First!
If I’ve learned just one thing about the internet during my 10+ years working bullshit office jobs that require little more of me than just looking at videos of monkeys peeing in their own mouths, it’s that Internet people love numbers. If you put a number in front of something, they’ll read it. That’s why popular sites always have tons of top five and top ten lists. If you offer someone a list Bolt Circle Diameters to look though, they’ll ignore it. But if you give them the Top 5 Hottest BCD’s for 2009, well, now you’ve got something. Because we read down the list, so excited to see what the best BCD is. As if some crack team of scientists with supercomputers has been crunching numbers day and night, and the results are now available as a ream of dot matrix printed data.
So from now on, I’m going to try to make all of my posts in the form of numbered lists. Even if it makes no sense. Examples I’m working on:
- Top 1 Ride from Albina Press to the top of Larch Mountain!
- Best 2 characters from the television show “Hardcastle and McCormick”!
- 8 favorite handlebar wrapping techniques mentioned in the craigslist ad from pdx wrap studio!
Also, I plan to use ALL CAPS whenever possible. Because I want my words to be HEARD. And I will use exclamation points liberally. To show that I’m really stoked to have listed these things. Internet people love excitement (and videos of monkeys peeing in their own mouths).
And aside from numbered lists, the internet is also full of mildly autistic youths who revel in counting off their placement in posts. Like this: FIRST! Well, nice job, jackass. You won.
Luckily, I don’t have to deal with this stuff on this blog. Because only three people read it (two of them also write for it, and the other one has the username of “mom”). So they never comment on the posts. Which is why I’m proposing a new form of internet boast: the “Only!” When a post hasn’t been commented on, I’m going to ONLY! it, boosting the ego of the person who posted it originally. Which on this site is often me.
But if the post you’re looking at has no comments, “only” it for me. I realize that the content was boring. I can’t fix this. Because I’m a boring man. But we can at least make it more Internet-y.
Sosovelo… now with more Internet!
Here’s a video The Count from Sesame Street:
podium!
Just in time for Christmas, salve for your ego:
I read the site religiously. I wish you would post more. Seriously, as far as unique visitors go, I’m right behind your mom. I hope she liked the teabagging reference as much as I did.
And yet. And yet while I love reading blogs and other online media, I’m
not someone who posts much on them. Or really at all. In fact, this is
only my second post ever. Still, I have been thinking about contacting you guys, because as much as I love the site, as appreciative as I am of the writing style, and as loudly as I laughed at the line about Burt Reynolds’s mustache, I do think the site occasionally needs a good copyeditor, or at least a commitment from you to adhere to the rules for commas, periods, and quotation marks. So I’ll make you a deal: you embrace placing your commas and periods INSIDE the closing quotation mark, and I’ll start commenting on your posts. I’ll even be provocative and start a flame war, even if it’s just with myself.
Deal?
My top five replies to Sixty!
1. Thanks for posting! And reading.
2. We (Ed: I) do need better copy editing. Better writing and photography are also on the to-do list. I like to tell myself that I’m the David Foster Wallace of sarcastic bicycle and economics blogging around Portland, shifting the post-modern paradigms of punctuation.
3. Number 2 is actually a lie. I’m just dumb. And never bothered to learn the appropriate placement of quotation marks, which is why my college papers were all sans-dialogue. The other contributors to the site don’t bother to correct me because they know about my fragile ego.
4. Deal. “Henceforth,” he said, “this shit will be grammatically correct.” But still weighted heavily with typos and misspellings
5. When you scan your post quickly, it says “I’m right behind your mom. I hope she liked the teabagging…”
This website is fucking hilarious.
Bookmarked, bitches… bookmarked.
David Foster Wallace is, alas, dead.
As far as economists go, I could be getting over my internet shyness by chatting with Paul Krugman on talkingpointsmemo.com. Instead I’m laughing at teabagging jokes (I know it’s a joke because it would be anatomically impossible) on a site ostensibly about bicycling. That’s got to be at least a little comforting to the fragile ego. As your mom might say, keep up the good work.
6th!