Filler 3

OK, so #2 turned out not to be a filler after all. If I was honest (and I want to make it clear that honesty is not and never will be a priority for this blog) I would have ditched the first paragraph and changed the name -- but, you know, I'd written the damn thing by then and it was too late. (And, having staked no claim to honesty, I feel duty bound to point out that I am one of the world's most incompetent liars. Most of what crops up here is likely to be true, not from some high moral purpose but because I'm no damn good at deception.)

Anyway, that isn't going to happen here. This post is guaranteed 100% filler or your money back. You may cheerfully skip it without fear of missing anything remotely worthwhile.

Apart from this quote, which tickled me no end:

The full context is mired in simplistic evolutionary psychology with all the wit and insight of men are from Mars, women are from Venus, but let's not get into that -- this is a filler post, after all. At least it's not as reprehensible as this crypto-homophobic tripe from the same so-called "Queer Issue" -- again, I could get worked up about it, but hey: filler.

It's rather liberating in fact, this "filler" thing. I am miraculously absolved of any responsibility to engage with hateful fuckwitted ignorance, I can just let it pass me by. The urge to call "bullshit", to say "who are these self-proclaimed-heterosexual motherfuckers to write this patronising, self-satisfied hogwash under the QUEER banner, and then top it off with unmistakably odious hatespeak in the name of balance?" just ebbs away. Calm, at peace with the world, I can note that this stuff is more than two years old, and surely no-one even knows it exists anymore. Why should I be in the least bit annoyed that this sort of brain-damaged fucking (sorry, I know, filler, I'm calm, I'm calm) fatuity is still polluting the infosphere, still up there in the search engine listings, all ready to sideswipe anyone whose search for, say, information about Seattle gay saunas, pops up this tacky straightboy titillation?

Thanks to a different Max for unintentionally sending me off on that one. Filler, kids. It's just filler.

In other news, I've enabled trackbacks on this blog, but I don't really know why. I've seen dozens of blogs that have them enabled, but I don't remember ever seeing an actual trackback in action -- in the wild, as it were. Does anyone actually use them? What purpose do they serve, other than adding a bit more cruft to already cruft-heavy pages like this?

I have no fucking idea -- but it's clear that I'm never going to see whether they work if they're switched off. So, in the interests of experimentation, they're now on here, and maybe I'll see if I can find a few sites to send trackbacks to.

I hereby promise that the next post will not be filler. But see my earlier comments on the subject of honesty.

TWO YEARS LATER: Well, it was an interesting experiment, but as the trackback facility has only been used 4 times for anything other than loads of spam, and all four of those referring pages seem to have disappeared, I'm disabling trackbacks again. Hey ho.
Posted by matt at August 24, 2003 04:51 AM