Metablogging Redux: About labels

Nota bene: I am now using this post in its capacity as a page-in-the-web, and leaving only the skeleton of the journal entry that was here. So things will be added, deleted, and changed to keep its new functionality. Pay it no mind: as I wrote in the original draft, "it turns out that you can make your chronometer an organ of goodfact around here," referring to the fact that I can give a post an arbitrary timestamp. Please let me know via comment if any links are broken or things like that.

The new purpose of this page is to explain the newly-implemented system of post tags. If you've never wanted to find an earlier entry but couldn't remember its date, this can't be of the slightest interest to you.

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"I'm trying out the latest Google-given gadget," I wrote in the original draft, "the blog post label. They're tags you give to your weblog entries, like themes, that let readers easily find or catch up on the history of a recurring thought by using a built-in search for the tag. Since I'm very much for being able to have a discussion that lasts more than one post and doesn't have to constantly recap what came before, I've decided I need to embrace this little classifying tool." These tags show up at the bottom of each post, after the word "Labels:", and before the signature/timestamp line.

Here's a current list of the tags in use at Sun-Drunken. I break them into two classes. The first group is roughly "things that make posts," and consists, in alphabetical order, of:

• Day by day, a catch-all category for posts and reports about things that just happened to happen some day. These posts are the journal side of Sun-Drunken, rather than the soapbox side.
  
• Deeper than day had been aware, a series about the night and night-time photography. The label is a line in a poem of Nietzsche. See the second entry in this category for an introduction, and an explanation of the label's meaning.
  
• JoaLDG, "Journal of a Lower-Division Grader." These are the entries about my experiences grading linear algebra papers and my contemporaneous thinking about pedagogy. See the earliest post in this category for an introduction.
  
• KUCA, the Lord Kelvin Useless Creation Award, an annual (so far) citation of a person or group whose continued survival has never been of the slightest use to any creature. See the earliest post in this category for an introduction.
  
• Lost Blogging, a quasi-behind-the-scenes series in which fragmentary posts that got lost or just never came together are given for what they are. See the earliest post in this category for an introduction.
  
• Metablogging, mainly posts of an administrative about the weblog, and not blogging-about-blogging. That typically falls under "Shameless whinging" or "Wordsmithing," depending on the tone of the article.
  
• Photoblogging, a series of posts built around annotated photographs. This is a catch-all category for the heavily photographic posts, and they have no other common identity, although in most cases they are pictoral tours of someplace I went or thing I did.
  
• Schachblogging, posts about chess or involving chess. (Schach is German.)
  
• Tigers Paint it Orange, a record of Princeton University's fascination that became Sun-Drunken's as well, the tiger. Also includes a few other bits of Princetoniana that made it to these pages.
  
• An Underground Den, a series about the places I live in. Photoblogs about my rooms fall here, as do stories about locks. The full quotation is "Behold! human beings living in an underground den," the words Socrates uses to introduce the famous allegory of the cave in Plato's Republic.

The second group of tags is roughly of themes that sometimes occur in parts of posts, and consists in alphabetical order of:

• Allzumenschlich, signifying instances of human failure or by extension general moods of existential brooding. Allzumenschlich is usually rendered in English as "all-too-human." This is the melancholy counterpart to "Man is something that shall be overcome."
  
• Man is something that shall be overcome, signifying things about or exemplifying our Sun-Drunken spirit of "Nietzschean optimism." This is the hopeful counterpart to "Allzumenschlich." Indeed, the tag is a direct quotation of Walter Kaufmann's translation of Zarathustra's "highest hope."
  
• Shameless Whinging, which is just that, because it happens to everyone now and then.
  
• They Should Have Sent a Poet, meaning usually just what it says: some image, thought, or other bit of phenomenology that mandates an articulate sense of wonder. Sometimes this tag is used ironically, as in, "they should have ... instead of me." This quotation is from the film (book?) Contact, when Ellie sees during her voyage cosmic conjunctions she likens to visual poetry.
  
• Three Thousand Years, that being about the duration of human history to date, (not counting highly scattered records of earlier times). Sometimes these posts are literally about history, but more often they are about the story of man, our place in history, and especially the history of thought. The full quotation is from Goethe, "He who cannot draw on three thousand years is living hand-to-mouth."
  
• Truly You Have a Dizzying Irony, or, "shameful (as in self-conscious) whinging." This tag is to be read in the voice of Cary Elwes.
  
• Wir mussen wissen, wir werden wissen, indicating mathematical content, these being famous words of David Hilbert. They mean, "We must know, we will know," referring to his belief that "there are no absolutely unsolvable problems." He said this in a 1930 radio address, which in fact was recorded, so you can listen to this mathematical titan say them in his own voice: just listen.
  
• Wordsmithing, or, writing about writing.
  

Please note that some posts are unlabelled. Usually these are the "Into the West" and "Toward the Rising Sun" posts that signal I'm about to shift locations. A few others I was inclined to leave unlabelled for other reasons: sometimes because they don't seem to fit any of our tags very well, sometimes because I'd just as soon leave the entry in a more obscure position.

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Let me close on my original joke:

If you're wondering why someone would waste their time going back to sort, catalogue, number, index, and file something that will likely never be of the slightest interest to anyone but for the completeness of the thing, please find the nearest male and ask him to explain it.