Internet sites i used to love, but now don’t give a fuck about
the internets might be the single greatest invention for bored people and perverts ever. in the beginning it was just dial up porn… but then came other things to do inbetween masturbating. the following are 6 websites that i had slight obsessions with and then suddenly had no interest in at all and the moments that made that so.
1. rotten.com- when i was in highschool at just the point when people started the get the Internet and all that was out there was porn and chatrooms. but where could a twisted 17 year old kid could go look at clips of people being hit by trains, photos of shark attacks, and the autopsy reports of dead celebrities? luckily rotten.com had all of that in one convenient spot.
moment i realized i was over it: i’m not actually sure when i quit looking at gross shit on this site, but after September 11th there really wasn’t any sort of horror that was ever gonna top what i watched all day on the news.
2. the onion- the original fake news. i spent countless hours scrolling through article after article on this site. emailing links to my friends. printing out all my favorite ones and compiling them in a notebook to read again and basically just laughing my ass off.
moment i was over it: when i started to notice that the Onion was recycling old articles pretty regularly for new issues and then also when i realized that the headlines themselves were usually way funnier than any of the articles inside.
3. Art Of the Mix- a website completely dedicated to one of my all time favorite obsessions, the making of mix tapes (and later cds). my love affair with this site lasted for years. you can go back and look at mixes i’ve posted from all the way back to 1999. it was great, you could post your own mixes. comment on other people’s mixes. get voted mix of the week (two times for me). and meet people who you could trade mixes with.
moment i was over it: this was a slow process as i regularly posted mixes on a weekly or daily basis until about 2005, then it began to trail off a bit. i only posted 3 mixes in the entire year of 2006 and then it picked up a bit again last year but for the most part my love was over. besides, i have an ipod. i don’t need mix cds or tapes anymore.
4. buddyhead.com- the perfect website for a jaded, snarky fan of underground rock. buddyhead was a website based out of LA run by these two kids who just posted gossip about bands, made fun of everyone and everything, and talked about cool music that i usually liked. it was pretty awesome, especially because it was at the height of illegal downloading sites, so any new band they’d mention i could usually go find some of their songs and download. plus Buddyhead regularly harassed Uber-Douche Fred Durst and would post his phone number on the site so that people could call and harass him. it was all wonderful and juvenile.
moment i said fuck this shit: when Buddyhead just turned into the Sour Grapes website and they would diss bands that they’d championed for whatever petty reason. also they spent more time promoting their record label and their bands and less time posting hilarious gossip posts or record reviews. getting too big for your britches is always a bad thing for a website. i think whenever it was that they started to think they were actually important then they became the thing they were always making fun of.
5. Deadspin- the anti ESPN blog for people who were fed up with Yankees/Redsox 24 7 and Chris Berman’s stupid nicknames. Deadspin was funny and snarky and pretty much a sports version of Buddyhead. i loved it, even if it was was really just a bunch of links to other people’s blogs. it was still a perfect place to go read hilarious rips on ESPN and how the world wide leader had lost their way. hell it even inspired me to start writing my own damn sports blog.
moment it was dead to me: deadspin moderator/creator/main contributor till he got a real job working for a magazine, Will Leitch constantly wrote about his lover affair with former Cardinals pitcher Rick Ankiel who made an amazing comeback as an outfielder last year, highlighted by him hitting a homerun in his second game back int the majors…blah blah blah. after about the 10th straight post on the subject i posted a comment that said, “who cares besides you?” and then got banned from commenting on the site ever again. really? so being a voice of descent against ESPN is ok because their big an evil, but daring to make fun of a deadspin post about Will’s boyfriend is totally unacceptable. that my friends is called being lame.
6. myspace- it really started with friendster, but then myspace came along and took all the things about friendster that were good and then combined those things with blogs, music pages, the ability to personalized your own site, and iming thereby making friendster look like beta max being compared to DVD. all in all myspace’s real charm lay in the fact it was a good place to meet sluts. and no value can be put on that.
moment i was over it: when i realized i wasn’t obsessively checking it every 20 minutes and wasn’t even writing people that i was friends with. then i just went back to email.
Tags: a-series-of-tubes, the internetsPosted by justin on 27 Jun 2008 at 10:05 am
