Monday, June 20, 2005

CapITaL Punishment.

Since I started blogging, I’ve been spending a lot of time walking around the blogosphere. I think everyone’s the same at first, you write your own, check your visitor stats about every 15 minutes, and rarely bother actually reading anything anyone else has written.

Well, I can honestly say that at this point, I’m pretty damn addicted to blogging and reading other’s blogs.

However, optimism can lead to disappointment. I mean, have you ever actually clicked that ‘next blog’ button?

Not a lot worth reading, is there?

Blogspot seems to be about 70% spam, 20% other languages (which aren’t necessarily bad, just no use to me), and about 10% actual readable material. Oh, and readable doesn’t necessarily mean good.

Put it this way, I’ve looked at probably 300-400 blogs, but only have about 7 in my favorites that I read regularly (Hey Serendipity, Cindy, Kato, Watski, Big Al and Mike). I once clicked through 30 blogs, and found nothing but blogs that consist of huge lists of search engine friendly words (IE Sex, boobs, pussy etc), obvious scams, and the occasional ‘revenge’ blogs (‘my ex is a shit’…nothing like a million posts on the same blog with all the same content over and over again. Look, he/she dumped you, get over it.)

The other ones that spring up very often are the suicidal teenager blogs. The ones where the writer does nothing but complain and whine about how terrible their life is, and how they’re going to end it all.

Surprisingly, ‘suicide’ blogs can be as funny as hell. There’s one I stumbled across which had the same guy swearing he was going to shoot himself, hang himself, gas himself in every post. Every post had about 15 comments from people acting as though they were trying to talk him down off a roof (Don’t do it!!!! You have so much to live for! Think it through…I can picture the panicking 15 year olds). However, this guy’s blog had been up and running for three years! Three years of posts saying how he was going to shoot himself as soon as he got off the computer…and the same dumbasses falling for it every time.

Can we say ‘I want attention?’ I felt like posting a comment myself. “Kill yourself, already, you’re boring the shit out of me!”

Now, before you get offended, bear in mind that there are about a million bazillion blogs on here. There are probably hundreds of thousands of good blogs, but with the sheer numbers on here, they’re in the minority. Chances are, if you type in actual sentences, aren’t trying to sell me something, scam me out of my money, or spew bile filled missives about a guy or gal you went out with once 6 years ago, I’m not talking about you.

However, if you fall into one of the following categories, I don’t care how offended you get. In fact, I would gladly come over to your house, drop trou, squat over your keyboard, and leave a basketball sized, chocolate mud baby on it, laugh at you...then make you eat it. I probably would piss on you if you were on fire…but only if I’d just drank 8 gallons of turpentine.

So who are these people? The people that lead me to fantasize about defecating on their computers?

The ones that use so-called ‘fashionable’ typing styles.

The first is the people who write their blogs, as though they’re writing it on a cell-phone keypad. You know the ones. ‘How R U doing, Do U want 2 go 4 a sk8 at the sk8 park B4 2sday?’

People, please. That’s perfectly fine in an actual text message. Using a phone keypad for texting is long and time consuming, you only have a limited amount of space for your text and have to push a single key about 8 times to get the letter you want.

However, a blog is not a text message. You can take as long as you want to type it, have unlimited space, and a full sized keyboard.

It’s laziness, pure and simple. If you want to write something for others to read…actually write it! You have a full sized keyboard in front of you! What’s next?

If you can’t be bothered to actually write your blog in full, don’t bother writing it at all. You’d be doing us all a big favour.

However, the cell phone typers have nothing on these people.

You know these ones to.

Yes, I’M TalkInG AboUT ThE OnES wHO tyPe LikE ThiS

What in the flaming blue f**k are these people on? What makes it even worse is that this typing ‘style’ and meaningless drivel seem to go hand in hand. If I read a blog, I want to do just that…read a blog. What I don’t want is a migraine with a side order of complete and total bollocks.

This must be the first form of communication designed to be as unreadable as possible. ‘Okay, I’ve already written over 100,000 words about the guy who I went out with once, 5 years ago, before he dumped me (This guy is usually referred to as ‘SHIT’, that’s right, in capital letters). Everyone is already bored to tears, it’s only half readable because I type in cellphone language…how can I make my boring, incomprehensible, teenage angst ridden, self indulgent drivel even more unreadable? I know! I’ll randomly hit the shift key!’

Why don’t you just go ahead and write it in ‘windings’? It’ll make just as much sense, and might result in fewer migraines.

I just do not understand what would cause anyone to type like that. I’ve only ever written anything even close to that once in my life, and that was the time I spilled coffee on my keyboard and managed to short it out.

I mean why? Why? Why? Why?

Let me let the WeiRdo TypErs in on a little secret. No one thinks that’s impressive, no one thinks it’s cool. No one reads it and thinks “Wow! This guy is obviously really different, non-conformist and cool!’ The only thing it makes people think is that you’re either a mental patient, or have wall-eye vision and a malfunctioning keyboard.

Here are a few little secrets. First of all, ‘different’ does not equal cool. Sometimes different is just different. If you want to stand out of the crowd, try to do it with the actual content of your writing, not in the actual writing style. Pick a different font for f**k’s sake if you’re that desperate. If you can’t write something interesting, don’t try to cover it by typing as though you’re typing with boxing gloves on and a wasp in your pants. We’re not fooled. We’re not impressed.

The other thing is that you’re not being different by doing it. There are about a million other people who are just as mentally impaired as you. It’s like the teenager who goes through a goth phase in order to be different and non-conformist, and doesn’t realize that all he’s doing is conforming in a different clique. (“Ha! I now sit on the other side of the lunch hall, with my myriad different friends! How different am I? We’ll show them, me and the other 40 goths that go to this school!”)

All that type of writing does is make your meaningless drivel about how much you hate your one-date ‘ex’, or how your teacher is a bastard and doesn’t understand you, even more incomprehensible. Talking in welsh riddles and screaming every third word is ‘different’ to, it doesn’t mean I’ll gain instant cool (sorry, kewl) and popularity by doing it.

If you talked the same way you typed, people would think you were having a seizure.

(deep breath)

Right now there’s a lot of angry teenagers, wearing eyeshadow in black bedrooms who are cursing my name while listening to Korn. They’re probably saying something like: “He don’t get it”, or “HE’s A H8r BcOZ He DuNT UnDerStanD thAt wE IS DiFFereNT, WoT A LuSoR”

Yes, maybe you are different, but having a cue-ball sized boil on the end of your dick is different as well…and that’s just about how cool, and about 1/10th as irritating, as you are.

I look forward to the poorly spelled hate mail.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I know a guy at work who never uses punctuation, once I made the mistake of mentioning it. I got a long complicated excuse - some kind of bad punctuation group, who subscribe to the view that we don't know how to puncuated so we just don't bother at all. Can you imagine reading meeting minutes he typed up ???

Talk about a headache!!!

Kato said...

Have you ever tried to type in all up and down letters for more than like one sentence? It's a pain. It probably takes four times as long and your pinkies get sore from all the extra SHIFT action. What's worse is that it has been around for quite awhile on the 'net. Someone started it and others emulated and along the line it was apparently interpreted as cool. Of course the people that thought it was cool are also the ones with the least interesting things to say (but yet they say them anyway). The only thing worse is the people who game online and like to use weird symbols (like the extended ASCII set) in their handles. C'mon, that's just retarded.

Paulius said...

That's the sad thing, random (or non-existent) punctuation, and bad writing styles have apparently become 'cool'.

Also, people who refuse to punctuate and wear it as a badge of honour really piss me off. It's like people who call themselves 'plain speakers', when in reality, they're just incredibly rude and have no social skills.

I do give the online gamers a tiny bit more leeway though. A gaming team (or 'clan') need to have unique handles so they can be tracked on the league tables.

Pisses me off when their name takes up 3/4 of the screen tho.

Chief Slacker said...

From my days on mIRC, I know that a lot fo the people who do that stupid ass TyPiNg actually have a Macro written for their computer so it does it automatically. Either way though it's irritating.

I completely agree with the rest of your post too :O)