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Trying Something New, or Actually, Complaining Is Old

posted by Carl Newman at 12:55 pm.

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A good friend of mine summarized (satirized) the format of my blog yesterday as:

“I was listening to this moderately obscure, but very good song while I was doing this totally inconsequential thing, and upon reflection, realized it had a much deeper significance.”

Now, this isn’t going to stop, but I’ve decided to switch it up a bit with a time-honored tradition in short-format writing: Bitching about stuff.

Now, this should be easy, because I do it all the time in real life. But putting it into the written word isn’t quite as familiar to me. So before I start the short series that I’m planning on my life as a business major starting this weekend (It will be called “Majoring in Business, or How To Get Rich Without Friday Classes), I wanted to get a little practice in humorous expository whining. So here goes:

This is me for the next couple of posts.

Stop inviting me to facebook applications. I will kill you if you ask me to be a zombie, vampire, or knight. I don’t want your shitty bumperstickers, your funwall posts, or your third-grade quality sketches. And I don’t need to know who has a crush on me, who thinks I’m hot, or how you rate me as a human being relative to your other friends. Facebook is for one thing, pictures of drunk people, and keeping tabs on people you’ve slept with (”one thing” is not a typo, the second is a subset of the first). Everything else is irrelevant.

Wikipedia refuses to let me kill Norm MacDonald, and, to add insult to injury, sent me this scolding:
Please refrain from making unconstructive edits to Wikipedia, as you did to Norm Macdonald (comedian). Your edits appeared to constitute vandalism and have been reverted. If you would like to experiment, please use the sandbox. Thank you.

First of all, a bunch of those words were hypertext in the original message. They’re so self-serving, that even when they’re yelling at me, they provide me with links to potentially useful information about “vandalism.”

Hey, Wiki! I know you guys are all for the democracy of information. You want people to have the truth at their fingertips. I think that’s very noble of you.

But I wanted to kill Norm MacDonald before he could become a has-been. I wanted people to have the truth as it should be at their fingertips. Isn’t that more noble? Write an entry on nobility, and get back to me.

And lastly in my complaints: Blogs. I know this seems hypocritical (because it is) but the more time I spend trying to learn how to be a better blogger from Maddox or Stuff White People Like, the more I realize that blogging is completely masturbatory. I Googled “better blogging” and all the suggestions I found were about how to get people to put your blog on “RSS Feed” (which I still don’t understand) or getting other bloggers to put you on their “blog roll” (circle-jerk). There’s tons of ways to have your blog get more pageviews (2,000 last month for me, BooYa!). Nothing is about how to write quality content and get loyal readers. In fact, most of it suggests that it’s better to post twice a day at half the quality.

So keep reading and tell your friends about warrior poet. And add me to your blog roll.

Carl Newman: appreciates when you don't feel like commenting, but still want to tell him what an asshole he is at warriorpoetresponds@gmail.com