BlargenBlog

Ingredient: Random Internet Amusement

Last night while the boy was napping, I visited my neglected myspace.com page to check messages. In the bulletins panel, I see something which says something like “Chat Live NOW!”

“Oh great” I thought,”I’ve accidentally added a porn spammer.”

So I click on the name with the intentions of removing the person from my increasingly exclusive friends list and instead feel a flash of recognition of the person in the profile. After browsing through a few pictures it dawned on me who it was: soon after the iPhone was released, a customer named Justine posted a video showing her bill from AT&T.

The bulletin was linking to a live blog. Despite being a connoisseur of internet culture, I had never bothered with video blogs and hey, it was worth trying once.

The blogger was sitting in a coffee shop talking to her laptop. Occasionally a random person would come to say hello or she’d get a phone call. Meanwhile she was responding to the constantly-scrolling text in the sidebar which was being moderated by several people. There were just over 100 users present at any given time.

It was obvious that some were trying to get her attention, while others made random commentary on what she said or what she was doing at the time. Then there were the occasional dweebs who hadn’t figured out that “OMFG U SO HOTT” is not the most effective way to address an attractive woman.

It was interesting, to say the least. I don’t think I’ll be back often if at all, but now I think I get what it’s about. “Type something random/funny and see if the person in the video responds.” For the 15 minutes or so I spent watching this thing, I got two responses: one was saying “NOM NOM NOM” after she started chewing some gum, the other was after asking about the moderators. Win? Win.

Ingredient: Heartburn.

Last night I discovered the upper limit of steak seasoning and overcooking (read: burning) expensive red meat.

Ingredient: Drama.

I would call it “needless drama,” but why be redundant? All drama is needless. This particular area of Dra-Mart is far worse than others–it’s in the internet department in a clearance aisle full of shit nobody ever wanted to begin with.  Maybe the trolls are in heat and their mating call consists of angry, bi-polar rants on internet forums. Or, maybe they caught the crazy.

Sometimes that spills over to other sites, as it has on ours or here at BlargenBlog. Preventative measures are being taken.

After using a standard and well-working anti-trolling policy over at the forum for awhile, I’ve applied the same standards here to my blog and am sure to achieve stellar results despite losing three quarters of all my comment activity (you guessed it: generated by a single person). In addition to weeding out run-of-the-mill trolls, this will also limit the amount of drama that splashes on the site the next time some stalker wants to take his misguided little grudge to the source. People are freaks.

Ingredient: Addiction

Specifically: the political one. I’ve done better than I expected in avoiding the topic on the blog, which is to say that I’ve failed horribly and therefore must extend the proposed hiatus. To be fair, I’ve mostly stuck to my intentions in this regard, which is why politics is not being mentioned in this post at all.

Wait… damn!

Dressing: Withdrawment

Tonight, due to weather, I will not be attending the Louie-Fest thing tonight. However, plans for tomorrow are still on.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 23rd, 2008 at 10:15 am and is filed under Odd, Rants, blargen. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.