David Wong is my hero
May. 30th, 2009 09:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
amanda_loddenIf you've been wandering around on the 'net for any length of time, chances are you've read something by David Wong. I first encountered him when someone forwarded a link for The Monkeysphere, which helps to explain why we go nuts when something bad happens to one of our friends but we shrug off something that kills a couple hundred thousand people halfway across the world.
That led me to poke around on his website (which, alas, is no more, but a lot of his work has been moved to cracked.com), where I found Ways Online Gaming Will Change The Future which was eerily accurate when I read it almost two years ago and is even more so now. Equally disturbing-because-it's-so-damned-true is his 7 Reasons the 21st Century Is Making You Miserable.
But the best article, the absolute pinnacle of "my God I *love* this man", is 10 Things Christians And Atheists Can (And Must) Agree On. This article says everything I've ever wanted to say about differing belief systems but have been too inarticulate to spit out. I can't count the number of times I've backed out of a debate that I felt strongly about because I didn't trust myself not to go on a verbal rampage of everything my opponent held dear; it's exceeded only by the number of times I *should* have backed out of a debate but stayed in long enough to stay something stupid and hurtful that I regretted saying, something that I didn't even mean but got too emotionally charged, something that turned the whole "difference of opinion" into "all-out war".
That led me to poke around on his website (which, alas, is no more, but a lot of his work has been moved to cracked.com), where I found Ways Online Gaming Will Change The Future which was eerily accurate when I read it almost two years ago and is even more so now. Equally disturbing-because-it's-so-damned-true is his 7 Reasons the 21st Century Is Making You Miserable.
But the best article, the absolute pinnacle of "my God I *love* this man", is 10 Things Christians And Atheists Can (And Must) Agree On. This article says everything I've ever wanted to say about differing belief systems but have been too inarticulate to spit out. I can't count the number of times I've backed out of a debate that I felt strongly about because I didn't trust myself not to go on a verbal rampage of everything my opponent held dear; it's exceeded only by the number of times I *should* have backed out of a debate but stayed in long enough to stay something stupid and hurtful that I regretted saying, something that I didn't even mean but got too emotionally charged, something that turned the whole "difference of opinion" into "all-out war".
