Saturday, February 02, 2008

A Vituperation of Bloggers

(Cool graphic courtesy of Skippy)

Or "My Life With The Shrill Krill Kult."



Happy Blogroll Amnesty Day, citizen!


That day whereon we little folk rise early, get down on our wee, dimpled knees and celebrate the glorious anniversary of that glorious moment when certain glorious A-List bloggers finally got shut of the smelly, little monkeys amongst whom they had been ingloriously trapped,


grabbed a glorious horse...

rode off with the glorious girl...

to a glorious future free from...


Oopsie

OK then, well, let's just never mind that shall we?


Support the day at Jon Swift's house (despicable conservative though he is) and enjoy the vituperation (which I do believe is the proper term of venery in this instance) of petite powerhouses he is gathering up.

Support the day at Skippy's place because, dude, it's Skippy.


Support the day by saying "hi" to cannablog, RIPcoco, Monkeyfister, an ornery bastard, myrtle june, Physio Prof, Brilliant At Breakfast. an Earth-bound misfit and Poor Impulse Control.

Join the Shrill Krill Kult and enjoy the day with a little e.e. cummings:

all ignorance toboggans into know

all ignorance toboggans into know
and trudges up to ignorance again:
but winter's not forever,even snow
melts;and if spring should spoil the game,what then?

all history's a winter sport or three:
but were it five,i'd still insist that all
history is too small for even me;
for me and you,exceedingly too small.

Swoop(shrill collective myth)into thy grave
merely to toil the scale to shrillerness
per every madge and mabel dick and dave
--tomorrow is our permanent address

and there they'll scarcely find us(if they do,
we'll move away still further:into now

21 comments:

Anonymous said...

lovin' you, buddy!

--mf

Anonymous said...

PhysioProf is about to shake up an Old Raj martini (no fruit) and play some fucking Yahtzee to celebrate!

Peace, Motherfuckers!!

Anonymous said...

Oh, shit. I just remembered. I finally took delivery on a couple bottles of Junipero, a small-batch gin distilled by the Anchor Steam Brewing Company.

Should be fucking smooooth.

Jennifer said...

Uh...yeah. If this is about what I think it's about, I think the guy's a douche, too, and I told him so.

Melina said...

Drifty..have I told you lately that I love you?



xoxo
m

CMike said...

Too many notes. You or Swift would be an A-, B+...well a solid B list blogger if either of you were in the habit of writing shorter posts.

This isn't art, you're blogging. It's all about the Technorati ranking.

Phil said...

Your intellectual range is stunning,
I mean I just get fucking awestruck following your musings around.
I have the dictionary on speed bookmark , I use it about every other post and I used to think I was intelligent!

And cmike above completely misses the boat, the pier and the nearest body of water, it is art, you just need to be intelligent enough to interpret it.
I have been claiming it to BE art for quite a while now.

I personally liken this BAD to be a big party where you get to introduce yourself to scads of interesting people you have never met and exchange business cards with, all the while, in the back of your mind, realizing that they are on YOUR side.
How fucking cool is that?

Thanks for the shout out Drifty. I catch Earth Bound every day, It's really weird, I think of her as my neighbor.
We are on the other side of the country from each other and have different viewpoints on a lot of things but thats how I see it.
She will probably want to move immediately if she see this.

CMike said...

CMike appreciates traveling on this luxury liner as much anyone of you who show up here regularly looking forward to shoving off for points unknown. In fact, I never miss a voyage.

Yet I can not help but note that Drifty and Jon Swift each believe it is their due to have longer passenger manifests. They believe the Establishment, by cruelly ignoring them, denies them their due.

They should console themselves with the knowledge that they will become celebrated figures after they are dead - that's how it works in the art world. Alternatively, they can sellout, become more short-winded, and appeal to a wider, more vulgar audience.

Myrtle June said...

Thanks Drifty! :-D

"into now".....indeed.

You rock!

muwhaaa :-)

Comrade Misfit said...

Driftglass,

Wow. Thanks for the mention.

Don't worry, Busted. If I move, it's not going to be because of you. :)

Anonymous said...

"Yet I can not help but note that Drifty and Jon Swift each believe it is their due to have longer passenger manifests. They believe the Establishment, by cruelly ignoring them, denies them their due."

Not to get all serious and shit, but I don't see this at all. Neither of them gives me the impression of thinking that some establishment "denies them their due". Mocking the establishment and its conceits is not the same as complaining that the establishment isn't giving you what you want.

jiminy jilliker said...

Physioprof:
That Junipero is very very good stuff. It knocked Hendricks off of my "treat for me when I've been very good" pedestal.

CMike said...

There's some history here. You have to go back to this post wherein early on Driftglass links to this post and a post by the late great Steve Gilliard.

Brilliant at Breakfast says:

***************
But with Kos and Atrios making a big show about "culling the blogroll", and Chris Bowers playing "Mine's Bigger" with the rest of the blogosphere, is this really what it's come to? Is this the Revenge of the Nerds come to fruition? Is this the guys who DIDN'T get laid on prom night finally staking their claim to coolness?

If so, are we going to sit by and take it? Are we going to just toil away while guys like Atrios and Kos and Chris Bowers define the rules and brand the rest of us as useless?

I don't know about you, but all this is making me feel just a wee tad Norma Rae here...

So all you progressive bloggers out there who are reading this and are damn sick and tired of these puffed-up assholes thinking they're somehow better than you are and that they decide who gets read and who doesn't, show yourselves in the comments. Let's hear your ideas for how we can help each other.

***************

Steve Gilliard says:

***************
Son, get off your knees.

Why the fuck do you care if Atrios or Kos has you on their blogroll. Does it feel like a pat on the head? A reward?

The ONLY blog you should worry about is YOURS. None of those people matter. It doesn't matter who links to you, only who reads you...

Cyberbuddying up to Atrios means nothing if you suck. I've never, ever exchanged a link or asked anyone to link to here. Why? Because I felt if people wanted to read this site, they would find their way here. You need to have the same confidence in your work.

****************

Driftglass does say:

****************
Admittedly in some cases – many cases – a writer’s expectations on the return on that investment are laughably out of proportion to the marketplace.

Demanding attention as if it were your due is absurd; on a par with asserting that if I buy Nike sneakers, the Nike corporation somehow owes me something. If you are of that mind you had best go and look up the word “investment” before you start slinging that kind of silly-ass, entitlement lingo ‘round here.

However, while part of being an entrepreneur is being a creator, the other part is being your own lobbyist.

****************

But Drifty then adds:

****************
The bulk of Atrios’ blog these days is Pez-ing out ten-word “heh indeedy” posts with links to other people’s work every several hours.

Kos has built a small city...

And while I begrudge no man or woman a single pfennig of their daily bread, let’s be honest about what the A-Listers have demonstrated.


(1) There is cold, hard cash in them thar blogs. Enough, perhaps, for a writer to live on. Comfortably. And,
(2) That cash is generated because of traffic.

Which brings us full-circle back to a genuine question masquerading as a silly blogroll kerfuffle: If you actually take your own work seriously -- if you believe in what you write, are confident in its quality, and value it for the time you’ve invested in it -- why the fuck wouldn’t you assertively try to bring it to a wider audience?
****************

By the way, Jon Swift shows up and introduces himself in the comment thread to this Driftglass post. Now if I can just remember the name of the parent post to the comment thread wherein Swopa offers his opinion on the subject...

jurassicpork said...

Those bloody fools! They should've linked to me!

Oh, wait. That's the Statue of the Liberty in Tennessee, the one with the cross.

Never mind, then...

Anonymous said...

cmike, thanks for the interesting history lesson. The scientific community has an exactly analogous tension between what is considered undue self-promotion and healthy assertions of the value one's work.

"Hey! Look at me!!" is an irreducible element of human nature. Maybe I'll blog on this!! cmike, do you mind if I quote from your historical exegesis? If that's ok, I'll cite the quotes as by "cmike, commenter at Driftglass", unless you prefer some other attribution.

CMike said...

Attribute those quotes to Driftglass et al. as cut and pasted by CMike.

Anonymous said...

OK. I just finished reading all the stuff you linked to, and here are some thoughts.

(1) Bowers is basically talking about the fact that blogging has become just another fucking job, for some bloggers.

(2) Driftglass and Brilliant at Breakfast are talking like young new up-and-comers figuring out what they need to do to gain an audience for their work. Driftglass is a little more reflective about this than BaB, who is more purely tactical.

(3) All due respect, but Gilliard sounds like a dude who already has an audience, and who has forgotten a lot of what it took to get that audience, and how painful it is when your entreaties of "Hey!! Look at me!!!" are ignored.

Fran / Blue Gal said...

Oh man, you guys are seriously taking me back. Chris Bowers in that notorious post said that the days of the single pundit blogger were over and that no one could break in to the big time anymore, that Atrios and a handful of other white men had taken all the good spots and well, there was a buncha other business model bullshit too:

quote: The days of the major, solo content generator, pundit blogger are all but over. ...Within the national blogosphere, the market dynamic has changed dramatically, and the entry barrier to the "top-tier" has become far more difficult to break through.

Brilliant at Breakfast and I had a lot of fun with that.

Anonymous said...

BG, you think people would have any interest in reading PhysioProf's take on this history, having not experienced it firsthand, and only relying on contemporaneous accounts by others?

Fran / Blue Gal said...

What? Claiming outsider status, huh? Well, you'll have to write it up and let us look it over for errors and stuff. :)

This is the blogosphere, dude. Tell me something you're not supposed to write about. My next big post is going to be about "fuck" as a tool no blogger should be without.

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