- The numbered lists found both online are all too often incoherent – rather than making real connections the blogger just ranks random statements.
- Best of lists are not only subjective, ninety-nine percent of the time they’re not nearly subjective enough – for example, check out the many lists of ‘best opening lines of books’ and notice how all too often these are simply lists of famous ‘canonical’ books. Ditto best films or albums of all time lists. These aren’t so much what the blogger likes as what the blogger thinks their audience will recognise and they (the blogger) ought to like to demonstrate their ‘fine’ (in reality below-average and handed down from square teachers) tastes.
- List blogs are repetitious but mostly they’re not repetitious enough – generally their authors are looking to create an impression of individuality in an alienated world rather than aiming at the overthrow of consumer and fan relations through parody and repetition.
- By around point four the blogger is usually getting pretty bored and just types the first thing that comes into their head!
- The bizarre and the offbeat are so over-emphasised in list blogs (non-best of cultural artifacts variety) that they cease to be odd.
- List blogs are bad enough when done as text but they are even worse when they’re streamed video compilations of ‘top’ gaming escapades – mostly boys demonstrating their ‘skill’ at shoot ’em up computer games.
- Unfortunately most bloggers are numerate enough to correctly order the numbers one to ten, or even one to one hundred – and list blogs are generally so boring that speaking personally I’d find it more exciting if they more were jumbled up, or simply skipped from point one to point ten (at least that way they’d be shorter)! The overwhelming majority of bloggers appear to have had the type of bourgeois college education designed to utterly smash any sense of imagination they may have possessed as children.
- The attention span of most web surfers is so short they’re unlikely to get beyond point 3!
- Very often one or more items in the list will only have the most tenuous of connections to the subject allegedly under discussion. NB this statement is a deliberate repetition of point one – the words are different but the meaning is the same. Therefore you’ve been cheated – despite including ten points I’ve actually only provided you with 9 reasons why list blogs suck!
- The final point is usually even more lightweight and throwaway than than the rest of the blog!
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Comments
Comment by Chus Martinez on 2012-08-28 18:48:41 +0000
What even when it is 10 Unusual Uses For Your Dishwasher.
10. Turn old masters into modern art by running them through a cycle.
3. Runs your solid silicone sex toys through the dishwasher.
7. Run Mac keyboards soiled with coffee, and soda through one. Find a keycap map that matches your keyboard on the internets. Pop off the keycaps, and put them in one of the baskets. Put the keyboard face down on the rack all by itself. Leave the dirty dishes for the next run. Run the dishwasher on the regular cycle with *no detergent*. Shake it out when finished, and put it upright in the corner to dry. When it’s dry, which is usually in 2-3 days, snap the keycaps back on in their proper positions, plug the fucking keyboard in, and use it.
4.Use a dishwasher as a washing machine…perfect for post-apocalyptic punk looks.
- Put yourself through a dishwasher cycle and come out as Malcolm Tent!
Comment by Lucy Johnson on 2012-08-28 19:09:09 +0000
I need a heavy rinse…
Comment by mistertrippy on 2012-08-28 20:57:07 +0000
…but just be ready for the blow dry on the second part of the cycle…..
Comment by Boz Boswell on 2012-08-28 22:21:43 +0000
I see what you did there…
Comment by mistertrippy on 2012-08-28 23:24:01 +0000
Yes drawing out the contradcitions of blogging for both humorous and critical effect!
Comment by Sex Boy on 2012-08-29 00:25:59 +0000
All I wanna know is does Mister Trippy suck?
Comment by Michael Roth on 2012-08-29 06:35:38 +0000
Agree with every point, which is easy as I skipped reading the blog and jumped straight to the comments!
I hate how some lists force you to click links to each page for each point, thus driving up page views etc. That’s a horrible trend in the blogging interweb.
Comment by Johnny Dollar on 2012-08-29 09:39:25 +0000
And your point is?
Comment by Martin Wrath on 2012-08-29 10:50:31 +0000
List blogs involve too much counting and math for my liking.
Comment by Fran Jeffries on 2012-08-29 12:39:08 +0000
Last time I counted to ten I had my eyes closed and when I opened them everyone had hidden themselves.
Comment by Ludwig Feuerbach on 2012-08-29 14:04:05 +0000
“5. The bizarre and the offbeat are so over-emphasised in list blogs (non-best of cultural artifacts variety) that they cease to be odd.”
Isn’t this post a classic example of just that?
Comment by Jacques Derrida on 2012-08-29 14:20:05 +0000
If you think list blogs are bad you should try making a close reading of the lists of comments under them!
Comment by Doctor Rock on 2012-08-29 14:56:25 +0000
Thousands of stoners have tried compiling The 10 Best Drug Stories Of All Time but none of them could ever get it together to finish the blog and then posting it….
Comment by john the cynic on 2012-08-29 15:24:11 +0000
what are you gonna follow this up with? 10 reasons not to read this blog?
Comment by Michael Roth on 2012-08-29 15:45:01 +0000
I’ve heard none of this before. Top ten lists make learning fun!
Comment by The Man in the Iron Mask on 2012-08-29 16:54:22 +0000
Lists – this is the way the bourgeois imagination works, in numbers and weights and measures. See the 17c economist and the strategist of colonial plantation, William Petty. He was the godfather of quantification and the first ‘time and motion’ man. Speaking of motions, what is quantitative easing – the current ruling-class’s attempt at solving the double-dip recession – but a voiding of its bowels all over us? Petty vacant for them, shitty for us. And there’s worse because after a blissful three weeks in a Cathar dungeon in a theme park near Montaillou, with plenty of strappado and strapping French sorceresses, I return to another kind of shower: the simultaneous publication of novels by McEwan, Self and sexy Zadie Smith – so sexy that she’s put an embargo on recent photos of herself…. I wish Self would embargo his mug, that of a late Victorian curate with constipation high on his own impacted stercoraceous effluvia, as Will – quoting from Smollett’s HUMPHREY CLINKER and straining hard as ever to impress – would call his own cast-iron turds. Keep them in, boy – like your prose, nobody wants them.
Comment by mistertrippy on 2012-08-29 21:26:16 +0000
Yes that’s three books that I’m not even bothering to read the reviews of or the pieces on the authors to promote them, let alone the novels themselves. Most lists are bad enough but the thought of a lists of over-hyped books that definitely aren’t worth reading is way way way too long to even contemplate!
@ Michael Roth – you’re being ironic but I know with you this is irony taken beyond all notions of bourgeois good taste and not just any old irony!
Comment by Benedict ‘Dutch’ Spinoza on 2012-08-30 14:07:27 +0000
“1. The numbered lists found both online are all too often incoherent – rather than making real connections the blogger just ranks random statements.”
“9. Very often one or more items in the list will only have the most tenuous of connections to the subject allegedly under discussion. NB this statement is a deliberate repetition of point one – the words are different but the meaning is the same. Therefore you’ve been cheated – despite including ten points I’ve actually only provided you with 9 reasons why list blogs suck!”
You’re taking the piss – if you use a different verbal formulation the meaning is not exactly the same. These are actually two subtly different points and that means you have 10 points and aren’t one point short as you falsely claim.
Comment by Smart Alex on 2012-08-30 18:39:56 +0000
I’m not reading this post until you add points 11 to 100.
Comment by The Happy Shopper on 2012-08-30 20:49:18 +0000
I prefer shopping lists!
Comment by Lucy Johnson on 2012-09-02 08:24:09 +0000
I love a shopping list too.
Comment by Lucy Johnson on 2012-09-02 08:25:23 +0000
The Man In The Iron Mask is onto something.
Comment by Lucy Johnson on 2012-09-02 08:26:32 +0000
Measurement is so…yesterday!
Comment by The Man in the Iron Mask on 2012-09-02 18:19:33 +0000
Unfortunately measurement is still of today – see that most neurotic form of self-quantification: dieting. The waist remains, the waist remains and kills (to adapt William Empson – and I wonder: did anyone ever measure his absurdist beard? Ditto George Perec’s dandified Albanian goatherd number?)…
Comment by mistertrippy on 2012-09-02 19:43:10 +0000
I think William Epmson probably resisted measurement of his beard as he considered ambiguity more literary…. That would be in line with his Missing Dates I think… And could we see Perec as a young dog bled dry for Empson as the old dog? The Frenchman probably would have had fewer problems with measurement, since he seems much closer to Handsome Dick Manitoba’s ideal of being “young, fast and scientific” than an old codger like Empson….