Tuesday, December 11, 2012

Stuff Like This Makes Me Happy Nobody Reads My Blog

As I was going through my RSS feeds this morning, I noticed "The Oatmeal" published a response to somebody. I started reading it. The "TL;DR" {Too Long; Didn't Read) urge started building, because it was long.

Some "Journalist" named Jack Steuf apparently wrote an article on The Oatmeal without bothering to fact check anything. The Oatmeal wrote a response, in the vein of his "I just wish I could write comics instead of having to respond to stuff like this" meme of the last couple years.

This "article" was also written on a site called Buzzfeed, which I'd never heard of, and have no interest in typing the URL in to see what it's about.

My opinion, for what it's worth, is that Matthew Inman (The Oatmeal's real name) should just ignore this kind of stuff. There was once a time when journalism was a serious and hard hitting profession (or at least, one made up by a few serious and hard hitting professionals). Today, journalism is a field of study and work that Aaron Cleary wrote his book "Worthless" to help prevent you from falling into. Gone are the days of Woodward and Bernstein. Now it's lazy liberal arts majors on web aggregators insinuating you're a millionaire and calling you a "Republican". And not even the classical liberal arts majors, like I'm self-studying. The modern liberal arts of no math. Rack up $60,000 in debt for a philosophy degree and wonder why only Starbucks will hire you. "But mommy and daddy and the college recruiter told me I'd make tons of money if I just went to college! And all my college professors agreed!"

I hope, if I ever find a fallacious article about myself or my work written by a nobody on a no-web site, I can simply ignore it. That's what The Oatmeal should do. That's what adults should do. I typically enjoy The Oatmeal's work and humor. Every now and again, he publishes a comic that I don't like or don't find funny. One or two have royally pissed me off. So I closed the browser tab and waited for his next comic to come out.

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