Is this the last leg on people are stupid's good-bye tour? Andrew Bayer posted his obervations on Kat's comments to Joe closing down his weblog, and concludes that logging is a kind of performance, with the logger trying to keep the performance going for an audience. He then applies this notion to Joe's own log and its "bitter and negative" tone.

The performance is hard to pull off, you feel like there are expectations you have to fit - you can't STOP being bitter, for one. Especially when your blog's title is 'people are stupid'. Actually, that's a character that's difficult to hold up in any medium. Even 'bitter' stand-up comedians (Denis Leary, for example) tend to lighten up eventually. It's hard to perform bitter full-time.

Joe replies:

it had nothing to do with "losing my bitterness" - less than half my posts were out-and-out bitter.

my point, which everyone seems to have missed, is that WORTHWHILE writing deserves something better than a weblog, and NON-WORTHWHILE (?) writing isn't worth writing!

see, it's really simple actually.

And furthermore:

i also like how you refuse to link to me even when i am the subject of your post ... pageview envy? :D if your writing didn't suck, you would probably be almost as popular as i was :)

Joe, your abrasive sincerity is sorely missed. At least we have your relentless adherence to your convictions: you made it through your free trial and left your weblog to die.

{Later...}

Seems like Andrew just found out about Joe's reply.

...Philip's Comment Monitor is an absolute necessity of blogging for me - the only way I can easily see what posts have comments that I haven't read. Thanks to it, I was able to easily see that Joe from people are stupid (happy now?) whined here a couple days ago, regarding a post from like a month ago. Actually, I guess I could have done without that specifically - but still, you get my point. =)

Introducing reverse cowgirl Susannah,
Queen of Kerosene

Se presentó Vestida de cuero negro Ella dijo ser La Reina del Keroseno La tentación Ese es su nombre de artista Y quiere que yo Compruebe su fuego en la pista "Reina del Keroseno" (Queen of Kerosene) Miguel Ríos & Sergio Castillo

Picture by Steve Diete Goedde.

I need to admit, if not to you but to myself, that I'm a heckler. As I go trolling through the different logs at Salon, I usually click on the comments link to leave a dumb joke in reaction to an interesting post. Oh, I might ocassionaly

Ah, to Hell with that. Whatever bug was eating me inside while writing the above has released its grip. Let's move on.

Jack-in-the-box

How does a sadist make a masochist suffer?

When the masochist asks to be punished, the sadist refuses.

Philip Pearson reports a bug fix to his comment monitor which wasn't working under non-IE browsers. Xian let me know when I introduced my customized monitor that he couldn't get neither it nor Philip's working on OS X. Maybe Phil's fix will help. Expect an updated version here soon.