1

I think one of the classic lines from the "Peanuts" comic strip went something like this: there's no heavier burden than having great potential. One of the kids moaned that after a teacher, or a parent, or some adult dressed that kid down for not living up to their potential.

Back near the end of the period when I was doing USS Clueless, I felt the weight of a great potential, or something very like that. I had gained credibility (it says here) and certainly people came to feel ownership over me and what I said. I never quite understood how they figured that.

I think it was something along the lines of "You speak for my position, so you have a responsibility to me to say what I think, because you're visible and I'm not." They would helpfully tell me what I should have said.

Having gotten fed up with self-elected coauthors, in 2004 I bagged it. A few months later, after some of the wounds had stopped bleeding, I started Chizumatic. And I deliberately chose anime as a subject matter because it was completely inconsequential. Totally unimportant. Extremely uninfluential. Totally unserious. I wanted to shed that weight which others were piling on my shoulders, and go back to speaking only for myself. Apparently the only way to do that was to speak about something all those earnest people would think was beneath them, so they'd ignore me.

Every once in a while my past catches up with me again, as it has tonight. And every time it does, I do my best to try to impeach myself. That's why the cheesecake pictures up there. No serious commentator would post a picture from "Fairy Tale" or a couple of swimsuit pictures from "Saki", so I can't be a serious commentator -- and the people who want me to become one again will go away and leave me alone.

If, on the other hand, they visit and like those pictures, well then please do return, for I post many like that.

2

Anyway, to continue that thought, the guy whose post brought me that instaflood tonight is looking back at the old "4 Horsemen of the Ablogalypse" joke from a few years back. He's noted that Andrew Sullivan and Charles Johnson have gone strange and become left wing. As to me, I just because silly and irrelevant.

I have no idea how or why Andrew and Charles changed, but my change was very deliberate.

3 'Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow?'

Arg, arg, bad brain, bad!

( the comments about self-declared coauthors )

4 Yeah, but he isn't entitled to the sweat of my brow.

5 Yes, exactly!

. . .however, the evil comes from that being a quote by an Objectivist villain ( as in, villain who is Objectivist, not a character viewed as villainous by Objectivists ).

6 You had that picture of Hisa in a swimsuit all this time and you didn't share until now??

You are a cruel, cruel man...

7 It's not new. I posted it before.

8 Oh.  Well, thanks for reposting them, then!  You are a gentleman and a scholar! 

I tried to remember which ep was the pool episode, as I didn't remember one--and then I recalled that I downloaded Saki from TheHylia and their copy of ep 20 was something from some other series.  The worst possible ep to have screwed up.  And to this day I still haven't seen ep 20, damn it all to hell.  (They still haven't fixed it.  Even though I reported the error in October. Webmaster FAIL.)

9 Could be worse. Could have been one of the onsen episodes.

10 Nice pictures...what was that about a flood?

11 An "Instaflood" is where you've been linked by the blog "Instapundit" and get huge amounts of traffic for a few hours. It's similar to being "slashdotted". (Though these days I bet Instapundit gets more readers than slashdot does.)

12 You've got some old USS Clueless readers who have little to no interest in anime but check Chizumatic anyway hoping for posts about other stuff. Anyway, you could probably write about how the grass in your yard grows and make it sound interesting.  

13

Anyway, you could probably write about how the grass in your yard grows and make it sound interesting.

Lileks can do that, but I'm not that good.

14 Yeah, Steven's limited to things like beavers and cooking french fries.

15

Anyone can write about those things and make them interesting.

16 I'm not so sure about that, but it made me think of writing an "Ode to the French Fry" just for a joke.....which of course, made me think of the Vogon classic "Ode to a Lump of Green Putty I Found Under My Armpit" and suddenly the idea didn't seem so great after all.

Nobody can make Vogon poetry sound interesting, even in the original Klingon.

Um. Okay, I think I'll go sleep now before my personal reality gets any more bizarre. I might turn out not to be a level 0, and then where would we be, with if my psychic power was to create Vogon poetry in Klingon pentameter?