Unsubscribing from BoingBoing

In my post last week, I tried to convey the feeling of freedom I got from mistakenly clicking on the "mark all as read" button, which wiped out the 1000+ backlog of unread blog entries.  The word I was looking for was serendipity - the happy accident.

Unfortunately, it took less than a week to build back up to the 1000+ mark of unread posts, which made me seriously look at what I subscribe to and what I actually want to read.  What I've found is that the blogs that get unread the most are the ones I've categorized as "General" - where the subject matter crosses many lines, or has no other reference point than there are topics that I feel I should keep abreast of. 

Out of those, the ones that are most unread are, ironically, the blogs that have the highest volume of posts.  And chief amongst these is the venerable Boing Boing - perhaps the king, queen, bishop, knight and rook of all blogs.  When I started reading Boing Boing, I was keenly interested and actively participating in the on-line tech community, via TWiT (mostly) and many of the Mac sites (frequently TMO and MacUser) and Ars Technica (occassionally), and Boing Boing was a frequent and relevant reference.  My interests have moved on - TWiT has shut down the forums, my skills and knowledge on the MacOS are no longer cutting edge and simply cheerleading is a waste of time - so I rarely comment on the Apple sites or Ars Technica , so being au courant on the latest Boing Boing post is no longer essential. 

And frankly, Boing Boing has gotten boring.  Regurgitating New York Times articles, tirades against intellectual property laws, fawning over freaky artwork - all wrapped up in 200+ posts a week.  Not for me - no more.  Stick a fork in me - I'm done.  A half-hour ago, I hit the unsubscribe button, and it was like the bell had just rung on the last day of school before summer vacation.

While I'm at it, I'm unsubscribing from Lifehacker and Laughing Squid, too.  Not that there's not interesting stuff there - but way too often, it's like a big circle jerk - BoingBoing reports on a NYT article that's repurposed in Laughing Squid, which is then quoted in Lifehacker for some reason.

Not that any of these well advertized blogs care about my eyeballs - I read only through the feeds, so I don't count at all.  Good.

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Google Reader - Happy Accident

Lots and lots of feeds in my Google Reader - and for the past month or so, I've been slow in keeping up with them.  Humor gets read all the time, and most of the Beading and Apple blogs as well, but I've fallen behind on Law, News and Politics, General and Books and Authors - to the point were a 1000+ count has been the usual header.  I rountinely mark as read old stuff in the high-volume blogs like Lifehacker and Boing Boing, but that's not been enough to keep the count down.  Since I've returned from vacation, the Reader's been stuffed like this:

But I just went to add a new subscription to the PMC blog, and I accidently hit "Mark All Read."  My Reader now looks like this:

Scary, but a bit refreshing. 

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New Obsession

It's called White Collar.

It appeared as a recommendation in my Hulu queue last fall, and I've completely and totally fallen in love.  Best Show on TV - EVER. 

Okay - a little exaggeration, but it's pretty freakin' awesome.  It's on USA - so the emphasis is more on character than on plot (which can be a bit thin at times), but the man-candy factor is off the scale - and I'm not just talking about the lovely Matthew Bomer. 

Tim DeKay is a god in a bad suit.

A really bad suit

Yum. 

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