 There is a site that calls itself the "largest advertisement-free blog on the web", and it's called PostSecret. The idea is that a troubled person sends in an anonymous postcard with some terrible secret. Some of them are uplifting, some of them are farcical, but they are nearly always interesting, playing on the voyeur in all of us as we witness what terrible things other people are going through. This is probably the central message of the site: You Are Not Alone. I have some problems with the site, personally, for instance every time the site is updated it seems to have the emailed reactions already installed, as though those people had seen the site before it was posted. Also, I have yet to see any way to actually e-mail the guy who puts the thing together. So this inclines me to believe that the reactions, if not the actual postcards, are invented. I also have a problem with how difficult it is to access the archives. Any site should have previous posts easily available to users. However, neither of these problems should interrupt your enjoyment of the site, and even if they do, now you know that You Are Not Alone. The site is supposed to update every Sunday, but on Sunday the 1st of July, it didn't update. It didn't update on the Monday either. Or the Tuesday. On Wednesday, I got sick of waiting for it, and I made up my own. I downloaded whatever came up under "postcard" on a Google image search, and invented some bullshit secrets. The purpose of satire in general is to make something ridiculous, and then demonstrate how little difference there is between the satire and the object of the satire. You'll have to see for yourselves whether or not I have succeeded. As ever, questions, comments, suggestions, criticisms or jpegs of hot asian chicks can be sent to solo1@eircom.net. Update 12th August 2007: PostSecret has just posted a movie instead of just posting a bunch of postcards. Things that happen during the movie (for instance, parts of postcards moving around, going missing etc.) incline me even more to believe that he's making the whole thing up. However, as I do not have the technology to make a movie out of the postcards that I make up, this might be the last time I do this. We'll see what happens next week. Update 15th August 2007: Apparently this is what happens next: Update 31st December 2007: Millions of years into the future, scientists will look at this page and wonder what happened - what caused this two month gap in the PostSatires. This paragraph is for them. My laptop computer broke. It took this long to get repaired. PostSatire is 50! Woo!Update 30th September 2008: I'm trying to see exactly how far I can take this crazy idea. Because the PostSecret website has some chat forums, I've set up some message boards for people to post on. I'm calling it the PostSatire Community, but depending on feedback, the whole thing could change, or fall over. I'm sure there's such a thing as being "too postmodern", but I was never any good at working out where the lines are. There is also a risk of being seen as egocentric (or at least self-indulgent, which is a fair criticism), but if it works and it's fun, I don't care.
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