substitute

Blog software that includes the headline in the url ruins things. I don't know why, but if I show someone a link and it has the dumb headline in there, it somehow spoilers the story even when it's not a story one would expect to be spoiled.

Am I crazy, or is the whole-story-in-url just a bad thing? Especially with photos.

threepunchstuff was kind enough to link me to a Salon.com article on the subprime mortgage mess, which quotes my old blog at length. Neato.

via cruel.com:

Blogs - And God's Youth.

Just don't, kids. It's not good to "want a voice," and you shouldn't be tempted by quizzes about flirtation. Plus, idle words are evil. Fortunately I am a professional and a specialist so I get to have one if I want.

About a third of what this guy says is dead on, of course. Blogs are blather, the "current mood" is ridiculous, and posting quizzes and babbling about nothing is in fact a huge waste of time. Point taken. He allows email and instant messaging, though. You'd think that recent events would have given him pause especially about IMing. My favorite paragraph:

Then there is the language itself. Here is a mild example: “If your a hater then whateva i dont have time 4 your negativity in my positive world.” Phrases such as “screwed up,” “I dunno,” and every type of swear word are commonly used. One blog by a young twentysomething in a splinter used the acronym “OMG,” which is a shorthand way to take God’s name in vain.

Wasn't Tyre incinerated because they kept saying "I dunno"?

So You Want To Be A China Sex Blogger from Maciej Ceglowski tells the story of an expat Brit inin Shanghai whose blog contained the poorly chosen mix of swaggering colonial sex yarns, culturally insensitive jabs at his host country, and loud criticism of an authoritarian government.

It looks as though some combination of internet sleuthing, mob rage, and government is going to give him a pretty bad rebellion in his boxers soon.

Christ, what an asshole.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

When I wrote The Sad Case of Dr. Day two years ago, I knew it would be a natural target for nuts, since it's about the tragedy of junk science among other things. What I didn't expect was a big picture historical view of the extraterrestrial origins of racism, domesticated animals, the Mafia, and the prophetic nature of a James Bond movie.

( the fun starts here )

I'm sort of interested in this person's fully fleshed out theory. Just not 39 megs of text interested, you know?