What’s it been? The Engine Room (3/5)

FROM PART 2

(Updated 07 March 2012 to fix broken links)

TL;DR, but should be worth your read.

This part is a ‘rando’ (newspaperspeak for ‘review and outlook’) about my online reading and writing activities. It’s really about the human chemistry behind the written word that makes the whole sordid exercise of reading and writing worthwhile, considering the finite time we all have on Earth.

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THE ENGINE ROOM

On the blogging front

“Pool’s Closed.”

That’s Internetspeak for the yearlong raid by readers who email me comments but, altogether bizarrely, won’t comment on the blogposts themselves.

Those shatloads of long comments complained all possible manner of complaints, prattling on that my posts weren’t in English at all, not up to academic standard, ‘poor’ idioms, not writing in Chinese, and so on and so forth.

Hilarity did NOT ensue.

The comments weren’t even spam — they’re from real people. Just un-bloody-real.

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On following blogs

As a testament to my own brain-damagedness, I follow roughly 300 blogs (via email) of all kinds of subjects imaginable. Ninety-nine percent of them have been fun-filled, entertaining, enlightening, thought-arousing, learn-something-new-every-day reads. A handful of them are even ever so slightly sexually arousing, especially if I really concentrate.

However, just like the “We are the 99%” vs. 1% making the rounds all over the USA, it is the 1% (in my case, 1.67%) that have caused 99% of the consternation for me.

Half the time the stuff from the 1.67% is a rehash of stuff already fleshed out in books or someplace else that, quite frankly between you and me, has been done better elsewhere.

That 1.67% are those sites related (‘devoted’) to China and linguistics. If you can figure out between the two, the worst must have been Chinese-related linguistics blogs from inside China. Of that, the pits are those written by non-Chinese who imagine they are Chinese.

If such a small number is causing such a great upset, why continue reading them?

Jeez, I went to law school, you know — just because I don’t like something, doesn’t necessarily mean I don’t read it. (Are YOU able to do that?) I assure you, it isn’t sado-masochism on my part.

“Don’t hold back,” my friends and my lawyers (yes, lawyers!) tell me, whilst I mulled over the advice for quite some time. But I demur. So indulge me, and let me state certain thoughts in conclusive manner in Part 4 coming up.

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UP NEXT IN PART 4: VENTING

© The Naked Listener’s Weblog, 2012.
Image of Chinese stanza in blue calligraphy by Samantha C.-S.