Does it annoy anyone else when people say “a couple” when they really mean “a few”? I mean, it doesn’t annoy me as such, but “a couple” very obviously means “two” and why would you use it otherwise, because that’s asking for trouble.
Anyway. The first link is one I got off this post on reddit. Executive summary: American mortgage broker becomes homeless, has laptop, maintains some kind of social life/support network by talking to people on the internet. He’s now set up a blog at Lillyweather Lane whereon he’s documenting his continuing adventures. I will point out that he is both smart people and good writers and well worth reading.
Link the second is to a main dudette of mine who has finally done the honourable thing and started a blog. She’s from Belfast, everyone. She has a funny accent. It adds at least three layers of excellent to her already jolly good material.
And just because I’m not about to be pushed around by no pedant, here’s a third link I happened to have open. I don’t care whose toes I step on.
but this man has the right idea.
Today I stumbled into becoming a cartoonist by proxy, thanks to the quick-witted, nifty-with-a-sketchpad and heavily-hyphenated Sparky Donatello. Which confirmed a suspicion of mine: while blogging is indeed a powerful tool of informational power media buzzwords 2.0, it’s not the blogs themselves that have the moxie; no no, my freakish little amigos, it’s the comments. You show me some maggoty ould tramp who wanders into a comment box and I’ll give you favourable if somewhat complicated odds that they’ll end up being treated like royalty.
With this in mind, I’m going to go lurk behind Leinster House with a laptop and mutter about tax cuts for the bearded. Going by my current run of luck, I expect sweeping reforms within the week.
The Orwell Prize is delighted to announce that, to mark the 70th anniversary of the diaries, each diary entry will be published on this blog exactly seventy years after it was written, allowing you to follow Orwell’s recuperation in Morocco, his return to the UK, and his opinions on the descent of Europe into war in real time. The diaries end in 1942, three years into the conflict.
It’s a nifty idea. At the moment he’s mooching around a sanatorium, and apparently he’s going to start Getting Political on the 7th of September. Exciting stuff.
[Found on languagehat]
So despite being technically the first person to come to the fray (that’s right, scoop city), my weekend away has meant that I’m now more or less the last. So uh, apologies to the 80+ people who turned up yesterday expecting something actually interesting.
Handily, the gap does give me the opportunity to guage the general outlook on the thing, which outlook can be more or less summed up as “Yeah, cool”. The consensus seems to be that blogging is a personal thing, everyone does it for different reasons, and no one’s necessarily trying to beat on the walls of the literary and journalistic mainstream. Fine and dandy. There were some ill-advised, feet-first responses from the kind of people who use words like “blogosphere” without cracking a smile, but that’s just bruised idealism, and in all fairness the technology wouldn’t exist without the Interlifeweb Beta 2.0 Release Candidate 4 evangelists so I’m prepared to look the other way any time they start taking themselves a mite seriously.
Which is not to say that we should just buy into the sermons. We’re told that a plurality of voices and a free marketplace of ideas and all that assorted et ceteration is causing pure liquid democracy to ooze out of every cranny in the gaff, but the aggregate level of context-hatin’, knee-jerkin’ self-righteousness among Serious Bloggers is enough to make the Daily Mail blush. Online discussions aren’t about considered debate or meticulous research, they’re about grabbing four words out of the comment above you, inventing some random connections between them, and then taking this new and improved comment personally. It’s about taking the worst qualities of four year olds and brick walls and then beating people in the face with them.
Back to the post in question. Some people took issue with Rosie’s assertion that some of the Irish blogging A-list are “shit-awful writers,” insisting that this was just her being a snob and stuck-up and too impressed with her own subjective judgement. Fellas: no. You’re wrong, and I have the ivory tower education to prove it. Put it this way – by your logic, Cecelia Ahern and Dan Brown are the most awesome and great writers in the world. If they had babies, they’d be in the shape of Nobel prize medals. But objectively speaking, they are bad manipulators of language whose novels are a great big slapstick orgy of clichés and mixed metaphors and lazy plots, and sure their content might be tons of fun if you’re in the right frame of mind but please in the name of all that’s holy don’t try to pretend that their merit as writers is just a matter of opinion.
Well. I haven’t slept in five days so I’ll leave you with the charming spectacle of a murderous gimp doing the funky chicken. Good night e’body.
Rosie has waxed critical-like on the Irish inter-blogging-o-sphere. I have some thoughts of my own but right now I have a bus to catch. I’m only posting this so that the lazy part of my brain can’t weasel out of posting a longer bit at some point over the next few days. Although now I kind of want to weasel out just to show that I’m not the boss of me.
Update: and away we go.
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