You Would Never Survive in the Wide, Windless Sargasso

A guest review by Rassles:

There are some trends I’ve never fully climbed aboard. Sniffed out and left for rotten scavengers, yes, but I’m way too preoccupied pretending I’m unique to feel their appeal. Two of these trends, which concern the blog in review, are online dating and…well…pirates. Aye, landlubbers, beware: I’ve no inclination to identify with fearsome buccaneers or use the interwebs to find love. But! I do own Captain Blood on VHS and a friend of mine met her husband on Match Dot Com.

So here we have a self-proclaimed saucy pirate wench Swashbuckling Through the Murky Waters of On-Line Dating. A long title, yes, but cute and piratey, promising a narrative goody bag full of Oedipal greasy-haired assholes with over-inflated sexual egos who leave toenail clippings in shag carpets and keep secret wives. Right? Why else would we read an online dating blog?

The template is standard white-on-black Blogger, stained with thick, blazing purple links that offend the backs of my eyes after just a quick scan. I never really know what to say about templates. As long as you smell okay and you didn’t buy your shirt from Spencer’s, I don’t give a shit what you wear (let’s face it, “one tequila, two tequila, three tequila floor” was kind of funny for about ten seconds when I was thirteen, and more importantly what kind of freckle-faced scallywag can’t hang after only three shots of tequila?).

But Leslie, my friend, those purple links are a cheap, ugly distraction. Do you buy your steaks from Walgreens? No? Your template suggests otherwise.

Firstly, this blog, as I was led to believe based upon a short profile and header sentence, is not about perilous dates, mutinous sexual trysts, or a collection of hilarious critiques and conversations between a formidable provost barking insults at the dirty, rotten, scurvy dogs of dating. So I’ma gonna keelhaul a bitch.

It’s a fuckjumble of poseur posts, where Leslie pirates a man’s personal ad and a picture from nonspecific dating websites and offers her opinions, which are usually painfully obvious insults with semi-clever name-calling pawned from Urban Dictionary. I know this because she links Urban Dictionary. Constantly. She links youtube videos that loosely relate to her topic and random websites detailing household namedrops everyone already knows about, like Sixteen Candles and Lorena Bobbit. She’s a big fat stump-legged linker.

Now Leslie, how about swinging your fucking cutlass like a real bad ass to strengthen those lame, tired jabs of yours? Sharpen your insults. Fire more pirate words. If you are going to be a pirate, Be A Fucking Pirate. Y’en’t bucklin’ no swash, lass. L’est not in my good eye. You already plunder the faux dignity of men directly from their online dating profiles, even post their actual pictures (I think) which is a total dick move, especially if these guys are paying for private profiles on whatever dating site. Sail smartly. Thar be sea demons.

I would link examples of non-hilarity and tortuously weak insults, but seeing as every post is basically the exact same thing it’s totally pointless.

You sound bitter, wounded, and painfully desperate to appear sassy and strong. We can smell our own. Your words reveal much more about you than the jerks you ridicule, but I don’t think that’s your intention, and it pisses me off. It would be better if you weren’t hiding behind trying to be a fucking pirate.

Oh, and what gave you the addled idea that you needed to create a new tag for all them posts you shot up in that there blog? Bitch, you know what tags are for? Two things: (1) categorically linking your posts, and (2) my fucking peace of mind. Yours offer neither. How am I supposed to draw comparisons between “Douchebags of the Week” if you’re making me sail all over creation? There is no uniting concept between these topics. I don’t even think you could *define douchebag in the first place.

More importantly, you have, and I fucking counted, on my fingers no less, thirteen different “of the week” themes for thirty-nine posts, and seven of those themes have an example of ONE. Themes, by nature, are recurring. Remember that.

If you insist on this “of the week” stuff, with richly diverse categories like “What Not To Do While On-Line Dating” and “What Not To Put On Your On-Line Dating Profile” and have no cohesive elements to pull things together other than the thin veil of piracy, play with it. Make them “Freak of the Week #37” and “On-Line Dating Experiment #242.” Rally up your posts and restrategize, because this shit ain’t working.

The only posts that are worth reading at all are your status updates. They prove that you can be conversational, honest and observant, with definitive smirk, although they do fall slightly flat. Still, they're way more productive than resorting to making fun of mullets and mid-life crisis-es. Avast, ye strumpet! These are classic topics for humor, but if you’re not going to offer anything substantive to the already extensive inventory of Hilarious-Shit-To-Say-About-Things-That-Are-Obviously-Pathetic, then don’t say anything at all. Also, stop raping your words with unnecessary hyphens. Do you get a nickel per hyphen? That is a fuckload of nickels.

Tighten up your business. You are better than this. Fucking act like it. I would ask you to edit, but seeing as your short posts are unenlightening as they are, I think you should stop trying to be something and just write whatever’s in your blood, not what you wish was there.


For being annoying:






For sucking at insults and wishing you were cool:








* Okay people: a douchebag is a person with an illogical, amped up value of self-worth, unintentionally resulting in extreme worthlessness and obnoxery. See, the point of the term is to compare a person’s ego with a vaginal cleaning pump that really does more harm than good. Get it? Use it correctly. It’s like, okay: the monster’s name is not Frankenstein. The doctor’s name is Frankenstein. Drives me fucking nuts.