Diary of a Low Budget Superhero

Oh yeah, I left you people hanging, didn't I? I started a side story in one of my recent "holy fuck is this a lot of snow" essays. I believe I promised a follow-up called "Somerville Can Suck It"? Well, I aim to please.

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"You know we're living in a society! We're supposed to act in a civilized way!"
(George Costanza)

Is it just me, or are we fast becoming a society of total dickheads? Everywhere I go and anywhere I look, it seems that people are becoming more and more rude, insensitive and thoughtless. One would think that as we advance technologically, making so many tasks and chores easier to do, we would also become better humans.

I guess I don't know why I think that; I guess I am assuming that the things that used to put people in a bad mood, say, waiting in lines at the Department of Motor Vehicles (also known as Satan's Asshole, thanks Dane Cook) are replaced with online transactions that take two minutes. Doing taxes. Changing your address at the post office. Applying for a loan, or a job or a credit card. Paying bills, making a household budget, checking bank balances, transferring money from savings to checking. Obtaining directions, finding out movie times. Getting tickets for a game or a show. Renting a car. Knowing if it's going to rain later.

In today's society, we don't even have to walk around with that niggling little memory tugger like we used to, you know, asking everyone we see "WHAT was that actor's name, you know, the guy with the thing? It's on the tip of my tongue. He was in that movie with one of the Baldwins and that other guy who was a vampire once. YOU know who I mean..." This kind of thing used to drive people crazy all day and nite. When is the last time you were unable to sleep because you couldn't think of "Kevin Spacey." Now it's instant gratification.

Yet people are still in bad moods. They don't have any sense of perspective on how bad things really COULD be. Just speaking in general terms, there's so much less to bitch about these days than our parents had, but all I hear is bitching, moaning, groaning. And thanks to Facebook I get to hear it constantly. "Really? You're having a 'crappy day' AGAIN? When do you ever have a GOOD day. Could it maybe, one wonders, be YOU that is bringing the crap along with you wherever you go?"

Why can't everyone just fucking relax? What's so bad about life? Angry people walking around with a scowl all day take every little thing as the universe attacking them. They got up that morning to find the outfit they were going to wear is in the laundry, the car low on gas, the coffee from the drive-thru turns out to be plain instead of hazelnut, there's traffic on the road...instead of taking all this in stride, looking on the bright side and getting past these little nuisances cheerfully, they stew and fume needlessly, working themselves into a lather. By the time they get to me, a fellow shopper in the grocery store, as we both approach the cashier with our purchases, they furiously shove ahead and cut in front of me even though they have fourteen items and I only have a pack of gum and a Diet Coke.

Probably the same person who didn't bother to scrape and brush the snow from their car hood and trunk, so that gigantic slabs of white death come hurdling off the car as they speed around, uncaring about cars, dogs and children in the path of their Apathy Torpedos of Destruction.

"Driving angry" is the cause of so many "accidents."

Parking in handicap spaces. Tossing wrappers and cans on the ground. Speaking rudely to service employees; one of my friends came back from the bank last week having witnessed some asshole being so rude they made the bank teller cry. Seriously? And it's necessary to be so angry WHY?

We should be nicer to each other. But that's not happening. Instead we seem to be becoming worse humans. Decency, consideration and kindness? There's no app for that.

"I want to go to Disneyland," I said to Joe, two seconds after seeing a TV commercial featuring flying Dumbo transporting the happiest family ever from their home to the park.

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Do you ever hear about something that a person did that was so stupid, I mean so incredibly brainless, that your reaction is something like "Wha...why...ARE...PEOPLE...!?" It's like the act of stupidity was so powerful that just by hearing about it, a dam of dumb burst and sent a wave of stupid all the way from its origin to your brain where it took away your verbs. All your mouth can summon is "Why are people."

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Two movies started about an hour ago, at midnight. I was supposed to be working on an essay, but as I glumly sat, freshly showered and staring down a blinking cursor that was all but mocking inspiration, I couldn't stand the deafening silence. Treading empty pages makes for a lonely night, dudes. So I reached over and mashed some buttons on the remote. And here I am, an hour later.

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Hey, guess what? It's time for a re-telling of this story. It's been eight years since I've told it and seventeen years since it happened. This is for Adam.

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(continued from Part 1)

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I see you over there in the menu bar, Weight Watcher's tab, don't get all lonely because I haven't touched you since summer. I got stuff for you too, I just haven't felt like writing. And you know those Facebook statuses? They've been taking the place of Low Budget Superhero. Almost a decade of writing, and it's coming undone because I can now post my thoughts in 220 character micro-blogs throughout the day and night, getting immediate and satisfying comments from every other obsessive Live Feed button-pusher. You know who you are! I have no legitimate claims to outrage, having been the cheerleader whose rallying whoops enticed at least five people to join. If you're tweeting because of me, I'm sorry.

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The latest barrel of hot viscous suck-juice to get dumped on the Internet is this thing called automatic comment generator, or blog comment widget. I'd like to track down the person who thought this kind of marketing would contribute to society and ask them a question or two, the first being simply: "What the fuck?"

But let me tell you why.

Some of you guys remember this, my online diary, from way back when it was called Jungle Sweet Jungle, so named for the inspiration provided by Geoffrey Holtz' book, Welcome to the Jungle: The Why Behind "Generation X" and the slant of my own writings, which was, is, and I guess will always be me searching for a foothold in history. Home, sweet Home. I don't crochet doilies, so I made a diary. Okay, blog, if you must. My first-ever post was about my erstwhile ebay addiction, where I spent my 1990s-boom era fat salary...a moment of silence for the dot-coms...on dust-collecting trifles like Brady Bunch lunchboxes. That last sentence ought to be in the dictionary under "Gen X."

So yeah, I'm in my ninth year here. Changed the name five years ago, changed the tools I use to do it, changed the style around a bunch. But I'm old school. I still only link to other diarists (okay, bloggers) that I actually read and enjoy. I still don't sell ad space (like, who would buy it). And I still view Low Budget Superhero as basically an adult version of the forts I used to make out of my Wonder Woman blankie and a couple of dining room chairs. You can come in if you want to, but you have to wear this Burger King crown and sing "Sesame Street" with me.

APPARENTLY, now that there's like eleventy-jillion blogs, and blog is a word now, and many of them have grown into quite the respectable (or at least oft-quoted) online news magazines, and everybody and your dog has one, and some have been made into books and movies, there's a great focus on making money from it. And part of that money-making hunger is getting more clicks. Clicks, clicks, clicks, it's all about the clicks, at the expense of basic Netiquette. Me, I hold no truck with this predatory practice of "generating more traffic" to one's blog by installing a fake comment widget.

Oh, you didn't know about the fake comment widget? Then your blog must have a WAY better defense against spambots than I do here at Low Budget Superhero. I've been battling these things with increasing fervor for years. I've tried everything on my utility belt except the shark repellent. Sometimes my arsenal of blockers wins, sometimes the hackers that write these spam codes win. I shake my fist at you, evil geniuses! I shall smite you with my strong words!

The idea is, these money-hungry dingleberries want more clicks, so they employ one of the comment spambot tools, and configure it for certain key words. Then it'll automatically go all around the web and leave comments in other blogs. With a link back to theirs. I don't know how they get past some of the things they get past! But they do. They'll leave you a comment right now, see if they don't. By leaving a fake comment with their link, they think this is going to get you to click on their link, because you think you got a comment. If it looks real enough, you'll leave it sitting there in your comments section and maybe some of your readers will click, too, and then...somebody...somehow makes money off that. I don't know quite how, I'm not good at that kind of thing. I still haven't worked out precisely what went on there at the end of Trading Places with the crop report and the whole "turn those machines back on." I've only been pretending to understand it for 26 years.

I get these automatic comments every damn day. My site here is set up so I get email saying there's a comment on one of my posts, and I have to log in to approve it first. Now, sometimes it's really you guys, which I adore and encourage, even if you don't agree with me -- but most of the time it's some horrendous auto-generated nonsense message that I just delete. I tell you, I must delete ten of these a week. They're insidious. I get auto comments with tracks back to websites as far reaching as shoe stores, phone companies, printing houses and dating sites. The worst offenders are online gambling sites and, of course, that mack daddy of the Internet, porn. What do they say? Occasionally the comments are somewhat normal, though just a little bit off...like, it could almost make sense when viewed in a certain way. For example, on my post called Oblique Strategies for Life, "Janice" posted this:

Well, yeah, true. But does it really pertain to the topic? Kinda not. I do know a Janice, too, so that one took me a few minutes to inspect. I may have even mentioned her in an entry, which may even have been the trigger for the auto-commentor. I knew it wasn't my Janice because the trackback url didn't make sense. Some handbag clearance website. That one pissed me off because they got me --I clicked it. I clicked it just to make sure it wasn't my Janice merely being loopy in her comment choice. She can be loopy now and then. She recently broke her ankle just walking. That takes a certain loopitude. But no, it wasn't her, it was some damn bot.

Other auto-commenter aren't so clever. Sometimes it's a bunch of random character gobbledy-gook that fools no one. Some are English words, but strung together into nonsense, like this one that repeated for about a week straight on a single post of mine. It read simply:

Then there was "Mort from Tonga," whose engine thought an appropriate reply to "I Don't Have The Guts For Health Care Reform" was this ramble:

Hey Mort, how about I "learn YOU into a rack with assets and companies." And what's with the sad emoticon? Christ, he's rude, crazy AND a downer. This is just terrible, terrible stuff.

I Googled for the widget applications so I could see how these marketing geniuses justify such spamming. Here's what one of them says:

You see that? This is only the beginning.

We have their word.

I want to hear one good reason why national health insurance cost can't be on a sliding scale based on individual income and expenses. Just one good reason. I, for one, would welcome that at this point. Because from everything I'm reading, hearing and watching, I'm starting to worry that health care "reform" is simply going to be new legislation stating that every person must buy health insurance, and that nobody is addressing the COST of it nor the list of benefits included.

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I didn't so much clear yesterday's Hurdle of Blah. It's more like I kinda shuffled up to it, stared at it awhile, drank a second cup of coffee, nudged it aside with my butt as I plodded past. Hey, I got to work and did my stuff, didn't I? Leaping over hurdles is for next week.

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This video that I posted earlier tonight on Facebook is worth reposting here, even though at this point I don't think anyone reads Low Budget Superhero who isn't also a Facebook friend. Unless I've blocked you and you don't yet realize it, which probably means you suck, so go away.

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Heather posted a Bostonist.com blog about the utter horror that are flip flops. My friends know enough not to wear flip flops around me, I cannot abide them.

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Jen and munk were Facebooking some frustrations tonight. The topic? Outsourcing North American call centers to the other side of the planet. Mostly to India. Now, my Spidey Sense told me that some people were, if not offended, then surprised that Jen and munk would be so blunt about this, but I totally get what they're saying. I hate it too.

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