Eric the .5b

bruceb brought writer Mark Evanier's blog to my attention a little while back when he was writing about the creation of the character Scrappy-Doo. I've been following it with interest since, especially his notes about the WGA strike (which he's posted between actually, you know, picketing).

The thing I like is that he explains the situation and his concerns honestly and fairly. This recent entry is worth reading in its entirety, but the part that jumped out to me is here:

No one, I should hope, is expecting you to feel sorry for us Professional Writers because we're getting gypped on DVD money and Internet downloads and the like. Not a one of us chose this line of work under duress. This is just a business dispute — a larger, nastier version of the kind of thing that goes on thousands of times a day in Hollywood when we aren't on strike, and which happens in some form in any profitable business. We may get emotional because we do see our work and human lives getting damaged by a number of things that the Producers have done or are attempting to do. You'd get emotional if your boss was trying to slash your salary, too. Or whittle away your family's health insurance.

Well, I didn't say he was dispassionate, ;) but I respect the way he presents his take.

I've annoyed people recently by not taking a pro- or anti-WGA stance on the strike, and I'm going to continue to annoy those people by not really having an emotional reaction beyond, "As the man said, it's a business dispute - one that will eventually be resolved." However, I find Evanier's posts on the subject clear, interesting, informative, and free of BS; anyone following the strike will probably find something worthwhile trawling through his archives or Googling for recent mentions of the WGA.

So I'm using Bloglines to catch up on some Ars Techica blogs...and there are ADS in the feeds. Earthlink banner ads - and they're attached to most of the items in the feed! Augh!

So I whip out Adblock. Buh-bye. (Ironically, I haven't bothered to use it to actually kill ads in web pages, yet. This was just egregious enough that I could actually see it killing my enjoyment of reading these blogs.)

But...why would they do this? Who reads RSS feeds on a tech-geek site and isn't savvy enough to block ads?