I want this blog to succeed but I also always want to throw a few curses into it. Then again when you curse and swear you alienate a certain amount of the population who have neither a sense of humour nor a sense of opprobrium. I mean a proper sense of opprobrium, which means not writing off the vulgar for the simple reason that it makes you uncomfortable. Some opprobrium is rightfully shunned, and other types are funny. I have no examples but a good fart joke goes a long way to settling who understands humour and who is afraid of scatology.
A while ago I read something by Douglas Coupland, in a newspaper (a good liberal intellectual paper, and yes I read newspapers), in which he describes "The Red Queen's Blog" as a concept that, the more someone 'races onto one's blog to assert one's uniqueness, the more generic one becomes'. I am paraphrasing somewhat, but that's what he means. This is an important statement but Coupland is becoming a bit derivative.
In other news, well you no doubt know your own news, so I don't have to write about that. I just celebrated Canadian Thanksgiving for the umpteenth time, and it gets a bit better each year even as the weather gets crazier. I almost got hit by lightning, to the point where I heard it sizzle the raindrops around me. That's my bit of personal revelation for today's post.
Coupland's blog post in the newspaper was important to read. It was titled "The Radical Pessimist's Guide to the Next Ten Years" and covered a range of important things that are worth considering even if you don't believe in pessimism or the future. Maybe I'll delve into it and post some more things here, assuming that's not a form of intellectual piracy (but how could it be when I acknowledge that it's Coupland's). Basically it was all 'bout the depersonalization and alienation and internetization of our so-called era. I wonder if Coupland has a twitter account? I will research this...
I did promise some dwellings on the Best Things of the Internet and I mean to follow through on that, even though it happened a year ago or more. The first thing I'll list is "Web of Trust" or WoT, at this link, which you can click/see for yourself.
The important thing is that you can type in any website address into the bar on the WoT site and then it will show you how the internet feels about that page. A lot of bad pages are given good ratings, probably because the bad page operators are ganking the WoT site, but the comments usually are balanced out with truthful and concerned internet judgements. If you enjoy finding new sites or free video of whatever (which is illegal and shouldn't be done) and try to keep your computer in good condition, this site is pretty useful. Of course you could install script blockers and security software, but that takes more work than copying and pasting an web-address into a website to tell you if it's trustworthy.
Spoiler alert: most websites are pretty shady.
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