1. The Philosophy of Punctuation: “Semicolons are pretentious and overactive.... I want to mention two other practices that are out of hand: the use of italics for emphasis and of quotation marks for distancing. These are ugly habits because of the intellectual tone they set. Italics rarely fail to insult the reader’s intelligence. More often than not they tell us to emphasize a word or phrase that we would emphasize automatically in any natural reading of the sentence. Quotation marks create the spurious impression of an aristocracy of sensibility. Three paragraphs back I originally put quotation marks around ‘fancy,’ to suggest quite falsely that I would never use such a word myself, being of too refined a temperament.”  ¶ 21a
2. 99.9% of Proper Grammar Is Obsolete: “Lax to the point of absurdity, online writers gobble up long phrases without a hiccup, in most cases displaying the reconfigured phrase as if it were authored correctly. This laxity has encouraged readers and writers alike to develop bad habits of which they are largely unaware. At the same time, it has turned true English into [N]ewspeak.”  ¶ 21b
3. Weblogs, Rage, and the Ethics of Public Writing: “In the end, we used <strike> tags [del elements, shurely?!] to strike-through the offending reader comment, and posted a somewhat lengthy proxy retraction and explanation of what had transpired. After which, the representative from Company A apologized, both privately and publically, and the entire debacle (which took all of thirty minutes to transpire) was over. Not insignificant, from the perspective of the ‘correction via addition’ camp when it comes to editing Weblogs, is that Company A made no objections to our use of the strike-through method of retracting the erroneous information about them. So, the mistake remains accessible for all to see, but will no longer be read as factual information. The offended company wins, and truly open communication wins as well.”  ¶ 21c
4. Berlin’s Creative Class: “[M]y memory of Berlin is of dozens of small businesses with absurdly narrow purposes – tiny closet-like techno record shops or clothing stores selling a dozen variations of the same T-shirt concept and milkshakes – that seem like they couldn’t possibly survive, but do. ‘Emergent’ is totally the wrong word for it, except that it evokes the sense that no one checked with central command before opening shop, and if goods are sold, well, that’s nice, but not why they’re there.... Knowing now that entire neighborhoods were made up of the retail equivalent of personal Web sites, they seem like a phenomenon. How people pay their rents running those places, I have no idea. It’s clear that Berlin’s economy, such as it is, is in the hands of its creative class. In a city where there isn’t even the potential for other sections of the economy (like manufacturing or finance) to contribute, the burden on the city’s creative class is huge.”  ¶ 21d
5. Derrick Peterson: Setting the Record Straight: “In the past month, Derrick has declared he is not gay and questioned the integrity of the article.... [H]e left a message saying that he finally read the article in Genre and thought it was well-written and that he liked it.... Derrick wrote a message on the paper’s online discussion board: “First of all I want to let the world know the truth and that I [AM] NOT GAY (get it right for God sake).... Anyways this is to the author I told you that I was not wanting any press on this, because this is my life and like many have said who gives a F**k who I go home with, it is my choice and a private choice at that, so STOP PRYING into my PRIVATE life.... Everyone goes through an experimental phase in their life and at the time of doing the interview with Genre I was in the phase and I truly know now that I can never love another man.” That explains why you gave a gay magazine an interview about being nonheterosexualist.  ¶ 21e
6. BLÖÖDHAG: “Describing themselves as ‘edu-core,’ the band performs nothing but two-minute thrash tributes to science fiction writers. Between songs, the band pelts the audience with paperback books, quizzes them on book titles, and demands that the audience show their library cards. Their motto: ’The Faster You Go Deaf, the More Time You Have to Read.’ ” The best part? It’s delivered in entirely unintelligible DEATHMETAL.  ¶ 21f
7. Bad Web sites and Daily Web Pages That [Bite].  ¶ 21g
8. Reading snatchmail out loud.  ¶ 21h
9. Using Diacriticals in Desktop Publishing.  ¶ 21i
10. Toronto eetcarstray otaku: CLRV (“clurve”) and ALRV lore  ¶ 21j
11. Glossary of Linguistics and Rhetoric: “accismus pretended refusal of something desired.” And it only gets more complicated from there.  ¶ 21k
12. Stinker of the Year: “The drama is accompanied by audio description, surtitles and sign language, but even with this extra help there are unresolved mysteries here. While the blindness of Maria is an integral part of the plot, no one actually mentions the fact that the portrait painter is played by a Thalidomide victim with truncated arms. This seems odd, considering his occupation. And are we even meant to know that the actor playing Maria’s neighbour, who regularly drops round to masturbate while she is talking, is deaf?”  ¶ 21l
13. Bobsledder crips. I just love this one! In the four-man or -woman run, anyone but the brake(wo)man and driver is essentially ballast on the way down. So why not just make half the driver ballast too? “The only required modification involved building a door in the hood of the sled that allowed staff members to position a driver’s legs. A special board was also built to assist drivers getting in and out of the sled. The field of drivers can include any individual with upper-body mobility. This would include paraplegics, amputees and individuals with spina bifida.”  ¶ 21m
14. Homosexualist Oscar winner who thanked his “beautiful boyfriend Dan” on TV then went on to put out a fire. Hello, nurse.  ¶ 21n
15. ASCII Ribbon Campaign: “Against HTML Mail” (I’m a supporter). Unicode Ribbon Campaign: “No ASCII, anywhere!” (I’m a supporter).  ¶ 21o
16. The hostname www.: Should it become nothing at all? Or should we add upgrade to WWWW and become Dogma W4?  ¶ 21p
17. Bugzilla Thesaurus & Reverse Dictionary. Ridiculously useful even if incomplete. Common terms are the hardest to define!  ¶ 21q
18. Spacer-GIF Coming Out Day: “I decided to use today’s class to tell them the truth about tables – and that meant introducing them to the miracle of spacer GIFs.... It was like a spacer-GIF coming out day. I use the spacer GIF, and I don’t care who knows it anymore.” Yeah, apparently fucking not.  ¶ 21r
19. Britney Spears spelling corrections. Why are so few of them Brittany?  ¶ 21s
20. “I had no choice but to recognise that the world was suddenly making itself available for improvement, and it was all Morrissey’s fault.”   ¶ 9a
21. Unearthly (and even unalien) chrome Mercedes in situ.   ¶ 9b
22. Darque Dungeon: “Accept that other people’s taste and opinions are not ‘incorrect.’ ”  ¶ 9c
23. “This Page Is Valid -//LiteraryMoose//DTD XHTML-LiteraryML 1.0//EN!”  ¶ 9d
24. “Everything has turned neo-cubist.”  ¶ 9e
25. Best-ever instructions to print a Web page.  ¶ 9f
26. Queer Guy at South by.  ¶ 9g
27. “When I Was”: New log meme in the making, but try topping the original. (Yes, he’s still cute.)  ¶ 9h
28. QBullets and Other Icons.  ¶ 9i
29. Two of ten Swedish Queer Eyes have ginger lashes.  ¶ 7

All dates in March 2004.

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