Ephemeral

I was in the mood for a bit of experimentation, so I decided to combine into a single text the "two-part rant" Original Print that I referred to in a recent post, edit it a bit, and create a cheap Blurb booklet from the result. You can see it here on my Blurb bookstore, or (probably better) as an Issuu flipbook (go for "full screen" to lose the adverts, etc.):

This struck me as a neat way to highlight and preserve some of my better posts, particularly the ones that are text-heavy and argumentative; a sort of pamphleteering. With over 2,000 posts to choose from, there's plenty of scope for more of the same. It must surely be a troubling thought at the back of the mind of any blogger (or, these days, substacker) who has put serious time and energy into their efforts that they are only as permanent as the platform they're made on. As I've mentioned before, I do send a copy of everything I have self-published to my old college library, and – so far – they haven't refused to take any of them, but these 2000+ posts will sooner or later vanish, leaving not a rack behind.

Sadly, though, Blurb's high shipping charges [1] mean that even a very cheap publication becomes prohibitively expensive to buy – in the UK, at least – so I'll continue to offer free-to-view flipbook versions on Issuu of all my Blurb efforts. You lucky people! In some ways these are better than a paper copy, it's true, although how long either Blurb or the Issuu platform will continue to be available (or affordable) is anybody's guess. We live in an increasingly ephemeral world.

BTW, I added this little illustrative two-page Appendix to the Original Print text, which you may find interesting:

If nothing else, it suggests how much thought and work can go into creating a digital image from a simple starting point. Although in its final version this one is relatively simple – just five layers altering or adding to the original scraperboard image – more recent projects may have thirty or more interacting layers.

That is, assuming an image is not AI-generated, of course. I probably should have added a paragraph or two about AI image-generation to that Original Print text, but I've never used AI, don't intend to, and consequently have nothing of value to say about it, other than the well-justified fear that people who do use it will royally fuck things up for us honest hard-working digital picture-makers, simply by reinforcing the prejudice that already exists. Troublingly, I notice that in recent times ChatGPT is listed among the regular visitors to this blog. I also simply don't believe that I have had 14,800 genuine page-views in the last seven days. These surely must mainly have been robotic scrapers, spammers, and whatever other allied AI-adjacent trades there are crawling all over my "content". Similarly, it seems Chinese robots (at least, I presume that's what they are, not actual, you know ... Chinese people) can't get enough of my webpage, which I have rather neglected and has remained unchanged for quite some time: 74 visits from China in the past 30 days, for example, compared to 7 from the UK or 6 from the USA. Nothing new to see here, comrade robots, please move along.

So, when it comes to the urge to make something more permanent out of these blog posts, readers of long-standing may recall that back in 2020 I had begun to produce a series of "best of" publications (see the post Idiotic Hat Selections 1 & 2). However, I soon gave up on that vainglorious project, partly due to a complete lack of interest [sad face emoji], but also because I had found that it was possible to save an entire year's worth of posts, images and all, as a PDF file via various "blog to book" services; something, moreover, that I recently discovered I can easily do for myself and entirely cost free. [2]

Consequently, I began to save compilations of these PDF files onto DVD as The Idiotic Hat Annuals. See, for example, the 2018 post Ten Idiotic Years, marking this blog's 10th anniversary, with files made using a slightly unsatisfactory (but cheap!) "blog to book" service, which is now, inevitably, defunct. These DVDs will serve as a handy archive to set against the inevitable day that either Google withdraws the free Blogger service or I decide to stop blogging, whichever is the sooner. Although, in this ephemeral world, how long either DVDs or PDFs will remain readable is yet another digital "known unknown".

There's still really no long-term substitute for ink on paper, is there? How lucky we are that Shakespeare's chums decided to commit his plays to print, saving fully half – half! – of those 36 plays from oblivion: no First Folio would have meant no Macbeth, no Measure for Measure, no Tempest... By comparison, of course, a mere blog seems a little, what? Insubstantial? But then, as Dogberry says in Much Ado, comparisons are odorous, so, let's save whatever we can from the inevitable Great Digital Forgetting to come. Crank up the pamphleteering! [3]

DVD case insert (my design skills have improved since 2018...)

1. Before adding any "profit", a single copy of this 24 page, 13 x 20 cm paperback on "economy" paper costs £2.99. Excellent! But the shipping charge for a single copy is £9.99 (unless I need it urgently, in which case "priority" shipping is £23.99...). For two copies, the shipping charge is £12.23, and for five copies £18.95 (£41.92 priority), and so on. There are discounts for larger quantities – for example, to order 100 would bring the per copy price + shipping down to £3.21 – but that rather defeats the whole point of "on demand" publication: you would be back in the self-publisher's nightmare of having boxes of unsellable items under the bed, that you would have to market and "fulfil" yourself... Been there, done that: no thanks! "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity... What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun?" (Ecclesiastes 1). That Preacher bloke knew what he was talking about...

2. Any bloggers out there who want to know how to do this? Just send me an email and I'll explain. It's very simple, and requires no technical knowledge at all, although it probably does require the use of the Chrome browser.

3. And FFS do something about those precious photos on your phone! How ironic, if our selfie-crazed generations leave fewer images behind for posterity than their great-grandparents did...