I realize that the title of this post may seem incendiary and perhaps even a bit hypocritical. No, wait — hypocritical isn’t quite what I’m going for here. Damn, can’t come up with the right description. Maybe if I was a better blogger, the words would just pour forth from my fingertips like self-aggrandizement from The Donald’s piehole. Anyway, I’ve noticed that the blogging landscape is kind of a reflection of the Internet itself: some good stuff here and there, but still mostly barren of quality. To wit: when I perform a DuckDuckGo search (that’s right, suck it, Google) for “funny blogs,” the top result is a three-year-old Huffington Post article listing the 23 funniest Tumblr blogs. Awesome: snarky captions about owls that look hung over (the birds are doing the heavy lifting here). Kinda one-note. The picture thing is fine once in awhile, but it doesn’t display a lot of creativity. Give me paragraphs!

Delving further down the rabbit hole for worthwhile bloggery, I happen upon several mommy blogs. What are their names? Christ, they’re called mommy blogs — do you think it gets better?! They’re all about the allegedly wacky, occasionally frustrating, supposedly fulfilling life of parenting. These bloggers just have to commit their domestic adventures to the information superhighway because, you know, anyone who’s ever been a parent can relate to balance work and home life and trying to get Caleb off to preschool while Ashton has gotten into your makeup again and hey, we’re all in this parenting thing together and OMIGOD IS IT WINE O’CLOCK YET?

When I take a spin around the WordPress website, I find that it’s rife with journal-type blogs. Writers recounting their daily lives, their views on the world, and their feelings. Ah, the feelings, always with the feelings. Their feelings have feelings. Most of these blogs threaten to collapse under the weight of their introspection; these bloggers are so up in their own heads that it’s amazing that they can communicate with the outside world (maybe it protects them from the harsh truth that no readers actually care). They come off as self-absorbed, rambling, and whiny. Done well, the journal blog can connect with its readers in genuine and profound ways on the shared human experience. Unfortunately, the vast majority of these blogs are not.

Oh, and let’s not forget lifestyle blogs! How can I live my best life? What are the best cotton T-shirts for under $75? How can I whip up a vegan paella in a jiffy? So very precious, so very unattainable. Many of them hide behind the pretense of offering creative tips. You too can make your child’s Amelia Earhart costume for school in minutes (give or take 14 hours and a mastery of sewing). I do wonder if the authors of lifestyle blogs know that 90 percent of their audiences hate-read their blather.

Lists! Many blogs are just collections of lists now, because writing paragraphs takes work…and our ever-shortening attention spans can’t accommodate them anyway. Plus, they create some sort of weird anticipation, as if it really matters to us what some random blogger thinks is the biggest continuity error in The Godfather trilogy. Wait, is this post actually a list? There’s an absence of numbers, so no.

But Geoff, you might say, Fuck you. Tags for some of your recent posts include Press Your Luck, Glass Tiger, and Corey Feldman. You’re probably just jealous that those blogs get more hits. It’s a matter of taste. If you don’t like those blogs, don’t read them. Plus, your profile picture makes you look like a sociopath.

That cheap shot at my appearance aside, yeah, I do write about allegedly-pointless pop culture stuff. But if my subject matter isn’t always original, I make an effort to provide a fresh, entertaining perspective on it without murdering the English language. And while I’d love a larger audience, it’s all the same to me if 10 or 2,547 read my blog each month. More people trying to be creative with the medium is better than none at all, I guess. I just find it odd that it takes some serious scouring of the internets to find worthwhile blogs. I should have some sites that are daily must-reads, and I don’t. Which bums me out.

Perhaps the preceding was a bit harsh. I was saving some of my ire for Christian vloggers and it all came out at once.