Wednesday, May 05, 2010

Awesome Sauce: Now With Less Awesome


Dear LiLu,

I am conflicted about your blog. Granted, I'm molded from fluxing confliction anyway, which is why I am so fucking charming, so this was expected. But still.

I started at the beginning.

At first, I liked you. You were honest and conversational and relateable and perfectly inappropriate, with refreshing self-assurance and offering unique views on common subjects. You displayed personality and good humor which made you, in many ways, uncommon. Stories were long-winded but interesting, everything dripped attitude.

I was semi-entranced. How is this possible that people like you exist outside of sitcoms and romantic comedies? You live in the world of Friends, and I live in MST3K. Seriously, it's all cheesy movies and sardonic robots up here on the Satellite o' Love.

Eventually you began doing TMI Thursdays and Shiz My Boyfriend Says and Stupid Fugly Things and Other Abbreviated Memes I Don't Care About. You and your boyfriend are entertaining and cute, I'll give you that. I skipped the others on principle. Why, internets, must there be a day set aside for telling the fucking truth? Shouldn't we always be boldly oversharing? The answer is yes, yes we should. Then recently, you ended them. I applaud your decision to un-limit yourself. You're best when you're uninhibited.

Oh, but you, like, stopped being cool.

All of a sudden your life wasn't your own and became a collection of catchphrases of FAIL and AWESOME SAUCE! and bold letters and....waaaaaaaaait for it....witty asides! I mean, you like things that are funny and can be funny yourself, in a non-threatening OMG-I-am-so-gross-in-the-cutest-manner-I-can-muster-exclamation-point! AWESOME SAUCE. Clever pawned internet slogan! Spelling words like they sound instead of how they're spelled (ON PURPOSE). Must-see Youtube video! ANOTHER clever internet slogan! Awesome sauce! It's annoying. But it's AAWWWWWESOOOOOOOMMMMME SAAAAAAUCE! Plus, I read "Firefly" and I think Malcolm Reynolds, and you just choke the joy out of my fucking world.

Then I read this regarding finding your "e-voice," and immediately morphed into sore snobbasaurus. Before I was irked. Now I'm pissed off.

You didn't tell them anything substantial, LiLu. No guidance, nothing. I thought you were fucking better than that. To quote you quoting Inigo Montoya: let me sum up.

Essentially your advice was, "I was boring in seventh grade. I know. I KNOW! And then I started talking to people and I took a risk! Now I have an e-voice and you can too!" You are not helping people find their voice, you are telling them how to be heard.

A voice, my friend, is not measurable by internet buddies and memes. We measure voices with decibels, which, as everyone knows, are the referential sliding scale points used to quantify the intensity of sound. Duh. Dumbass. Sound, and consequently voice, is a slippery, discordant tramp of a thing made of invisible particles and temperamental waves and shit. There are obstacles to fight through until it becomes clear.

You might think you've found your "e-voice," but stop fucking gimmicking. Write unplugged. Dude, that is a fucking brilliant phrase that I totally just invented, but probably read somewhere and subconsciously suppressed. Seriously LiLu, I cannot support the logic behind correlating your individual voice with how well you successfully woo goddamn internet friends. That's just a desperation to be popular.

Which is your goal, I guess. You're making friends and you got a bajillion fans. I can tell because your sidebar is a jumbly-wumbly anneurysm of advertisements, admiration, and Bootleg Awards (whatever those are). There's a quirky, darkly adorable header image that looks like a Threadless t-shirt and a quirky, darkly adorable About Me that reads like a personal ad, explaining, " I have come to classify myself as a 'South-i-fied Masshole'… all the fun of a Northerner, now with the grace of a Southern belle!"

Please fix your fourteen feet of sidebar tags. Just copy and paste it onto a post and shove it up there on your tabs in between "Roll Call" and "Subscribe." I really don't like that grid of posts beneath your first two entries. Mouse-clicking is a complicated task, and you are forcing me to make a decision between O'Douls and Sharps, when before you were serving up Stella and sometimes La Fin Du Monde.

It's frustrating, because I really, really just don't understand you. Maybe the blog became too much work. You claim to be boring. But the best thing about you early on was your attitude and uncompromising sense of self. Lately, you're still nice, and you're still cute, but you sound just like everyone else.

Regards,

Shinerpunch




For the early years.







For losing it.

21 comments:

  1. That's the fuckingest lame layout I've ever seen.

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  2. Shiner, this was in my queue to review originally and it sat their a while because I couldn't put my finger on how I felt about it. Thank you for exactly summing up how I felt about LiLu. This was a great review, one of the best you've done.

    That's the problem with having "blog fans", some bloggers feel like they need to keep 'em laughing and it happens at the expense of real connection and expression. Livitlovit is just another empty calorie reality show/sitcom and it doesn't have to be. Still, I actually like her template, too cluttered at sidebar but the design is nice.

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  3. you so nailed it on the internet catch phrases that start infecting blogs. I'm probably guilty myself.

    great review Shiny.

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  4. This is what happens one gets carried away by pandering to 100 plus comments. Her blog lately seems to be a text version of a youtube channel, a lousy one at that. Pity, does look like she can write

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  5. That aside, loved the review

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  6. I want to be mad, but after reading this through a couple times, I really couldn't agree more.

    Time to get back to basics, my roots, whatever you want to call it. Thanks for voicing what was wrong, because I'd been struggling with it lately (obviously).

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  7. LiLu, I really did like it at first. I read the whole first two years in one sitting.

    And then I wanted to slap some sense into you.

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  8. Thanks for summing up exactly how I felt about her stuff! I used to enjoy reading her blog, but nowadays it's so much more impersonal, sort of mass-produced. I miss the early days, I really do!

    xx

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  9. Mongoliangirl5/05/2010 2:04 PM

    I could not agree more. Get to the roots, or leave it alone. Suck up Saturday or Fuck Me Friday or whatever is lame. Once I lost the desire to get to the roots on my blog, I just shut it down. If I could, I would write again. Until then, I'm committed to never, never, never doing a Wussy Wednesday.
    Wait, if there was a week day that started with a 'C', I would have a day especially designed for Crow Bars. Just beating people or something.
    Alas, looks like I'll still be shut down.

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  10. Damnit. I'm so shut down (literally and figuratively)from the roots that I can't even get a comment to get through.
    I said I liked the review.
    I agreed with sticking with the roots or shutting things down.
    And then I said something really funny about beating someone with a crow bar.
    Damn.

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  11. shiz
    da bank
    bish
    ‘tude
    drunkity

    How the fuck do you have 1,000 followers?

    Maybe I’m the one who's tired and out of touch. You make me want to quit reading blogs. And throw up.

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  12. Hot damn Mongo, is it naptime?

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  13. I miss MG and her crow bar and her pumpkin muffins and Hellbilly and Ozarkian tales of horses and horses' shit.

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  14. I am far too old and too tired to condone anything that contains the phrase 'Livit Luvit'.

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  15. I've totally been missing Mongo saying 'smack down bitch'.

    Need more of that in my life.

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  16. No worries, Shinerpunch. You just haven't been around long enough to know I love crow bars. And pumpkin muffins. And have horses that shit a lot.
    I mean, that also means you don't know I couldn't give two shits about judo or karate or whatever it is you said.
    But seriously, no worries. Unless you try that shit and I have to get my crow bar. Then? Lots of worries.
    Blues: I'm going to molest your washing machine any day now. And probably your dishwasher as well.

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  17. So. There I was, having read the review and intrigued by what Lilu could have sounded like at the beginning. I clicked through to Livitluvit and had, in essence, a mild seizure.

    I've seen this template before, at least the layout part of the template, and I really, really hate it. Too little logic. Too much clutter.

    So I read the first entry, skimmed the rest of the first page and soon realized that even FINDING the fucking archives was going to suck the marrow from my bones. So I chose not to even look.

    I went to the About page, and, okay, Lilu's kinda easy on the eyes, at least in the two pictures she chose to put up there, but nothing I read THERE made me want to dig further.

    Sorry. I'm being hostile. I'm okay with that though, because everything I am saying is true.

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  18. Yeah, going through her archives was like skinning cats. She's not a brilliant writer, and she's not even the greatest storyteller. But she was always honest and basically herself, all knuckles and heels.

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  19. I loved this review - not because it was a hatchet job, but because it's a superb reminder that being popular is nowhere near the same thing as being good. I guess if you have a hundred comments on your posts it's easy to forget that.

    Not convinced the blog has changed much as a result of the feedback though.

    Oh, and the Unbearable Banishment's blog is very good. I'll be following that but not, on this showing, LiLu.

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  20. LiLu got "back to my roots" by launching a campaign to become the first ever MTV Twitter DJ. Hmm. That critique obviously sunk in.

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Grow a pair.