…to a blog post of a picture and nothing more. I am a walking contradiction.
Sure, it’s all basically advertising but my feet yearn for these cuddly knitted Nikes, they look so comfy.
This Is via Creative Review, Mocoloco
If there’s one thing that really annoys me, it’s seeing “TLDNR” posted anywhere, ever*.
“TLDNR” is a sign of everything that’s wrong with the internet, in my opinion. It marries poor grammar with downright rudeness and implies that any piece of writing over a screen’s length is not worth the effort of reading. An acronym coined by the kind of moron that hangs about online with nary a good word to say about anyone, TLDNR stands for ‘too long did not read’.
First of all, congratu-frickin-lations for coming up with that, sounds as though you had a team of Oxford scholars working round the clock on it. Secondly, it’s not really a sentence, is it? Ok, so maybe it contains all the appropriate types of word required to make up a sentence, but it’s quite clearly caveman speak. Me tarzan you jane, too long did not read, me hungry want food. See what I mean?
I see where this has come from: simply using an acronym wasn’t quick enough for you, your time is so precious that you can’t even spare the three seconds it takes to form a proper sentence to abbreviate. A quick look on, er, Wiktionary reveals that, hey! There are variants! Some favour the punctuated acronym, whether it’s the insertion of a colon, semi-colon or, for no fathomable reason, a forward slash after ‘long’. Hell, you can even use TLDR (too long didn’t read) if you’re too busy to spare the millisecond it takes to type an N. Here’s an idea, save yourself even more time by just not commenting at all. What do I care if you didn’t read something? In fact, let’s formalise this: if you don’t comment on it, I’ll just assume you didn’t read it. Deal? There, saved you another eight precious seconds to spend trolling about elsewhere online.
The people who coined TLDNR are no doubt the same people who rfs2wst txtmsg spc on vwls so they don’t have to shell out the bank-breaking sum of 20 pence instead of 10. In the end, their messages make no sense and leave them sounding like an illiterate teenager. We should all agree to delete them unceremoniously and never give them another thought. (Sorry Mum.)
But why, general moronity aside, aren’t we allowed to be wordy on the internet? (I say ‘we’ as if I belong to that club of bloggers who actually have readers and not just words. I realise also that the eight people who do actually read this have probably given up by now. Understandable. What was I saying again? Oh yeah:) why does everything has to be so quick and short and sharp? It’s as though there’s an unwritten rule that decrees we shalt not make a point elegantly in ten words if we can do it clumsily in three.
The real problem is that this stupid acronym assumes that long = boring. It is not so! There are plenty of brief, boring blog posts and news pieces online – hell, I’ve written a good few of them. The reverse is also true; but people’s attention spans are so distressingly short now, it’s as though we just can’t be bothered to concentrate on something for longer than three seconds. Why bother reading something properly when you can get the gist from the headline and a quick skim of the first paragraph? And why waste time actually reading something if you can leap straight into the comments and berate the author for putting time and effort into something that you couldn’t be bothered to read instead?
Me, I like a long read. I like the twisting winding tangent-y ramblings of the witty, the sharp, the passionate and the interesting – even if they consist of 16,000 brilliantly nonsensical words about a videogames show in which I have little-to-no interest.
Now, Twitter; that’s a different kettle of fish. I hate the verbose on Twitter. If you find yourself repeatedly taking three or four tweets to make your one point, you need to forget Twitter and get yourself a blog. The occasional two-tweet case is acceptable. I’ve even been known to do it myself, you know.
You know why there’s no acronym for ‘Wow, this was long but totally worth it as I enjoyed reading it a lot and it was generally really interesting, good job person who wrote it’? Because if you actually read something, you get to actually form your own opinion, which you can then actually legitimately post as a comment and I won’t loathe you forever even if it’s really mean.
Also it would be stupid: WTWLBTWIAIERIALAIWGRIGJPWWI would never catch on.
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Inevitably, some fucking comedian is going to post a TLDNR-or-variant comment now. Good imagination skills, internet. You know what else we could try? Selling pre-sliced bread and a box that sits in your living room and displays moving pictures.
*except, annoyingly, the t-shirt from BustedTees that the above image is taken from.
Yeah, that’s over. I lasted like, two days.
Think one person missed me, though. My ego reckons it was worth it.
Twitter is a funny thing. I’ve rather arbitrarily decided to give it up for a few days, so of course all I want to do is say things in less than 140 characters and see what other people are tweeting and fave things and retweet comedy links and so on and so forth.
For example, José Saramago has passed away – very sad. But I know who he is and I’ve read half of one of his books so I’d like to take the opportunity to show off how fabulously cultured I am. I was going to say, “Oh Twitter, I turn my back for two days and you go and kill off José Saramago.” – or something equally irritating and un-hilarious.
But then I remembered that the only person likely to be impressed by anything I have to say is myself. Twitter is really just about talking as though someone is listening. Sure, occasionally someone will answer – not to tell you to shut up, although I’m sure they want to, but to say “hoho, good point!” or, more often than not, “Oi, you’ve got that wrong.” To spend time obsessing about possibly tweeting or not is completely ridiculous – no one will really notice if you do or you don’t. At the end of the day, it’s just Twitter. It’s not really real*.
Not to mention that it was the self-congratulatory nature of Twitter that started to get me down and made me go cold turkey in the first place. One of the best and worst things about Twitter is how it can make you feel like a bit of a rockstar – your followers are your loyal audience, lapping up your every inane tweet, right? Wrong. Post a picture to Twitpic and take a look at the number of people who view it. Then take that number away from how many followers you have – you’ll soon realise how many people are really following you.
But seeing that little number of followers grow fills you with a false sense of celebrity. I’m not sure I like what it’s done to me; exclamation marks all over the place, obsessively checking it every three seconds, craving the short-lived elation of an @reply. Is it the same for everyone? Seems to just be me – in which case, it was definitely time to take a break. And possibly also time to check myself into some kind of secure establishment for the internet-insane.
Not sure my Facebook friends really appreciate the upsurge in my status updatery, but hey – at least they can hide me.
*Hello anyone I’ve met through Twitter who thinks I might be undermining our friendship with this statement: it is not so. Relationships are really real and devilishly important to me.
It has come to my attention today that everyone hates Stephen Dorff.
What is up with that?
He has many fine films to his name, including Blade (actually, I didn’t like Blade all that much) and, er, that Britney Spears video (hey, it was emotional! She tried to kill herself in the bath! Guys!). Ok, actually he doesn’t have very many good films to his name – Entropy was a huge yawnfest and Cecil B. Demented was probably only good if you were a bit high when you watched it.
In fact, I don’t know where this good feeling towards Stephen Dorff springs from, maybe Just 17 is to blame. Whatever, I just know it exists. It’d be nice to know I’m not alone… Britney? Anyone? Hello? <cue tumbleweed>
Oh and here’s the trailer for Somewhere what sparked all this chatter. I think it looks quite good.
Here’s what international silver-fox Keith Murray from We Are Scientists has to say about iPads and mobile phones and whatnot:
As a band we reject the iPad. We’ve picked them up at the Apple store and then immediately put them down again. It’s just an oversized iPhone that you can’t make phonecalls on. And phone-wise, we endorse the iPhone – it tramples the BlackBerry. We were living in London for about three and a half months at one stage and we were using BlackBerrys and were so miserable for the entire time. The quality of life decreased when I couldn’t use my iPhone. [Shortlist]
God, I love that guy (iPad-is-oversized-iPhone cliché aside).
It was just at that moment that i began remembering this really important conversation I had once which will surely be revealed to be imperative to the plot of this story later on or perhaps in just a paragraph or two. Insert post-info-dump-cliche here. One slightly predictable twist, English stereotype and albino monk later, and you’ve pretty much got the book.
I wrote this review on a Facebook app about two years ago and just rediscovered it. I stand by it.
I inherited this copy of Romeo and Juliet from my gran who died earlier this year. On the first page she dated it January 1942, when she would have been 20 years old. And here I am, 68 years later, reading through it and feeling a connection with Gran through nothing more than paper, ink and someone else’s words.
Another point for the ‘against’ column in the great e-Reader debate.
Something’s been troubling me. So, vampires are dead, yeah? Consequently, their hearts don’t beat? And if their hearts don’t beat then their blood doesn’t flow. So how can boy vampires, well, yknow, copulate?
It’s not that I think about vampires and their bedroom activities on a regular basis, it just occurred to me that, despite their reputation as the sluttiest of all the undead, they surely couldn’t physically do the deed.
Unless my rudimentary grasp of GCSE Biology is failing me and I’ve got completely the wrong end of the, er, stick.
*** PLEASE NOTE: I do not wish to sleep with a vampire. The risk of demon spawn is too high. ***
At the risk of going all ‘I feel blue! Look at me! Look at me!’, this clip from Amelie adequately illustrates how I’ve been feeling lately. Wish it would stop.