Two Things You Should Be Reading On The Internet This Morning

1)  Today’s your last chance to save the Internet – quite literally, as the cable companies want to make the Internet more profitable for them and worse for everyone else, including all the businesses on it.  All you have to do is leave a comment for the FCC.  I suggest strongly that you do so.
2)  I spoke about the disaster that was DashCon yesterday, and this being the Internet we have a rebuttal from someone who actually attended, saying it wasn’t as bad as it was made out to be.  (Hint: That still doesn’t make it good.)
But this is your daily reminder that the Internet is a distortion zone.  By the time a story becomes big enough to go viral, chances are very good that several facts have already been mismanaged by the time you get to hear about it.  And then, once the weight of numbers has decided that Thing X is Bad, people sift through every factoid they can unearth, looking to find all the worst bits to make it a more interesting story.
Do I think that DashCon was well managed?  Lord no.  Can I understand that the tragically-tiny ball pit might have been meant ironically, and that the Internet sailed right past any sense of irony?  Oh yes.  I can completely believe that.
Do I think that DashCon might have had some very good things couched in what was, by many objectiveish accounts, a disaster of PR and management?  Absolutely yes!  But the Internet doesn’t like “Some of it was good, much of it was bad” – they want a punching bag, like Transformers, something so incompetent that they can make fun of it to their hearts’ content without having to feel bad about hurting anyone’s feelings.
Do I qualify as one of those heartless morons searching for a chewtoy to savage?
Yes.
Yes, I damn well do.