Pits of Internet Sadassery

There's a pencil on the floor, with feathers all around it.

There's a dish in the sink, serving up feathers.

There's a boot in the hall, with a brand new feather trim.

Every morning, I wipe puffs of down off the TV screen, and comb little green feathers out of my hair. The vacuum canister is choked with fluff. I stuck my hand in a bag of crisps the other day, and pulled out a feather. And last night, between the hours of seven and ten PM, I sneezed thirty-seven times. It's a wonder I haven't got four naked birds, at this rate.

Speaking of nudity, and suchlike scandals, I also have a confession to make. I've been--I've been looking at questionable websites again. Garbage sites. When I was wee, I knew a man who spent his Sunday afternoons at the dump, hoping to find salvageable items amidst the trash. He wasn't a tramp, or anything. He just liked restoring stuff, and the smug feeling he got from doing up people's rubbish till it was worth more than it had been brand new. Me, I'm a little like that, too. Except, see, I follow the rubbish trail in pursuit of even worse rubbish. It's exciting, and a little like an archaeological dig. I'm an Internet prospector, headlamp and Geiger counter switched on, following a faint trail of radioactive drivel to its source. (Either that, or I'm some kind of online peeping Tom, always on the lookout for sordid scraps.)

At any rate, I began my most recent expedition on Myspace. I've been hearing a lot about Myspace, just lately. Bad hair has been mentioned a lot, and some skyvey new youth culture called "emo." There's also something referred to in LiveJournal* circles as the Myspace portrait, which looks something like this:

Apparently, Myspace users like to present themselves as pale, foreheady greaseballs with no eyebrows. Go figure.

At any rate, I didn't find anything of particular note on Myspace. All the promised drama and intrigue came to nothing more shocking than thirty-thousand half-exposed breasts and a pair of cookie-cutter FU-icides:

this is jasons mother posting as you know, jaon had issues with selfwsteem an depression, well after the comemtns left by raven an jeremy he took 100 tylenol and atavin. he died 30 mins ago. i want u to know i hold u responsable 4 the death of my son, fuck you.

Well, that nonsense was old before the last VicModem'd dropped its last connection. Hell, I'm sure folks were faking their own deaths in the obituaries section before the Net was even dreamed of. I wanted something more...more writhey, like a bag of horny weasels. Something unintentionally hysterical--something simultaneously naive and hopeful and horribly disappointing. It had to affirm both the eternally-springing nature of hope and the law of universal mediocrity, all in a oner.

"I'm not sure what I'm looking for," I told Rat B, who was eating my collar--"I'm not sure what I'm looking for, but I'll know it when I see it. Pornography for the funnybone, sort of thing. I want to gasp with laughter, Rat B, even as I pluck out my eyes with an especially pointy bookmark."

Rat B sneezed in my ear. I reached for a hanky to wipe off the rat-mucus, and that was when my elbow clicked the mouse--

--no, just kidding. I did stumble upon my goal in a rather haphazard fashion, though. There was lots of random clicking involved, and LiveJournals belonging to people with names like Ariana Silverwolf, and an incomprehensible site calling itself "Fandom Wank". They seemed to be making fun of something, but I couldn't tell what. Still, it was through Fandom Wank that my search bore fruit:

I'd heard it before, that old saw about everyone loathing, in others, the same things they loathe in themselves, but I never imagined I'd see it illustrated quite like this. The Forum, which shall remain nameless, is dedicated to lampooning bad writing found on the Internet. Fair enough: the Net's full of bad writing. It's the information age, what. Everybody gets a voice, even the ones with nothing to say. (Witness this journal. Haw!) It stands to reason that a certain contingent of wags should appear, furnishing a wry and witty commentary on the death of literacy, education, the Queen's English, and so forth. It also stands to reason that some of these wags might only think they're wry and witty.

That's not to say the Forum isn't entertaining. Indeed, it's absolutely hysterical--just not for the reasons its denizens believe. They think it's their clever and incisive reviews that make the Forum such a riot. An impartial observer, however, might note that these reviews tend to bulge at the seams with spelling mistakes, bad analogies, horrible grammar, and, in short, all the things they're complaining about in the original writing. It's one lot of bad writers bagging on another--and they don't even realise it!

Bad Writing***: I then used my finger to describe a circle on his lowr back with my thumb. i then used my hand to wipe his hare back from his forehead. He was still crying but less ferocieous.

Review: so he wiped a large rabbit of this guy's forehead? i know i deffinately keep a rabbit up there at all times. in general his spelling/grammer aren't too bad, but this kind of thing really takes you out of the story.

Outsider's Review of the Review: The rabbit crack was a bit obvious, perhaps. (Perhaps? No--definitely.)

* * *

Commentary on Bad Writing in General: I hate fics were people have sex one time and then all of a sudden its like "omg, let's get married!" Like, whatever. it takes more than 1-night-stand to make your avarege guy fall in love.

Another Bad Writer, Making Excuses: Haha, well, I had a fic where they pretty much fell in love after one night, but it was the first time for each of them, very emotional, and they spent much of the night talking as making love. And then they were seperated by tragedy for 10 years and she had his baby and he didn't know, and...[so on and so forth]...so it was totally different.

Several More Bad Writers: [Variations on the above]

Some Anonymous Person, who has Nothing Better to Do With His Time**: Ha, ha. This whole thread is full of people making excuses for doing exactly what the original poster is complaining about.

* * *

Bad Writer, Angry at Another Bad Writer: I know nothing is truely origional, but this fic: [link] is definatly plagerized from my fic: [link]. Mine was obviously posted before his (check the dates), but the admin says i have no way to prove mine was first. I shouldn't have to...[et cetera].

Bad Writers' Moral Support Detail: [Various rumblings of assent, all using the same misspelling of "original." Curiously, no two spell "definitely" or "plagiarism" alike.]

Devil's Advocate: I have to say, neither of the fics were all that origional. I have seen that exact fic done 1000 times at least.

After a while, of course, it stops being funny and starts being a little bit--oh, I don't know. You laugh at one horrible speller poking holes in another for a while, wonder when it became fashionable to refer to short stories as fics, groan at the guy who managed to spell "defiantly" correctly (except he meant "definitely")--you do all that, but then.... Well, what do you say to something like this:

Another Bad Writer: yes, i like to think of myself as a serious writer. i write alot of origional fics as well as the one's i post online which i am seriously looking for a publisher. i have been writing for 27+ years, i am in my 40ies, i hate to be lumped in with the 13y/o netspeakers.

Twenty-seven years, and--oh, dear God. It's nice to see someone keeping the dream alive, as it were, but not when disappointment's a foregone conclusion. Poor sod's not going to be a successful writer, not in this lifetime. It's not just the awful spelling that makes this apparent. It's not the artless sentence structure, either. It's not even the lack of pride in her craft, as evidenced by her willingness to post this sort of uncapitalised drivel on the Internet. It's the absence of any discernible life, imagination, or passion for language. Here's someone who can't even be arsed with learning where to stick her apostrophes, hoping to make a living with words! (Lest you think I judge too quickly, I did try reading some of her fiction. It...well, I have absolutely nothing to say about it, one way or the other. I've had bigger thrills from the back of a cereal box.)

Somehow, these pits of Internet sadassery always leave me with the same feeling. It's a grubby sort of feeling, like I've been stuck in an elevator with thirteen horny fratboys all afternoon. That groping desolation; those needy cries for approval--it's like an Oscar Wilde poem given flesh:

...those witless men who dare
To try to rear the changeling Hope
In the cave of black Despair....

* Before Myspace came along, LiveJournal was known as the hangout of choice for angsty, vain teenagers with entitlement complexes. Once Myspace showed up and gave the LJ set a run for their money, a certain feeling of superiority welled up on LiveJournals Internet-wide. At last, here was a lower rung on the Internet ladder--someone they could make fun of. And they did. Do. Blimey.

** Was not!

*** Note: These excerpts are only similar to ones found on the Forum. They are not direct quotes. Last thing I need is some berkus tracing their words to my journal, and getting all up in a bunch over my calling them a bad writer.