flattened.

Accidental, that's what I'm talking about. I could be exaggerating, but seriously the whole thing happened so fast and with so little input from me that it truly is just luck that I didn't seriously bust up my dome permanent-like.

I was standing on this chair to get something, and in my haste to grab the thing I stood on my tiptoes, and the chair immediately saw the potential to escape, so it took off (make bullet ricocheting sound) and I have no idea what happened next, other than about one big slow-mo second of me thinking "oh you dumb piece of noooooo£$%&*o". The mid-air contortions required to save myself from serious harm have left this duck in a world of ouch.

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I don't spend any time on eGullet anymore because most of the interesting characters or topics have gone, or gone silent, and the moderators have begun following some random and/or sinister policies about "decorum and topicality".

Some smart person somewhere knows what this phenomenon is called, right, when critical mass stops feeding something's positive evolution and finds something better to do, and the thing just stops growing in good or productive ways and slowly dies from inertia and being ignored, or by actively being watered down into mediocre boring irrelevance. For some reason OS/2 springs to mind.

This all has something to do with Mark Athitakis's post about Advancing Genius, but I'm too fatigued by cognitive surplus to research what the applicable term is here.

So anyway, as I said I don't read or contribute to eGullet anymore because it's not very compelling or inspirational or creative, right. But like once a month I optimistically click my eG bookmark and see what's happening.

I did this today, and was all hey, cool, pleasantly surprised by the goodness of a newly active topic on Lebanon. Great photos and informed, passionate commentary that made me want to go to Beirut immediately.

It reminded me favorably of the weekly foodblogs that eG used to have, these usually-awesome little microscopic documentations and dissections of people's daily foodlives from around the world. In fact, it reminded me so favorably of the ol' foodblogs that I made a post on the Lebanon topic to that effect, upon where it was deleted by a moderator as being "inappropriate", which seemed like an awesome feat of impersonal cluelessness, deleting a post that tried to constructively explain why I don't post there anymore, so I whined about it here, and then after I got all the badness out of me I deleted my own whining.

And in doing so I may have just stumbled on a solution to this whole Cognitive Surplus thing: lots of deletion.

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