Grumpy

Morons make me grumpy.

The Moron of the New Year award goes to Tom, who runs a site that I’ll choose not to link, because he doesn’t deserve the egoboost/hit count increase from me. Hint: said site ‘reviews’ weblogs, using the heads of two famous actors as the ‘rating system’.

A good friend of mine reports that Tom told her that her blog is “set up like a disenfranchised teenager’s,” along with other choice criticisms regarding the sites she chose to link, subject matters, and design. She wasn’t very happy about these remarks, even though she should have known better than to ask the opinions of this creep.

What I dislike most about pathetic “A-list” wannabes like Tom is the reliance on style over substance. I could frankly care less about your cssflashmacromediaswoopytilingjingles; if you have something interesting to say, you are a rarity. Beth is one of these. Matt is another. Both sites admittedly are sparse on the design side, and this is ok, because the point of these sites is the message, not the method.

What Tom and the rest of the design Nazis don’t understand is that that the Web has been, is, and always will be about text, not lunchbox stickers. As we’ve seen from the dotcom fallout, if you have nothing to say, nobody will care. If you have no substance, nobody will visit.

Now, specifically regarding Tom and Ed’s method to fame: since they can’t produce their own original content, they must attack the work of others in order to satisfy their own need for ego-improvement. I’m sure their site started as a joke, but as they invariably played the sycophant to well-connected A-listers, they began to become more relentless in their attack of the non-A-list sites. Seriously, folks, if these guys had a clue, they wouldn’t be hosted by Earthlink. I mean, Earthlink, for cryin-out-loud. If they were skilled, productive members of society, they’d be running a successful business, instead of whining about other people’s personal websites. Why, I ask, don’t they run an equally-entertaining site that reviews “The Storm Drains of Lower San Francisco”? Well, I answer: you can insult a storm drain all day long, and it will not link back to you in its rant about how it was wronged.