But I Don't Even Like Football...

Seems like every other day I start with some variation on "Well, this is going to be a really short post..." and then go on to write at least a thousand words. This is not one of those days.

This time it really is going to be short, although not so much for you, dear reader, if, as I hope you will, you click on the links. If you do, it's going to be two hours of your day gone, like it just was of mine, which is one reason this is not going to be one of those posts that take me two or three hours to write, (i.e. most of them).

There are going to be two links. (Edit: Of course there aren't. Well, there are, because two is inside five, but there aren't just two. And now it's six. I just added another in post. In post in the post. Whatever...) The first is to one of the fine blogs I discovered thanks to this year's Blaugust. 

All month I've been enjoying axxuy's concise posts in their restful shades of green. They've been one of the most consistently entertaining reads of the event, which is probably why I clicked through the link in today's post. Residual good vibes carry you far.

I don't click on most links in posts I read. I mean, lots of people include lots of links all the time. I know I do. I very much doubt anyone clicks through all of them and I'd bet most people don't click through many. I dithered a moment before clicking this one but I'm very glad I did and I'd like to thank axxuy for introducing me to something of value I'd almost certainly never have found on my own.

Probably about time I linked to axxuy's post, isn't it?  It's called Football Forever and you don't need to know or care about American Football to read it. I certainly don't. 

Neither do you need any kind of grounding in the game to click again on the link axxuy includes, which I'm going to put up here in a skronking point size so you can't miss it:

17776

And that is the biggest point size Blogger has. I'd make it bigger if I could.

Where does it take you? Not saying. Axxuy gives a good framing intro. Read that.

What I'd add is that it's quite an undertaking. It took me, as I said, about two hours, end to end. Given that I can't seem to make time to watch a whole movie these days and think an hour is quite a good session in a video game, it says a lot that I didn't even start to think "Just how long is this going to go on?" until I was about ninety minutes in.

People (Who are they, these generic, unreferenced "people"? I don't know but I'm agin 'em.) like to talk about the corrosion of the internet and how nothing is as good as it used to be in the good old days because apparently that's just how we feel about stuff when it's been around a while. And it is true that the sense of play, the sense of wonder, may have gone out of the worldwide web, swept away by the tides of commerce. (Geez! Flowery, much?)

Remember when people (Them again...) genuinely weren't sure if Poppy was real? Or Pronunciation Book? I guess those days of innocent gullibility really are over. Even before AI made the irreal real, we were well past being fooled that way, even willingly. Weren't we? (By the way, more Blaugust props (No-one says props any more. Shhh. You're just drawing attention to it!) to Calishat, without whose excellent utility Back That Ask Up! I would have had to waste a lot more time finding a suitable reference for that That Poppy story.) 

Just because we can't be fooled so easily doesn't mean the web has gone all to shit like people keep saying. There are things the web can do that no other medium can approach and there's still far, far more out there than any of us is ever going to find.

I very, very definitely would not have gone looking for an experimental, multi-media meditation on eternity, framed as a science-fiction novella, on a massive, corporate sports channel but that's where this comes from. Still find that hard to believe. What the hell is it doing there, anyway?

But that's where it is and I suggest you go experience it. It's a ride. 

Thanks again to axxuy and indeed to Blaugust for showing it to me. I'd never have found it on my own and that would have been my loss, which is why I'm sharing it here, because I know for sure not everyone reading this is also reading every other Blaugust blog, let alone clicking on all the links.

And this turned out longer than I planned but then doesn't it always?