I don’t surf the internet looking for new articles to read very often. I don’t have to do so. Most of the internet articles I read are subscribed to from the RSS feeds in my Google reader fed through Feedly, and I can read them all in one place (my phone) like a perpetually refilling magazine of goodness.

Today, I decided to expand that list of goodness and add to it some art news, photo tips, and other new sources. I found some extremely high rated and seemingly well written online sites and added them to Feedly, but upon opening the new content in my reader I found, to my dismay, that nearly all the new feeds were truncating their articles’ content. You, dear reader, may have a blog or other news source feeding into the pulsating masses through some variation of Really Simple Syndication. If you do, please consider this. A large quantity of readers are not surfing through the slow loading graphical content of your website on their various mobile devices, nor do they want to have to do so. If you want readership to expand keep your RSS feeds unlimited in length and allow Twitter sharing. I now am going back through my newly found RSS feeds and deleting them based on their truncation. I’m not certain the reasoning behind the dreaded “click to read full” or other variation of doom and despair, but there are easy ways of tracking even RSS readership, so stats boosting should not be a factor.

I may be just ranting to no justified end, but I’m pretty certain I’m not alone in this mindset. I’m now (mildly) advocating a boycott of all web news sources, blogs included, that truncate their RSS feeds and force me to actually load their page to read the textual content.

Bleck!

It’s that time again, time to put my spin on a popular myth for the future of geeks everywhere. The topic is… (drum roll, please) Aliens! Time to construct a classification for these short, tall, fat, skinny, grey, green, pink, purple, hairy, slimy, ridiculously intelligent, monstrous beings from another world that refuse to interact with our common society.

What are Aliens?
For purposes of this article, aliens are classified as any non-terrestrial origin entity. I know that is a broad stroke, but it’s also constrictive and will likely rile up a few scientologists in our midst because the classification implies that any non-terrestrial entity could create, birth, spawn, or otherwise replicate itself here on earth and its offspring would no longer be classified as an alien. It’s an alien immigrant policy for earth, my friends.

Where do aliens come from?
Who cares, they’re not from here and that’s what seems to matter to most people. Keeping in mind that the earth is populated with a multitude of species, and most of those species are scared to death of each other, I dare say that the universe is probably the same. There are probably tons of alien species out there, but unless they’re ultra naive or ultra scary powerful they likely are just as afraid of us as we are of them. It now should make sense why they seem to prey upon the weaker minded people and animals on earth. Think about it. When was the last time you heard of a rocket scientist who got abducted by aliens and “mind” probed; or, for that matter, when was the last case of German Shepherd abduction recorded. Never, because it’s not the smart ones aliens want to mess with, it’s the dumb ones. Mutilating cattle, messin’ with the hill folk, grabbing up seamen who haven’t see land in months… it all makes sense. Aliens are just poking around, but not wanting to get poked back. If I were an alien, I wouldn’t try to integrate with our common society either. Heck, I’m human and I don’t necessarily want to associate with the common earthling’s society.

What do aliens look like?
Not sure, exactly; this question is a bit like asking what worms look like or, for that matter, what humans look like. A helminthologist could tell you what every worm looked like and what function they had that demanded that particular distinction, but the average Jane is just going to say “slippery and slimy”; not a very good descriptor of what they look like. If every planet that could support intelligent life had as many distinctions between its classifications of intelligent life as we have then describing what an alien actually looks like (even if they all originate from one singular planet out there) is impossible in the grand scheme of things. That said, most alien descriptions offered up by popular mythology seem to indicate that aliens embody the viewer’s own fears; a true monster, if you will. Again, I state that aliens are just as afraid of us as we are of them because they/we are an unknown. For the purpose of this article I’ll just say that beyond the obvious factors aliens are best described as your younger sibling: annoying, mischievous, inquisitive, know-it-all, nosy, sneaky, undermining, copycat, whiny, wimpy, gets cooler toys for Christmas when all you get are socks, and annoying (that’s listed twice for emphasis).

What can aliens do, exactly?
Aliens can mess with sasquatch… we just happen to be the sasquatch in this case. Aliens are possibly in possession of super advanced technology with which they choose to shine lights on us and pick on the funnier examples of our species. Aliens purportedly have super high intelligence with which they integrate themselves into society so well we can’t tell the difference between them and us unless some guy that lives alone in a cabin in the woods posts a blog about it. Aliens could have amazing telepathic, telekenetic, or telephonetic brains that they choose to use to make iphones for general consumption by teen girls everywhere. Aliens are feasibly regenerative which they use to maintain their disguise as Cher. Aliens might also be able to master time and space which they’ve chosen to do in order to help our pitiful civilization reach the pinnacle of it’s existence: couch wars.

Should we be worried?
Heck, yes we should be worried! Didn’t you read that list of what aliens can do!?

How can we kill these invading hordes, Jon?
With water, supposedly (thanks, M. Night Shyamanalonalonalonalanmanaskjdaflkjgfsdll!slkfjgh&*kjfg!!!!). If that doesn’t work, you could just wait for them to die off from infection caused by our zombie hordes… wait wrong topic. Nuking them doesn’t seem to ever work, just FYI for those of you who do live a cabin in the woods and have a stockpile of Russian nukes in your root cellar. I suggest the good ol’ fashion Will Smith approach and punch-em-in-the-face!

If that doesn’t work play dumb and they’ll probably just probe you for a bit and let you go in Alaska somewhere. If you’re worried about your family, don’t be. I’d be more worried about the poor alien’s sanity if they abducted your modern child. Have you listened to kids these days? They’re nuts! The most likely scenario would be like that story about the kidnappers who couldn’t wait to get the kid home because he was so annoying and demanding. Trust me, kids are more annoying than aliens. Wait maybe that’s the big secret: kids are aliens!

Now what?
Why are you still reading this? Post a comment about your outrage and give us your own version of an alien descriptor. I’m sure someone stumbled across this on accident and really wants to know. Just give me a day or so to root through the spam about viagra and other supplements before looking for your post to get approved (it’s instant if you’ve been approved before).

Stu was a boiler worker who was called upon day and night to fix the steam powered electric generator that Tesla had been using to power his ghastly experiments within the aether… or something like that.

This is the last one, fellows and gals. The Steampunk Rabbit idea is horrible.

So, steampunk or bunnies?

I really don’t mind the fact that the Steam Airship picture from my “Desktops” page has made its rounds, but a close second in the search stats is the post I did a while back in which I put up some goofy picture of a rabbit with a pancake on its head. The picture was emailed to me by The Rambling J. I could not think of a good way to use it so I titled the post “Flap Jack Rabbit” and left it that way. The cancer has spread. This searching for bunnies on the site has got to end. However, knowing it will likely continue and even more so be exacerbated by this post, I submit to the pressure. Here, in all its glory, is my answer to the flap jack rabbit: Capt. Jack Rabbit inventor of the steam powered biplane.

I suggest clicking on the picture it may “reveal” itself.