Closed until further notice

Due to professional reasons, I will not be posting anything here for a while. I suppose it's not a great loss, since I haven't been able to motivate myself to get posts up. Still, it's a little frustrating that it's a blanket restriction, instead of a set of guidelines. But then, the Internet is still a confusing thing to many.

other examples of visual processing

Okay, previous attempt did not work. I may have to check a few settings in Google docs. Anyway, here's what I was trying to post.

5 most popular posts here

I've posting this more out of curiosity to see if this changes over time:

 

1. Echoes through space: art therapy in prison
2. Echoes through space: Due Thursday (It's about an article on what we missed about the 1950s.)
3. Echoes through space: Erikson's 8 stages of Psychosocial Development
4. Echoes through space: Carl Rogers
5. Echoes through space: Psychotherapy 

 

 

Blog Maintenance

Echoes Through Space isn't going down or anything, I'm just going back through my posts and adding tags. Considering how many posts I will be going back through, this is going take some time.

Adding another wish list

This one is just for books I want for research purposes. In other words, it's only being made public for the curious. So far I have a lot of books on art, cognition, senses, psychology, art history and color.

In particular, I also have a book on color science. This is deliberate on my part. I used to be a packaging quality assurance lab technician for a top Fortune 100 company and I had to learn color science for one of my projects. While I don't need the formulae, I do remember some very interesting science in regards to color and I would like to review it.

So here it is, for the morbidly curious, Cosmic Siren's Research Book Wishlist!

A Splog???

Well, you learn something new everyday.

I showed several of my more savvy friends a list of "profitable blogs" and they shared the following insights with me:

Viv:
I suppose there are a couple of models of blogging for profit. There is the
Instapundit thing, where you gain a huge following and put ads up, which is
what you are talking about. Then there is the pyramid scheme model, which
seems to be what [they are] advocating.

The difference is that people read Instapundit intentionally and the other
method looks more like high view count due to google-bombing.


Phelps:
You might have stumbled onto a splog -- a spam blog. They scrape stories
(automatically sometimes) from other places and intersperse them with the
spam, so that they get a higher google rank (from the scraped stories) for
the spam and search hits. I had one a couple of years ago that was scraping
my entire feed.


I don't think I actually was following a splog. But I do see it as more of the pyramid-type of blogging. And I suppose that's okay for some folks. Though I must admit that many of my friends and I mostly share the opinion of my friend Irix:

Sounds dirty and dishonourable to me, only a slightly better way to earn your living than email spamming. Of course, I may be not in a position to judge, with my cushy job and opportunity to leech on the employer's resources, I don't have to struggle to make ends meet.

Still, leave it to my best friend to send the definitive reply to the whole situation:

"I don't think that list is a good representation of the people who "quit" working. I think it's a good representation of people who are bragging about it.

The sites I frequent are interesting and engaging; I don't have a lot of time to waste on a blog that tells me how to waste less time.

But hey, I see no harm in putting up your wishlist. It's not like you're out there pursuing the almighty dollar."


So, with that advice, here is Comic Siren's Little Wishlist.

And thank you for reading this blog.

Why I Blog on Here

Recently, I've been seeing a feed from someone who apparently took up blogging to make money. I must admit I find the concept a bit bizarre. I don't consider blog posts a commodity - I consider them a form of self-reflection and communication. I started this blog five years ago, so I could share what I learned with my friends. I am an experiential learner, which means I learn concepts by applying them to the world around me. This includes writing about them and hopefully taking them a few steps further to see if my understanding still holds up.

So, you see, this blog is really a personal indulgence of mine, which I share because at least a few other people find my intellectual/academic musings and discoveries interesting. I have it separate from my livejournal account because not all of my friends are interested in this part of my life. They are more concerned with my more mundane doings and and rants. I have another journal for my creative writings, so those friends interested in those can read them. I even have a religious journal, which to be honest, I have neglected badly, for the same reason. Most of my friends like the ala cart method I have, and I have no problem with them preferring only part of my life to follow.

So, for me personally, adding advertisements to this blog feels wrong, as does running it like a business. I want to share freely with my friends. I consider it an act of true charity (i.e. love) for those who don't have the access to material that I have (which is the reason this particular site was created - a friend in another country, who does not have the resources to study the topics I am, asked me to share some of my assignments with her). From there, it sort of turned into my more formal blog.

Still, if someone wishes to making blogging their career, then all the more power to them. There's nothing wrong with gaining something for providing information. Frankly, I'm tempted to put my Amazon wishlist up for those who wish to give me something to alleviate any feelings of one sided indebtedness they may feel while reading this blog. Not because I want something for it, but because I have learned that there is more to being charitable and generous than just giving to people--sometimes, you have to be humble and gracious enough to let them give to you. If you can't do this, then your generousity is a sham; a means to assert superiority to those you perceive as less fortunate than you. If receiving help or gifts from other people means you're weak, then what does that say about your view of those you are giving to? If you believe that receiving puts you into another's debt, then what price are you attaching to your gifts?

I will have to think this over some more. I haven't been keeping track of who has been reading this blog during the past three years or so. Most of the people who I do know that read it are friends who already give to me of their talents, companionship, and even the occassional gift. I guess I can start monitoring visitors again and if, indeed, I have a wider audience than I realize, I might put a link somewhere for people who just want to send a little something to thank me for whatever reason. I want whatever I do to be done as a free choice and not as an obligation. I will probably make a special "under $5" wishlist for this blog then. And maybe a list of professional books that a reader here might what me to comment on. But then I might feel obligated to read some books that really don't spark my interest.

Oh well, like I said, I'll have to think this over more.