As a child my father drilled into my head that it is irresponsible to live without acknowledging the things that are happening around you. I hated watching TV news, and I only read the paper because of the comics page, and he insisted that it was part of my duty as a citizen to be informed of what was happening. The process took years, but eventually I became a little bit of a news freak. It is not that I am addicted to yellow press or that kind of crap, I just like to know that things are happening.

The problem is, with the tubes, how the hell do you keep up?

Once web browsers added bookmark bars with folders, it was possible to open all of the bookmarks within a folder with one click. This allowed me to have a folder with all of my news websites, and one with all of my comics. When RSS took off, I realized that most of my news sources had a feed, which was even better: I could see which ones were updated.

The news bookmarks folder shrunk. The comics folder went up and down every 6 or so months.

Google introduced a RSS tool based on the Gmail platform, which was even better.

There’s this cool comic I discovered a few weeks ago, while trying to look up a comic I had not read in over a year.

I really liked it. It was different and witty. The art definitely set it apart from the other stuff I read. It went straight into my daily comics folder.

Right around the time of the VT tragedy, Three Panel Soul posted a comic about talking harmlessly about buying a gun. While at work. Coworker overheard it out of context. Ouch.

I thought that it was funny but not tasteless. What I did not know is that it got the writer (Matt Boyd) in a shitload of trouble, to the point that the DA for wherever the hell he is in Maryland was considering to prosecute him for making terroristic threats. Worse, life imitates fiction: the comic describes what happened to him in real life at work. He DID get fired.

Here’s Fleen’s interview with the writer.

The irony here is that I worked in Maryland for about four years. At my office (70 or so people, depending on how the dot-bomb was doing) we had all parts of the political spectrum. What was funny was that the demographics were upside down. For example, we had more women that were pro-gun. We even had a (male) project manager that was a WWII re-enacter.

Just imagine the water cooler talk and the lunch talk whenever it steered to gun control (there are few things in this world funnier than a liberal man arguing gun control against a 30 years old mother of two). I am sure we could not get away with that kind of talk in the present shape of the work environment in the DC Metro area and probably anywhere within 300 miles of Virginia Tech.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 5th, 2007 at 10:12 am and is filed under Internet, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.