03/14/2003
This is a review of chedz.diaryland.com (now defunct).
Content - 48/75pts.
[-]Execution - 30/45pts. Let's begin with the AIDS entry. I was on a university campus the weekend of AIDS Awareness Day/week/month/decade. Busy and caring college students barricaded a part of a road and wrote a number of informative and encouraging messages with sidewalk chalk, such as "Don't be a monkey and share your banana without a condom!" Unkind, no? You said that through discrimination, human beings drive themselves to a "state lower than the AIDS virus [itself]." Hmm.
A human being infected with AIDS has a combination of both lows, being human and toddling around with AIDS, and thus is the supreme. Right? When people tell me that "human beings" are lower than a virus (which isn't even really ALIVE), I am annoyed and become, well, less of a human being. I doubt that it was the effect you wanted to create, but it's the one that manifested itself.
Then you told the story of your HIV-positive friend. She discovered that her family loved her, and so on, and then she bravely smiled a quavering smile (I imagine), and declared herself to be fortunate. This is fine. But then you said that you wondered. And you coughed. You wondered that she is happy? You wondered whether she is lucky? (She's luckier than most people who are infected with AIDS.) (But she should have used a condom!) (It's better she doesn't live a life of meaningless sex though. Would she have been one of those girls who "fuck all night" and "hump all day" if she hadn't been infected?)
It's a difficult subject. You tried to express your thoughts in two ways, the first by preaching (no. baaad. don't do this) and the second by anecdote. The anecdote was fine until the last two paragraphs. Then you lapsed. I was disappointed, and this reminded me of the bad sun/cloud imagery. What, are you trying to put in SYMBOLS in your diary entries? Pretentious, aren't we? I finished off annoyed with the entry, despite the possibilities.
But, to lighten things up, an entry about the friendlier side of SEX! This was amusing.
Okay, but more seriously, it is time to contemplate the meaning of life. You say that "certain events in the past" have driven you to this, you know, driving question. What events? Being alive? Toddling around AIDS-free? Anyway, I hoped you could tell me the meaning. The Meaning. You couldn't though. (Haven't you found Jesus?) Instead, you babbled incoherently about some sort of ocean, and I drifted. And you came to a rather redundant conclusion - that you liked being alive. So is that all the meaning is to you, happy chemicals floating in your body?
I criticize because you shifted away from the topic at hand. You wanted to say that it was nice to be alive and bad to be dead, but you began by rhetorically asking what the meaning of life was. And, self-evidently, the meaning of life isn't "life is good." The introduction didn't FIT, and also, I wanted to know what the meaning was. The Meaning. (But not of your life, of MY life. The MEaning.)
On this page you want to have a serious discussion of universality. But your second and third paragraphs were about being bored at work (so you only write when you're bored?). And your last paragraph told me to ignore the entry. Good thing I only skimmed it! I'll not read it then.
The purpose of your diary is to show everyone how grand you are and how much you know about fan fiction, right? Fan fiction, from what I understand, consists of stories that fourteen-year-olds read covertly, stories about Backstreet Boys and so on, where they have lots of unprotected sex. These stories are written in teenage prose by Internet teenagers and other people who can't create original work. This point is argued in the entry.
The main contention of the entry was that the idea of fan fiction has intellectual property right issues. It was interesting and reasonably well-written.
However, that interesting and reasonably well-written entry was counterbalanced by this dull and confusing one. Conclusion? No one should be this inspired by fan fiction.
Also, a dull entry can be read by clicking here. I say "dull" because you'd rather write it to Zoe than to me. And that makes me sad on the inside. And I don't even know what you're trying to say here or here. I feel lonelier and lonelier.
Like most people, you've got your interesting entries and then the ones that a person fidgets through. (I never actually read the boring ones.) Boo. Stop writing the dull entries.
[-]Grammar/Mechanics - 4/10pts. There were errors, and there were errors on almost every page. I can't stand that. I mean, sure, you can read it, but it's still an irritant.
Examples.
"Those who never knew these stuff enough".. from here.
"and it's existance in the public domain".... found here.
I have dreams (secretly) of becoming an English teacher to slash all over everyone's papers. No! It's spelled grammAr. And so on.
[-]Readability - 10/10pts. Fine.
[-]Style - 4/10pts. You have a rather uneven style, most of the time. (You are unevenly uneven. Ha, ha.) On this entry, for example, you use figurative language, saying that the "knocks floated" and so on, and then you hurt your foot, you "sprained it big time." Big time?
Layout - 10/10pts.
[-]Aesthetics - 5/5pts. The entry and the image overlap (I never view sites in a maximized window), and I don't know if this was intentional, but the effect was nice. I'm going to assume that it was intentional. Anyway, there's nothing wrong with it.
[-]Navigability/Legibility - 5/5pts. I liked the way you organized your archives. Except for calling your regular entries a part of your "boring" life. It made me sleepy.
Contact - 5/5pts.
Updates - 5/5pts. You don't show the dates of your entries. Tricky, tricky. But with all of my wily ways and the ability to look at the filename.html of your pages, I determined that you began the thing at the end of November 2002, and it's four months, and you've about seventy entries. A divide or two later, that averages about seventeen entries per month. Full credit for you, and kudos to my detective work. (I don't think I say enough how nice I am myself.)
Errors - 4/5pts. In the archive pages, the link to the section titled "day - the boring life" is dead. (It's because you have an extra quotation mark after the dot html.)
Total - 72/100pts. This means your diary is going to be on my "mediocre" page. Yep. So mediocre. So very, very soporific. (Except the entries that I said weren't. Like the one about sex.)
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