the Pen

26th March 2009

To our nine followers, we love you!

*high five*

“

While Barack Obama had an official Tumblr for his Inauguration, Anna Bligh is the first politician to have a presence on this popular new blogging network.

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FRIST!* Incumbent Queensland Premier Anna Bligh announces that she has joined the polaroid-taking, Gossip Girl-watching, ffffound-finding, Apple-hearting, self-portrait-taking, Katy Perry-following rebloggers posse on Tumblr.

* Deliberate typo.

I love the fact that everyone seems to be on Tumblr on “Valentine’s” morning… myself included!

Fight the power people, fight the power.

So... a couple of things about Tumblr

Everyone seems to be obsessed gossip girl or 30 rock.
An increasing number of posts appearing on my feed are simply reblogs in the form of a conversation between a number of fellow tumblrs. It really doesn’t make sense to an outsider. Maybe that’s the point? But why publish online? Anyway, it’s a bit of a hindrance when looking for quality posts.

somethingchanged:

fletter:(via f letter)

True that. Replace “Friendster” with “Facebook”.

Reblogged from Something Changed

Our former life

An email received today gave me the opportunity to take a little walk down memory lane, to the history of “the Pen”.

Rooster and I, back in the day (the day being from 2003-2005) were extremely avid bloggers (surprise!). Upon reflection, I don’t think we were really all that flash - particularly with our political analysis (my political analysis).

Back when we were university students, blogging seemed like the easiest way to navigate through the political quagmire that was the late Howard years. We were the product of the so called “me generation” which apparently meant that our cohort (those born from 1980 onwards) was engendered with a strong sense of individualism, materialism and political apathy. However, we never really felt that we subscribed to that label, or that it really represented us.

I was always left leaning as a teenager, but came from an extremely conservative high school which did not engage that openly in debate. Plus I only got the internet in 2002, which meant I wasn’t really getting exposed to the concepts that I so wanted to engage in.

Though University opened us to a myriad of opportunity and exposed us to different dialogs with masses of people, I found that either I engaged with people who:

a) Weren’t particularly interested in politics

b) Were extremely interested in politics, but perhaps did not have the patience to engage with someone who was just new to many of the concepts that I was first exposed to during in my first year at uni.

Without a happy medium, blogging opened up a whole new world for me, sad as that may be. And it allowed me to engage in debates and discussion (for example refugees in detention, feminism and gender politics, the neoconservative uprising in Australia - and its subsequent demise of sorts) that I could not (or did not feel confident in discussing) in my day to day life. And being a poor uni student, blogging gave me the opportunity to muse frequently, at low cost.

In 2005, however, University wrapped up and suddenly I found myself with a full time job and not much time for writing. And whilst it was sad to give it up, it was probably a good thing upon reflection. The dialog switched from online, to more open/public surroundings. Really, that was the way it should be. I’m disappointed that I was too shy at uni to engage in debates and instead scuttled home to furiously type out my angst and publish it in the blogosphere. On the upside, I’m glad that I was able to have learned so much about political and social analysis through our online community.

We’re back to writing now, more for fun than anything else. And we’re not much “pseudo political pundits” these days either. I leave the real analysis to the big kids and just stick to naff and pop culture etc.

Addendum: As I was writing the email, I ended up chasing up the blogs we used to follow back in the day. Turns out, a whole heap of them stopped writing when the war was over. Which is a shame really.

It's hard to tumble

… when you get home from work at 9:30pm.

So you get lazy and reblog instead.

Ps. We’re still tweaking the Pen. Stay tuned (insert suspense here)

somethingchanged:

semisetadrift: helloadam: WELCOME TO TUMBLR!

Fuck me, this is so true. Particularly Gossip Girl, Polaroid, and hipster photography!

Reblogged from Something Changed

“

Yes. This is the new-look Pen. Whaddya reckon?

Just like the two sausage dogs above, the world is moving at quite a furious rate.

And we’ve tried to keep up with numerous reincarnations of our blog. It’s come to a stage where we’ve become time poor but still content rich.

There’s so much we want to share, but we felt that the immediacy and motivation was sometimes lost when it came to using our previous content management systems.

This is our “tumblelog”. Here’s to keeping up with the times.

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