Alexander Nachaj

Blog

  • Nobody likes blogging

    “I don’t like blogging. I never wanted to be a blogger. I still blog anyways.”

    I think that’s where a lot of us are these days. Nobody actually likes blogging and when it comes to keeping our blogs active and alive, it’s just a chore. It’s work, not passion; monotony, not creativity. As a character out of Heinlein once put it “nobody enjoys writing, they write because they have to”. But really,  it’s all about how we look at things.

    Let’s run down metaphor lane. Blogging is a chore, yes; but it’s not a “cleaning the house” kind of chore. It’s more like tending to the garden. It takes effort, but gives us fruits and vegetables. Or at the very least some pretty flowers that people can stop and admire.

    People who blog on a regular basis, and can see through the monotony of tossing words to paper, usually go for one of the two. Either they do it because they want people to stop and read (hey, who doesn’t?) but then move on, or else they do it because the blog will generate a fruit of it’s own: currency.

    Usually the blogs that fall under category 2 are the easiest to spot. They exist to sell and trump your better senses. They rely on cheeky adjectives like like “top”, “best” and “secret” and aren’t afraid to dig one-liners from a bag callled “catch-phrase galore”. It’s literal crap; ads for x-ray goggles on the back of old comic books had more merit.

    They can be persuasive, and not just to the reader but to other bloggers. It answers the old “if we’re not making, then why bother?” dilemma of blogging in the first place. Blogging is a means to an end, a tangible end at that.  But the end result of blogging doesn’t have to be money or despondence.

    There’s reasons a plenty. It’s clearing the slate, tossing some of those tangled phrases into the open, making space for more ideas in your mind, and getting ready to move on to bigger and better. The way an actor or a singer warms up their vocals chords, blogging warms up our minds and our typing hands.

    Blogging is a chore only if that’s the way we want to look at it.

  • Books I Read in 2013

    I had meant to get this post up sooner, but the nature of a blog is to be ignored and ignored it was.

    In 2013, I read a total of 20 books. It’s a little shabby, especially considering the large amounts of free time I had compared to previous years (though, I suspect the lack of free time is what pressed me to read more when I could). As well, I certainly spent more time writing for myself than I have in previous years, so at least I managed to strike some sort of rough literally truce between my pen and the books on my shelf.

    Here’s what I plowed through last year:

    • Stephen King – The Green Mile
    • Frank Miller – Batman: Year One
    • Robert Jordan – The Eye of the World
    • John Wyndham – The Day of the Triffids
    • Harry Harrison – Make Room! Make Room!
    • Michael Pollan – The Botany of Desire
    • Sigmund Freud – Civilization and its discontents
    • Tristan Das – Documentary Screenwriting
    • Linda J. Cowgill – The art of Plotting
    • Kurt Vonnegut – Player Piano
    • Marilyn Webber – The Writer’s Road Map
    • Alan Weisman – The World Without Us
    • Edward Dolnick  – The Clockwork Universe
    • Maurice Druon – The Iron King
    • Stephen King – Insomnia
    • Robert Jordan – The Great Hunt
    • Bryan Lee O’Malley – Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life
    • Ethan A. Kincaid – Blood Of Midnight: The Broken Prophecy
    • Robert Jordan – The Dragon Reborn

    I also read an ebook called A Crash Course in Visual Content Creation but I can’t seem to find the damn thing or remember who authored it.

    I had a good year in the non-fiction category. Most were insightful, others life changing: after reading The Botany of Desire I can honestly say I will never buy non-organic potatoes again (in fact, the majority of all vegetables I buy are now organic).

    I wasn’t expecting to read so much fantasy, but that’s just the way the cards hit the table this time around. As always, I squeezed in a few Stephen King novels in there, but that’s to be expected since everyone needs a little junk food now and then (and it’s so plentiful and wondrous!). What I did realize is that I need to branch out my reading patterns a little bit more and dive into new authors, which I have fortunately already started this year.

     

  • Mr Goudas Rice (Is Very Nice)

    I don’t usually read the labels on the food I purchase, but something happened in my kitchen today.

    Sure, I’ll examine the ingredients list with surgical precision (you have no idea how often one company or another will try to sneak beef stock into something masquerading as vegetarian) and I maybe give a cursory glance at the nutritional content, but the rest of the label might as well be non-existent as far as I’m concerned.

    Why?

    For one, I discovered long ago that the other 90% of the label is reserved for the usual marketing bullshit.

    You know, that section where they cram as many “top quality”, “100%”, “premium grade” and other nonsense praising the subtle aromas of grocery store wine. It numbing and it’s all the same.

    Or so I thought.

    Earlier this evening, as I paced my kitchen waiting for some water to boil I passed the time by picking up a near empty bag of Mr Goudas rice and, for whatever strange compulsion, I read the labels.

    At first I was put off by the strangely constructed phrases, leading me to assume it was simply the victim of some criminal transliteration. But then, I realized I misjudged the flavour text on my bag of rice and, simply put, everything I thought I knew about product labels came crashing down before me.

    Mr. Goudas wasn’t try to play ball the way your average bag of rice tries to play ball. Quite the contrary: Mr. Goudas is playing a game of its own.

    Instead of finding cooking instructions, I found a three paragraph rant on why cooking instructions on products suck and how we should never follow them. At first I thought it was just a long-winded way of getting to the topic; but nope, the label had no intention of telling us how to cook rice.

    Intrigued, I continued to read. I suddenly noticed the crazy jingle about the quality of Mr. Goudas rice (it’s so very nice) that was smack on the front of the bag as well as the offer to visit the company’s website . (dead as of 2023 or earlier) I knew I had to.

    The company’s website is, to put it bluntly, absolutely, marvelously insane.

    Picture your average website, circa 1997: there’s an animated intro with a theme song; we’ve got Rastafarian beans praising the quality of Goudas’ rice; there’s a scrolling banner pulled by an airplane; there’s an an e-Book about cow’s feet and Rastafarian culture, with the opening disclaimer that that one should use the washroom before reading it lest they laugh themselves so hard they have an accident (it even contains the occasional smattering of phonetically cringeworthy patois yaaaa mohn); there’s also thousands of words of biography, history, blog posts, assorted rants and everything else under the sun.

    Mr. Goudas is a remarkably bizarre brand, which kind of also makes it remarkably awesome. I don’t know whether half of what I saw was satire or just out of fashion, but I do know what brand of rice I’ll be reaching for the next time I’m at the market.