So, in case you don’t know, there’s a guy named Cory Doctorow, and he writes on a blog called BoingBoing, and it’s a pretty popular website, largely thanks to Cory’s contributions, although he pretty much seems to write about himself most of the time, and his petty grievances. I was reading this entry tonight about people who park rudely, take up too much space, etc, and ran across the following quote by Doctorow: I recently started shooting the SUVs parked across two “compact” spaces at USC (it’s always SUVs!) and tagging them on Flickr with “niceparkingasshole,”and it struck me that that’s just about the most pathetically passive-aggressive impotent act of vengeance I’ve ever heard of. Oooooh! You really showed them, Cory! You tagged your private photo of their car with a nasty note! Good thing they didn’t steal your glasses from you or take your lunch money, or you might have to Google them & leave nasty anonymous quotes on their MySpace pages. Cory Doctorow is a pussy, is essentially what I’m saying.
But the sad thing is, Doctorow’s not the worst part of Boing Boing. There are five main writers, who mostly just post links sent into them by readers, which is about the laziest kind of blogging there is, and from the hideous amounts of traffic the site receives and the garish advertising plastered all over it, the writers all make crazy dollars, like, ”I don’t work for a living I just post links that were sent to me by readers” kind of dollars. Which I’d be fine with, if I didn’t dislike the two most prolific personalities on the site so much. Doctorow, lame as he is, is only the 2nd biggest offender. Xeni (not her real first name) Jardin (not her real last name) is a vacuous egoist, the internet equivalent of a media whore, famous for being internet-famous. Her posts are about 60% risque “ooh, look, someone said ‘vagina’!” style attention bids, with the remainder a collection of posts about her upcoming appearances and mildly interesting things happening in L.A. that are completely useless to the non L.A. portion of the blog’s audience. If Cory deserves to be punched in the nuts*, then Xeni deserves to be hit with a hammer.
So, all this is by way of boring you with a recent dream of mine, which I swear to you on my life is 100% true. I dreamt that I was at a Hammer convention. Not like the 1960’s British Christopher Lee horror film studio, but like an actual hammer convention, where they were showing off new kinds of hammers, and ways in which you could optimize your hammering experience. And I’m standing there, with a hammer in my hand, when up walks Xeni Jardin, standing close enough to be plonked with a hammer. I want to make sure it’s her, so I ask “Excuse me, are you Xeni Jardin?” and when she replies that she is, indeed Xeni, instead of doing the right thing, I say “I’m a big fan of your work.”
Later, when I awoke, I wondered why my dream self had betrayed my waking sense of justice, but eventually I realized, that’s pretty much what would have happened in real life, if, somehow in real life there had been a hammer convention, and both Xeni & I had attended. I probably would have asked for a picture with her, but at the very least I could have uploaded it to Flickr and tagged it “vacuousmediawhore.”
*Note: He does.
