ChapterZero

I remember finding out sometime this week that kuro5hin is pronounced “Corrosion”; I had always pronounced it ‘kuro-5-hin.org’, which is a lot less satisfactory. My coolness factor just went up.

I haven’t visited there in a while, because most of the front page articles are crap— half-baked opinions of would-be pundits on economics and politics, mostly. The pickings this time around were better than I expected; there was even the rarest of the rare: a piece of short fiction. A relatively pointless piece of fiction, with no satisfactory ending (of course, the two are related), but a well written one. I had better luck in the moderation queue. There was one engaging, astonishingly well written article on homosexuality and religion— almost, but not quite, a topic that has been overdone on kuro5hin—, and another interesting, albeit morose, essay on the futility of relationships for some types of people. I am surprised that the first article had a score of -5 and the second of 35, when the post threshold is 70. No wonder there is no fresh material on the front page! I can imagine the type of people who would vote down good articles like these, and vote up the usual crap, but I thought the k5 crowd was better than that. Guess not.

Possibly relevant posts:

• The WikiSystem (9/16/2005)
• How I discovered a roommate, and other sordid tales (12/4/2001)
• Sci-Fi as the last bastion of philosophical writing? (2/18/2008)