Comments on: Reinvoking the Law

By: rikchik

rikchik — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 22:02:52 +0000

Dammit, something went wrong with that link – should point to http://www.yarnivore.com/francis/archives/000632.html .

By: rikchik

rikchik — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 22:02:09 +0000

Some people don’t google themselves? I do it pretty often, and once or twice I even found someone discussing me that I wasn’t aware of.

This Francis Heaney cartoon comes to mind as well.

By: Robert Hutchinson

Robert Hutchinson — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 21:51:55 +0000

1) My name doesn’t seem to be uncommon enough to be susceptible to this–I have to dig and dig through Google just to find something I’ve written.

2) I admit that I spent five minutes or so using Google’s Blog Search to see if I could dig up what specifically prompted this entry. On the one hand, I failed. On the other hand, wow, people get angry enough with John to post their anger in their own journals. On the third hand, pay no attention to the time I got angry enough with John to post my anger in my own journal.

3) Get this–a few weeks ago, I simultaneously sent someone an angry e-mail over subject X, and posted more of that anger on my journal. They replied to my e-mail (very nicely, mind you) with a comment about “yeah, I saw your LJ, I can see it upset you!” I was freaking MORTIFIED, despite my journal not really expressing anything I hadn’t already put into the e-mail. One day I will understand how the Internet works.

By: George E Martin

George E Martin — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 15:55:39 +0000

#17 I discovered the law of internet invocation by accident.I did a post on my blog about Harlan Ellison

A little over two years ago, John also made a blog entry about Harlan, showing up in a dream I think. And yes, Harlan posted a comment here, a neutral one.

George

By: Martin Wisse

Martin Wisse — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 11:55:16 +0000

#36: I know Terry Pratchett used to worry about being accused of stealing ideas from his fans that he would stop reading alt.fan.pratchett when it got into one of its regular bouts of speculation.

#43: The Turkey hater was Serdar Ardic, immortalised in Ken MacLeod’s first novel, The Star Fraction where his name is used as a explictive. He had a bee in his bonnet about the Armenian Genocide and onse replied to a recipe for Turkey one Usenet poster had in his sig around Thanksgiving with a pages long rant about this subject.

The law of internet invocation is just the realisation of that old Woody Allen sketch where he pulls Marshall McLuhan into the movie to tell another character how wrong he is.

By: Fletcher

Fletcher — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 05:05:40 +0000

Since nostalgia is a toxic substance to me, I avoid visiting the websites I used to frequent in my fledgling noobhood. Also since I don’t use my real name online (because I’m paranoid about that sort of thing, and because it’s clunky as hell) finding it splashed all over the Internet would be /creepy/.

So I don’t egosearch myself – I’ve never been able to see the /point/, really. But then I don’t “get” Twitter or Facebook or whatever the social networking site of the month is either.

It seems I’m not missing out on much, really. Drama is to be avoided.

By: Jennifer

Jennifer — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 04:43:46 +0000

I haven’t Googled myself since about 1998 when I was a freshman and had unlimited net access for the first time. See, someone has restraint. I also have a fairly dirt-common full name- obviously my first name is what it is, and I don’t have an extremely unusual last name, so there you go. I also DO NOT WANT TO KNOW what everyone is saying behind my back, thanks. The Internet has the potential to be middle school, so I’ll skip that.

I get annoyed when I am googling something else and find posts I wrote, though. Ugh.

By: John Scalzi

John Scalzi — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 03:54:20 +0000

Thena:

“That’s so old it only has, like, four comments on it. Wow.”

Well, it had more comments before, which didn’t survive two different changes of blog software.

By: Natalie L.

Natalie L. — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 03:30:14 +0000

37 & 51: Sure, there are absolutely legitimate reasons for authors to request that sort of agreement, however, the author in question had been lurking in our community for several years by that point and presumably reading /our/ speculations on the series in question. The way it all went down really left a bad taste in everyone’s mouth and the way the requirement was worded just didn’t sound on the up and up, if that makes sense? It was basically, “You can’t copyright an idea, everything you say here becomes my intellectual property” or something like that, it was definitely over and above disclaimers I’d read on other author boards at the time.

By: Thena

Thena — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 02:13:15 +0000

That’s so old it only has, like, four comments on it. Wow.

Also, thank you for helping me figure out when I started reading the whatever, because I’m fairly confident I haven’t ever read that, but I know I’d been around awhile when “Being Poor” posted.

And, just FYI, I’ve been on the internet since 1994 (more or less) and it didn’t occur to me to plug my name into a search engine until probably three or four years ago.

Apparently there aren’t many of us. Who would have known?