Brett Kelly

For some reason, I decided to reread Merlin’s “Cranking” piece just now.

I’m going to go hug my wife and kids now. And read that article once a month for the rest of my fucking life.

And it’s mine.

Now I know how the third world feels.

And I’m crying happy tears because I didn’t.

Intolerance seems to be preached a lot more vehemently than its practiced (by lots of people on both sides of the debate).

Maybe we should all try being nice and genuine instead of worrying so much about being right.

Believe (or disbelieve) whatever you want. I’m happy to talk about it with anybody as long as we can agree that we’ll act like gentle(men|women).

It’s ok to emphatically disagree with somebody on any number of personal, important topics and still care deeply about them and enjoy having delicious grown-up drinks with them.

I’ll try to do better. It’d be cool if we all tried to do better, I think.

Last year when Ars Technica published the behemoth review of OS X Lion by John Siracusa, I wanted to read it on my iPad without having to visit 20-something different pages on the Ars site. So, I paid $5 for the Ars Premier membership (which, among other things, lets you download the Siracusa reviews as single PDFs). I downloaded the PDF of the review and promptly canceled my subscription. They got my $5 and I got to not be annoyed by the pagination on Ars’ site.

This year, it’s a little different. I use Instapaper for most of my longer-form article consumption and, as of recently, this service is able to figure out if an article has been spread across multiple pages. If it is, each page is captured and the article is rebuilt into a single document, suitable for viewing in the Instapaper app (or on the Web site).

I can’t help but think that Ars (and sites like Ars) must be a little miffed at Instapaper (and services like Instapaper). Naturally, the reason Ars spreads the article out over so many pages is so they can get 20-something ad impressions per reader of the article. Or, as described earlier, you can pay some dough and get a PDF without ads. Instapaper (and services like it) effectively sidestep both monetization efforts by offering the equivalent of the paid option for free.

I’m not singling out Instapaper here as there are many competing services that perform similar functions (though, to be fair, Instapaper created this class of application). I guess I just find it curious and wonder if sites like Ars are doing anything to impede services like Instapaper.

Every few days, I’ll open up the Tumblr app on my phone and read through the newest 50-70 posts. I’ve flirted with Tumblr plenty in the past and, for one reason or another that I can’t recall, always end up letting it lie dormant until the next time I look at it a month later or whatever.

I think I’ve figured out why I really do like it here so much.

It’s a mixture of Internet jokes I don’t quite get, artsy pictures, offbeat humor that frequently requires having been around for earlier parts of a user’s story and (this is the real reason) a shitload of vulnerability and honesty.

I read a fair bit of stuff online and I’m routinely warmed about the heart cockles when I visit you nice people. I’d love to know you all more because you seem like my kind of folks. So I’ll give it a shot (but I’ll probably dork it up somehow, so don’t hate me).

Thanks to all of you for reminding me that there are lots of real human beings on the Internet and that many of them hang out here.

I think I’ve figured it out. Tumblr is like Google+ but with less pretense (sometimes) and more drawings, generally.

*cough*