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| Tinker, Tailor, Blogger, SpyApparently there's yet another Xanga popularity contest going on, which is yet another one of the devoutly unsubtle attempts to drive mass amounts of voter traffic in the direction of the "genius" who set it up, thereby dragging up his numbers one by one until there's almost mastubatory amounts of self-congratulation all around.
Though in the case of this popularity contest, there's probably going to be a lot of masturbation, both implied and done, since it's some sort of twisted, backwardsly narcissistic beauty contest that has the shallow hotties crawling out of their holes by the pound in hope of some more re-assurance that yes, they are beautiful. Because as you all know, beauty isn't truly appreciated unless it's maxed out, put on display, and then sharpened up with enough angles and photoshop and seen by presumably virginated geeks on the internet who vote in droves for "ur hawt" and probably took most of their classes in the basement cutting out construction paper shapes, and will skip this entry in hopes of finding one with pretty pictures and less big words. Yes, I have a vocabulary. You should have one too. It comes from some mysterious thing called reading. Sometimes it's even called not being a thick-headed twatmonger with all the intellectual interest of a very dull rock and the perceptive acumen of a horny and juvenile teenager.
For some reason I signed up to be a judge in this travesty, perhaps because some masochistic part of me knew that as soon as I'd do something judging-edque people would liken me to Simon Cowell en masse, because originality is really a dead concept and people draw parallels like Japanese perverts draw enormous breasts, which is to say they're too rounadabout and distinctly overused. Not that I'm actually anything like Simon Cowell when you give it a moment's thought, but then people enjoy familiarity and pigeon-holing me into some digital archetype makes any interaction with me more comfortable, like I'm some angry sofa that curses at you and knocks over your beer and frightens the neighbors when you have them over to watch Sergio Leone movies on the blu-ray hi-def you just paid out for. And though while I watch Sergio Leone movies like they're my lifeline to westerns, I never watch American Idol, because that amount of shallowness and hackneyed talent passing itself off as the new Star Search makes my teeth itch. So your pitiful modern references are lost on me, fuckfaces.
In the meanwhile, I'm not sure what this judging thing actually entails, other than deferring to the headmaster of the fucked-up classless circus and his ideas on how to make posting about good looking women get him more subscribers, and dealing with various messages from the strumpets a-plenty looking to cash in some sort of favor for my vote, or find a way to get into my good graces. The interesting part is that I'm only in it as a judge because a good friend of mine texted me about it, and I in return rolled my eyes at yet another transparent attempt to create popularity through contests, and advised her not to enter because if she won, most of the traffic would be from the creakingly understimulated freaky shits with little-to-no typing skills and far too much libido for their craniums who crawl around Xanga looking for a photoblog to ravish every now and again for the good ol' spank bank, or hipsters just hoping to be acknowledged. But she went ahead and did it anyway, because no one ever listens to good sense anymore. So I said fuck it, she enters, I'll become a judge.
No one saw that shit coming.
Now being an official judge is kind of weird for me, typically I write some verbose and profane grumble pointing out the inherent flaws in this (like that it'll quickly become less about beauty and brains [supposedly brains are important in this one, I don't think fucking anyone is falling for that line of bullshit] and more about who can turn into a bigger sell-out whore for the sake of a brief popularity spike and who has more friends to vote for them. Believe me, it's how I won a good handful of contests because I'm an enormous sell-out whore and I come with plenty of backing) and make plenty of enemies with insights and friends with conformist non-conformist countercultural bloggers who all write the same kind of entries, but now I'm all...official and shit. What the fuck.
All of this makes me envision a day when Xanga might actually have an interesting contest, one actually dependent on intelligence and wit and charm, rather than tits and ass and lots of pseudo-internet allegiances, but then I remember that'll never fucking happen because people are cretinous wastes of oxygen and internet, and often so cliche about their posts they're a walking (typing?) fucking punchline to an online columnists joke about bloggers and their silly urge to be recognized for having something more than a far-too-high opinion of themselves and way too much free time.
But I got my black belt in insults and I have to use it somewhere, dammit!
So the long and the short of it is, and don't stick your head in the sand for this part, contestants, because I'm probably talking about you to some small degree, is that I'll actually not just be judging you on how many times your blog has been featured or how many people you can get to message me saying SO AND SO IS THA GRATE STUFF U SHUOLD LIKE VOTE FOR THEM A PLUS NUMBER ONE SUPER TIME VOTE OR DIE HARD, but just how interesting you really are and the sort of intelligent, cleverly put-together shit you can come up with inbetween begging for votes on other sites.
And, of course, titties. | | |
| Jesus LubeLife, for most of us who aren't boring shut-ins, is often full of strange moments of sheerly iconographic irony, prone to illustrating the fucked-up dichotomy between the separate and subjective realities that most people believe in, or if I scrap the pretentiousness for a second, just showing how fucked-up the world is.
So on my stroll through the United Nations plaza on my way to go into the depths of this city, I stopped to spit on France on the little globe etched into the ground (as is my custom) and then when I look up, I see two things that this planet has in an absurd abundance scattered around; a used condom lying in a sticky latex puddle of itself, and a cast-off pamphlet for some religious group, culty "believe now or die in sin!" or otherwise.
I mean, talk about fucking strong symbolism.
It almost perfectly sums up the disturbingly two-faced American attitudes relating to faith and sexuality, and that conflicting battleground between them, trying to balance what we supposedly want as opposed to what we supposedly believe.
Admit it. Sometimes those creepy old men in cheap suits holding placards reading "Jesus Christ Loves You" bombarding you with scripture quotes while trying to hand out cheap environmentally unfriendly pamphlets about how we're all taking the highway to Hell unless we make a quick turn at the Savior off-ramp (or just tiny little Bibles with incomprehensible print) have a disturbingly alike feverous pitchman's quality to it, like they really don't give that much of a fuck about their Lord, they're just trying to sell him to as many people as possible...and they're matched oddly evenly by the greasy guys in ugly suits with creepy facial hair handing out fliers for All Night All Penetration All Girls All Toys implying you'll experience the most overwhelming hard-on of you life if you shell out some bucks to watch a bored girl with implants shimmy up and down some frighteningly oversize accessory. If you switched their products, you think they'd both sell the reversed boobs and Bibles with that same snake-oil intensity? Is ideology so important as making the sale? Soldiers for Christ and People For Larry Flynt fighting for the contents of your wallet.
It'd be a lot more showing of the strength of human nature if they were actually fighting for what they believed in rather than endless scourging out the last strips of cash from people's lust for flesh or salvation, but since half the PTL club seems to be caught in some scandal involving a lot of lube and a stacked secretary straight outta Christ-Camp and there's so many priest molestation references in today's culture that both sides have their own sexcapades and seem to have experienced a bit of terminal fucking overlap.
Soon the only people who will be seeing God will see Him because they picked up something nasty in a brothel in the middle of nowheresville.
But while the gray area remains mostly shady, for the rest of us nothing's ever subtle in being caught in this propaganda duel to control the biggest billboards and most posters that flood our eyes every time we step back into culture. Where not only does Mr. Crown-Of-Thorns-though-that's-very-last-season Jesus Saves, but Members Save Half Off and whatever inappropriate creation of filth they're saving half off of, Jesus seriously disapproves of. Paraphernalia loosely related to religion and sex toys clashing in the market while adult superstores are built next to churches. Guerrilla warfare starts upgrading to trenches and demilitarized zones of people who don't have the money to support. Not long before they start firebombing each other or trying to annoy the hell out of each other with that endless submission of proselytizing recruitment or just the power of sales, sales, sales! | | |
| Wake For A KikeLadies and gentlemen, I regret to inform you this morning I received word from Andrew, a friend of Nathan's, that there were complications during the surgery and they were forced to stop removing parts of the cancer before they did any more damage, and...late last night, Nathan passed away.
I'm sorry. There wasn't anything the doctors could do. There was too much bleeding and some complication with the cancer having spread more than they'd anticipated. I really couldn't make out everything that Andrew said, he was a wreck, but apparently the surgery wouldn't have worked very well anyway, the cancer was too advanced. I really don't have too many details, but I'm afraid that he's gone.
R.I.P., Nathan Christien | | |
| Blogging On Blogging Because It Sure Never Gets OldIt's everyone's favorite topic on here...XAAAANGAAAA.
I'm always confused by people who decide to recommend in full force a Featured entry. I stare at my home page with this sense of both contempt and confusion, much like I found someone replaced a screwdriver with chai, and think to myself that people are fucking morons. If it's on the Front Page, recommending it is kind of an irrelevant and unnecessary action. Though there are a lot of people on my friends list who are recommend happy and go about recommending every damn sweet post they see until my home page is so full of bullshit saccharine it's damn near oozing fecal honey all over the place. And of course there's always the same people who beg for recommendations at the end of every post because their posts are so important to the well-being of xanga and reading-class (also referred to as the bored cuntfaces with nothing better to do...though that's most of us, to be fair) that they have to beg like a hobo losing fingers just to pull in some precious, precious footprints. I can state honestly the only times I've ever asked for a recommend has been to someone it's on the topic of or something they'd appreciate, and in private, rather than begging for the masses like these knee-to-ground simpletons. If they could, like the soon to be fingerless hobos, would probably be giving wacky improv handjobs in the back-alley of cheap-o pizza places and discount disco management places in some sort of sticky inter-accumulation of desperation and a general lack of trust in the strength of one's material.
Boy, I'm going to get one of those nasty emails from the People For The Ethical Treatment of Internet Culture for this. But those fuckwit rumor-mongering info-grubbers have too much power in their tiny little hands anyway.
The other thing I hate is how most of the time it's the same fuckheads recommending the same fuckheads (and then people recommending back just to be...polite or something, who the fuck knows with this crowd of cretinous digital circle-jerks), to the point where I feel like I'm basically staring at the same corridor of mirror-posts about How To Become Inter-Famous and have to go turn off the computer and have a good sit. Though most of them, to be accurate, were less how to become Inter-Famous, and more how to become Inter-Whoremongering and pass that off as a facade of web-renown. I was considering writing one myself, as I've said because I'm an authority in both, but then I think that shit might kill my buzz, so I decided to let that idea take a long hard fuck at itself before vanishing into the ether of my brain. I suppose I've abused my unblemished recommend record with that befuckery awhile back involving Jebbit (remember?), but fuck you, he had a point, a lot of you are sheep who might as well get sheared in the face once in awhile in-between your inharmonious bleatings.
It occurs to me I've gone this far without actually mention what the recommend feature is; some of you are so clueless when it comes to the workings of Xanga it seems to be a fucking miracle you can update with a few lines much less stumble your way around the very concept of a 'blog'. Recommend is a feature Xanga added so you don't have to just link to a person; now it saves you all that agonizing time of linking and probably writing some "hey, check out this guy's entry" preface by just being one click. Simple, easy, and some people click that recommend button twenty times every day just because it's so easy. Or they've got some perverse online Down's Syndrome and just like clicking things so much it drives the other people retarded.
I can't stop people from recommending stupid same like-minded over-read shit in the first place, other than taking them off my friends list and sending them messages about how I have a strong and urgent suspicion that they've had their brain replaced with something significantly more useless like tapioca and have distracted them from any intelligence, but I can point out that it is rather a feat of backwards thinking to pile on the recommends for featured posts and perhaps make some people stop and say "oh, that's right", though I know never actually fucking happens with any of you dangerously stupid twits.
I say, use the recommend feature to show high quality posts from random nobodies that normally wouldn't get dick for exposure because they're writing their little heart out and don't have the time to go comment whore like the blazes, and the normal sheep-ground of "god, you're SO RIGHT, Mr. DMV" starts pouring in by the hundreds, and then after ten minutes you go and recommend that ass-hat's stalker-ish entry about a girl named Christine or some putrid superficial smear like there's dopamine hooked up to it.
Perhaps if people weren't so stupid and trigger-happy on the recommend I wouldn't have found it necessary to unload this thrusting upheaval of bitterness into their faces like the unseemly and degrading facial of hate that it is, and could have updated about something nice, like being raped by a clown or just why it is that puppies are so adorable before you put them in particle accelerators, but no, I had to be distracted why I think so many other Xangans take a long healthy suck on the sweaty scrotums of each other's online mediocrity.
Thanks. You daft motherfuckers. | | |
| Newsbreak 11Tom, I'm coming to you live from the Internet. It's pretty rough out here at the moment, as you can see.
We've got various fire-fights raging on from rag-tag combatants in forums. When you look to the left [camera pan] you can see what's left of a discussion that started about who their favorite character from One Piece was, and quickly dissolved into fractured infighting. Then someone called someone a Nazi, and the Godwin's Law bomb was dropped, and it's all gone to hell. The devastation here is horrible, Tom, just horrible. The fringes have already been made into parody inspirational posters as "epic fail" for 4chan. People are probably yelling in disgust at their monitors right now and logging off, Tom. Like I said, it's horrible. This is the worst thing I've seen since the abandoned MMORPGs last month, characters just left to rot in desolate towns. Those poor characters were looted before they were left behind, but thanks to NB-11, we were able to identify the bodies and next of clan.
If you look above us [swing up], you can see the blogosphere has been critical damaged; there were ad hominem strikes just a couple of hours ago on the Straw Man defense line; while weak illogic is holding up, it's only a matter of time before it all falls apart and they dissolve into the habitually incoherent anger and petty remarks that have already claimed the forums nearby. These blogs were once statements and arguments against an inability to form rational thought, and now too they are succumbing to what we saw take the forums away from any connection to living intellect. People with petty vendettas are in fact, spamming each other like hell in an effort to be annoying but not confrontational. You can see here where personal insults and malicious generalizations have started to degrade someone's counter-arguments, Tom. It's almost painful to look at.
Over here we have MySpace, it's taken quite a toll; there are hipsters everywhere, Tom. You can barely see through it for all the hipsters, even the emo kids are almost outmatched by all of this. They've got Jarvis Cocker glasses and Decemberist t-shirts and their not afraid to use them to pseudo-elitist their way into what they want. They've got Palanhuik novels ready to easy-quote their way into superficial nihilism, and they're holding a couple of Facebooks hostage as we speak. The situation is very tense, Tom, but they're sending in some of their best negotiators to deal with this. There are a wanton, savage acts of bad taste masquerading as elitism in there, Tom, but I'm pretty sure the negotiators can give them what they want to get the hostages back, be it vintage clothing or discount indie records.
Wait -- wait, can you hear that? You can hear the sounds of -- oh my god. Oh my god. It's a reality bomber and it's carrying social lives. It'll wipe out this entire area. Tom, I need immediate evac, I need to get out of here, I still haven't won that fucking Pulitzer for journalism, Tom, tell the network I --
[static] | | |
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