Grumble, Grumble

It's that time again—when I fill my blog with gripes about things that annoy me. (Let's face it, gripes about things that don't annoy me wouldn't make any sense at all!) Today's first topic:

Paginating online news articles

I'm told that people on the Internet have a short attention span. I'm told that they don't read; they skim. And I'm told that if you don't give your e-audience their information in little bits and pieces, they won't read it at all.

The online news media seems to have taken this advice to mean that they cannot post an article on their website in its entirety, but rather have to divide it into 2–4 pages. Mind you, these pages are not meaningfully divided, such as by topic wherein you can skip topic 2 if it doesn't interest you and go right on to 3. No, they're just divided to make the page look shorter.

Does this really result in any kind of benefit for anyone? If I were to break this blog entry right here, and make you click a link to see the rest of it, would you? Or would you decide you'd had enough, and it wasn't worth the wait to load an entirely new page just to continue reading?

If I've already committed to reading an article, making me click through several pages of it is only an annoyance. In my opinion, dividing content on the Internet should only be done if it assists in navigation—not if it slows the reader down.

On second thought, this unnecessary pagination may be a ploy to ensure the reader sees more ads. In which case, I complain even more adamantly than ever before!

Speaking of complaining...

There are some people on my Facebook who keep a running commentary via their status updates of all the things that have gone wrong in their life since their last status update. I hardly hear anything from them but some complaint. There are also some people in my immediate vicinity who have a cynical comment to make every time they open their mouth. Jeez! Grumbling every once in a while is all right (it'd have to be, or it would be very hypocritical of me to be writing this post), but try to maintain a balance!

And speaking of balance...

Yoga

I'm aware yoga has been in existence for millennia. Apparently it has some practical benefit, or people would have given up after the first thousand years. But ever since yoga splattered all over my radar screen about a decade ago, I have been struggling with my skepticism. I can't help but think that a good portion of yoga practitioners merely do it because it's trendy. And another good portion of them only do it because they like to show off all the strange ways they can contort their limbs. Maybe I'm just jealous because I'm about as flexible as a Lego person, but frankly, I just can't work up any respect for an activity that inspires captions such as the one below.

If we relax our minds and concentrate,
perhaps we can rip our own heads off!