Carpe Datum

Heh, I still need to try and pick up that series. It sound like one I might enjoy, although my hubby has cautioned me against it... But then again, I love the works of William Faulkner, so I might just be a weirdo to start with... :)

Actually, the first series is worth trying to read ... once. I wouldn't deny that the writing style is good. It's just that I find the theme and the characters unrelentingly depressing (the only character worth the time of day is Mhoram), and there's been no sign that the second series is any different, so I've never picked it up, and I cannot understand why people enjoy it.

Compared the the first series, the second series is like a 3-month long root canal.

Now that leprosy can be cured it loses some of it's effect, as well.

I thought the purpose of this blog was for you to rant about politics?

The purpose of this blog is for me to talk about whatever I feel like talking about, and sometimes that means venting about whatever pisses me off. If I'm not particularly pissed off about politics at any given moment, though, I might throw a book review out there just to see what other people think. Or talk about home life, work, whatever.

The point I was trying to make is that I never want to put myself in a position where I feel like I have to talk about some current events even though I don't necessarily have anything original or interesting to say. I want to talk about what I want to talk about for my own reasons. The blog is meant to be a therapeutic hobby, not an avenue for making money or gaining fame, etc. It's nice to be noticed, of course.

Actually, I do appreciate Observer's blog, because I don't have to enter an email address to be able to post a comment. (He knows who I am and where I live, of course.)

Why do other blogs require that? It's all write-only memory, and if I want to put in a dead address I can usually get away with it, so why bother?

There are only two reasons, really, to require an email address: One is to discourage stupid trolls. Some trolls (including kids who are screwing around on the internet during their library time in junior high) are not smart enough to realize you can put a fake email address in there, and so that prevents them from electronically vandalizing your site. Second is to discourage spam. A lot of spambots do not automatically put an email in with their comment, and so by requiring it, you can cut down x% of spam in a heartbeat. I don't know what x is, though.

Hmm, ok. The reason I prefer not to leave an email is because nost so much that I don't trust places not to sell the harvested emails to spammers, but because it's too damn easy for an archive to hacked and all email addresses in there harvested and sold to spammers.

I know that one of those two (I hope the latter, but you never can be sure) happens with the e-greeting card outfits; give one of them an email address and that address soon starts getting spam of the worst kind.

There's a third reason, actually. With MT's emailing comments by email address, if none is set it sets your own as the sender. If you force people to put anything in there, fake or no, you can at least have some idea of the who the author is before you even look at it.

Oh, and I like Faulkner. He's good.

I wonder if, in centuries to come, blogs and bloggers in the early 21st Century US will be looked at like the salons of Paris, and those who participated in them, in the last decade or two before the French Revolution.