WonderMark

Here are some comics from a web site that you shouldn't go to. Most of what they have is funny but there is some inappropriate stuff there too.

Worth Writting, Reading, and Talking About

I've been confronted lately with the massive wasteland that the Internet has become. Admittedly, I am a contributor to this mess, as are approximately 4 billion other nobodies. I always wondered why there were magazine articles and CBS Evening News sound-bites of celebrities voicing their opinions on any number of topics from Politics to religion. "Who cares what Samuel L. Jackson has to say about angels?" I would say. I don't know what Sam Jackson's opinion on the possibility of a new "True" video iPod is, having never read his blog or downloaded one of his PodCasts, but there are a couple million people who think that their voice should be heard on the subject. "Why?"

The true reason behind the popularity of personal blogs and "friend" sites like MySpace and Facebook is that such sites make it possible to convince ones-self that he is more popular than he actually is. I am no longer popular because I am a great athlete or because I look good, I am popular because I have 4,001 friends on Facebook and have had 32,022 hits on my YouTube video of my brother acting like a dog. The crazy thing is that my popularity will never go down, it will only rise! Tomorrow I may have 34,000 hits on my YouTube video making me even more popular than I was the day before.

So are people really convinced that they have reason to believe that they have friends simply because someone wrote "hi halokilla412, 'sup?" on their Facebook wall? Are they really convinced that they are cool because they beet a level 5 mage in WoW (World of Whatever) and someone said "dragolore222, that was tight, a/s?"?

I'm not saying that we should revert back to basing popularity on looks and athletic accomplishment (back in '82 I could throw a pigskin a quarter-mile!). What I am saying is "get over yourself". No one cares what your thoughts on something that you read on someone else's MySpace page about what would make a great feature for the new PSP-2. I have been spending a lot of time recently reading the BBC news site, the Bayly Blog and New Yorker reviews of musicians and film directors. Sure I don't want to simply suck in "big media" opinion and culture, but I want to know where the info is coming from. Contrary to popular belief, just because it's on the Internet, doesn't make it true (or worth you time).

[by nobody, Ben Crum]

Windows Live Local

It isn't often that I promote something from Microsoft, but this has got to be seen. Their "Windows Live Local" webservice is what powered my Hole in a Hill post on the Crum Family Blog. Now check this out. I have tried my best to find all the houses and dorms that I have lived in (which means anyone from my family would have a slightly different list). You will notice some of the locations are not houses but rather towns, that's because I have no idea where our house or apartments were in those towns.

Enjoy!