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I hope to avoid using this blog to gripe excessively about things that annoy me, because a lot of things annoy me, and I no longer have a comic where I can get it out of my system in a potentially funny way. But this is something that needs to be brought up, so we of the blogosphere can talk about the blog issues that affect our blog community. I’m talking about the increasing use of irrelevant-ass pictures in blog posts. Take a look at this post from Gizmodo:

It’s a post about a site that helps you find radio stations or, if you are using an iPod FM transmitter, unused FM frequencies. OK, cool. Why the hell is there a picture of Candace Cameron as DJ on Full House (from the show’s Big Hair Era, no less)? Oh, because it’s about a site you might need if you’re DJing up some tunes in the car. Get it? Of course you do, but it’s still not funny. This is what we in the business refer to as a “reach”. Sometimes we just refer to it as “not funny”. The DJ/DJ joke was funny when Homestar Runner made it in 2002, and you could probably still get some comedy mileage out of it, but you’d have to not want it so bad.

You see this in more subtle ways, too. Sometimes Gizmodo will be talking about an unreleased MP3 player or something. Lacking a picture, they’ll include a picture of another MP3 player by the same manufacturer. This seems more useful than slapping up a picture of John Stamos, but in some ways it’s worse, because seeing the picture provides you with negative information; the text of the post then has to inform you back above zero, or the blog post will have been an unmitigated waste of your time. Not unlike this one.

But there’s a bigger problem at work here. I realized, looking at DJ’s expression of possibly-Gibbler-induced dismay, that the good people of Gawker Media feel like they have to be funny, in some token way, every time they write a post. And it’s not even really humor: it’s more like snark, which is funny in the same sense that pictures of food are delicious. Why do they do it? I think the dirty secret of Gizmodo and other blog empires is this: they don’t really know anything we don’t know. They aggregate links on a particular topic and add their reactions, which generally line up pretty well with their reader’s reactions. Then a fight breaks out in the comments section. Recently I started pointing my RSS reader at Engadget to see if it would be any different, but nope, basically the same blog.

I don’t mean to come down on professional bloggers; no doubt they take their blog jobs very seriously, even when they use the word “jive” when they mean “jibe“, which makes me fly into a homicidal rage. But I think my personal preference is to read blogs written by a particular person, rather than blogs on a specific topic with a rotating staff of contributors. What do you, my handful of readers, think?

Although I wrote Death To The Extremist for almost seven years, I’ve never thought of comics as my field. I was always more into music, and that kind of seeped into DTE in the form of many references to various bands. I was afraid to do this too much (more on that in a future post), but I was curious who I’d ended up referencing and how much, so the other day I sat down and made a list. It took about two hours, which is time I could’ve been using to do something else. I’ve included the list below, if that’s the sort of thing you’d be interested in.

What I learned: I’m a big nerd who references They Might Be Giants and Devo a lot. This may be tempered by the fact that I reference Dr. Dre just as much, or it may just underscore why people associate me with Michael Bolton from Office Space. Also, I should point out that the number of references is not necessarily a reflection of how much I like the band, otherwise Shonen Knife and Veruca Salt would be on there like 16 times.

Legend: Direct references (i.e. name-checking a band) are in bold. References in the subtitle (hold your mouse cursor over the comic) are in italics. Some of these references are kind of obscure. If you’re curious what the hell I was thinking, leave a comment and I’ll see if I can explain.

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I’ve been meaning to learn how to cook for way too long, and that scary “processed food will make you fat and dead, you uncultured Cheeto-stained American” article in the New York Times has somewhat spurred me into action: tonight I am going to make something. And I’m going to get all Web 2.0 on your asses and liveblog it.

I’m making Chicken Marsala, not to be confused with Chicken Masala, although I’ll happily eat either. It’s a bit of an exaggeration to say that I’m making it, though: I’ve got a packet of chicken and a jar of Marsala sauce from Trader Joe’s, so there is some prepared food involved, but the ingredient list on the sauce is pretty short, if you ignore the paragraph-long parenthetical after “SEASONING”. The bottle even has instructions — I wouldn’t quite call it a recipe — on the side. If I’m understanding this right, I’m to “cook boneless chicken until done, add sauce and saute until heated through, about 10 minutes”. I’m planning to add pasta to the whole deal, to make it at least sort of like the Chicken Marsala I’ve had in restaurants. So let’s get started.

7:10. We have a shitload of spices on the shelf above the stove. In the old apartment we had more cupboards so you couldn’t see them all at once. I’m not going to be using any of them, but damn. OK. Cook the chicken. I remembered to take it out of the freezer this morning, so we’re on the right track. Oh, right, pasta. I’ll have to time this right. 10 minutes to saute, 8 minutes to cook the pasta… shouldn’t be too hard.

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