Jim writes how blogging can feel like being the child in The Emperor’s New Clothes, a feeling I often encounter myself:

You feel like someone gone mad: “Is anyone else seeing the same thing I’m seeing? And we’re just ok with this?”

Very often, those are the best posts I read from others.

Indeed.

Back in college when we used to run a newspaper, I had a column about the Middle East, and I had a blog about the same thing. At that time, I was a journalism minor. We had a teacher whom I feel weird calling a professor, as he didn’t have a PhD or even a doctorate; he was simply a professional journalist. He used to say journalism was dying, that he was one of the last dinosaurs, and that he advised me to “stay the hell away from this profession” if I cared about my soul.

Much of the energy I feel in Jim’s posts stems from the same place. We don’t bother with well-known facts (like ads flying in our faces left and right, as his article mentioned on Daring Fireball) because we all know them, so what’s the point?

But shrugging and moving on is accepting the crazy as our new reality. Yes, there was a time when Google was actually good, without ads (can you believe it?); paywalls were fewer and belonged to big publications, which charged for their printed newspapers anyway.

I already shook my fist at some well-known clouds in this blog. The state of owning movies and books and encouraging piracy. Dating in the age of dating apps. And of course, social media being a hoze of recycled crap that has little to do with facts, if at all.

I feel like Jim captures the essence of this, and I’m in agreement. I promise to keep being a grumpy old man yelling at clouds then.