělaška), I'm shifting one of my G+ collections' content from my profile to here, and a second collection into a new subject specific blog. This means a few years of my most worthwhile & thoughtful social media back content will be integrated into these blogrolls. If you've followed me on both Dark Entries & G+ you'll be witness to the redundancy, but I know the re-runs hold up. If you only follow me here, there will be many new to you but backdated entries to enjoy, share, & comment on.


Dark Inscriptions, my microblog sounding-off reactionary smallform version that compliments this one, will add ~100 entries here, and adorn this Dark Entries blog which you already know & love. While I'd reserved this blog for mostly longform pieces as per my journalism degree background, this merging will change that format in future to both short & full posts here. Hit the follow button in my Blogger-specific subscribe box and stay tuned.


When launching my new NorsePlay blog, there will eventually be 400+ curated shortform posts, re-posts of the few longer NorsePlay entries from here, plus a longform writer's statement about the importance of NorsePlay to start it off with. If you've followed my Norse Mythology-related content on G+, NorsePlay is where it'll be re-housed and enthusiastically continued. If you've liked the NorsePlay-headed entries here, do follow that focus on the forthcoming new blog. I'll announce when the new site publishes in a new post here soon.



This dual archive of content will appear gradually, as each backlogged post will need a slight manual format adjustment to fit Blogger's pages, so rest assured you won't get a megaflood of notifications once you subscribe to either or both of my blogs.

[Well, now the G+ closure narrows that choice down, really.]

While this change is born of disappointment in GooglePlus' lack of vision & self-imposed defeat, the relocation to here will give my content more standalone stability. And the pro-active & specific audience it deserves -- that's you. Thank you all for your new & continued readership & personal enthusiasm.

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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or in the comments below.

the fallacy of social networks.

I must begin by saying that I don't buy into the idea of a "virtual community". The phrase itself reveals its oxymoronic limitations, as the concept is seeded by falsity from the get-go.



Largest case in point: Facebook. Why is Facebook fake? Are those 1,289 so-called friends going to buy you a drink tonight at the club, bother to make & bring you chicken bullion when you've got a cold, come pick you up when you've got car trouble, or bail you out of jail? No, they aren't.



Recently an umpteenth friend of mine exhorted, "You should get a Facebook. And just wait until someone adds you -- it's the best feeling!"



"Oh really? Better than sex?", I asked pointedly.



"Um, well no." And the exaggeration of it all began to dawn on her.



A page is just a page, a fill-in-the-blank non-paper representation of a person's perception of themselves, which may not even be them. Just go search for Claire Standish from "The Breakfast Club" or Ferris Bueller and you'll get nine of them. And that's not even a real person. Think you're friends with George Clooney? Think again.



Users generally slap together overcluttered pages, busily wallpapered with annoying midis, or animated gifs, even trite and unnecessary videoclips lifted from the distorted lens of television. These are not real nor honest representations. And the text is rife with baselessly clever attempts having no depth or substance. And face it -- most of the hits you're getting are probably from some glammed-out-in-your-fancy-sexpot-boots picture you put up, or from some flippant & ridiculous countercultural pose in lighting that doesn't exist in nature. It's someone at their most winning if it's them at all, and perhaps that's insightful in a limited way, but it's not really them 24-7, which is all a setup for disappointment if you ever met. And maybe even then said photo gallery visitor shan't bother to read a word of what you have to say, which is ultimately far more important than any photoset.



Such online networks only impart a false sense of intimacy. Still more than six degrees of electronics & geography away, we've been sold an illusion that an add is better than a handshake. And while those comments you post to someone, or the inbox messages you receive might illicit an emotion, it's in isolation, self-generated, with no real interactive event or other corporeal presence to reference. We keep tabs & bookmarks in the virtual so we can more easily take each other for granted without putting forth any real attention or commitment in what probably never was or will be a real friendship.



Without any postmodern realization about what they are doing, it feels as if everyone is building these cybershrines to slotlist these comparative images and shortlist answers about ourselves, 2-D temples of ego, all packed in an invisible server's silicone filing cabinet. The hint of shirttail reality is that it all refers back to the physical world, that these pictures of things, those goods we click upon, the email we traffic in are only phosphors or LCD ghosts, a nothing. 'Tis all a maia because there still isn't a "WarGames" where you push "Y" to execute superpowers via DOS, much less a trigger button to permaheadshot your enemy outside a cyber deathmatch.



None of it matters until the box is on your doorstep, you set foot on that faraway soil, or you hold a cuppa and look each other in the eye and touch actuality, the fist connecting, the discomfiting silence, the slippery bliss of a slow kiss. That's the sugar you really want.



So what does this stance have to do with my bothering to write this negation, and your precious time reading it? It is this: If I choose to give you anything at all, it will be myself, because that's the one precious thing that I have to bestow, and that's what I will post on my page & within my words to you.

[Not me, just photo illustration.]

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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.