Some people just use their Internet connection as a tool. They log on, find what they’re looking for as quickly as they can, read it or save it or print it out, and log off again.
While I’ve certainly done that on occasion, it’s not the way I normally operate, nor is it the way most of the people I know use the Internet. I’m more of a Web wanderer. I go snooping and poking and following link after link until I’m in so deep I can’t remember what I started looking for in the first place. You too? I thought so. I fact, that’s probably how you ended up here.
When I’m exploring the Web that way, I sometimes do it on my own and sometimes with the help of the well-known and extremely popular service called Stumble Upon, which lets you open an account, designate your various interests from a very lengthy list, and then just hit a “Stumble” button to take you from site to site to site. Along the way, you can give thumbs up or thumbs down to the places you visit, save your favorites, or e-mail the links to a friend. When I’m in one of those lazy, random, can’t-really-be-bothered-to-go-digging-around-on-my-own moods, it’s the perfect solution. Plus, it’s great fun.
As an example of how this works, and a really long way around to pointing you toward a fascinating book that I discovered, consider this:
The other day, I clicked my “Stumble” button and was taken to this site, a really quirky but fascinating blog that was apparently retired last year but whose owner is leaving everything in place in perpetuity to preserve the material and the links, like this one, that point there.
While browsing around The Nonist, I found this post , which naturally got me quite excited and had me drooling over the gorgeous photographs for the next twenty minutes or so.
Then, as you might expect, I wanted to know more about the person who took those marvelous pictures and put them into this book
so I went here and here and here and here, and a few other places, as well.
And then, of course, I found out that you can purchase this extremely expensive but utterly beautiful book (which, by the way, has an introduction by Umberto Eco) at many independent booksellers … and, naturally, at Amazon and Borders and Barnes and Noble and other retailers, too.
I don’t know about you, but I consider that a good day’s work, especially when you consider that all it took to get started was a single click of a single button — an inauspicious start for a very entertaining trip.
The book, which features a brilliant Wayne Miller cover, is available for pre-order now. I highly recommend that you snag your copy while you have the chance. It’s a wonderful collection that introduces you to a very dark corner of the world, a place you would definitely not want to pass through in real life, the kind of place that’s really only safe to visit between the pages of a book. It’s also a collection that shows off Dave’s depth and range, and his knack for tweaking old-fashioned themes into unsettling new shapes.
, which I waited far too many years before reading.
