ISSN 1703-5511
About the pd.o’s International Standard Serial Number
Pintday.org is a weekly serial, published every Tuesday, which presents editorial content on contemporary issues.
This is a dry, lifeless way of saying that once a week, we climb up on our podium and let fly at whatever is chapping our asses at the moment.
We describe our content as being based on “beer, rants and boot sectors,” to give some idea of the breadth of topics available at the pd.o. They’re actually even more far-ranging than that.
We designate each rant with a Roman numeral, starting first with June 19, 2001 as “D” (500). The first 500 rants before that were oral only, and took place at various venues throughout the world between 1991 and 2001. At PD D, however, we started the tradition of recording these rants online.
We use Roman numerals to make ourselves feel more important.
Those of us who rant are referred to as Saints. (But really, only by us.) This is both a juvenile conceit, and a bald slur against organized religion. The vocabulary doesn’t end there: We observe Pint Day. We step up to the podium. Beer becomes communion. Contributors are first beatified before they can rant, and canonized at the appropriate time afterward. (Pint Day: Going to Hell one Tuesday at a time.)
Why register for an ISSN? We were reared by librarians, so we tend to develop and participate in taxonomies at the drop of a hat. Now that we’re a catalogued serial, we can’t be immediate dismissed as off the wall, or without consequence. We’re legit, see? (Pointing at ISSN.) Now we can only be dismissed after cursory thought.
But this is really a specious argument. Cataloguing, naming and numbering adds zero credibility. The discourses here must, and do, stand on their own merit. A number gains us, and anyone, no street cred whatsoever.
So why bother? It forces a little discipline on us. We’ve declared our weekly schedule, so now it’s up to us to continue to live up to it. It’s kind of analogous to buying a health club membership with the idea of compelling yourself to attend.
Also, making government or NGO standards bodies recognize little old us is a bit of a thrill. It makes us feel like big men.
The ISSN designation only applies to our weekly rant. The rest of the site remains an unnumbered, and largely unsorted jumble of online detritus, some of which is of archival quality, some of which is of interest only to us. This seems almost like the essence of the web, doesn’t it?