making new friends
A few months ago, a comic strip that doesn't suck called Fight, Cast, or Evade was featured as Something Awful's "Awful Link of the Day". The result? A huge spike in readership. Recently, Syke, the cartoonist of about half or more of the comic strips available at The Nice (and now, Keenspot) had a baby, mentioned that fact on her site, and was accused of whoring her baby. Result? Around a hundred new people reading her strips.

So I thought I'd get in on the act. First, I post an inflammatory message about various websites with rabid fanatical followers. Next, the screed gets back to the frothing masses, someone posts it in a message forum and then hundreds of new readers find my work. Based on a number I just made up, I should retain about 10-20% of those readers. So here goes.

Hey, remember when Something Awful used to be funny? You know, it's the site that's famous for showing how well people can use Photoshop's Type Tool on 72 dpi graphics they've discovered at images.google.com. Check out the most recent Photoshop undertaking: goofy motivational posters.

Yeah, nice work on that. Picture of a horse on a big black box and text on the black box. Oh, I so f34r your l33t ph0t0sh0p skillz. That took you what, ten seconds? Y'all probably know the keyboard shortcut to the Type Tool by now. Wow.

What's even more bizarre is how SA treats people who forget to anti-alias their text. They post the images anyway, but on a page that tells them how much they suck. Not bizarre enough? Just realize this -- to submit something, you've got to be a forum member. To be a forum member, you have to give SA money. So SA gets to call its own fanbase idiots. I'm glad I'm not a member!

SA is also the site that's engaged in some sort of juvenile rivalry with Fark.com. It's like they're in some sort of contest to see who will be the last to lose their virginity. Fark also has a Photoshop thing, but anyone can join. Instead of just adding text to images, the Onanists at Fark actually composite images together. Unfortunately, they just grab random images and slap them together. To be fair, they probably spend at least fifteen seconds on their "art". Oh, and there's links to images of boobies at Fark. Fark is sort of like Maxim magazine, if Maxim was written by thirteen-year-old boys who stammer when they see girls.

But for rabid zealotry, both the above pales to the social lepers who frequent Slashdot. I'll admit it, I used to read Slashdot. But that's when I realized that it's inhabited by people the Libertarian Party thinks lean just a little bit too far to the left. It was an article over there, about how they can use cameras in parking lots to observe people to see if they're displaying behavior that would indicate the person is a car thief. Or a rapist waiting for a single woman to head to her car. Whoa. You should have read the responses to that article. Someone actually said that everyone should try to spoof the cameras by walking "suspiciously" whenever in parking lots. Sometimes, I wonder if that guy lurks around parking lots to this day, defiantly sticking it to The Man! Rock on, my Kazaa-using brother! However I think that he's probably still trying to get Linux to run on an Xbox.

Anyway, the day I left Slashdot was during the Microsoft monopoly trial. Aside from the nerds constantly calling the company "Micro$oft", there was the day that the judge released his decision that basically called Microsoft a greedy company. The dotters were all about to nominate the judge for sainthood when someone noted that he listed Linux (an operating system that less than one percent of all computer users, um, use) under the "Fringe Operating Systems" category. Oh, how the overweight dateless wonders turned on their hero! It was as if someone dared to suggest Janeway was a better captain than Picard!

Slashdot is like reading aint-it-cool-news' message forums, but with paranoid computer geeks who hate Microsoft simply because Microsoft is a huge successful company instead of fanboys who want to ruin their own movie-watching experience. Oh, and George W. Bush sucks. That should get me mentioned at kuro5hin, simply because of the anti-US bias to the site.

Oh, I've head the people who submit reviews at gamespot have sex with their pets. Blue's News looks like it was written by people who have no friends in real life.

I'd say something bad about Keenspot, but part of me hopes that one day they'll invite me to join, so I won't.

Let's see... insulted several high-profile websites, each with a rabid fanbase. Yeah, I should get hundreds of new readers from this.

Posted at September 12, 2003 05:00 PM