hi susan, my suitemate and love! did you get my phone message before you left? to answer your initial question, i haven't heard anything about the 50th anniversary events. this is because the telluride association hates me and in a fit of passive-aggressive pique sends my mail a couple of months after everyone else's. so tae-yeoun gets ta mail before i do.

to answer your technical question, there could be a couple of reasons. one is that blogger's been really buggy lately, and i've been unable to view the blog a few times myself. often hitting reload helps, or reading the blog from the july archive page (http://reasonablyremarkable.blogspot.com/2004_07_01_reasonablyremarkable_archive.html). compounding that, when i just tried to read the blog, the page loaded your two posts and then choked and refused to load anything else. when i checked the blogger dashboard the template code had been modified to try and enable comments, which of course in the crappy cobbled together voodoo template i've thrown up made the whole thing keel over and die.

which brings up another issue. comments. i do realize that tae-yeoun and i have run the blog a bit autocratically (technocrats?) and that the issue should be decided by all the users of the blog, meaning all of us taspers and not just the two who are hunched obsessively over their keyboards all hours of the night (okay, maybe only one of us is like that.)

here is how i feel about comments: i am ideologically opposed to them in this context. i think they are a great tool on blogs run by one person, where the format is something like a lecture and comments allow readers a bit of participation. however i think that this here website has way more of a taspish spirit than that and is more like a seminar. a seminar that allows for (encourages!) discussion of face-farting and the such, but still. and in a seminar, not only is there no room but there's actually no need for the kind of segmented discussion and side conversations that grow from a commenting system.

on michigan tasp 2003's message board, a tasper writes "Based on my experience in forums and blogs, threaded posts are much easier to navigate. In flat forums, you tend to spend a lot of time wading through other people's conversations that have no bearing on what you are interested in." while i'm sure this is true on special interest forums about, say, knitting or nascar, i'm afraid this person has totally missed the point in terms of post-tasp blogging. because all of our conversations have bearing on what we're interested in - that topic of interest being, of course, each other. not to say that everyone has to participate in every conversation - they don't, of course - but that all the conversations that go on in this forum have some bearing/interest to us, and if they don't, someone will speak up about it.

evidence: the aforementioned michigan tasp message board, which has very few posts at all; the cornell tasp's threaded blog (linked to the right), which has had few posts until very recently, and seems to be updated by the same 5 or 6 people. (it could just be, of course, their prideful and prejudiced nature.)

anyway, enough. i've made my position clear, but if there's a majority in favor of comments, i will dive into the creaky template code and implement them properly. i suppose what i'm doing is proposing an erni, in favor of keeping our blog comment-free. only i've gone about it all wrong, because i've said my opinion first and theat's a terribly biased way of doing it. or maybe that's how it's done, i can't remember. (john, a little help?) so kindly advance your arguments and your votes.

i am all in favor of reviving the post-ending question, susan, i've been terrible about remembering to do that. so my question to end this post is: WHERE IN THE NAME OF ALL THAT IS GOOD AND HOLY ARE THE REST OF YOUR YEARBOOK PAGES?!??? (yeah, i know that's a bad question, but i think i've asked one with the rest of my post and everyone should answer susan's first anyway because i'd like to know too.)

missing you all terribly.

posted by Kelsey   [11:23 AM]

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