If you don't hear from me--blame Scientology. Or blame Paul Haggis and his evil evil ways. If the only thing the internet accomplished was to give a platform for Scientology debunkers and defenders, it would be enough to justify its existence.

This shit is GOLDEN.

OMG the stupid is strong tonight. I need to go read some more Higgs Boson articles now.

Tonight's dinner: modified Italian wedding soup. Onion, zucchini, garlic, chicken broth, potatoes, kale, and little chicken meatballs with a smeeedge of nutmeg.

My Elementary school is on fire

Oh dear.

Looking at that picture I'm really supposed to think they're advertising lip and brow waxing?

Yeah, mmhmm.

Sophia, your post totally weirded me out..it was moose biting sister for a second. Damn, Is it on bad fire? I mean, a large fire, bad damage? I hope not.

Man, the IO9 site design leads to weirdnesses. If you get the "featured" post (they have an algorithm that ranks them) your comment is the first one everyone sees, and there's no clear immediate way to tell that not only are there other comments, you don't need to reply to the featured comment to talk. So I'm getting weird random comments in the middle of perfectly cromulent bad art posts.

Denton was really adamant about making comments harder to read--this is not paraphrasing bitterly and losing context--he said that. He wants more comments to be harder to find. So the reader is presented with the application's ranking of posts that include a number of criteria, but it's not criteria they'll supply. Getting to see *all* the comments before you decide which to read more deeply is not how he wants his sites to work.

So--if a poster decides to write a Chrome plugin to contravene one of his key pieces of functionality (the others being removing stars, allowing quasi-anon posting, and allowing you to kick people out of the thread created by your comment) and show all top level comments at the same time--what's your reaction, as the franchise owner? And the hacker started with Chrome, and is now working on Firefox. Do you task your developers with breaking the hack? Or do you let the people obsessive enough to install a plugin to get back the interface they want a lost cause, and you'll let them have their fun?

I can't work out if he needs to save face, or he has some sort of plan or agreement with advertisers (his new way does have many more unique URLs), or what...I mean, I don't get his model at all. But it's almost impossible to work out if he's right or not. You can't trust any numbers you get from posters, since they're the people he doesn't care about.

Vampire infestation?

Denton was really adamant about making comments harder to read--this is not paraphrasing bitterly and losing context--he said that.

Which is part of the reason I'm trying to stop reading those sites. I never have commented, but I liked (well, found amusement in) reading the comments.

There is pretty much nothing gawker.com has to offer me without a plethora of comments. Their news is not news, their journalism isn't journalistic--the comments were literally half the fun, if not more. Without that, I can get my shit elsewhere.

I still like IO9 a lot though, but my commenting there has dropped dramatically too. I have to fire up a different browser to be able to read much.

They left lifehacker until the last--I saw some people hoping they'd escape, but sheeit. Nick Denton, man! No matter if the tips and counterpoints in the comments weren't as useful (if not more) than the posts themselves. On IO9 I want to talk to people--on LH they have a shitload of people doing the writer's jobs for free and it's not like I'm the only person that noticed that his employees are often wrong and don't print retractions.

I just keep thinking back to the "Use WD40 on everything!" post that was quickly flooded with "Oh, god, please don't ruin your stuff!" comments from people who seemed to have a clue. I'm not going to get property damage because I don't read the comments on other sites...

Oh, and Denton has of course managed to rile people up, so each new install comes with fresh new *apparently* unbannable trolls making undeletable posts...I suspect they'll be discovering new functionality in the admin console--I just hope it's sooner rather than later.

I think I need ice cream.