What Antick Musings Is All About

I've decided that I need to post a credo or manifesto here, to explain or explicate what I'm trying to do. (Long-time readers may recall my original mission statement and the somewhat later Credo, and may suspect I am repeating myself. It's possible...)

This is not quite a personal blog -- I'm generally reserved about my personal life (including such minor points as the actual name of The Wife) -- and isn't going to turn into one. I'll blog about things that happen to me, if I think they'll be sufficiently amusing, but the point of this blog is not to share my life with others. (Perhaps this is the point where I should mention one of my all-time favorite songs, "Knowing People" by Matthew Sweet?)

This is also not a political blog. I do have political views, but I'm not convinced that they're particularly interesting, and I believe talking too much about what one believes inevitably turns one into a humorless, self-obsessed crank. I've occasionally wandered over in that direction, but it will stay occasional.

To be even more confusing, this isn't consistently a science fictional blog, either, though it comes much closer there. I do think about SF and Fantasy a lot, so they'll both keep coming up. I've spent the past sixteen years thinking about SFF stories, how they work and don't work, and I doubt I'll stop doing that.

It's neither a book blog nor a movie blog, though those are the sources for most of my posts -- the former much more than the latter.

Frankly, this isn't a single-topic blog, or even one arranged around a central theme. (Despite the fact that all authorities say that single-topic blogs are the way to go, if you want people to read you.)

My aim has been to post at least once day, every day when I have access to the Internet. Most of those posts will be essentially short essays (often badly-formed, unfinished, not-completely-thought-through essays, true, but you get what you pay for) of a thousand or two thousand words, on one of the subjects (see list to the left for a non-exhaustive list) that interest me. So consider me a really odd op-ed writer, and you'll be close. Shorter pieces are interspersed as the mood, and ideas, hit me.

Also, please note that I am inordinately fond of:

1. ironic understatement
2. sarcasm
3. sarcastic understatement
4. any other kind of understatement I can think of
   
5. contrarianism
6. putting ideas into overly convoluted forms
7. sentences that are too long to support their own weight
   
8. and numbered lists

I think that should cover everything. That's what I do here, and I hope you enjoy it. Tomorrow, with luck, I'll finish typing up what I thought about Pan's Labyrinth (which I finally saw over the past two days.)