Life of Smiley

Just in time for Watchmen: Jon Savage on the history of the smiley face.

Cross-posted from Old is the New New. Comments welcome.

Meta

Hide your puppies, there’s metablogging ahead. Writing that tribute to Digital History Hacks (call it data point no. 1)  got me thinking, if I wasn’t already, about weblogs and their natural lifespans, about when and how they change or end, and about how you know when you are done. Oho, you say, could Rob be talking about his own increasingly cobwebby weblog? Very clever of you to spot it. But first, a few other data points:

Data point no. 2: I don’t think I can overstate how much I love the blog Snarkout–named for my favorite Daniel Pinkwater novel, and that just adds to its swelliness. I don’t even know the name of Snarkout’s author but he (I’m taking a wild guess) writes long, smart, link-lousy, digression-infested posts on just about everything under the sun. His posts start out about one thing, like how Isaac Asimov is “the boringest man ever to inspire a Japanese death cult,” then somehow wander off, like late-era Simpsons episodes, to work in the invention of the Pringles potato chip, then end up being about an insane CIA intelligence officer who insisted he was a galactic emperor and may have been the pseudonymous science fiction writer Cordwainer Smith. That’s one post, you understand, and they’re all like that.

But here’s what really impresses a slow blogger like me:

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Cross-posted from Old is the New New. Comments welcome.