As Pressed as a Freshly Pressed Sock

So it seems as though I’ve made it to level 2 of this online game I’ve been playing for a while now, called Blogging.

Getting to level 2 is every blogger’s dream, but I have to admit, it’s kind of daunting when it happens. I’d been plugging away for 2 years, writing “posts” that were highly likely to not be read at all. There was a small group of readers who intermittently read, or commented, on posts. This small group of readers can be easily divided into 3 main categories: those who are related to me, those who live under the same roof as me, and those who exist only in my imagination. This last category comprised the largest section of my readership, and were the most supportive, although not on the blog, naturally, as they can’t type.

Leap forward to about 10 days ago, when I received an email to say that my post was about to be “Freshly Pressed”.

Wow. Being Freshly Pressed means you finally get a pass to go to level 2, which is a Freshly Pressed badge on your site, and lots of  new “followers”. The exciting bit about the way this game works is that these new followers are allegedly “real” – i.e, actual people, who exist outside of my head and are able to press the “Like” button or type a comment!

My loyal band of imaginary readers were unable to ever “like” or  comment, much they wished they could, because they lacked a physical body, which (despite all the recent advances in quantum mechanics) is still a necessary encumberance if you wish to control a keyboard.

I have to admit that it feels as if the deluge of new followers and commenters that interacted with my blog after it was Freshly Pressed may not really be real. Now that it’s all a week ago, it seems possible that all those comments were generated by a very sophisticated spamming program that is able to respond to key words as if it is conversing about suspected malicious whitegoods, partners who lose socks, and the possibility of the existence of other universes where socks are a black-market item.

But apparently these new followers are real human beings. Even so, it still requires imagination to think about all these real human beings reading my blog.

For a start, I don’t know them, what they look like, or where they are. For another thing, since I’m still writing this post, clearly, they can not yet be reading it yet and may never do so. At this point, they do so only in my imagination. Like any blogger, as I’m writing this, I’m imagining that I’m addressing a person, or some people, who might read it some time in the future, when it’s published on my blog. When we write a blog, or any writing for publication, readers can only be imagined, since they can only exist in the future, so – I rest my case. I am imagining all my potential readers, notwithstanding the fact that some of them are real.

So I feel that I need to proceed with caution here. There is a risk of imaginary feelings being hurt. Just because new readers of this blog may have certain advantages – such as having real fingers that allow them to “like”and comment – I don’t want my old imaginary readers to feel as if I’ve forgotten them.

So I decided that some introductions are in order to smooth over any possible ruffled feathers.

With that in mind – hello to any new, and/or real, readers out there! So that everyone is comfortable with one another, whether real or imaginary, I’d like to introduce you newbies/real folk to a few of my older/imaginary readers:

An academic at Melbourne University today, worried that this blog has discredited his thesis on Beckett

Early on there was this dude, above, who read one of my first posts, about Waiting for Godot. He had the nerve to object furiously to my ideas, in a 20,000 word paper that he scribbled out and submitted to the Academic Panel at the University of Melbourne.

Still, I didn’t really mind, since at least he read the post. He tunes in from time to time to see if I’ve written anything else he can react furiously to, but so far there has been nothing else even vaguely worthy of his snooty academic attention.

An example of a moustache

This is some mumbling guy that tried to respond to a few of my early posts about moustaches. Unfortunately, I couldn’t work out what on earth he was saying.

Help! My finger got stuck in a hole in this goddam mat, and now look at me!!

This guy enjoyed my post about yoga mats, but he tried a particularly complex yoga move in 2011, and sadly he is still stuck in that position, so he only gets to read my blog now if someone else holds a laptop in front of him. Poor guy!

Finally there is also my mum, who I mention from time to time, as if she reads this blog. That is my own little joke, as, in fact my mother is also an imaginary reader. Mum, bless her, is in her seventies and is the most extreme technophobe the world has ever known. She can’t even watch a DVD unless my father puts it on for her. They don’t have a computer, and she has no understanding of what the internet is, has certainly never seen this blog and would be totally perplexed at the entire notion of writing a blog if I was to try and explain it to her.

Hi Mum! I’ve been Freshly Pressed!