It may be premature of me to create this page, but I like to head trouble off at the pass whenever I can. The charitable call that trait “being deliberative”. The uncharitable can refer to section one.
Section One: General Offensiveness
This is my blog and herein I will speak my mind. I will not try to offend anyone, but neither will I go any further out of my way to avoid it than I normally do. (I rarely offend people in day to day life.)
That being said, if I do say something to offend you, please accept my apologies in advance. If you want to let me know that I’ve offended you, or that I’m unspeakably wrong about something, please feel free, as long as you’re reasonably civil. But don’t expect that I will necessarily agree with you. My opinions are mine, after all.
If you’re rude to me, expect a rude response or (more likely) no response at all. People who are repeated and unrepentant dicks will be blocked/ignored/targets of my as-yet futile attempts to explode peoples’ heads with my as-yet non-existent psychic powers.
If you don’t like it … well, don’t read my blog. There are lots of other corners of the internet for you to explore.
Section Two: Pedantic Nonsense
Many people who are forced to interact with me on a daily basis will gleefully tell you that I can be painfully pedantic. Poor grammar, egregious misspellings and incorrect usages of the phrase “begging the question” will set my teeth on edge. Often I will, against my better judgement, feel compelled to make corrections.
If you see something on this blog that sets your own pedantic teeth on edge, please let me know. A well-intentioned correction is likely to be well-received. Any correction whose intention is to make you feel better by making me feel worse will be decidedly less well-received.
Also, I will occasionally talk about computer- and programming-related topics. I will get things wrong. Or I will come down on the wrong side of some nerd holy war. (For the record I use spaces over tabs to indent because I have to, and Vi over Emacs because I want to. Flame on, nerds! Flame on!) Please refer to the guidelines in Section One before writing to tell me what a hopeless noob I am.
One of the things I’m planning to do on this blog is write overly harsh reviews of movies you’ve probably already seen and books you’re not particularly interested in. Given my life-long hatred for spoilers, I will try to write those posts so that nothing is spoiled, or anything spoiled is done so only after prolific warnings.
If I do inadvertently spoil the ending of a movie (Titanic: it sinks) or book (Catcher in the Rye: No catching; no rye) I’m very, very sorry.
Section Four: Celebrities and Public Personas
Occasionally on this blog I’ll say something like: “I love Natalie Portman” or “I hate Keanu Reeves”. The overly pedantic, overly literal or those who are looking to pick a fight, might point out that I’ve never met either of those people and therefore have no real basis on which to profess such emotions.
This fictional straw man would of course be correct, if annoying.
It’s true that when I talk about any public figure, I cannot speak with any authority about who they are as a person, how they treat their friends, whether or not their dogs really love them or are just faking it for the milk bones, whether or not they fart in their sleep, any of those important things. Any judgements I make are about either A) the public persona that they (consciously or not) create and present to the public or B) their skill or facility in whatever sport, profession or vocation it is that has made them famous.
What they say and do in the public eye is fair game to be judged, lauded or derided by virtue of the fact that it was done or said in the public eye. I will generally go easy on people who are inadvertently thrust under the spotlight of public opinion, but for those who chose it I make no such promises. They chose the life, and all the adulation and criticism that goes with it.
So bear in mind that I’m not really adoring or criticizing any public figure for who they are as a person, because I don’t know that. So, to save us all a lot of trouble, any time you see me say “I love X” in your mind replace it with “I love the public persona that X presents to the world” or “I love what X is going to do for my beloved Broncos.” It’ll be closer to the truth.
Addendum: I make special exceptions for people, like Kim Kardashian, who are famous for no real reason. Anyone who courts public attention but has no accomplishments, opinions or contributions to society that make them worthy of such attention does not deserve my restraint. I dislike them, and in this case I do mean I dislike them as a person.
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