It had to be done
2005-03-18

As all humanity knows, every single piece of serial writing on the web has to contain, at some point, meta commentary on the world of blogging. So here we go, I'm playing in the big leagues now. Those of you who do stuff with their lives can skip this entry.

Gawker used to center on this tiny little universe which contained the Sun, and around the Sun revolved Soho House and the Conde Nast toilets. Then they changed editors from Choire Sicha to Jessica Coen and Gawker's universe suddenly exploded, rapidly expanding at the speed of light past links to Page Six (semi-interesting) to links to some blog with gonerrhea jokes in it (not really interesting at all). Now they are regularly linking to Slate articles, which suggests to me that their universe is slowly fading, the dark matter growing as the particles of actual content float farther and farther apart.

I mean, for Christ's sake, Slate? Why not MSNBC.com? Or the AOL Homepage? Hey, at least that's exclusive. Kind of.

Remember, these people get paid to surf the Net all day.

OK, and now I am done.

UPDATE: It turned out I WASN'T done. Since everyone in the world has to do a tribute to Hunter S. Thompson, I will also do a tribute... Forget it, I'd rather go on bitching about Gawker.

For those of you (including me) who haven't read "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," here's a recommendation:

"Don�t let the end of Thompson�s life fool you: Fear and Loathing is a funny, hopeful book."

Something rings wrong there. I never thought of Thompson's writing as especially hopeful. Maybe "Fear and Loathing" was his "Tuesdays with Morrie," though, and I just missed his cheeriest work. Regardless, there's something sick about recommending a book on the basis that "the guy killed himself, but the writing isn't sad or nothin'."

(The rest of the post makes it sound like "Fear and Loathing" was mainly for saddos who wanted to vicarously experience drug trips, so even if it makes "Night" look like Regis Philbin's autobigraphy, I still wouldn't pick it up based on the Gawker rec.)