Monday, June 14, 2004

Blogging is not Mirror Masturbation

I do realize that what I say here to a sometimes-vacant audience could be perceived to be me stroking my own ego, but really it is an exercise in my literary skills, and an attempt to add humour and satire to my life, and the world. Perhaps, blogging is also a chance for me to hone my skills and produce something of interest and quality. What I do take offence at is Illiad’s jokes about blogging in his comic User Friendly. Most recently, here, Here>, and here Illiad has made reference that blogging is no more then an author jerking off in the mirror as opposed to some run of the mills smut. I suppose as a doyen of technical humour it is both his job and his place to express his opinion through the media of his choice, which just happens to be comics on the web, wait a second there, so if I can draw, it legitimizes and social commentary I might make, or perhaps personal anecdote of my life I want to share (no offence to Scott Kurtz on this one, just this PVP is illustrative of that last point.) Now here is the trick, Illiad, you are entitled to your opinion, and can express it how you choose, the upside to blogging is I CAN DISAGREE, so I do disagree, I think there are plenty of legitimate reasons to blog, are not memoirs just dead tree blogs? So you blog your way, I blog mine, and if we both keep it up, and millions more join us, one day the web might represent more then a gigantic porn hole (no pun intended.) Instead it will be a land of people talking, and people listening, and maybe in that space we can bridge our differences and become a global community, hey, it’s got to start somewhere.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

I'm not sure I follow your thought here, the issue I was having was not with Illiad posting a comic, but the light he cast bloggers in. I was going to say he infered, but he actually pretty well came out and said, through his character, that "This 'Blogging' is nothing more thean 'degaussing your own coil!'" "And further instead of looking at naughty pictures while you're 'degaussing' you're looking in a mirror!" 'Degaussing' being his synonym for masturbation. In retrospec, it was the Sid character making the comment, and not nessesarily Illiad.
That is an entirly different issue, as some creators put aspects of themselves into their creations, other creators just pull cool characters seemingly out of thin air, and others use people around them for inspiration.