Shattered Siegel
Sep. 2nd, 2006 10:45 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tikistitchSo, like the rest of y'all, we were pretty enthralled by the whole Msscribe saga. We're not ones for Potter fandom (we've read the books and seen the movies, and once or twice visited Rowling's web site, but that's about the extent of it). Nevertheless, we saw mighty parallels with the whole freaky universe of teh Intarnets and crazy online collecting fandoms in which we've participated.
We also learned a new term, "sockpuppet," which is apparently what you call it when a particular crazyhead invents a new online persona expressly for the purpose of appearing to have a wealth of online support where none would otherwise exist. (Having been on the 'net since the dawn of time, we'd definitely encountered the behavior before, but were simply too unhip to be familiar with the correct terminology.)
After spending valuable time reading through the whole wretched drama, we put it all down to the beautiful geekitude which is fandom. Face it, we're all craaaaazy, right? In our real life collecting community, we had a guy who was widely believed to be living in his office at Microsoft, expressly to have more money to spend on toys. We had another guy organize well-publicized fandom events to benefit children's charities, all the while running a business specializing in gay pr0n (not that there's anything wrong with gay pr0n, or, for that matter, children, but you must admit, it makes a rather odd combo). Tikistitch herself has been to Tunisia--twice!--to visit Obi-Wan Kenobi's house and pick fiberglass dinosaur bone shards out of sand dunes.
But, you know, we're a bunch of geeks. We're completely nuts. And, we expect nutty behavior from a bunch of head cases.
We were therefore most surprised (not to mention gleeful) to hear the news that a journalist--that is, a real journalist, meaning a guy who wrote stuff for real established print magazines and got paid for it--has just been fired, by The New Republic, no less, for creating a sockpuppet to cheerlead his admittedly wacky blog ravings.
Pundits--they're all just a bunch o' geeks. Hahahahahahaha.....
We also learned a new term, "sockpuppet," which is apparently what you call it when a particular crazyhead invents a new online persona expressly for the purpose of appearing to have a wealth of online support where none would otherwise exist. (Having been on the 'net since the dawn of time, we'd definitely encountered the behavior before, but were simply too unhip to be familiar with the correct terminology.)
After spending valuable time reading through the whole wretched drama, we put it all down to the beautiful geekitude which is fandom. Face it, we're all craaaaazy, right? In our real life collecting community, we had a guy who was widely believed to be living in his office at Microsoft, expressly to have more money to spend on toys. We had another guy organize well-publicized fandom events to benefit children's charities, all the while running a business specializing in gay pr0n (not that there's anything wrong with gay pr0n, or, for that matter, children, but you must admit, it makes a rather odd combo). Tikistitch herself has been to Tunisia--twice!--to visit Obi-Wan Kenobi's house and pick fiberglass dinosaur bone shards out of sand dunes.
But, you know, we're a bunch of geeks. We're completely nuts. And, we expect nutty behavior from a bunch of head cases.
We were therefore most surprised (not to mention gleeful) to hear the news that a journalist--that is, a real journalist, meaning a guy who wrote stuff for real established print magazines and got paid for it--has just been fired, by The New Republic, no less, for creating a sockpuppet to cheerlead his admittedly wacky blog ravings.
Pundits--they're all just a bunch o' geeks. Hahahahahahaha.....
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Date: 2006-09-02 06:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-02 11:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-03 04:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-04 03:30 am (UTC)