Ash, Why?

In which I talk about why I'm writing a blog.
I feel like I have to explain myself.

Writing a blog is a number of different things:

-It's not new. Everyone and their knitting-enthusiast grandmother has a blog. Some of them are incredible, or entertaining, or both. Most of them suck, and I think that's just fine. If everyone was a hard-hitting journalist, or an incredibly evocative writer, we'd all get bored with excellence and we'd have to throw ourselves in front of trucks or something. I digress.

-It's hilariously cliché, and it's exactly what a loudmouth with a lack of focus--like me--would do in this world of Web2.0rwhatever. "A soapbox to cry your thoughts from? Oh Reginald, how excellent!" Big sigh.

But in the light of the wikileaks Cablegate and its attendant scandals, a couple things have also been made clear to me.

First is that there is an awful lot of important stuff happening that gets buried under the exploits of the Kardashians at best, and under mountains of misinformation at worst.


Secondly, information that is important needs to be mirrored, preserved, publicized and discussed--especially with people who would usually be averse to looking for it.

Thirdly, I should probably reduce my use of facebook as my personal megaphone, as its losing its efficacy and turning me into "that annoying girl that just posts links all the time". Which is totally what I am.

So this is what THIS blog is going to attempt to be:

-a place for me to post links to things that are happening that I think are interesting, important, infuriating, hilarious, or otherwise worthy of attention

-occasionally a place for me to make sassy editorial comments about these things.

-that's all, really.

**FULL DISCLOSURE:
I AM NOT A PROFESSIONAL JOURNALIST. I am a biased, privileged, rather smarmy individual with the benefit of an internet connection and next to no official expertise. I'm unlikely to change the-entire-universe-omg with anything I post here--especially as it's already been posted in other places.
I believe that everything with value is political, that free speech is important, that we live in an inequitable world that we should work within to make more equitable, and that kittens and other fuzzy things are awesome.

That being said, I do consider validity of information very important, and will only post sensitive things that I believe to be true.

If you're one of the five people who read my facebook status updates, maybe you'll like this!
-/Ash out.