Thursday, November 14, 2013

I love the Internet


As some of you might know, I like to amuse myself, and occasionally others, by poking fun at Kim Jung Un. Apparently his name is spelled Kim Jong Un, but I made the initial mistake of spelling his name with a U and I'm sticking with it.

I try to make daily additions to the collection on a tumblr called kimjungfun.tumblr.com.

But this post isn't about Kim Jung Un. Or, his accomplished father, Kim Jung Il, who, on his first golf outing hit an astounding 11 holes in one.

This is about tumblr.

I'll be the first to admit that prior to signing up for my tumblr account I knew very little about this emerging social media platform. I only knew it was similar to instagram. They're both visually driven venues that operate a little different than Facebook or linkedin or even Twitter.

I don't have a network of tumblr friends. That is, people I converse with or exchange ideas with, I simply have followers. I don't know them. They don't know me. However, in order for my Kim Jung Un tumblr to get more exposure and more traffic, I have to "follow" other tumblers.

And they have to follow me.

My daughters tried to explain the machinations to me, but every word out of their mouths is "like" and I can't listen to them for more than 5 minutes.

The long and the short of it is, I now have 147 faithful followers on tumblr.

Many of them are from Japan.
Many of them are into goth.
And tattoos.
And weed.
Lots and lots of weed.
And all of them are are very young.
So when I check my dashboard -- the equivalent of a Facebook newsfeed -- I see a lot of this:

A lot of them are into something called Manga porn, so I also see stuff like this:



That's offset by some of my tumblr followers who post beautiful pictures like these:



Which can be followed by something like this:


Or this:


Or even this:



But once in a while I will come across something that is truly magnificent and worth all the time lost to senseless browsing.

Something like this:


There's no point to all of this.
But as the Internet often proves, there doesn't have to be.

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