The post has many spoilers about various movies and TV series. The list includes:
* The Invention of Lying
* House (TV series)
* Lucifer (TV series)
* Supernatural (TV series)

Everybody lies, right? I was thinking about this. Small or big, everybody lies and life goes on. You may lie about how far are you from the restaurant, like telling people you’ll be there in 5 when you actually will be there in 10. You may lie about killing people, like when you lie when you’re a psychopath murderer and cannibal and you lie to the court. The point is everybody lies.

But is lying always bad?Like if I tell someone that she’s beautiful just to make her happy, did I do a wrong thing? I know I shouldn’t lie about my work experience when I’m applying as a neurosurgeon while my only work experience is none, but what about lying when you really don’t want to visit some friends at the moment so you tell them you’re busy so you don’t hurt their feelings?

In the movie The Invention of Lying, Mark starts lying when his mom is dying. Nobody can lie in that alternative reality, nobody. Mark (Ricky Gervais) starts lying when his mom, in hospital, tells him that she’s scared of dying. She doesn’t want to go to an eternity of nothingness. Mark, trying to comfort his mom, tells her she’s wrong. He says it’s not an eternity of nothingness, rather you go to your favorite place in the whole world. There will be no pain, there’s love there, happiness, and everyone gets a mansion.

Was he wrong? In that alternative reality he lied to his mother and went on to lie to everybody else but did he do something wrong when he lied to his mother? And if yes, why? All he did was to tell a harmless lie to his mother to comfort her. She won’t realize it’s a lie, it’ll only help her to die peacefully.

Lying has a bad effect. I understand that. In the movie, Mark went on a journey of lying to everybody for his own benefits. Lying to casino about winning, lying to the bank about how much money he had, etc. but at that specific moment, did he do something wrong?

Lying is bad because it makes us lie and lie again to keep up with the first one. We will tell bigger lies as a result. But we do tell harmless little white lies every now and then. If you mom cooks for you and it tastes bad, you won’t tell her that, you’ll tell her it’s delicious. It’s a lie but you’ll protect her feelings. I don’t think it’s bad to lie about this. It makes her happy, and won’t harm anyone.

In the TV series House, there was an episode that Dr. House had a (if I recall right) pastor patient who was an atheist. The pastor hallucinated that he sees Jesus. House was amazed that an atheist could work in church, the pastor told him that he lied to the church and nobody knows that he’s an atheist. He managed to do his work perfectly, helped many people, earned an honest living, and became a good member of the society, all because he lied about one small detail.

I don’t think lying is good, I try my best to not lie, but is that little lie he told the church bad? He did his job with no problem as he was supposed to do. Nobody got hurt, nobody was harmed, and quite opposite, one or more people were more happy and in a better place as the result of this lie.

In the TV series Lucifer, Lucifer is famous for always telling the truth. It’s awesome. I always wanted to be able to do that. Always telling the truth is such an amazing ability to have. However, he managed to not answer somethings by asking a question in return, or changing the subject. I was thinking, isn’t that lying?

To lie is to give a false impression. So sometimes, giving only half the truth, or changing the subject, or asking a question in return, could be considered a lie. We all have something to hide. We have guilty pleasures, we have some people we like but not that much, we all have people who we love and don’t want to hurt their feelings, and so on, and we lie. It keeps the balance.

There will be chaos if we don’t lie. In an episode of TV series Supernatural, son of the devil will make everyone stop lying (warning: YouTube link). It causes chaos in a funny way but also the scene makes you think. It’s not possible to quit lying quickly, and it’s not possible to stop lying when you’ve said countless lies in your life, so is not-lying possible at all?

It’s a dream of mine to be able to not say even smallest lies. Being able to be truthful, honest, and straight with everybody is a dream. I personally believe there’s no harm in little lies we tell every day, such as “I’m fine” when someone asks us how we are, or telling your grandma that the dinner she cooked is delicious. There’s no harm in telling your children that tooth fairy puts money under their pillow or santa gives them presents. It’s OK to tell your children that storks bring babies.

But I still think it would be awesome if we could just tell the truth. Lying is not always bad and telling the truth is not always good. Lying is needed to balance our lives. A lie is a great story that someone ruined with truth. Barney Stinson said that.

Oh and wouldn’t it be funny if someone’s pants caught on fire when we sang liar, liar, pants on fire?

There’s nothing more human than

• Texting people you’re on your way when you’re actually not even dressed.
• Keep having hope when you know it’s not gonna happen/gonna happen.
• Promising God you’ll behave when you need something from him.
• Wandering around naked when nobody’s home.
• Feeling beautiful when you look at yourself in the mirror but feeling opposite when you see yourself in front camera.
• Wasting your money on something foolish when you need to spend on more serious stuff.
• Unlocking your phone and then locking it immediately.
• Looking at clock on your phone then forgetting the time right away.
• Setting up multiple alarms, each 5 minutes apart, in the morning.
• Lying about your age.
• Speaking your mind while joking but truly meaning it.
• Opening another bag of snacks when you finished one.
• Grabbing some fruit or sweets from the box when you’re placing it inside the fridge.
• Making lists of stupid stuff.
• Dreaming about what would you do if you had Jeff Bezos money.
• Imagining yourself in a race when you’re driving or walking in the sidewalk.
• Imagining yourself as a singer in the shower.
• Randomly counting your money in the wallet.
• Writing something on social networks and not posting it.
• Imagining you’re friends with someone famous or someone you look up to.
• Being indecisive on unimportant matters or details.
• Forgetting a specific thing when you know you know it, but right now that you need it, you forget about it.
• Being depressed about your future while you know you’re fine.
• Keep being calm and acting normal when you’re exploding from inside.
• Doing the exact opposite of what you advise people to do.
• Fantasizing about becoming a superhero.
• Bluffing.
• Imagining your wedding with a random person you see on street.
• Randomly removing your mobile screen protection and getting a new one.
• Being excited for your online order then being completely emotionless about it.
• Playing a music track on loop too much that you get sick of it and can never listen to it again.
• Forgetting what you’ve put in the list so you put it on again then you realize it’s duplicate so you remove it.
• Being excited about a change then realizing what you had before was better.
• Giving excuses to continue your behavior towards something when you know it’s just an excuse and you don’t really mean it or believe in it.
• Suddenly doubting everything in life.
• Forgetting why you were angry at someone/something but keeping your distance.
• Wanting to text someone but being afraid that you look cheesy.
• Trying to prove yourself to someone.
• Getting tired of proving yourself to people.
• Disagreeing with someone even if, deep down, you agree with that person.
• Not liking someone you don’t even met. You just don’t like the sound of that person.
• Answering someone’s messages just because you have to keep social manners but you don’t really want to answer.
• Leaving someone on ‘seen’, thinking you’ll answer later, but totally forget about it.
• Having a favorite set of outfit.
• Drinking something out of habit, not because you really like it.
• Suddenly starting to cry with no reason.
• Getting up and your brain decides you’re sad today.
• Getting up and thinking it’s a sad day but it turns out to be a really good day.
• Getting up hyped and happy then becoming the least-lucky person alive.
• Actually being afraid of flying (airplanes) but pretending you’re not.
• Reading an entire page of a book and then having to read it again because you can’t remember a word of it.
• Picking up something you dropped by your toes.
• Checking if something is expired by sniffing it.
• Holding your breath when the main character in the movie goes under water to see if you would survive in the same situation.
• Peeing in the shower.
• Accidentally sending a text to the person you’re talking about.
• Carrying too much from your car or somewhere so make it in one trip.
• Running to your room when you turn off the lights in living room so the monster won’t catch you.
• Drinking something out of the cap.
• Drinking directly from the bottle instead of pouring it into a cup.
• Trying to push down every color in those pens we all had.
• Spinning an apple by holding the stalk.
• Grabbing and cutting a leaf when you walk past a tree.
• Trying to put the light switch halfway.
• Trying to peel an orange in one go.
• Disassembling and then reassembling your pen and imagining it’s a gun or bomb.
• Not stepping on lines on sidewalks.
• Trying to go upstairs but using least steps as possible.
• Randomly opening the fridge when you’re bored and keep going at it every 10 minutes.
• Opening the microwave one second before the alarm goes off.
• Checking if you can do something faster than your shadow.
• Adapting an accent from someone you’re talking to.
• Reacting so fast that you think you’re an Avenger. You’ll test if you’ve became Spiderman or Dr. Strange.
• Writing something someone says instead of writing what you actually wanted to write.
• Sniffing your armpits to check if you smell.
• Going up on a slide instead of the stairs.
• Singling or talking into the fan like a robot.
• Drinking juice from a wine glass and pretending you’re drinking alcohol.
• Poking holes in the pencil eraser.
• Pretending you’re giving yourself a shot with those mechanical pencils.
• Fake sleeping.
• Smelling book pages.
• Closing the fridge door slowly so you can see when the lights go off.
• Trying to finish your drink at the same time as your cake/meal.
• Blow bubbles on your drink.
• Putting hair clip on your mouth.
• Using your hand as a cup when drinking water.
• Pretending you’re smoking when it’s so cold that that steam-like thing comes out of your mouth.
• Writing 07734 on your calculator and turning it upside down so it reads “hello.”
• Jumping on bed or sofas.
• TV as background music.
• Repeating some part of a music that you like more than other parts.
• Imagining yourself in a movie fight scene and knocking out your enemies.
• Building a castle using bed sheets and pillows.
• Looking into a pipe and pretending you’re a pirate.
• Drawing on the steam on the car windows.
• Lying when you didn’t need to and you don’t know why you lied.
• Claiming you have ability and talent when you finished the game completely out of luck.
• Licking yogurt lids.
• Walking along the fences and touching it.
• Peel the paint off the walls.
• Make a ring with our fingers and put it under a stream of water so it wouldn’t touch our hands.
• Trying to connect two magnets with same poles.
• Holding the ice cream stick in our mouth after we finished eating it.
• Drawing nonsense on paper or books during long phone calls or in classrooms.
• Hiding in clothes rack in malls.
• Forcing kids or being forced to talk to relatives on the phone.
• Imagining you’re driving a race car when you push the shopping cart in the mall.
• Checking if somebody sees you after using the bathroom so you can skip washing your hands.
• Sitting next to your parents watching TV but not loving a muscle so they don’t notice it’s past your bed time.
• Acting suspiciously when you see a CCTV in the store.
• Being super concerned about the Bermuda Triangle.
• Opening the battery lid on TV remote.
• Mixing different soda flavors.
• Putting glue on your hand and peeling it off when it’s dry.
• Making origami fortune tellers.
• Practicing your autograph.
• Shampoo mohawk.
• Lying to children.
• Eating too much that you fall asleep.
• Getting stressed for no reason.
• Ending lists on random numbers and items just to mess with you.

Many years ago, when we still had control over the web and giant corporation hadn’t still send it to hell, and there were no giant search engines for people to use, we had blogrolls. Blogrolls were sidebar links on our blogs with links to other blogs, usually our friends, which we recommended people to visit.

Sometimes we recommended a blog, sometimes we linked to an interesting post or project, sometimes we wanted to boost a project, but we always had something to recommend to our visitors.

These were carefully curated lists. We felt an obligation to recommend only good stuff. We felt a responsibility over the material we were recommending to other people. Blogrolls could be found on any blog you visited. We essentially built a network of blogs all linked to each other.

Then blogging platforms and programs became more advanced and we could create pages. We moved our sidebar links to special “links” pages and then blogroll ones. Blogroll pages used to contain links to other blogs and projects with small description or comment on each of them. Sometimes we collectively described them as good stuff.

I don’t know what happened to blogrolls after that. They started to fade away and disappear from blogs. Search engines became more advanced and people encouraged each other to use them more. Few remaining old-school blogs and networks kept their blogrolls but they became some kind of listed-only link pages. No description, no comment, no old-school stuff.

I, too, made these boring lists. Only listing names or projects. I even deleted my blogroll page for quite a time. Then I read Simone’s post. He was right. We should curate our blogroll pages in the old manner. We should care about what we post and publish or recommend to people.

Simone asked for context on blogroll pages. He wants to see:

• Who is this person you’re linking?
• Why are you following them?
• What’s in their blog that caught your interest?

and he’s absolutely right. So I updated my blogroll page to do exactly this. I must describe what I’m recommending to people. This should be the default way of publishing blogrolls. Oh, and before that, we should have blogrolls. Old-school blogs baby, bring them back. Bring back the old blogs and the old way of blogging.

This post may contain spoilers about “The Good Place” television series.

Things in the afterlife don’t happen while things are happening here because while time on Earth moves in a straight line, one thing happens and the next and the next, time in afterlife moves in a “Jeremy Bearimy.”

In the afterlife time doubles back and loops around and ends up looking something like Jeremy Bearimy. This is the timeline in the afterlife. Happens to kinda look like the name “Jeremy Bearimy” in cursive English, so that’s what we call it.

It means that something can happen before the stuff that happened before. Like future can be past, or the past can happen in future while it also happened in past after what has happened in future.

See the dot above the “I” in Bearimy? That’s Tuesdays, and also July, and sometimes it’s never. Occasionally that moment on the Bearimy timeline is the time-moment when nothing never occurs. If you don’t get it, don’t worry. The dot over the I broke Chidi.

If you have no idea what I’m talking about, well, you probably haven’t watched the show The Good Place. Your loss. It’s hilarious, fun, clever, pleasant, thought provoking, and top-rated. I sometimes re-watch some episodes or review some parts.

Now what happened that I thought of this again? Specially the Jeremy Bearimy part? I was visiting Silvia Maggi’s web site and I saw her Jeremy Bearimy page. I immediately recognized the name, that’s why I clicked on it. In her words, the Jeremy Bearimy page is “where time flows differently. Past, present and future happen at the same time. There is no clear structure, and the rules are different.”

I thought it’s exactly like the blogosphere. While Silvia uses the page for CSS experiments and creativity, when we look at our blogs, we get the same feeling. I know I’m sounding weird and I probably make no sense to you but let me explain.

Sometimes I visit my favorite blogs and I read old posts. I read about their concerns at that time, I feel their excitement to announce something, and sometimes I try to imagine myself as a third-person thing when those stuff are happening. It’s like a time travel for me except that it’s already happened, while it is happening at the moment to me, and it will happen again in future if I want to. Kinda like Jeremy Bearimy.

Isn’t it awesome? I love blogging and reading blogs. I love indieweb and people who still are active in old-school communities. I love subscribing to your independent and self-owned blogs. It makes me feel alive, it makes me feel part of a community. When I receive an email from you about a post I published or shared, I truly, and genuinely, get happy and smile.

I sometimes read blog posts about an Apple event or WordPress release, or just some rants or emotional posts about difficulties in their lives and it fascinates me. Not just because they’re old posts but because I get to read them when I want. You can’t do that in social networks such as Twitter or (currently) Mastodon, they’re not designed for that.

But blogs are specially designed and created to have this ability. Most blogs are designed in a way to make oldest posts as easily accessible as the newest ones. It’s one of the basics of blogs and I’m glad it’s like this. I get to experience the past, I get to know about future, and I get everything live, right now, in the easiest way possible. It’s the Jeremy Bearimy, time in afterlife, but we get to experience it now; and that’s awesome.

It was when I quit social networks that I knew how they’re truly addicting. I felt something was missing from my life. I missed communicating with friends I made, I missed writing about whatever came to my mind, and I was opening the web sites randomly out of habit only to realize I no longer have anything there.

I signed up again a few times because I couldn’t tolerate the situation. I was too addicted to social networks to be able to function like a normal person. The addiction to constantly writing or reading about random things and being virtually and digitally social prevented me to do anything meaningful, like reading more books, long articles, or even get some shut-eye.

I was an addict. Just like a heroin addict, that can’t function normally in society, I was having problems in society. I couldn’t have a focused meaningful conversation with people, I couldn’t enjoy my environment, I couldn’t enjoy the company of people around me, and I was looking at a screen all the time, even though there was nothing for me there.