My love is bigger than your loveOr, Like a daisy chain turning into an ourobouros. Bloggers are inconsequential. OK, some are more consequential than others. It's just my opinion: clearly, I think that my blog is inconsequential, therefore.... But I imagine that 95% of the bloggers (the Matthew Klam article claimed there were 2 million in the US alone, an important-if-true fact for the Hemlock Society to consider in its next direct mail drive) write for an audience of ten people. (Actually, they *have* an audience of ten people and write as though they're Moses on the mount.) Or, to put it another way, bloggers are "the Internet version of the sad loners who used to listen to police radios in their bachelor apartments." Funny! It's a little-known fact: Even if you have only ten readers, you can be certain that at least one of them hates you. Scientific studies have shown that this figure increases exponentially if you are female, live in a metro area, and or/are really, really into a band from Scotland/Sweden/Japan. But pop culture blogging is fairly new, and its backlash is thus ultra-new. It's very much in the spirit of that lightning-speed backlash the ADD-addled society is so good at. (We love low-carb! We HATE low-carb! We LOVE Britney! No, wait, we HATE her!) So, to paraphrase History of the World, with the birth of the blogger came the inevitable afterbirth of the blog critic. How important, however, are blog critics when the blogs they choose to malign are not so important themselves? (I ask this simply because as a NY blogger of a certain age who has met some of the snarked-on bloggers [and who's mos def guilty of criticising them myself], I have no idea how this shit plays out in Peoria.) Why, then, with such potent fodder are these blog critics so effete and unfunny? Their criticisms should fall somewhere between On Camp and Mein Kampf, yet they're more like Freddy Got Fingered: The Sarah Lawrence Director's Cut. Take, for example, Some Blogs Are Better than Others. I don't remember how I came across this--probably he was linked by one of the victims of his RAZOR SHARP WIT--but he's devoted his time to mocking the "A-list" NYC bloggers who consist of a circle of friends and sycophants in their mid-20s who spend a lot of time drinking and going to shows. Wheeee! Still, Some Blogs could be far better. You've been presented with an embarassment of riches and yet the best pejorative you can come up with is "asshole"? You call female bloggers "fat"? You make Don Rickles look like Aristotle. And take that godforsaken [p] tag out of the title. Jesus. Exhibit B: The NY Press maligning Gawker. Regardless of how distasteful one might find Gawker, couldn't the editors of this shitrag (ok, now that's not fair: this "libertarian-leaning, irrelevant alternative paper") come up with something better? They're not bloggers; they have print schedules and editorial meetings and such, don't they? Or do they sit in cages waist-deep in their own excrement like the rest of us? OK, then there's blogs like these where I'm not certain if they're parodies or serious. [Edited to add: As I was lying in bed last night, it occurred to me that this blog is clearly a parody. No one could possibly be such a dummy--except me.] I mean, you drink like 27 kamikazes and take a vicodin and then you drive home and almost kill someone and you're bitter that your exgirlfriend won't pick you up at the 7-11? Um, I think We've Got a Bigger Problem Now. But seriously: Keep drinking! See? These jokes write themselves, kids. Apparently, anyhow. Perhaps the truth of the matter is that the blog critics are not much brighter than their subjects. Google Gogol. Or Emo Phillips. Something. And all of you get some better goddamn musical taste. Also, will someone mock Metropolitan Diary? Ok, fair enough. Posted by Dana at 11:14 PM
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Little Man with a Gun in His Handwell you obvs felt the need to write about it, so SBABTO isnt that bad. keeps it simple, and i think most of us are glad someone is saying what so many are thinking, and saying it the way anyone would say it, rather than thinking up clever puns and being overly verbose. fart, dick and shit jokes win every time, and that site is really no different.
Posted by: duh at September 30, 2004 01:44 AMWell, "duh", too bad Dana never uses fart, dick, and shit jokes.
Oh wait, she does.
See, it's okay if you don't like something. But if you're going to slam it, you should at least be able to cogently articulate why, lest you wind up coming across as even sillier and less capable than those you critique.
Oh yeah, and those constantly applauding pinbrains on the crosstown bus can go fuck themselves.
Posted by: Vidiot at September 30, 2004 02:21 AMThis is why I am studiously avoiding updating my pitiful excuse for a blog until someone at Blogspot finally pulls the plug, at which point I will be freed from the hitherto self-inflicted yet often disregarded obligation to pen witty gems for the world to read, ponder and nod-thoughtfully-at.
*applauds, boards bus, fucks self*
Posted by: Fes at September 30, 2004 09:39 AMIt's a little-known fact: Even if you have only ten readers, you can be certain that at least one of them hates you.
Actually, if you stick around long enough, eventually all of your readers will hate you. It's inevitable. At fist you're a new person offering a glimpse inside your tortured psyche, then after awhile you become Aunt Edna who won't stop talking about her rectal cysts.
Posted by: jonmc at September 30, 2004 09:42 AMIt's a little-known fact: Even if you have only ten readers, you can be certain that at least one of them hates you. Scientific studies have shown that this figure increases exponentially if... you just left him. C claims he never read it. But he has specifically asked me not to cyberstalk him. Projecting, you think?
Posted by: Octavia at September 30, 2004 11:29 AMyeah, i wish you'd all stop stalking me. it's getting old...
Posted by: reeves at September 30, 2004 01:45 PMI love when bloggers talk about blogging! It's blogtastic! And "comments" numbers go up, up, up. I want in.
First of all, if you achieve any level of popularity, online/offline/at your high school, you will suffer a meaure of backlash. That's a matter of individual tastes banging up against popular tastes. I almost didn't need to type that.
Secondly, I completely disagree that one needs to present cogent arguments in the duty of criticizing something else, particularly if the subject of the critique presents nothing cogent or intelligent of his/her own. Cogent arguments should be reserved for big "important" paradigm-shifting ideas; for a blogger who posts 24 word-and-under entries linking to a British advertisement for canned "FAGGOTS," I think "jerktard" will suffice.
My site gets shit on regularly, and I don't mind. In fact, I could probably shit harder and with greater laser-precision than most of the unsolicited criticism I receive. Truthfully, I'm just happy and surprised that people read the site at all.
I'm with Dana, in that I wish sites like "Some Bloggers.." (which i hadn't heard of until today) were funnier. But I don't wish they were smarter. It would be a waste of breath to exert that much effort on a medium that is, by its very nature, so rushed and immediate. Far more depressing than reading about TMFLTMLFTT being a cockaholic or whatever, is reading an article like Matthew Klam's mooning about how pretty some blogger's eyes are, or hearing the aforementioned TMTMFMTLMT's claim that "blogging is over." Or dead. Or whatever someone already declared about personal web sites in 1998. Or about online diaries in 2001.
They's just jokes.
Posted by: todd at September 30, 2004 03:55 PMGreat, now I'm gonna get all these Google hits for "Todd" and "FAGGOT." This is why we can't have nice things, Todd!
Posted by: dana at September 30, 2004 04:22 PMBut blogging is over. It's the new painter's pants, the new Rick Astley, the new pet rock. I've been waiting for The End Of Blogging As We Know It(tm) as long as Phil Fucking Collins has been waiting for his moment, and just like that apocalypse that gets every would-be Daria type on LJ hard and/or wet upon its mere mention, it sure looks like it's a-coming soon.
And I feel fine! Pop is eating itself! Again! Yayyyyy!
(And you don't have to say it, because I'm fucking myself right now!)
Posted by: Chico at October 1, 2004 02:55 PMBut blogging is over.
Oh yeah, we had our Kent State, Altamont, and whatever awile ago. That's why I allowed the plug to be pulled. to dust thou art and to dust thou returneth.
Woo-hoo.