My Internet Haunts

The worldwide web is a big place, but I imagine everybody has their own fairly restricted "beat". Here's mine.

I don't read very many blogs. I've been a longtime reader of Peter Hitchens's blog, especially appreciating his more reflective posts on poetry and religion and that kind of thing. He's becoming increasingly fatalistic about society, and I can't really blame him, but it does sometimes put me off reading him for weeks at a time. That, or when he becomes narrowly focused on a particular issue, such as Covid lockdowns-- again, I don't blame him, but I don't have his dogged persistence.

Edward Feser's book The Last Superstition played a role in my acceptance of Catholicism as the truth, and my acceptance of the intellectual credibility of theism. I've been reading his blog for many years now. I stop reading it for months at a time, but I regularly come back. There's lots of intellectual stimulation there, if you have a taste for philosophy and clear ideas.

Of course, there is the wonderful Some Definite Service blog, which concentrates on all the important things-- religion, poetry, trains, music, Englishness, and all that. The author is conservative but not angry, which is an all-too-rare combination. And it's always beautifully written.

There are the two forums I take part in, the first of which I help to administer: the Irish Conservative Forum and the Irish Catholics' Forum. Both are pretty urbane and thoughtful.

I read most articles that appear on The Burkean. It's perhaps the most fearless scourge of political correctness in Ireland. I don't agree with the somewhat identitarian leanings of many of its writers, being more of a cultural nationalist myself. But it's open to a plurality of voices, and I've often published there myself. (In this article I tried to argue in favour of traditional conservatism, and against the more radical ideologies that many young Irish people on the right are flirting with. But I believe such debates should be had, and not suppressed.)

My favourite website on the entire internet is undoubtedly TV Tropes. This began (long, long before I discovered it) as a sort of catalogue of writing conventions or "tropes", a reference tool for writers. However, it's expanded to become an "all-devouring pop culture wiki", as it describes itself. In fact, it casts its net well beyond pop culture, and there's quite a lot on there about literature, folklore, mythology and religion.

I'm especially interested in the pages about audience reactions. It's reassuring that the public often have very different reactions to that expected by studios, labels and publishing houses.

Here are some of my favourite TV Tropes pages:

Audiences taking a message from a work that isn't intended.

Audiences being scared by things that aren't intended to be scary.

Audiences think something is fictional when it's actually real. (This is especially fascinating.)

Audiences cheer for the bad guys.

Audiences sympathise with a character they are supposed to hate. (Of special interest to conservatives and Christians, since they are so often demonized in popular culture.)

Another fascinating TV Tropes page, outside the sub-category of audience reactions, is Newer Than They Think. (Did you know, for instance, that the white smoke which signals the election of a Pope goes back only to the nineteenth century at the oldest, and perhaps even only to 1914? Or that the Canadian flag as we know it dates back only to 1965? Or that Bailey's Irish cream was invented in 1974? Or that the first sequel to be identified with "II" in the title was The French Connection II in 1975?)

There is also an Older Than They Think page.

The Dead Unicorn page describes supposed clichés or conventions which never really existed- for instance, Clarke Kent turning into Superman in a phone booth, which only ever occurred twice outside of parodies. "The butler did it" is another example-- there were very few mystery novels where this actually happened, apparently, before it became a running joke.

I could link to a whole lot of other pages on this website but I won't. I've spent a ridiculous amount of time on TV Tropes, often revisiting the same pages over and over. The best part of a day, often enough.

It's surprisingly well-written, considering it's a wiki. Along with the King James Bible, it goes to show that good writing and anonymous collaboration are not mutually exclusive.

I used to visit the Catholic Herald a lot, but it's mostly disappeared behind a paywall, so I don't so much anymore.

I often go to the Vatican website to read the homilies and other writings of recent Popes. It's a good corrective to the sensationalism and clickbait of so much reporting on the Church.

When it comes to YouTube, I like the channels of Matt Fradd and Brian Holdsworth. I also like to check out what the great Nigel Farage is saying, every now and again.

I've been a longtime fan of Jimmy Akin's Mysterious World, a video channel that looks at unsolved mysteries from "the twin perspectives of faith and reason". Jimmy Akin is a Catholic apologist. I haven't listened to this in a few months, since I became bored with too many UFO-themed episodes, but I'm sure I'll go back to it soon.

Sometimes I watch the Catholic Answers YouTube channel, though the tiresome banter of the host Cy Kellett annoys me, as does the focus on Catholic-Protestant controversies-- which seem less and less relevant to the modern world. Tiresome, not-at-all-funny banter is the bane of many channels and podcasts, and Christians seem especially addicted to it-- doubtless out of a morbid fear of appearing to be a humourless "holy Joe". Jimmy Akin's Mysterious World suffers from it, too, as does Matt Fradd's channel. I'm not anti-humour, but I do prefer it to be spontaneous rather than compulsive and forced.

One person who was never afraid to be serious (or even sober and formal) was William F. Buckley Jr., the American conservative and Catholic intellectual who hosted the show Firing Line, which ran from 1966 to 1996. It has its own YouTube channel, where you can see many of the episodes.

And that's about it. Hopefully you might find something of interest in all those links.