on posting dates and post-dating

I'm writing this at 2 AM on a Sunday morning. Yet, this will be date-stamped late Friday night. The reason is that I want to have a post every single day. Not necessarily for any real reason, beyond the fact that I promised to do it in my State of the Zembla address on January 1. Come to think of it, even the post announcing that there would be daily posts was itself composed after its supposed date. At 9:44 on January 1, I was still talking to the Keane cousins about accidentally going to a gay bar my first week in San Francisco (the subject for a new post, perhaps?).

There's no real reason that Zembla needs to be a daily endeavor. The site doesn't cover breaking news. I have no real idea of what the readership even entails, except that it's greater when posts get linked on Deadspin, and Allen tends to read several weeks at a time in big Dutch RSS text gulps. Nor is it an issue of merely keep ing the post count up. It's March 4th, but there have been far more than 62 posts this year. Maybe 65, 66, in fact. Truly, there's more Zembla than anyone actually wants.

In the early days of Cementhorizon, there was more of an informal competition to get one's posts and comments to appear at the top of the main page. Just for the sake of history take a gander at how the old girl used to look. Events? News stories? What a different, more innocent world it was, back in 2002. I do miss the polls a little, shamelessly stolen for the most part from the old Squelch poll site, including my favorite:

What is your reason for crushing a lot?

• I'm a player


• I'm not a player; I just crush a lot

These days, CH sites are updated so infrequently, there's no real race. The frantic post/comment rat race has been replaced by general malaise, as readers get their self-worth from things like "loving relationships" and "rewarding careers" and "international travel", rather than the sweet temporary high of being the most recent poster. I personally like to fly under the radar. There's a post every day, somehow, but when did it go up? Most Zembla pieces are written on scraps of paper and pocket-sized notebooks, but only committed to cyber-immortality between midnight and 3 AM. If I were Doc Brown, I'd have finished the wiring job for the Clock Tower four or five hours late, waited for my future self to time-travel from the Old West, then zipped back to 9:54 PM or so to connect the cables.

This might be all hullabalooing over nothing. It's not clear whether people generally read the site via the Cementhorizon main page, and even if they do, whether fake posting dates confuse people, making them think there's no new content, and driving them into the cybernetic arms of Digital Johnny. In fact, I acknowledged the likelihood of fake dates in the original posts. Still, when a friend referred to post-dating a blog post as "pulling a Sean", I knew I had gone too far.

Post-dating posts. Will I ever stop? Yo, I don't know. I might have an answer "tomorrow", but it probably will have been written three weeks from yesterday.