I find useful information useless

| Thursday, May 14, 2009
And the reverse. My favorite blogs are the useless ones. I can't stand the ones filled with useful information.

Having recently completed a bit of a lit review about the limits of text, I suppose it would make sense to apply it. *Ahem* Sorry to ruin the usual flow of flowing, but I must inform the reader that the following is meant to be interpreted as an attempt at humor. You are free to decide that it is not funny, but acknowledge the attempt. This is not intended to be an attack on any bloggers or any content. Furthermore, why is this disclaimer/clarification the second longest paragraph?

Useful: Ferarro. She knows her stuff and explains things pretty well. I find it useless. What do I care which weapon is slightly better than the other? I'm not in a position to choose, instead I say "this is an upgrade" or "this is not an upgrade" or "this is an upgrade, but I just got a new weapon and look at what he's using over there."

Useless: Larisa. I can recall no time at which I gained any information from Larisa which would in any way improve my abilities in WoW. Utterly useless. It's great!

Mixed: Rohan. Sometimes a post has theorycraft and I say "oh that's nice." Sometimes a post is useless, discussions about guilds or tanking. Those are fun.

I imagine this is due to two things.
1) I am a noob.
2) Useful blogs are redundant. I can find useful information many other places. There are few places to find useless information.

For further, better reading, check out the comments here.

5 comments:

LarĂ­sa said...

Ah! I'm really honored to be called useless the way you do it. I really think that my posts ARE kind of useless. No one will become the slightest better at playing wow after reading them. But still you seem to appreciate them. You may share the same taste for blogs as I do. I too tend to care more about the "useless" blogs. They speak to me in a way that useful blogs normally don't...

Actually you're pretty useless too! I don't always comment but I really enjoy the way you write. For instance the other day about politics... just awesome.

Cheers and hugs!

Klepsacovic said...

I'm relieved that I managed to not offend. I was worried at how you or others might interpret useless, that it wasn't meant to be insulting.

Though perhaps I should take back useless. I'm a psych major, sociology minor, so all the useless posts about thoughts and experiences and guild relations, those are almost like little case studies.

Stabs said...

I think what you're talking about is good writing.

It's very entertaining to read good writing. The more technical the data the harder it is to write about it in an interesting way.

Rohan said...

I think you're looking for posts which are novel.

Theorycraft is useful, but it is very rarely surprising. It's usually a choice between two or three alternatives, and it's just following the math to see which option is correct. The last bit of theorycraft which actually surprised me was the Bloodlust timing stuff.

The best "useless" posts on the other hand, are usually about subjects that you don't often think about. They cause you to take a closer look at things and to think new thoughts.

Klepsacovic said...

@Stabs and Rohan: Good points. It is unfortunate that technical writing tends to be efficient, which usually ends up meaning boring.

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