Bitter Dicta - Behind the Music

So many people have asked, in a variety of forms, what exactly happened to Oh, Bitter Dicta?

The answer is complicated. A number of things happened.

Time Constraints
Let's be honest, here, people. Writing a blog in addition to being a law student can be a little difficult at times. Take all your schoolwork, add in extracurricular commitments, social interaction to preserve sanity, consumption of alcohol and sleep, and you've got only so much time to write.

On the other hand, you have plenty of time to surf the web, check your email, and become a connoisseur of pr0n. So in the end, there isn't much of an excuse here.

Disappointment
When we started OBD, we had planned to write two posts per week each until things got to be too much. The idea behind this was that with five bloggers, we could keep the interests of readers by regularly updating, and the onus of updating wouldn't fall too much on one or another of us.

That didn't really happen, even from the beginning. Although I managed to keep up with the posting most of the time, most of the time, only one or two of my co-bloggers kept up. This situation only got worse after a while. It got to the point that I would post, and wouldn't want to post again so that it wouldn't seem like OBD was just about me, but was about everyone. That didn't work either. I would wait for someone else to post, but by the time they did, I didn't want to steal their thunder by posting immediately after. By the time I felt it was my turn to post, I had lost my inspiration. I had about a dozen Harriet Miers links saved up to blog about, and while waiting for others to post, the issue was mooted.

Not to complain about my co-bloggers. I love them. All. But they had their own time constraints that sort of just meant that all the fireworks I'd imagined were really just a flash in the pan. Which is okay. But I digress --

Comments
The last problem on OBD was the comments. Anonymous comments that ranged from puerile, insulting, to just plain boneheaded. While I was at worst slightly intimidated by these comments (and at best determined to one up those morons), my co-bloggers felt somewhat differently. They wondered why they should continue to post when it seemed like the only people reading only cared about when we talked about feces or how hot someone was.

Although I did manage to unmask one of the commenters as a patent naysayer who offered up manufactured statistics to cover up for a lack of consistent argument, the attacks continued. To me, his fangs had been removed, but my co-bloggers still felt that the blog was something of a hostile environment.

In the end, it all sort of accumulated to kill OBD. Maybe not forever. Maybe not for everyone. But for me. OBD was about spreading the responsibility of maintaining a blog while maintaining, and possibly even increasing the Menlovian audience. It was about offering different angles on the law school experience, on how 2L would affect us as opposed to the first year experience. Well, considering everything that happened, the experiment was a failure.

Again, though, this is not the fault of my co-bloggers. We've all got our own crap going on, and considering the issues we had with OBD, I don't blame them at all for not continuing. And if they decide to pick it up again, that's great too. But it's time for me to strike back out on my own.

Coming soon: What I want Opostrophe to be