Lazy Sunday mornings with my readers
Every once in awhile I go through a comments binge, where I trawl through them all for the last while and send off little notes if they've left a way to reply. It wasn't such a big deal ages ago when I committed to it, but if you look closely at the screenshots below, it's starting to get a little over the top.
I'm not going to stop doing it, because even as I slip into legend it's just polite. If someone has gone through the effort to leave me their thoughts, it's not like their time isn't valuable and should be treated as such. Plus, it's good to leave the rarified air and slum with the common people a little, and it lets them know I'm actually really listening and appreciate their POV even if it doesn't necessarily match up with my own.
However, some things to keep in mind...
- I don't send notes off to everyone, so don't take it personally if your inbox doesn't have a message from drunkenbatman in it. Sometimes it's because nothing at all is coming to mind, and sometimes because I'm planning on answering the question in another way sometime later because it's come up before or it's sparked something in my brain.
- Do take note of the unread count in my inbox, and realize that if you respond to one of my little notes, if I don't respond back don't take it personally. I have a high typing speed, and try to be polite in responding to someone who sends me any form of communiqué, which can lead to me killing too much time typing out these long things while answering emails. Sometimes the vicious circle needs to be broken.
Still, while aspects of having comments and such open can grind me down sometimes, they've provided so much value to the site (and other readers) that I can't imagine not having them and do really value the effort given in them over time.
On a quick note, this strange question ended up in my inbox this morning too, so while we're here I figured I'd knock it out:
Just as a random mood, I've suddenly decided that there are way too many people calling themselves "batman"... So... what is with the "somethingbatman" naming craze? Does it have special meaning, or admit to an unhealthy interest in caped crusaders? Enquiring not-entirely-normal mind wants to know! :)Stephen W.
Um, no real clue? Are there a bunch of people with batman in their name now? I noticed a few sites with 'drunken' or 'drunk' in their name recently, but I've been swamped enough that if there is some batman naming craze going on I'm out of the loop.
My 'nom de plume', aka 'handle', has been in use for years, and is an old nickname (I was young and stupid, and you will never hear the story behind it until the statute of limitation expires, so don't ask) from ages ago. I'll admit it took guts to keep it when "Batman and Robin" was in theaters, which was so bad it probably inspired no one to pick it up.
I kept it because the visual image it puts in people's minds is so amusing to me it far outweighs that they may be envisioning the giant rubber nipples of the earlier movies (Note: I did like the Burton movies, but they felt more like a cover song, and the latter were just horrifying).
There is a new 'Batman Begins' movie out (which, by the way, is quite good) and the hype was building for that for quite awhile. I know there's a phenomenon where, due to the power of suggestion and mindshare, when something has been going on with a celebrity newborn babies have a habit of picking up that celebrity's name...
Comments (18)
Posted by: eggsnatcher at July 3, 2005 12:32 PM
"There MUST be better uses for your time."
Sure there are, but it is what makes DB so cool. Oh DB, your desktop is getting messy again... I hate that.
Posted by: David Magda at July 3, 2005 12:34 PM
There MUST be better uses for your time.
There are always more productive ways of wasting your time, but life is not always about efficiency.
Heck, I just wasted two days of my life waiting around for my chance to jump out of a perfectly working aircraft. :)
Posted by: drunkenbatman at July 3, 2005 12:41 PM
Heck, I just wasted two days of my life waiting around for my chance to jump out of a perfectly working aircraft. :)
You better have had The Cow with you.
Posted by: nougatmachine at July 3, 2005 12:44 PM
I'd just like to be the first to say that I'm rather shocked someone with the l337 comput0rz sk|llz as drunkenbatman actually still has the dashboard icon in his dock. Weird!
Posted by: Nabil at July 3, 2005 01:11 PM
You're a better man than I, Gunga Din. I'm lousy at responding to comments, and I don't get NEARLY the volume that you do.
Keep up the good work, and don't sweat the backlog: most people just appreciate the articles, and aren't really expecting a personal response. When we get them, it's just like an extra treat.
Posted by: Saad Mahamood at July 3, 2005 01:29 PM
This is a classical problem that requires some sort of Artificial Intelligence solution! ;)
Saad.
Posted by: Jason Terhorst at July 3, 2005 02:07 PM
You're right about the "extra treat" part. I recieved a response this morning, when I came home from church, and it was like, "whoa! cool!". If you put it in perspective, what's the blog's readership numbers? More than a couple thousand? A day?
Posted by: Oliver at July 3, 2005 03:39 PM
I'm intrigued by your use of GyazMail... never heard of it before, and i just assumed all of us mac users would be on mail.app or entourage. Time for a bit of googling.
Posted by: Oliver at July 3, 2005 03:40 PM
Ha! I googled 'gyazmail' and the last result on the first page was: DrunkenBlog: GyazMail wide-screen
http://www.drunkenbatman.com/drunkenblog-archives/000165.html
Posted by: Wes McGee at July 3, 2005 04:20 PM
...seeing my name in that graphic reminds me...I need to start riding the butts that run my hosting place. I hate my ISP's (non-existant) spam filter, (I have as many emails as DB does in that box. Unfortunately, the only real letter in that stack was from DB...which I found like 7 months later.) and I'd like to have my personal website and email address back. (there's no excuse for it to be down for months.) I need to send my business elsewhere.
Posted by: Bruce Hoult at July 3, 2005 05:56 PM
Oh! *That* kind of batman!
I don't know quite why, but the image in my mind was always the Biggles kind of batman, a kind of PA whose job is to keep The Pilot comfortable and operating at peak efficiency.
Posted by: Carl at July 3, 2005 07:11 PM
On Slashdot, there's "AKA I am Batman," who posts semi-frequently. That could be who the writer is thinking of.
Posted by: icedtrip at July 3, 2005 10:36 PM
well, looks like you might need to plug that guy in. the juice is low my man.
Posted by: Dave at July 4, 2005 12:16 AM
When I saw the first Batman film, I found myself wondering why on earth they cast Michael Keaton as the caped crusader. As a slapstick Robin, fair enough, but Batman in personage? (not seen any of the others so can't comment on them.)
Posted by: Mike at July 4, 2005 03:02 AM
The Biggles kind of batman?
As in:
"My batman awoke me from bed.
I'd had a thick night and I'd got a sore head.
So I said to myself,
To myself I said,
I haven't got a hope in the morning."
http://www.xv.flyer.co.uk/songs.html
Thick night, sore head - our DB sounds more like the pilot than the batman.
Posted by: Pauly D at July 4, 2005 09:58 PM
Well, I personally would like you to know that I went out to Boston recently and there are a shitload of Dunkin Donut shops out there even though there are just as many Starbucks Coffee shops out there, and I had to ask aloud just why nobody is going to Starbucks and no one really knows, but they just don't.
And that's saying something about Boston, isn't it?
Posted by: MacHeadCase at July 5, 2005 09:15 AM
My 'non de plume', aka 'handle'...
That should be "nom de plume". As in nom = name.
Congrats on your site BTW. I greatly enjoy reading it on a regular basis!










FOUR hours? That is f'ing crazy. There MUST be better uses for your time.