Only last week, I was speculating to a very skeptical audience that, without the rise of some more realistic and less distasteful monetization model for digital content than AdSense, production of said content may eventually start to trickle off.

And, whaddya know, Your Daily Awesome has stopped blogging, due to the enormous time investment of "noodl[ing] around on the internet every night, hunting for something appropriately awesome to blog."

And even the Jason Kottke, the unstoppable blogging machine who pointed to Your Daily Awesome's closure, can relate to the enormous output required to maintain a respectable level of content production. (How could he not? The man blogs like a banshee.*)

So. Should we fear for the production of duly awesome content in a world where information has to be free to be even remotely relevant?

*Wondering where the expression "[verb]s like a banshee" comes from? Me too!

banshee drawing from Ireland's Eye

First off, as you may or may not know, a banshee, says the wikipedia, "is a female spirit in Irish mythology, usually seen as an omen of death and a messenger from the Otherworld." More significant to the etymology of the phrase "like a banshee," however, is the fact that, "[a]ccording to legend, a banshee wails around a house if someone in the house is about to die."

According to world wide words:

The basic phrase like a banshee has been used many times over the past couple of hundred years as a figurative expression to describe someone screaming or making a noise, usually in an excess of emotion.
[…]
It seems that the idea of a banshee being a noisy spirit in torment has been extended so far it has snapped, most likely out of ignorance of what a banshee actually is…

Well, I'm glad to have contributed, if only a little, to modern society's ignorance of what a banshee actually is.

On the other hand, I'm not sure if there's any better metaphor for a blogger than a noisy spirit in torment.

I've previously made kenspeckle my recent and aggravating affliction with chronic dry eye syndrome, likely due to a rather nasty habit of reading too much, both on- and off-screen.

After well over a decade of nearly hassle-free contact lens use, I've suddenly descended into the troublesome and confusing world of care for ocular pain, featuring dozens of brands of artificial tears, each of which use different lubricants with no explanation of the differences among them; Bausch & Lomb's cash cow, Muro 128 5% Ointment, which forces otherwise sane consumers to pay $26 for 1/8 of an ounce of what's essentially salty ointment; and distressing assumptions about the age of dry eye sufferers.

But my most shocking ophthalmic experience thus far has to my first encounter with Restasis, a prescription eye drop for chronic dry eye manufactured by Allergan. When I went to pick up my first month's worth of Restasis, I almost fell over as the pharmacist handed me a large brown paper bag instead of the typical little prescription pouch.

I was so appalled by the complete environmental disregard shown in the packaging of Restasis that I just had to document it in the slideshow below—well, that and I wanted a chance to play around with JonDesign's Smooth Gallery, because I have a hunch that its CSS layout will degrade beautifully in RSS readers. Hopefully I'm right!

what is this supposed to be for anyway???

To be fair to the folks at Allergan, I know that Restasis is packaged in single-use vials because it doesn't contain a preservative like the over-the-counter drops I've compared its packaging to. Although I'm normally not a fan of preservatives in anything, this seems like a reasonable time to make an exception—Allergan could at least offer a version with preservatives for those of us who hate seeing wasteful packaging and don't have adverse reactions to the preservatives in over-the-counter drops.

Even if the drug developers have been through this quandry and decided that a preservative was out of the question for Restasis for a reason beyond my biochemcially challenged comprehension, I've no doubt you could make a single-use vial with less plastic by eliminating the completely useless tab beneath each little container.

The only reasonable conclusion seems to be that the ophthalmic industrial complex is trying to ruin the environment, one chronic dry eye patient at a time.