I suppose you could say that the title was justa bit shy of unequivocality — I suppose you kudda read it, «Better Things To Do With Your Time Online (Than Spend It Online)» — what can I say:

«That is not what I meant at all. That is not it, at all.»

Jon

• Read webcomics
• Watch TV (Hulu, youtube)
• Online gaming sites such as MSN games, Pogo, Yahoo! games
• Play free MMORPGs.
• Piracy!Perfectly legal downloads of freely licensed software and media.
• Net Radio, including talk shows and podcasts.
• Go to a custom computer configurator and see how expensive a computer you can design.
• Organize your bookmark collection.
• Catch up on specialty blogs. Gizmodo, consumerist, hackaday, jalopnik, whatever.
• Learn something about someone else's religion.
• Subscribe to RSS feeds.
• Draw ASCII art.
• Take online college classes. Earn a degree.
• Learn a programming language.
• Learn a human language.
• Got money? Gamble or invest online. Same thing, really.
• Write a novel, then publish it.
• Learn some logic or, instead, logic.

...or you could go outside. Play sports. Exercise. Meet people in RL.

Umm ....

• Working funny hours at the somewhat misnamed "day-job".
• Teaching children about English literature.
• Cooking.
• Looking after my kids.
• Making music.
• Walking with friends for an hour every morning.
• Programming strictly for fun.
• Watching Mythbusters.
• Making jewellery.
• Sewing clothes from patterns.

... all happened over the last 7 days, and none of them involved Wikipedia. These are why I'm spending less and less time on-wiki these days. Yay!!

To be fair, your damage limitation pursuits on WP have been spectacularly successful this week. I counted four or five interjections on BLPs that have been an uncontroversial triumph.

Yeah, but that's all I'm doing over there, Kato. That and blocking proxies used by ... eh, nevermind Thing is, I cannot stand seeing some of the private anguish I get to see on some BLPs there, and I know that a number of people posting/snooping here feel the same. Pushing against the overwhelming tide.

That Mary Yang thing was just frustrating and heartbreaking. I swear, I want to pack in all that crap only for the undoing of damage that I can do over there.

EDIT: And the reason there's no defamation in the move logs over the last few weeks, is because I sat down and revision-hid every one I could find, dammit. And I'm not done yet.

Ending other people's pain is the only thing that sustained me on wikipedia for months and months.#

That and the fact I was addicted.

But now I've bought my kids a wii..........

(I do feel guilty of holding back on the BLP First Aid. But the cause of a systemic fix for the defamation engine is a lost one.)


I'll still do what I can for BLPs. But my opinion is now that Wikipedia is basically unreformable (not in the theory, but in wikipediot practice) and it would probably be best if the whole thing disappeared.