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08/13/2001 Archived Entry: "New top"

The new banner image of Vavatch Orbital is of the galaxy cluster NGC 4631, courtesy of the Chandra X-Ray Observatory.

I was reading yet another long and predictable article about weblogs today when I decided to break the habit of a few months and check out some of the links. As I expected, the weblogs featured high amounts of incestuous linkage (i.e. lots of links to other webloggers) and various numbered lists of pithy thoughts. I sometimes wonder exactly who the hell reads this stuff, and always reach the same conclusion: either no-one reads it, or the people who do are so beguiled by the pretty pictures and layout of the weblog that they are completely distract (or don't care) about the non-existant content.

Let me explain how terrible I think their content is (read as: bear with me). I recently had an argument with a friend as to the definition of negative-G, which people use when talking about rollercoasters and fighter pilots. I surmised that if taken literally, there could be no such thing as negative-G, since I didn't remember seeing anything in the news about antigravity recently, and clearly the people who'd coined the term negative-G:

a) didn't know what they were talking about
b) perhaps meant it as in acceleration (and thus the feeling of gravity) on the body in a directional sense*

So, if we carry the analogy to the quality of content (which hereafter will be termed qC) then under all normal circumstances, you have positive-qC. However, unlike gravity, it is in fact possible if rare to have negative-qC; instead of gaining something - knowledge, enjoyment, insight - from a piece of writing, negative-qC writing physically sucks this out of you.

And that is what I get when reading some of the more terrible weblogs - and that is the reason why I have a pathological fear of visiting said weblogs ever again...

*I am only too aware of the acute irony that I also have a numbered list in today's post. But don't worry - it's ironic, self-referential irony. Whatever that means.