She's Got Two Or Three Dwarves Covered

I know, I know. You wanted Forcemeat to do this review, which is understandable. Meat's the jam, I get it, but you got me.

A. Today's blogger suffers the same slippery ill communications of basically, like, 90 percent of submitters: she claims to be something and offers no supporting evidence.

EVERYONE: To echo nearly every single review ever given on this fucking site, do not make blatant declarations about your character unless you're packing a smoking gun. The only thing that reviewers loathe more than shitty writers is shitty liars. Remember way back when everyone was a fucking Humor Blogger (it is so much easier to critique douchey frat-core humorists than the poor, woebegone idealists of late)? Grumpy, you wanna be a cranky bitch? BE A FUCKING BITCH, THEN. Pussy.

However, "grumpy young lady" is an excellent phrase to describe you, I think. It's perky and familiar, tickled with slight self-derogation and intentional bunglement. Granted, the luvable, socially awkward, clumsy puppy-eyes thing can only take a blogger so far. Everyone's doing it. I blame Helen Fielding. I want you to take that personality and cube it.

And then quablam! Cubed. Honesty is underrated. Too much honesty makes some readers uncomfortable, but it depends on the author's presenting attitude, even when we're talking about a woman's right to bear pubic hair. And I must say, I think your stance is brilliant and your defense is brilliant, although I think you might benefit from thicker skin. And to those who made fun of you: I support looking your "best," but don't snoot all over those who are comfortable with themselves and their natural beauty - it's shallow and uncouth, and reveals your classless insecurity.

Then I read something like this, and I realize: she is "whinging" about being ideally healthy. Shut up. That's just obnoxious. Who did that to her, made her think that her personal weight was a problem? And don't tell me "society" because that's bullshit. Suck it.

Sometimes she delves into topics that I don't relate to: marriage, clothes, chick lit (she's a well-balanced reader, but our book preferences differ). But there's wit in there, making it tolerable.

2. Grumpy? Fucking soften up the background color of your template. I have an aversion to offensive digital yellows. Maybe you think that yellowness represents you, like, as a person or something, because you're bright and sweet and tend to give people migraines, and that's...whatever. You seem very nice, but from over here it smells like moldy fruit and I just want to quickly and politely suggest we go for out for some pistachio gelato and then head back to my place.

D. Here's the thing: You obviously can write. I like how you've started venturing into snapshots and stories instead of your old school chronicling journal stuff.

So here's my advice, from an uneducated reviewer to an established Australian teacher, which seems unfair: Sometimes your writing is a little hurried and overenthusiastic. Breathe. Edit. You often find a rhythm two sentences before your posts end. Start writing each post loose and unrestrained, then cut half of it. Four small paragraphs of introduction and one punchline at the end doesn't do it for me. I want you to write a post that is, itself, a punchline. Not a collection of zingers - that's annoying. What I mean is, take this line you invented:

Music for awakening, rather than cute boys who were all teeth.

and write the shit out of that post.



As an afterthought: I totally should have gone with this like, Seven Dwarves motiff, where I analyzed little grumpypants in seven different categories, and then like...whatever. Too late.

Lessons Learned

Come, my little chitterlings, put your tiny paws in mine. We are going on a journey, and we may be some time.

Now, you know that when it comes to blogs I am a drool-sopped old gourmet, continually ravening for succulent mouthfuls and nourishing treats. I am on a lifelong quest (and have been for some months) to find the ortolan of weblogs, the site so rare and so delectable that I would needs must eat it hooded to hide my pleasure from the gods. You know that each week I am largely thwarted in my search for satiety, albeit with hilarious consequences. But you also know, and I know as well, that I cannot keep dismissing blogs on the grounds that they do not live up to some gilded ideal I have declared master, because that is not what they are for. Most blogs do not intend to be literature, and the sooner I come to terms with that, the less likely I will be to spork out my eyes.

It’s an inanity to say that we all blog for different reasons, but it is something of which I have had cause to remind myself in the course of my reviewing escapades. Some people do it for comments and adverts and the tacky baubles of internet fame. These people are dangerous and should never be approached unarmed. Some people (mentioning no names) appear to be doing it because their neighbour’s dog suggested it might be a good idea. I would imagine that most people do it because telling stories is such jolly good fun. My favourite bloggers, as I am sure you all are now grindingly aware, are the ones who do it to create something beautiful.

'T' does it for another reason. She is on a journey of self-discovery, ‘a quest to find out Who I Really Am amongst the chaos/order and drama/perfection of being a single mom’. T writes about herself and her life in a very frank way. She writes about her children, the long-distance relationship she is having with an old school friend, her divorce, the lives of her friends and family and her general day-to-day existence. She is mostly likeable, readable and friendly. Naturally, I hated it. I can’t help myself. I am a terrible old clown. I was calling for my spork after the first page, but thankfully Fanny had the foresight to hide it in the downstairs cistern, bless her little sacking socks.

First there was the style, instantly recognisable from a hundred thousand other blogs by mommies who describe themselves as ‘a little crazy’ and ‘painfully honest’. Then there was the Bon Jovi video. The merest mention of that ghastly, ghastly man and his dream-defiling bouffant makes me come over all killy. Then there was a sex scene that used the phrase ‘throbbing moistness’. Then there was the ‘spirituality’ business, the belief in something called A Course in Miracles. Very easy to mock, especially for a jaded old beast like my vast and seeping self. I get all my spiritual guidance from my Fanny.

But then I caught myself and I said no, Sir! I decided that with my petty bile I had delighted myself long enough and resolved to look beyond my knee-jerk contempt and embrace T for who she really is. When Fanny had revived me, I read on. I realised that if I were a blogger like T, if I were one of her ethereal peers and in a similar situation to her, I would probably find things like this and this rather helpful. I might take comfort in knowing that someone else had been through it and come out of the other side relatively happy and able to form a nauseatingly demonstrative new relationship. I might be amused, enlightened or inspired to read someone talking so unabashedly about sex. I can see how T could be a great friend to her many readers.

However, I need no emotional succour. Of course I would like to see T brush up on her story-telling skills. Here and here she writes about a school reunion but it feels dead to me, an exercise in self-aggrandizement as opposed to an interesting tale. There are rather a lot of posts like these, in which T says ‘I am very attractive and popular and everybody fancies my boyfriend’, and although T might be aiming for sassy, she veers rather toward the smug. Personally, I find all this boasting and shouting about being ‘awesome’ terribly infra dig, but perhaps that’s just a cultural difference. All I will say is that it is possible to write a story about oneself without writing only about oneself.

And so, as we stagger exhausted towards the finish line, knackered as my Fanny after a night at the bath house, I will try, finally, to sum things up. T is a decent person, a good mother and, by all accounts, a generous and tender lover. She has spent a long time thinking about things, has profited on it and uses that profit to try and help others. There are some clunks and bumps, but I don’t suppose it matters.

I have learned a lesson today. I must be good and fair and look for more than beauty. I do despise learning lessons. Even through I make a habit of forgetting them immediately, they discombobulate me something chronic. To quote T, ‘I don’t know whether to meditate or masturbate’. I don’t know which I will choose, but ye gods, I could murder an ortolan.

I really don’t know how to rate T. She’s rather like the Church of England; I have no personal use for it, but I am sure it serves a purpose. I suppose she can have a star for making an old clown feel chastened, however temporarily, and for being a very brave soldier.




P.S. The winner of last week’s thrilling ‘giveaway’ is Ellie, for ‘Tranny whores are all the rage these days’. That’s what my Fanny keeps trying to tell me, but I still maintain that three at a time is excessive. Why not drop me a line, Ellie, and you can give me your address and claim your ‘prize’. I promise I won’t let Fanny know where you live.

Maybe There Should Be A Consequence?

Folks, here's the deal right now. Completely unrelated to my part-time gig here at AAYSR, this has been a brutal two weeks. Long-nights-and-red-flags brutal. I mean, people have fucking died, man.

So if I come across as a bit curt or abrupt, I mean, more so than usual, don't take it personally.

Not this time.

But it does mean that I just need to cut to the friggin' chase here, and tell you about my friend Roschelle, and her Inconsequential Logic. (Side note: What the hell is that supposed to mean anyway? Are we supposed to dismiss you out of hand, because you're Inconsequential? Or are you being ironic?) Roschelle has been blogging a long time. A looooooong time. Since 2004, if you believe her.

Which you kind of have to. Because there's no way to get back all the way to the beginning to see when she began and what she sounded like way back then. Because she has no archive navigation at all. Other than this little roulette wheel type thingy where you click it and it serves up a random post. First couple days I was reviewing what she had to say, I thought that was kind of fun. But that fun wore off.

And I still couldn't get to the beginning.

As a reviewer, very little chaps my ass more than making getting the big picture a damn puzzle.

I pulled it up in Google Reader. Which took me back to October 11, 2009. In which I learned about splogs. Which I already knew about, I just didn't know they had a name. She then spends a lot of time blogging about blogging and social media. Not so much about content as much as about mechanics. In short, she came off sounding a bit like the back section of Reader's Digest, where they give you little bite sized tid-bits, but not full on articles.

And sure, that's probably someone's cup of treacle. Just not mine.

So, yeah, I skipped ahead, back to the present day. Luckily at some point along the way, she stopped writing exclusively about blogging and started writing about other stuff, but it still seemed like for every post that was what I'm in this whole blogging thing for, there were ten that were genuinely, to me, inconsequential, to use her own word.

Roschelle is pleasant enough. Does, generally, nothing particularly wrong. But I was not engaged. I was not especially amused. It wasn't a chore to read her writing, but it wasn't enrapturing either. I sort of felt like I was being held at arms length, away from the more challenging subject matter, the more humanizing material. And I'd say that's the one thing I'd suggest to Roschelle about her content -- bring more of herself to it.

I mean, seriously, she wrote an entire post about Father's day, doing a twist on it and stuff, without telling me anything about her, her mom, or her dad.

Unless that's not what she's in it for. All the clutter and gadgetry in her template does lead me to believe that she may be in it for the click-throughs and follows and all of that shit. But if she is trying to engage readers more, she should work on that opening up thing a bit more.

Oh, yeah, and about that template? Normally, I'm the guy who doesn't pay attention to that. As long as I can read the text and can find the navigation, I don't care what your template looks like. But right now, all the doodads and hoohahs all over this thing make it look like a teenage girl's bedroom. In cases like this, Roschelle, less is very much more.

All told, this whole thing adds up to this... One large, full-fledged "MEH."



I think you have it in you to get a star or two, but as the Smiths say, you just haven't earned it yet, baby.

...and don’t even get me started on the hors d’oeuvres...

As a general rule, my Fanny and I keep ourselves to ourselves. Don’t get me wrong - in my youth I was a prominent frequenter of the most exclusive gaming hells and a member of several highly specialised dining clubs, but these days I prefer a quiet life, largely because I find people en masse rather nauseating. It’s the lack of control that bothers me. I would much prefer to cloister myself with my Fanny and a family-size tub of Germoline than haul my old bones to a cocktail party where I might find myself forced to exchange pleasantries with a man in slip-on shoes, or the kind of woman who touches one’s arm while she talks.

This reviewing lark is rather like a cocktail party. You never know who is going to buttonhole you next, although you can usually tell within a few moments whether or not you are going to enjoy the experience. We all make snap judgements based on our own set of social markers and we are usually right. Personally, I avoid visible swastikas, t-shirts with comedy slogans and readers of the Daily Mail, but it’s different for everyone.

Of course, the most frightening words one can hear from a new acquaintance, the words guaranteed to put the kibosh on any kind of social connection, are any variation on the theme of, “I’m mad, me! Completely insane! All my friends say I’m just totally bonkers!” In my experience, this sentiment usually translates as, “I am a deeply conservative person who, out of the desperate desire for a personality, occasionally wears stripy tights,” and has me edging towards the door every time, no matter how divine the hors d’oeuvres.

Imagine my delight, then, when I saw the title of today’s blog. For a brief moment, I fancied that maybe I was judging too soon and that Mind of a Madwoman was going to be a stunning piece of online outsider art that would forever change the way we understand madness and sanity. For a brief moment, I was a fool. The Madwoman was Maggie, and when I saw her over the metaphorical punchbowl my first thought was that she had better be serving some pretty bloody extraordinary hors d’oeuvres.

This will not be a particularly link-laden review, best beloveds. If you pop over to Maggie’s blog you will soon see that it is a Möbius strip of repeating content. Maggie likes 'memes', you see, Random Thoughts Tuesdays and Self-Obsession Saturdays and all of that sorry business. She seems to have a particular soft-spot for lengthy lists of arse-clenchingly inane questions, real Paxmanesque posers like, “do you recycle?” and “do you prefer coffee or tea?” Maggie and her cronies swap these penetrating puzzlers, think up smart answers and then post them in reel after reel of arrogant banality. For the love of Princess Anne, why would anyone be interested in your favourite ‘BBQ’ food?

This post was the nadir, especially the part where she has the sheer lack of class to beg for corporate sponsorship. It was at this juncture that I was forced to have Fanny break out my emergency poultice and perform the Special Manoeuvres. I suppose it’s the kind of sassy ‘telling it like it is’ malarkey that is so prevalent in the milk-clogged world of ‘mommy’ blogging and I know there’s an audience for it, but I state for the record here and now that if I ever meet a member of that audience face-to-face, I will slap them until we are both weeping.

It’s all just laziness, and although I fully condone sloth as a lifestyle choice, it should have no place in your work. It’s a shame as well, because Maggie has her charms. She has a readable style, she can be funny and irreverent. If I were going to give Maggie any advice, which it would appear I am, I would say Maggie, stop pissing about and submit some articles to some magazines or something. You might not get published, but you’ll have to concentrate and you’ll have to stop relying on borrowed ideas, and that will make you a better writer. I think you can do better. You’re wasting yourself on this froth. If anyone ever asks you again if you prefer a shower or a bath, you just walk away my duck, just walk away.

I appreciate that I may come across a touch harsh, but I do feel strongly about this (Fanny’s heard it all before. She’s rolling her eye at me). There’s something about a blog that seems to make people think it’s better to post lazy content than nothing at all, and that makes me a sad, sad clown. And now I am a sad clown whose dreams will be haunted by a parade of self-proclaimed ‘madwomen’ waggling their ‘boobs’ at me and shrieking at the top of their lungs about their husbands’ toilet habits and exactly why they prefer foolscap to A4.

So I try to subtly shuffle closer to the cloakroom, pouring my drink in a potted plant and avoiding eye-contact with the hostess, my only comfort the thought that Fanny is waiting outside in the rickshaw. It’s going to take a long time and a lot of unguents for the poor thing to settle me tonight, and so on my Fanny’s behalf I feel I should make an example of Maggie. Consider her a casualty in the war against banality.

Two flaming fingers for you, Meggers. Feel free to return them when you’ve stopped squandering yourself on all this.

Effing Internet.

Hello, Askers.

I would like to apologize for my slackery lately. Sure, reviews are getting up and everything, but not anything I've written. Internet is down at the Shiner household and work is busy.

Things will be up to snuff shortly, I hope.

To keep everyone entertained, I recommend Joe the Comedian. Is he brilliant in his awkward absurdity or just plain awkward? You be the judge.

Excerpts from my overwhelming emotion

I was reading this blog. Well, actually I was reading the excerpts from the blog! I know! I know! It’s confusing! I assumed this meant that the real blog was somewhere else and what I was reading was just the crème de la crème! Well, let me tell you, I felt a mix of confusion and excitement and kept on reading! My heart was beating out of my chest! And boy oh boy was I glad I persevered!

You see, Nilu is an Indian lady living in America with a swell family and shitloads of words of wisdom! She's a real funny gal! I’m not gonna tell you why. How about you just take my word for it? Because, you see, that’s kinda how she writes. She just tells us something was funny or great without actually transmitting any of the humor or emotion of the situation at all. But you know what? The exclamations points themselves were enough for me to know just how goddamn exciting everything was! Oh man alive! You wouldn’t believe how much!

I know some of you will think some of her posts are downright idiotic, but I don’t care! Some of you may think that the only funny thing she has ever written was the screamingly inappropriate letter that nearly got her fired from her job two hours before her shift ended on her last day of work! Not true! After an hour of perusing her blog, I know the truth! Besides, who needs good storytelling when we have superlative forms of punctuation!?!?








Thank God I only had to read the excerpts.

Sociopaths Ain't Sexy

Hey, y'all, I know that you thought that I died the true blog death or something, but I'm still here, watching over you, like the dark fairy blogmother. Isn't Shiner doing an awesome job running things? I knew she would. And, I am never wrong, y'all.

Except about sociopathic men. In that realm, I've dated my fair share of them, thinking that I could heal them, fix them, or love them. At the time, it felt normal to me to have someone try to choke me, throw things at me, call me the most evil names on earth, and hit me. Love was pain for me, because that's how I was raised. However, I'm long past that long dark teatime of the soul, and bad boys on steroids have no place in my life anymore.

Being around someone who hurts themselves with impunity, hurts other people with entitlement, and prides themselves on their own mental illness is like falling through an outhouse floor into an infinity of ancient excrement, squirming with maggots, that coats your skin with a filthy lung destroying warmth. As you can imagine, I don't enjoy it.

I'd barely glanced at Claudia Calling when I agreed to review this blog for Shiner.

My bad, y'all. Let me just give you a sample:

If I went to confession, this is the cheat sheet I would take
--I have had unprotected sex on three different occasions with three different men (other than my husband) in the last 2 months.
--I don't do any fucking housework anymore. I just don't.
--About 7 hours of my work day is spent fucking around on the internet or staring off into space.
--I know that my drug and alcohol use/abuse will lead to a premature death, but I don't want to stop.
--Only very rarely do I drink at work.
--On one of those occasions, I actually did carry a hip flask in my garter belt, and it was pretty sexy.
--I don't consider myself a drug abuser because I only smoke weed. I'm more concerned about the drugs my psychiatrist prescribes, which don't mix well with my alcohol habit.
--I'm almost certainly going to end up hurting SkullsAndShit if I keep seeing him, and I don't want to break things off because I enjoy him. Wow for real. He's enamored. I don't get it.
--I've been leaving slightly suggestive comments on Trucker's Facebook updates just because I know it drives Trucker Wife crazy. Ah-hahahaha! She's such a narcissist. It really brings me so much joy to fuck with her. The lesson here: Narcissist v. Sociopath? Sociopath wins every time. Respect that shit.

I'm pretty sure that Claudia thinks she's being all badass and brave by blogging about her sociopathy and her need to hurt other people (and herself). Allowing herself to be anally raped and not fighting back is just par for the course.

However, I've worked with (and loved) enough crazy fucked-up people participating in their own emotional dismemberment to last a lifetime. Thanks, but I'm full-up on crazy here, and doing my best not to fall into the abyss again. I've fought it, and clawed my way up the rocky cliff until my nails bled, and right now, in spite of everything, I'm beating it.

So, finding someone who wallows in the crazy, who glories in it, and who does damage to herself and others without caring...that shit pisses me off.

I read about 10 posts. That was all I could stand.

Claudia/Lola: You're a dual-diagnosis clusterfuck with a fatalistic outlook who wants to hurt yourself and/or die. I refuse to participate in your ritual disembowelment. Find someone else to sell that shit to, or start doing the hard work to heal yourself. And I'm not going to lie...I know, as someone who was physically and emotionally abused for years, and still bears the scars, that it ain't easy.

But it's a choice.

As Alice Sebold said, in her memoir, Lucky,:

You save yourself or you remain unsaved.

You're not saving yourself, Claudia/Lola. You're a willing participant in your own destruction. And truthfully, your rape of yourself is far more excruciating to view, even from a distance, than I suspect your original sexual molestation ever was.

I can't rate you. I don't want to damage you further with flaming fingers, and I certainly don't want to reward you.

Mayor of Red Flag Town

Several years ago, I was all about the online dating. At one point, I'd lined up dates with six different dudes in a matter of two weeks. Through all those coffee dates fraught with weirdos in dad jeans and potential kidnappers/rapists/murderers, I started doing something to prevent my time from being wasted by asshats.

As soon as these dudes would contact me, I'd begin mentally tallying their "red flags". Nothing makes me lose my lady-boner faster than a couple red flags. And nothing makes me lose my blog-boner faster either.

But that's exactly what happened when I began reading The Cool Jerks, which was created to help dudes understand how to meet and date women.

BLOODY RED FLAGS ON FIRE. ALL. OVER. THE. PLACE. PEOPLE. "Twiggy" doesn't understand women, and he sure as hell doesn't know how to blog. And since he is inept at both, how the hell does this toolbag expect to give online advice about women?

Answer: He can't.

Red Flag #1 - First impressions actually matter, Twigster, and you don't seem to give a shit about the impression you're making.

• You have two sidebars filled with meaningless shit. It's like you've dowsed yourself in Axe Body Spray. Less is more, dude.
  
• You have redundant tabs and "click to read more" posts. You look messy and lazy, and in desperate need of a makeover, which is just waaaay too much work.
• You're asking for PayPal donations. What the fuck for? You cheap bastard.
• You have tons of paid-to-click advertisements. You're into money more than you're into self-development. Classy.
  

What's pathetic is all of that could have been prevented, but . . .

Red Flag #2 - You never read our online profile before contacting us.

Did you read the FAQ before submitting here? Fuck no, you didn't. Thanks for making it obvious you care more about getting web traffic, than about having respect for our time, asswipe. Really, what you were looking for here is the blog review equivalent of a "wham, bam, thank you, ma'am".

You need to sweet talk the lady, get to know her a bit, and if you're lucky enough to climb her bell tower, you need to make sure you ring her fucking bell. As of now, I feel objectified, used, and completely unsatisfied. Nice job.

Red Flag #3 - Your online profile says nothing about you.

The "About Us" tab just reiterates what's on your home page. I had to trek halfway down your sidebar and click a link to ANOTHER site, before I got a legit "About Me" page. The only reason I took the effort to figure out who the hell you are, is because I'm reviewing your site, not because I actually care.

If you make it too hard for someone to get to know you, they won't bother, genius.

Red Flag #4 - Your writing is incoherent.

Your grasp of the English language is mediocre at best. Which would be fine, since it's not your mother tongue . . .but you're writing for an English-reading audience. Your writing doesn't flow at all, because you use incorrect punctuation, grammar and spelling, on top of repeatedly misusing words. For instance, here you use the word "viscous". I do not think it means what you think it means.

Microsoft Word's grammar and spell check won't cut the mustard, cowboy. To avoid looking completely bush league, you need to actually look up the meaning of the word before you use it. And why would anyone take your advice (or date your lameass), if you can't be bothered to take the time to be professional and coherent?

Red Flag #5 - You're halfass about communication.

You have blog posts dating back to 2008, but you only have 40 posts. WTF. Your last post was a month ago, which is just an embedded video, and the post before that is from March. Maybe try a little harder, and you'd get more of attention from readers. And the ladies. Jesus.

Red Flag #6 - You have no fucking clue who you are at all.

Your posts flip-flop between "be a real man and develop yourself" and "this is how you play asshole head games with the ladies". You say your site is "dedicated to the self development of men" and your tagline is "Redefining Jerks". But then you make repeated references to being a pick-up artist, and advise men to purchase a whole slew of books on "how to play women". So which is it? Are you trying to help men develop themselves as people, or help them get laid? Because they're not even close to being the same thing, bucko.

Have you ever thought that maybe, just maybe, if you ACTUALLY developed yourself as a person for your own sake, cultivated some interests outside of picking up women, got over your obvious issues and got your shit together (meaning become a fucking adult who doesn't drunkenly puke on himself), you might not have to play games with women? Because all those things foster confidence, which is far more attractive than the shit you have going on now.

Red Flag #7 - I have a sneaking suspicion you're one of those "nice guys" who are actually "passive-aggressive douchebags".

These bitches have been blogging about fuckers like you for YEARS. I'll let them have at it.

Red Flag #8 - On the other hand, I'm pretty sure you're really a full-on misogynistic asshole.

Women are innately addicted to dating assholes. Women are only after money and "feeling good". Women should only be cheerleaders, beauty queens or chefs. Women are just walking tits, asses and vaginas, nothing more.

Those stereotypes exist for a reason, because there are girls out there who believe them and do nothing but live up to them. But there's a difference between girls and women, sweetcheeks.

Have you ever heard the phrase, "you attract what you are"? If you go through life believing those fucked up stereotypes, you will only attract girls who live up to them, which is exactly the type of female your site is trying to help men avoid. Do you see the vicious (not viscous) cycle?

I'm gonna let you in on a little secret. The type of WOMAN you and your Cool Jerk buddies are scheming to meet would have abso-fucking-lutely NOTHING to do with you in real life. Hell, you've got a single, intelligent, smoking hot lady in her 20's writing this review. I'm your fucking dream woman, and I'm gonna tell y'all something: I've had an outbreak of vagina dentata after reading this shit.

So, I award you a nice



for using us to get website traffic, a






for not reading the FAQ and wasting my time, and a






for being a misogynistic fucktard. I hate you.

In Which a Clown Is Made to Feel Old

Ahoy there, my little loin chops! Seem to have skipped a week or so, I’m afraid. Eurovision happened and the larks spread somewhat. We came last, of course. Terribly cunning. We’ve already saddled ourselves with the Olympics – we’d have to mortgage Wales to host Eurovision as well. I lost my poor Fanny in all the excitement, and I didn’t find her yesterday morning. She had somehow managed to get herself buried neck-deep in the antirrhinums. I have no recollection of the incident, but I will own that my fingernails seemed muddier than usual.

In my current state of advanced toxicity it seems unjust that I should have to review the blog of a fresh-faced young woman who is years away from the legal drinking age. Of course, there are a great many people who would say that I shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near any fourteen-year-olds, under any circumstances, and they are probably right, but Andrea has submitted herself for review and I must do right by her. I fear this may be a lengthy endeavour. Refill your glasses now.

Andrea writes a blog called Another Amphigory. She describes herself as “Just another fourteen year old girl writing about Vonnegut, knitting, grammar and the stuff under my bed”. She has only been blogging since the beginning of this year, and it did not take me long to read every last one of her entries.

Andrea, cherub, I know you are only fourteen, but I’m not going to pull any punches here. If you are big enough to read this site, you are big enough to be treated like everybody else. I will have to admit that the first page of your blog is not very appealing. There are some photos of you, a couple of brief snippets and - my personal bugbear - a list of things that you did but are too tired to write about. The last post on the first page talks about how you are struggling for content, how you want to go back to writing little vignettes about your life, as that is when you feel your writing is strongest. Yet after that, you seem to decide to start publishing daily pictures of yourself, and then you stop doing that, too, and then you stop posting altogether.

Looking back through your archives, your content is markedly uneven. You post song lyrics and recipes and the kind of guff I could find under any internet rock I cared to pick up. It is as though you are just hurling content at your blog in the hopes that it will become more than the sum of its parts, and this is a shame, because I think you are far, far better than that.

Andrea, I believe you have a lot of nascent talent. I have been waiting to read a blog that contained a line that made me stop to savour, and your line about unpicking the embroidery on your pillow said so much in such an elegant manner that I did just that. I agree that your writing is strongest when you are writing your little snapshots. You have a way of pinning a moment to cork that is lacking in a lot of the ‘adult’ writers I read online. However, don’t be afraid of expanding on these little toothfuls. There is more to be said, and relish to be had in the saying of it.

You talk about your blog as though it was a journal, but it isn’t one, not really. Keep a journal under your mattress to vent to, by all means, but put only your very best work online. Think long and hard about what you are going to write and then write it as well as you possibly can. It may seem private at times, like there’s nobody reading, but there are still standards that you should try and retain. Especially now you’ve gone and shown your ‘journal’ to all these big, bad people.

Throughout your blog you mention being worried that people you know are reading your work, and this makes you feel unable to write honestly about certain matters. I would suggest that if you think this for one moment you should immediately up sticks and start writing somewhere you are sure you are anonymous. It is sometimes pleasant to think of people we know reading our work and being astonished by our brilliance, but it is much, much more important to both your readers and yourself that you feel you can be honest.

I understand that it’s hard to think of things to say, especially when one feels like one is shouting into a void. Sometimes, in my own personal writings, I look at the blank page in front of me and feel as though every thought I have ever had has been sucked out of my head like my Fanny hoovers out a Cadbury’s Creme Egg. When I get stuck like this I sometimes find it helpful to pick a thing at random and just try to write about it in the best way I can. You can make a magnum opus out of a tin of Spam if you put your mind to it, especially if, like you, you have a cunning eye for detail and a pretty way with words.

Sometimes, though, nothing helps. The muse professes a headache and goes to bed early with Danielle Steele and you need to find inspiration in another source. So, take that post you wrote when you were too tired to write anything properly. There were ten items on it. Take each of those and sum them up in two hundred words or so. Et voila! Your first ten posts. Or show me New York – I cannot comprehend what it must be like to be a fourteen-year old with easy access to New York City. My, what carnage I could have caused. The School was ten miles from the nearest sweet shop and the penalties for escape were harsh.

In conclusion, Andrea, I think you should treat Another Amphigory as a practise run. Kill it dead and plunder its corpse, take away all the juiciest organs and leave the rest for the dogs. Then set yourself up in a plush new home and write like I believe you can. You should treat your blog as though it were a strange baby you birthed through your brain. Feed it well and keep it safe from banality.

And Andrea, if you do relocate, I would be very pleased if you would email me with your new address. I would like to keep track of you, in the least upsetting way I know how.

I am going to give you two and a half stars, for now, but I think that in the future, you could come back and bag a few more.

Give Him a Hand, Ladies and Gentlemen

I think we all know someone like today's subject of excoriation. I know I do. In fact I know several, many of whom have ridiculously goofy names that sound like cartoon characters. These are large men, typically white Anglo-Saxons, frequently very intelligent, possibly over educated. They hang out at your local bars, or at cookouts, or wherever groups of men gather together to discuss the topics of the day. They almost always take a deep breath before pontificating forth on any topic, and at times release an exasperated sigh when you make a statement that they feel is silly, or naive.

Okay. I'll be honest. I don't know if any of that is an accurate description of Dave Hand, author of Dave's Quills and Pixels, today's blog, but there was just something about the way he turns a phrase or states what he feels are facts that reminded me of these other guys I know. Who do fit that description. To a "t".

What I do know: he's 46, he's a grandfather (and by extension, a father), he's married, he lives in Texas, and he is a conservative republican. (I did find it odd that in his About Me page, he capitalizes 'Husband,' 'Dad,' and 'Grampa', but keeps 'republican' in lower case.)

It just so happens that I am decidedly not a conservative republican. But then, I'm not a liberal democrat. Or even a progressive whig, a despondent communist, or a repressed socialist either. I am unaffiliated, as there is no party that properly represents my view of what direction the USA should be going in. So there are some points with which I was able to agree with Dave on and some points where I wholeheartedly disagreed.

So be it. We live in a country where such differing opinions are welcomed and encouraged.

And honestly, I don't give a rat's ass what your politics are. I'm not here to review your politics -- I'm here to review your blog. So here I go with that.

Dave, my friend, you are one seriously long-winded, meandering son-of-a-bitch. And you tend to hash over the same ground more times than might be necessary, although I suspect that observation was the product of my having read big blocks all at once rather than digesting a single post and then waiting a few days until your next post appeared. It did seem that your favorite non-political topics are "Man, it sucks getting old" and "Man, I was such a sci-fi nerd when I was a kid and I still am!"

There's no arguing that you know how to write. I suppose anyone who was a professional journalist and writing teacher ought to be able to string a few paragraphs together. It just seems at time that you aren't sure what your point exactly is. Which makes it hard to know when you're done covering it.

It comes across somewhat Andy Rooney-ish. And, who knows, maybe that's a compliment.

Your template is relatively clean and uncluttered. Your About Me is informative and clear. You commit damn few grammar or spelling errors. (The inner curmudgeon in me insists on pointing out to you, however, that when you decide to enter a state of repose at the end of a long day, you "LIE" down, not "LAY" down. Lay is a transitive verb and demands an object. Lie is intransitive and therefore is something you can do without an object to act on.) My only complaint about your template is that, as a reviewer wanting to delve into your back catalog, your archive navigation was cumbersome and awkward. My only options were to scroll to the end of the page and see Older Entries, or to use the calendar navigation widget, but that presented pages that did not contain full entries -- only snippets that I had to click through to.

So, that's basically it. Consider editing more or being more selective. Maybe expand your topic base. Fix your archive navigation. Other than that, you're pretty much doing this whole "blog" thing right. I'm going to give you two stars for all of this:



But, my friend, some of the cheap shots really got to me. So, for calling President Obama "Osama Bin Bama", you are getting a flaming finger:



I don't care if you like the guy, or respect him, or respect the office or any of that crap. This juxtaposition was a cheap shot that really has no validity. It'd be like if I called our last president Adolph W. Hitler. George W. Bush was a lot of things, but an evil genocidal madman was not one of them. Likewise, Obama is a lot of things, but an evil terrorist mastermind isn't one of them. Dave, you're better than this. Show some class.

She's Leaving Home

Greetings primates. Life in an underground bunker isn't that bad. The scotch is plentiful, and only the finest tobacco makes it to our cigars. We avoid blogging, civil conversations are our joie de vivre. That, and typing with claws is damn near impossible.

Call it an experiment or a voyeur's wet dream, lurking on this website has been most beneficial in understanding your race and the hardships it puts itself through. It doesn't take long to come up with a set of rules, and even less time to be beheaded for not sticking to them. As such, the laws of this land are simple:

1. Avoid cliches.
2. Tidy design lets even high school dropouts appreciate writing.
3. Respect your reader's time and patience.
4. Read the bleeding FAQ.
   

On to Quaint Murmur then. This review would probably never see the light of the day had Shiner not threatened to cause grievous physical harm to my aging exoskeleton. Cliched title? Check. Uninformative "About me"? Check. "Amethyst Haze" is a 22 year old student who describes herself as a dreamer among other things. This will take time. And more scotch.

Considering the recent deluge of DOA submissions, it's a relief to review an active blog. The template needs work, but more on that later. It's the writing we all care about, and it's something everything else would be forgiven for. Everything about the blog screamed Indian emo kid, but one must stay objective in this gig.

Amethyst, you're from a part of the world that fiercely values its identity and your writing shows that. But why do I get the feeling I'm reading the words of Ted Mosby crossed with Zach Braff? All these thank you speeches sound alright when read one by one, but collectively make it sound like you can't stop gloating. And that's just a tenth of your self-indulgent "thank you" posts.

We visit blogs for stories, to identify with journeys similar to ours. It's why retarded mommy blogs get 300 comments, and why the folk here wait months together to add a new blog to their readers. Amethyst, you have stories. Some random. Some mundane. Some are pretty good. It's a start. You try your hand at creative writing. It's not for me, but I can see that you're trying to flex your writing muscles and that's okay. Go on, explore what writing has to offer. But don't compromise with rants and smileys.

Your posts are ungodly long, and you need to work on obvious typos. Proof-read, edit, take a little time to read your own writing. Your fonts are never consistent, and your post-dates don't always show up. Clean up your layout, 3 columns are a waste of space. Use a private test blog for your template and find something less banal. Speaking of cliches, how about something original for your title and author description? Write about yourself, your blog and post it for everyone to see. What disappoints me the most about your blog is the tone of your writing. I kept asking asking myself "who are you?". And that's not just due to your spartan profile, but just who is this person spouting random wisdom? Sagacity and advice, really? No wonder 40-year olds chuckle at teenagers' blogs.

Amethyst. Slow down. Pace yourself. Think of the direction your blog has to take. Don't hit that damn publish button right away. Keep your voice, but use it for something that needs telling.

For decent to good writing, I'm giving you 2 stars.







For trying a little too hard you get:

Unless you have four fingers on your right hand, there's no excuse for you

Listen, I don't have much time today, and less to read thick, carcass-like slabs of text which suggest that I am to read without breathing.

Today's lesson will be to the point, omitting the mind-numbingly repetitive part about why I hate fugly ass templates with stupid ads about ulcers and 6 feet long sidebars with no proper About Me page.

That shit's a given.

Ed, your blog about being a dad and about your son’s ear deformity and partial deafness is an excruciating goddamn test of perseverance that I failed very quickly for one simple reason.

It is not because you can’t write and you’re not funny and you haven’t made me care about your kid; you can write and you are funny and you have made me care about Ethan. You made my hard heart laugh and you even made me happy that your kid can hear better now. You’re foul mouthed and full of attitude and introspective and your self-deprecating nature is the only thing keeping me from wanting to beat you senseless with my keyboard. You can write a decent sentence, I'll give you that.

Your problem is that you offer up solid, unappetizing hunks of visually suffocating, time-annihilating texts where I cannot discern where one mangled thought-juggernaut stops and another begins. Are you missing your right pinkie by chance? Why do you refuse to hit ENTER to help the reader visually? Do you not ever click on "View post" and see that your blog is a slop of grey matter filled with soul sucking skyscrapers of unending words? This, for example, was the blogging equivalent of someone on coke at two in the morning that won't shut up long enough to let the people being aurally trespassed upon make a lick of sense out of the jabbering.

Here's some advice:

Relax. Inhale. Exhale. Come down off of whatever it is you’re on that makes you litter your blog with parenthetical side notes in italics every ten words (which are seemingly arbitrarily thrown all over your posts and due to overuse retain none of their intended effect whatsofuckingever). Slow your hair-trigger thoughts down to a moderate hurricane, finish a thought, and then hit the motherfucking ENTER key before starting a new one.







Buckle in boy, and don't forget your helmet and when you get off you can pick up these for somehow managing to entertain the hell out of me despite your birdbrained way of presenting text:

Wandering? I'll Show You Wandering.

I fucking do not understand. Please, explain to me why this poor little girl would submit her blog here. It's not even fair.

It's just...everything is presented so basely, so numb and uncomplicated, and readers are given the impression that she finds these ideas and opinions freshly inspiring...I feel sorry for her. This little fucking goblin makes me feel sorry for her because she has a lame blog about stale observations coupled with the audacity to imply she wants to be a writer and does so without a speck of pretension, and I have to ask: is this blog a joke?

There is no way a trilingual woman with an advanced degree in software engineering could think that something like this served as radical expository when it reminds me of exchanges with my junior high pen pal from Senegal, who was assigned to me in Social Studies and all of our letters were graded essays on "what I learned in class" and "things about my country" and all that bullshit. No one in class really cared; we were a bunch of little racist American brats that wanted to see pictures of bone-necklaced tribespeople riding giant hyenas or ripping roasted zebra meat from the bone. Then one time, between letters, while we were waiting for a picture of school life in Dakar, fucking Nancy Baumgarten asked our teacher if they had cameras in Africa. That, my friends, taught me two significant life-changing lies: I hate blazing ignorance and I am better than other people because of it.

This blog reminds me of that unwarranted superiority. Every word she writes elicits this reaction:

1. I judge her simplicity and unfairly blame it on Mauritania.
2. I remember that she is from Mauritius, not Mauritania, and they are two very different countries.
   
3. I am comforted by my lofty acceptance of our cultural differences.
4. I imagine people judging her for cultural differences.
5. I realize am better than other people. Because of the lofty acceptance.
6. I realize that acceptance is not the same thing as caring.
7. I feel guilty for my lack of emotional connection with the blog, even when she opens up.
8. I get angry, because that shit's not my fault. It's the fault of the wandering mind (change the title, it's horribly misleading) that never really wanders much farther than the tip of her own fingers.
9. I am such a fucking self-important douchebag for reacting this way.
   

So I feel superior to her as well as all of those hypothetical bullies that I created in my brain, and then I feel like a dick. Basically this blog made me think about me and not at all about the blogger.

Is that still the sign of a good blog? No. No it's not, I've decided.

She made me analyze myself being such a fucking simpleton that I wanted to just give her a piece of my brain to help with mental indigestion. HOW DOES THIS MAKE YOU FEEL? DO YOU FEEL ANYTHING? DO I FEEL ANYTHING? How can we relate as human beings when there are all these insipid fences everywhere that aren't even fun to climb over?








This is extremely frustrating. I hate you because you make me hate myself. And to the readers: I'm sorry you had to sit through this review.

Even Dead Stops Stinking Eventually

Well hello there. It seems someone left a door open, allowing me to poke around in the entrails of some blogs for a while. No matter, poking around in entrails is something I enjoy, rather a lot.

Now, I know this place has a URL of I will fucking tear you apart. But I'm nice, mostly. I don't do tearing apart - I much prefer to poke you in all your sensitive places with my rapier and leave you looking like a pin cushion. A bleeding, crying pin cushion.

Today's reviewee was picked on a whim of mine. A blog called Nomadic Celebrations? Oh no, Nomadic Cerebrations. I thought yes! There will be some traveling and some writing and it will be interesting.

No.

I've read here long enough that I should have been forewarned that the chaff far outweighs the corn.

Nomadic Celebrations just doesn't deliver, well, anything. There is a total of 8 posts on the entire blog and I read them all. You can't accuse me of not being thorough. Pradeepsinghraghav is the author of the blog and while I can't pronounce his name, it doesn't stop me wanting to throw sharp things at his head, because damn.

First things first: edit your damn posts. You've got capitals where they shouldn't be and simple typos make the whole blog look messy. The ellipses. Oh god, the ellipses. One ellipse is acceptable if you're trailing off a thought. This guy, he uses multiple ellipses at the end of every. single. fucking. sentence. Stop it! Just stop it now.

His last blog post was way back in October, before the blog just fizzled out. There is no About page and nothing to tell me why he started blogging. The sidebar, while it isn't cluttered by Internet standards, still has shit in it he doesn't need.

The actual posts though, once I got past the ellipses and the random capitalisation in the first few posts, they weren't that bad. He talks a bit about the Capitalism of India and a little about corruption, but there is nothing to draw you in and keep you reading. Obviously there wasn't even enough meat to his story to keep him interested enough to write it.

So here is some free advice to all bloggers, if you're not passionate about it, don't fucking write about it. If you don't live it, love it, breathe it, what makes you think you can write about it with enough passion to draw other people in? If you're not loving what you write about, your blog will just trail off, leaving the Internet to deal with yet another dead blog.

And everyone knows that dead blogs are no fun for poking at.

The ellipses and capitalisations made me want to give you this:







But instead I give you a Meh, because just meh. You can't hate a blog that's been dead for over 7 months. Even the stink has disappeared by that point.