Virtual vehicles for the metaverse
Topics concerning that thing known as ‘real life’ and not virtual worlds.
In the news, parents of children attending South Park Elementary in Victoria, BC, have pulled their children out of school following a seimic assessment (“Parents fear school collapse”). The report indicates that a “moderately-sized” quake could cause the school to collapse.
When asked for comment, one student remarked, “Aw, man! That’s hellacool!”
Alright. I’ve been puzzling over this question since I started blogging, and I still don’t have a definitive answer. After seening Eric’s creative definition of “blog”, I thought I’d take a crack at it myself.
The Bloggies define a weblog as “a page with dated entries that has a purpose (in whole or in part) of linking to other sites” and they exclude “personal journals”. That’s a start, alright, but it seems a little narrow for my tastes. By that definition, most blogs that I read aren’t actually “blogs”. Frankly, I wouldn’t read something that has the primary purpose of simply linking to other sites. I can’t imagine a more boring read.
To me, a blog can be any web-based form of creative expression in a format that uses dated entries. It can be commentary, it can be news, it can be a personal journal, and it can even be a cat-worship page with hundreds of high-resolution photos (although I wouldn’t read that either).
We can also define blogging by what it isn’t. As CNN is more than happy to report, blogs are — for the most part — an unreliable source of news. Feeling the pressure from bloggers, traditional media outlets love to trash bloggers on this basis. Even Wired.com isn’t beyond taking a shot, as illustrated by the article “Noted War Blogger Cops to Copying“. No, bloggers do not, in general, verify their sources or even credit their sources as thoroughly as they should, which leads me to believe that reporting the news is not for amateurs. Reporting opinion, on the other hand, is for every blogger and his highly photographed cat. Bloggers excel at expressing their reactions to current events and even mouldy, old non-current events.
What’s more of a mystery to me is why people become so easily addicted to reading and writing blogs. For example, why are you still reading this? Go outside and do something meaningful, for crying out loud! As for myself, I think I’ll lounge on some formed meat for a while.
Google has done it again. According to Eric J of Webraw.com, Google lists me first in a search for “sweaty manager“. Previously, I enjoyed a fleeting notoriety as the world’s leading authority regarding “Hockey Hero Sandwich” and “cubicle”, and I attempted to fulfill my responsibilities by answering any and all questions relating to Hockey Hero Sandwiches and cubicles.
This time, however, I think I’ll pass. The subject of sweaty managers simply doesn’t need any more attention. In fact, I’d rather not spend any more time thinking about it.
But I would like to ask Eric why he was searching for “sweaty manager”.
I had a disconcerting moment at the video store. I asked the clerk for a specific movie, and when she returned, she handed me the strangest thing. It was a black, rectangular object — a plastic case that held two reels of brown ribbon. Apparently, the object is meant to be inserted into a video playback device, which runs the brown ribbon across a spinning drum, and the magnetic patterns encoded on the ribbon produce a moving image. It was all so frighteningly primitive.
I asked her if I needed a grammophone for the audio portion of the recording, but I suppose it was slightly more advanced than that.
If you haven’t noticed yet, you should probably know that yesterday we set our clocks forward by an hour. I would have missed it completely, if I hadn’t sat down at the computer Sunday morning. And so, I dutifully went from room to room to room (I have three rooms) setting each of my clocks. Why do so many things come with clocks in them?