What I Dislike About...

Non-respondents.

There are actual gods of this particular craft - gods you can attempt to reach out to; gods you can try to contact through this electronic ether.

Here's the thing, though: You'll only be met by empty silence. Much the same as it is with any of their more-ephemeral counterparts.

I used to daydream so fondly about what it'd be like to contact an honest-to-God (see what I did there?) celebrity! Which one would it be? Ah, how I'd waste away the hours - imagining what it would be like to preface my correspondence with, regardless of cliché, the likes of, "You might not believe this - but this is the first fan-letter I've ever written!" And so I finally took the plunge.

What a fat lot of good it did me.

Look, I can't pretend that I'll ever achieve even the merest fraction of the renown that other internet personalities can rightfully claim. Heck, most of my site traffic comes from my having mentioned Magic: The Gathering a few times here and there... and that was almost two years ago!

I am, however, a full-time graduate student - as well as an unpaid intern. And at that job as it is with this, I am strictly a volunteer.

Unlike you, I don't get paid to create new material for the internet. Unlike you, I've never received even one single piece of feedback.

Yet even in that unlikely event I would still like to think of myself as being somehow capable of marshaling the tremendous effort requisite to typing up something like this: "Thank you for taking the time and the effort necessary to write to me, and for sending me this email."

And you don't even have to type in the return address! Or is hitting the 'Reply' button simply beneath you now?