The trainwrecks blog has categories for Annoyances, Birth Control, Flame Wars, Hubris, Oh Honey, Tragedies, Trolling for Free Stuff, and Unintentional Humor. It’s pretty good.
For father’s day they have a truly fine roundup of deadbeat dads, off-the-rails misogyny, one very strange mom, and something that appears to have been written by a teddy bear.
save_the_net syndicates the blog of the Save the Internet site.
The intention of the site and the blog is to oppose a U.S. law that would create a tiered internet instead of the current “net neutrality” policy that governs the Internet.
fengi says it way better than I can about the RAPE OF THE SOUL thing. Botticelli… what… catholic… Oh! It’s Judith Reisman! No wonder!
Meanwhile, ludickid made me chorf my tea with his necessary commentary on the Great Profanity Problem.
Advice to people wishing to become smarter: Get in the habit of assuming that everything is more complex than you imagine.
It’s not quite as good as the “go on a sex vacation with a Heinlein heroine” offer, but I really did enjoy Join The Mile High Club With A Single Webmaster.
“The trip will be kept confidential and will not be blogged.”
Thanks to foo2rama
I awoke in a black depression this morning, only to be jollied into a fit of giggling by the Aardvark’s Curious George Culture Wars post.
The other day we had discussed the difference between “cripes” and “yeesh”, both of which she uses as tags for posts on del.icio.us. It was my opinion that “cripes” could be used for any type of fucked-up situation, but that “yeesh” indicated not only that things were really jacked, but that someone was being a total lamer.
This is why the government needs to track us on the Internet, because the difference between a cripes and a yeesh is just the kind of subtle code that our biowarfare sleeper cell the terrorists use to signal their cohorts.
Dear The Bloggers:
I understand the desire to emulate print media. It can be fun to write in the style of a columnist, assume the authority of an Op-Ed writer, and issue judgments about taste or politics in the voice of a successful journalist.
I also understand that you see journalistic types producing year-end lists, and that seems worthy of emulation too. Your model music reviewer or humor columnist or political analyst cranks out a Top 10 or 100 for the year, or the Cheers ‘n’ Jeers of the Yeer, or something like that. You want to be part of it, and as a self-identified journalist you feel it’s an obligation to carry through what you’d call a “meme”.
Don’t.
There is a reason for the “End of year list” phenomenon in journalism. The ink-stained wretches who are living out your dream want to spend a week with their families around now, and all but a skeleton crew of hard core news types do. The feature writers and columnists and reviewers all turn in their stupid lists around Dec. 20 and go off to open presents, drink, and reconsider their career choices. The lists suck, and they know it. It’s the lowest form of journalism. The only reason they exist is to give these poor bastards a breather for one week a year. Then it’s back to turning in the column and banging out the news for another 51 weeks.
So this year, feel lucky that you’re unpaid, and stop aping the survival behavior of exhausted journos. Your lists aren’t any better, and you have far less reason to dump them on us.
The Null Device has an excellent summary of the Australian race riots, with some background information that the international media hasn’t touched.
Also, text messaging. Yow.
Podcasting is bad. I’ve bitched about it already. Mouth-breathing geeks droning about technology. Even the ones who are good writers (0.1%) are unlistenable like bad college professors. Fire it into the sun.
But something worse looms. The video iPod and its cousins, and the ease of making small downloadable portable video magazines, offers a future of what I’m sure they’re calling vodcasting. This unfortunately does not provide vodka, but may require it. The thought of tapping on my handheld video device and seeing Dave Winer or some person who has the best blog about Babylon 5 talk at me is, frankly, emetic.
My opinion is that mumbling, whiny, unsightly geeks who insist on being media personalities should restrict themselves to text like the other mumbling, whiny, unsightly geeks over the last 10,000 years and stay out of the public eye and ear. The reason we’re not all on the radio and the TV is not just that access to media is limited. It’s also that very few people have either the skills or the charisma to do either of those things without making others dizzy with loathing.
But I can deal with that just by not watching any of it. The second part of this is worse. Right now, blogging is a text medium, and I love it. I have maybe 200 RSS subscriptions to personal and institutional weblogs and weblog-like things and I get a lot out of it. I make fun of the bozosphere, but mostly it’s great.
Video may not kill it, but it’ll be a huge kick in the stomach. Video is seductive. It’s immediate and TV-like. It’s visual. It makes people feel like stars to be in videos. It’s dumbed down and easy. And it’s made for ad insertion. Video podcasting, when it gets to a certain point, will be adopted by just about all the commercially-run weblogs and a huge portion of the homebrew ones. And I see it as having an unpleasantly TV-like effect on the web. You might not think a three-paragraph blog update on one of the Weblogs Inc. or Gawker sites is a heavy chunk of ideas, but it’ll get smaller and dumber in a video. Instead of a galaxy of smart little snide magazine article squibs, we’ll have huge numbers of local news quality “segments” with stock footage and maybe 200 words of idea in them. Inevitably the commercial blogs will be done by prettier and prettier faces. And because there’s less money in blogging than in actual TV, the use of stock provided footage from commercial sources will be universal.
With luck, we’ll keep a core of text-based weblogging that has actual ideas in it, the way we kept an intelligent chunk of the Web after the flashmonsters and marketing droids ate most of it. But it’s not a good thing, not at all.
I hate video.
Quotes:
Aaron Flores is co-founder of Armor of Light Productions -a ministry geared towards embracing culture and emerging generations. He is creator of the blog turn videoblog, theVoiz.com where he intimately shares his personal life, faith, culture, art, and other areas of interest using video, new media, and the internet. For Aaron, theVoiz.com is an experiment with new media, social networking, and cultural engagement. Aaron takes his nickname, The First Christian Vlogger lightly since theVoiz.com is simply he’s way of sharing life with others.
[…]
Since I began blogging in 2003, I have experienced this on so many levels. As a Christian blogger who also writes about politics, I’m accused of being offensive, harsh, and unloving. What many unbelievers don’t realize is that Jesus was offensive and harsh, and his actions would seem unloving to some. For example, he said that unless you repent, you will perish. That is, you will be destroyed. Does that sound loving?
[…]
Stacy L. Harp is the President and Founder of Mind &; Media an online publicity company that utilizes the blogosphere’s potential to market Christian books, music and products. Stacy also writes daily at the recently launched Persecution Blog . She also maintains a more personal blog called Writing Right where she discusses the issues of the day while adding humor and inspiration.
Also: GODBLOGCONBLOG?
Be My Blog 