We Don't Need No Stinking Content!
Which bloodthirsty dictator are you? :D:D:D:DDespite the fact that I make it look so easy, it is in fact kind of tough to think up mildly funny and relatively thought provoking things to write about every week, and so a few days ago, at a loss for what to write today’s entry about, I turned to Google. Google, hand in hand with Wikipedia, is where atheistic geeks go to find life’s answers in lieu of the Bible or friends. It’s the manhole cover over the festering sewer of the Internet, and by prying it off of the ground with a Mozilla Firefox crowbar and sticking your head inside you’ll probably find at least one of the answers to your questions, as well as some kid’s Nerf gun fan site.
I Googled the term “things to blog about”, and the first site I found was Blogthings.com, so I figured I was on the right track. What I was hoping for was an indexed list of interesting topics that are easy to make light of and write metaphors about, but what I saw reminded me that I’m in the minority by actually creating my own content for my blog. Blogthings.com provides you with everything you’ll ever need to get around actually writing. It’s an archive of cute add-ons for your blogs – polls and quizzes* to let you determine what your prom style is, or what 2004 hit song you are, or how Texan you are. All of these are burning questions that I’m glad we’re devoting our time to, and did I mention that there’s currently a genocide going on in Darfur?
*So since when did quizzes become fun again? I seem to remember everybody hating quizzes in high school, and I’m pretty sure I still hate quizzes now, but it seems that everybody else can’t get enough of these timewasters. One of the quizzes on Blogthings – I’m not kidding – is “How evil are you?” Don’t you think we could figure this out for ourselves, Internet? I mean, if a person really, truly is evil, then the voices in his head telling him to kill hookers are probably also telling him how evil he is. What I find really disturbing is that the quiz isn’t called “Are you evil?”, but “How evil are you?”, implying that there are, I don’t know, degrees of evilocity, and all of us are somewhere on the evil scale. I consider myself four dead orphans’ worth of evil, but the anonymous wanker in my hall who seems to like slamming his door as hard as possible at 3:30 AM is probably about 15 dead orphans’ worth.
Y’know, one of the earliest blogging sites was Livejournal.com, which kickstarted blogs as an online diary of sorts where people publicly posted thoughts that common sense dictates should best be kept in a locked pink My Little Pony notebook. The impression was that the blogger makes entries about him or herself, and the bloggie reads them and learns something about the blogger – for example, and I’m just throwing out ideas here, maybe he likes anime. That’s the way blogs are supposed to be. You come here, you find out that I’m determined to be cranky and cynical about everything, you go to Snively’s blog, you find out that he’s a genius with a disturbing amount of time on his hands, you go to The Aspiring Liter and you find out that she doesn’t update very often. But now, with all these add-ons from Blogthings, there’s blogs in which every update consists of a sentence and a quiz, and now the blogger only exists so that the bloggie can find out color his or her toenails should be.
Blogthings advertises itself as a place to find quizzes that “will give you a good idea of who you are.” The quest for identity has been something that’s consumed human beings for thousands of years and has traditionally been a process that includes career changes, drugs and alcohol, listening to Pink Floyd, and divorce, among other things, but now we can axe all that garbage because we’ve got quizzes to find our identities for us. While most dystopic science fiction doesn’t apply to modern society yet, the thought of a simple test to determine one’s place in society seems to be taking shape now that there are entire websites devoted to people testing themselves to get advice. So remember – if we aren’t careful, in ten years our children may well be forced to find out what kind of cheesecake they are.
Truman Capps is waiting for the “Are You A Replicant?” quiz, wherein if your test results are positive, an aging, alcoholic Harrison Ford comes and tracks you down.
I Googled the term “things to blog about”, and the first site I found was Blogthings.com, so I figured I was on the right track. What I was hoping for was an indexed list of interesting topics that are easy to make light of and write metaphors about, but what I saw reminded me that I’m in the minority by actually creating my own content for my blog. Blogthings.com provides you with everything you’ll ever need to get around actually writing. It’s an archive of cute add-ons for your blogs – polls and quizzes* to let you determine what your prom style is, or what 2004 hit song you are, or how Texan you are. All of these are burning questions that I’m glad we’re devoting our time to, and did I mention that there’s currently a genocide going on in Darfur?
*So since when did quizzes become fun again? I seem to remember everybody hating quizzes in high school, and I’m pretty sure I still hate quizzes now, but it seems that everybody else can’t get enough of these timewasters. One of the quizzes on Blogthings – I’m not kidding – is “How evil are you?” Don’t you think we could figure this out for ourselves, Internet? I mean, if a person really, truly is evil, then the voices in his head telling him to kill hookers are probably also telling him how evil he is. What I find really disturbing is that the quiz isn’t called “Are you evil?”, but “How evil are you?”, implying that there are, I don’t know, degrees of evilocity, and all of us are somewhere on the evil scale. I consider myself four dead orphans’ worth of evil, but the anonymous wanker in my hall who seems to like slamming his door as hard as possible at 3:30 AM is probably about 15 dead orphans’ worth.
Y’know, one of the earliest blogging sites was Livejournal.com, which kickstarted blogs as an online diary of sorts where people publicly posted thoughts that common sense dictates should best be kept in a locked pink My Little Pony notebook. The impression was that the blogger makes entries about him or herself, and the bloggie reads them and learns something about the blogger – for example, and I’m just throwing out ideas here, maybe he likes anime. That’s the way blogs are supposed to be. You come here, you find out that I’m determined to be cranky and cynical about everything, you go to Snively’s blog, you find out that he’s a genius with a disturbing amount of time on his hands, you go to The Aspiring Liter and you find out that she doesn’t update very often. But now, with all these add-ons from Blogthings, there’s blogs in which every update consists of a sentence and a quiz, and now the blogger only exists so that the bloggie can find out color his or her toenails should be.
Blogthings advertises itself as a place to find quizzes that “will give you a good idea of who you are.” The quest for identity has been something that’s consumed human beings for thousands of years and has traditionally been a process that includes career changes, drugs and alcohol, listening to Pink Floyd, and divorce, among other things, but now we can axe all that garbage because we’ve got quizzes to find our identities for us. While most dystopic science fiction doesn’t apply to modern society yet, the thought of a simple test to determine one’s place in society seems to be taking shape now that there are entire websites devoted to people testing themselves to get advice. So remember – if we aren’t careful, in ten years our children may well be forced to find out what kind of cheesecake they are.
Truman Capps is waiting for the “Are You A Replicant?” quiz, wherein if your test results are positive, an aging, alcoholic Harrison Ford comes and tracks you down.