Geekery

I hate your blog

Posted on 12. Nov, 2009 by Jake.

The pure socialist beauty of the blog is that anyone can have one. You don’t need a license or any form of qualification. These days they are like opinions, or arseholes, everybody has one, and many of them are full of shit. And so I present to you some of the worst blogs on the interweb:

1. Deep Thought: http://easyasfallingoffablog.blogspot.com

In its own words, this blog is about:

‘Random thoughts on subjects such as youth work, worship, God, the Church of England, films, paintings and occasional peeks at Latin, Medieval history, Merovingians and bishops along with a healthy smattering of children’s television, books, cooking and other oddities!’

If you find this interesting, you are probably the blog’s author, or a lobotomy patient, or maybe both.

2. Toast 99: http://hornytoubab.blogspot.com/

Billed as the ‘everyday musings of a middle-aged man’, the five most recent posts on this blog are about the author’s attempts to get his wife decent travel insurance. Gripping stuff.

3. Baller King: http://www.ballerking.com/

God’s gift to women now has his own blog.

It contains educational posts with titles such as ‘The Recession Will Make Getting Laid Easier’ and ‘becoming “exotic” and “intelligent” to a girl”‘.

Here is a sample of the blog’s sagely advice:

‘…when dating girls, remember two things:

1. Don’t spend too much money on them before they sleep with you. Otherwise they wont’ respect you.

2. You still need to pay for any date you go on with them though. So don’t go on any expensive dates before you stick it in her’.

I would bet any amount of hard cash that whoever writes this blog is actually a virgin with chronic BO and at least four cats.

4. Bad Hair Day: http://badhairday.typepad.com/bad_hair_day/

Yes, believe it or not this site is literally about catching people who are having bad hair days and posting the pics online. This is what happens when Heat Magazine’s rejection of your job application isn’t enough to kill your dream of being a writer.

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Things that make you go hmmm

Posted on 17. Sep, 2009 by Jake.

I am pro-technology. I write a technology blog, so I don’t suppose this revelation will come as a surprise to you. Technology facilitates the advancement of the human race. No self-respecting technology blog reader would disagree.

However, sometimes technology is used for something so mind-bogglingly pathetic that it actually sets mankind back. Inventions so retarded that they make you feel that maybe life was better in caveman days after all, because at least back then no-one would have been able to manufacture something as stupid as the subjects of this here blog – things that should never have been invented.

For example, there are some people out there who are so lazy that they feel that lifting the toilet seat is just too much of an effort. There are others who are so obsessed with hygiene that they require rubber gloves in order to shake your hand. These people have gotten together to create one of the least necessary inventions of all time – the hands free automatic toilet seat.

Then, let me tell you about a friend of mine. He has a Roboraptor. It is a robotic dinosaur that runs around your house causing chaos for no apparent good reason. I would pay good money not to have one of these in my home. Along with the Tamagotchi, the Furbey and Sims, the inventor of this deserves a free frontal lobotomy. Get a kitten.

So we’ve messed up the world beyond repair and are hurtling towards extinction. But, don’t stress, there’s a solution. A car that has absolutely no power, no space, and is light enough for people to throw it into rivers. Which they actually do, enough for Smart Car Tipping to make the news: The dumbest part about the ironically named Smart Car is that it still runs on gas, and has the exact same fuel economy as other similarly small cars. Rather get a bicycle. Less people will laugh at you when they see you riding around in it.

Ok, so this is less an example of technology than something invented for technology to wear. But laptops don’t need clothing, I hear you protest. Yes they do, say the people who will earn money if they actually manage to convince anyone of this. “Well, why SHOULDN’T your laptop be warm & cozy too?” these people say. Don’t allow these people to prosper.

And finally, an invention so hilariously inane that it speaks for itself.  Allow me to introduce the DVD rewinder.
Nuff said I think.

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Thought piece: Too much tech?

Posted on 13. Jul, 2009 by Jake.

A young fogey of my acquaintance put down his pipe and single malt just long enough to deliver this rant:

Two inventions are responsible for the contemporary inflation of people’s sense of self-importance: the cell phone and 24 hour news.

Everyone now takes for granted that they, at all times, need to be contactable and to know what is happening everywhere in the world the moment it happens. But unless you are a trauma surgeon or the president neither of these is likely to be true.

Seriously, do you need to know the foreign minister of Uzbekistan has moved house? More to the point, do you need to know it now? And because it has to be instant, the networks focus on speed rather than reliability. Because it’s all day, the focus is on impact rather than substance.

And everyone will have at least one experience of planning to meet someone and then running out of batteries/airtime/decent signal and getting completely lost. I say ‘plan’ in the loosest sense. In the pre-mobile era, you’d give clear, precise instructions: ‘meet me at the left side of the fountain at 11.15’ for example. Today it’s more like ‘I’ll be inside in the afternoon sometime, call me when you’re there’, inevitably followed by hours of confusion and frustration.

The world, and our social and intellectual lives, would only be improved if we switched off and tuned out.

My response might surprise you: I agree.

Sort of.

Except instead of less technology, I think we need more.

Yes, the language of texting leaves plenty to be desired. But it’s a symptom of an underlying problem, not the cause.

Look at how rich and sophisticated the more advanced Twitter users have become. Creating nuance out of 140 characters takes tremendous skill; there is, after all, an art to making more out of less.

Blaming texting for the illiteracy of the youth is like blaming the sonnet for junky teenage poetry. (There is, however, no hope for the cell phone novel.)

And social networking, as well as being a medium for posting embarrassing pictures of your friends, opens new ways of speaking, often to people you might not have spoken to before.

What we’ll do with these powerful technologies is another thing altogether, but here again I think freedom of communication triumphs.

Yes, 24 hour network news overloads us with schlock and awe, and every jerk with an opinion has his own website, but the flipside is that every jerk with the opposite opinion also has a blog.

And amongst the tumult, occasionally a fresh thought emerges.

More importantly, there is now oversight – or perhaps we should call it undersight -
with bloggers taking the mainstream media to task. Lazy opinions are scrutinized, partisan columnists are called to account, facts are checked.

FiveThirtyEight was the source some of the most informative, and accurate, polling data during the recent US election, and that’s basically some guy with a head for stats and a laptop.

And shoddy science reporting wouldn’t exist if there were more people doing what Ben Goldacre does.

Yes we might have delegated just a little of our decision making to our electronic devices (don’t tell my friend about SatNav!) but that’s our fault.

Anxiety about the effect of new technologies isn’t new.

It’s what we do with it that counts.

I look forward to hearing why I’m completely wrong.

 

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