March 2009

  • "Bad" Doesn't Quite Cover It

    By msarko on 3/30/09 4:02pm
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    I'm at something of a crossroads, readers. See, I like this job. It's fun to be snide and intermittently cruel for a living. Since my Cat 'O Nine Tails got lost in the mail, I'll have to hold off on my blossoming dungeon dom career and settle for putting the whip to the many laughable horrors of the World Wide Web. But as much as I adore the catharsis of this kind of work, it's forcing me to go deeper into the fetid pits of failed humanity than I ever intended in my naive years of idealistic boyhood. I mean, I can't tell my mother that I spent my day looking at silicone approximations of mythical animal genitals.

    Well, I could, but she deserves better than that.

    Today, I explored a dark corner of the Internet known as Bad Dragon. In short (because nothing else about this site will be), they are purveyors of special sex toys modeled after what they imagine the penises of creatures that don't even exist look like.

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  • Craigslist Files #14

    By msarko on 3/25/09 12:36am
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    In my own deeply embarrassing way, I've come to appreciate the sheer variety of content on craigslist. As depressing as I find the myriad absurdities of that least venerable pseudo-community, I believe it would be all the sadder if it were just another boring collection of boring people with boring demands. Sure, I cherry pick the crazies so we can all bask in the cosmic humor of people with unfortunate desires and childish plans for petty criminality, but doing so requires a lot of wading and weeding. Even if you were to remove all of the spam and bots from W4M, there is only one wild-eyed idiot for every fifty workaday drones who are neither remarkably awful nor surprisingly appealing. The Furry Civil War Re-Enactment clubs share space with pickup games of 40-and-up soccer and short-lived coffee chats. Though I wish the world were a better place, I'd rather have some wanton ridiculousness than an infinite field of vanilla yogurt.  



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  • Beautiful Cervix is the Title of a Real Website

    By msarko on 3/23/09 4:57pm
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    If growing up in a politically-correct society has taught me anything, it's that females are all hyper-sensitive sacks of aloe-moisturized emotions who only understand themselves through the filter of product advertisements and children's toys. As a result, an small but intrepid contingent of misandronistic lesbians called "feminists" have taken it upon themselves to undo the damage done to their chromosomal peers by evil, evil penises and the people attached to them. Central to this battle is the mission to convince women that their girl-parts aren't ugly just because Barbie doesn't have them.

    Yes, despite the fact that the vast majority of males spend the better part of their lives attempting to interact with them in excessively intimate ways, many women still believe that their vaginae are embarrassing and repulsive.

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  • A Very Special Craigslist Files: Chicago Prostitutes

    By msarko on 3/18/09 5:41am
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    The Internet has spent its first fifteen years of widespread public use in a state of Wild West lawlessness. Sure, various governments have made a show of shutting down kiddie porn rings and stroking the RIAA in the unwinnable war against Peer-2-Peer file sharing. All the same, the authorities have been slow on the uptake of new technology. To this day most US government offices are running Windows 2000 on ancient Gateways. The fact that it takes a day and a half to get the "human kidney" auctions taken down from Ebay is a clear indication that our society has a long way to go before the World Wide Web is properly policed. But hold on to your ten gallon hats, pardners. There's a new sheriff in town. Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart, to be exact. See, Dart is getting sick of dumping money into his vice squad just so they can keep up with the constant stream of unambiguous ads for hookers on the craigslist Erotic Services page. He's asking the federal government to officially ban Erotic Services sections from online classified sites in a bid to ease the task of law enforcement. I, myself, am conflicted about this. I'm a pretty liberal guy, so I'd much rather see vice elements like drugs and prostitution legalized so the cops will actually spend their time pursuing justice for real crimes. At the same time, this is craigslist we're talking about. These aren't going to be normal prostitutes, they're going to be horrible, bizarro-world hookers fueled by delusions and the wrong kind of DIY sensibilities. I've decided to take a sample of posts from the Chicago craigslist Erotic Services page so that you, readers, can judge for yourselves.



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  • Giant Scroll Bar Theater: Anti-American Female Posters

    By msarko on 3/16/09 4:18pm
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    In the mid-1990's some horrible linguist discovered that the Internet was rife with miscommunications because it is incredibly difficult to convey complex emotions with only text. Many gifted poets and authors spend their entire lives contending with this problem, so what hope does the average Joe Download have of avoiding the unintentional faux pas in his chats and emails? This is the origin of that irritating device, the emoticon. It's ironic, really, that people have been using punctuations they never knew how to use properly in order to overcome the hurtles of web communication. Maybe one in every ten-thousand English speakers know how to use a semicolon for its intended purpose, but there are millions of borderline-illiterate teens who know that it makes a winking smiley face when combined with a close-parenthesis.

    If it isn't apparent, I'm generally not a fan of emoticons or of Internet lingo in general. But sometimes I wish it was present just to clear up any confusion.

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  • Craigslist Files #12: Anime Girl

    By msarko on 3/11/09 3:04pm
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    Boredom can be a wonderful thing. Aside from necessity, it's the leading cause of invention. This past week, in a moment of supreme boredom, I decided to engage in one of my favorite new pastimes. I created a fake post on craigslist. Now, the posts I've made in the past have only been marginally successful, for various reasons. I think the biggest problem with all of them was that they didn't really target the right demographic. Sure, the concept of a suicidal guy looking for his last screw on Casual Encounters may be funny in an Andy Kaufman sort of way, but that doesn't mean the majority of responses aren't going to be from the same spam-bots that infest serious posts. This time around, I decided to go after a more ambitious item. So, I meandered over to Women Seeking Men and decided to do a little Internet drag, with a twist. This is the post that resulted: 

    Anime Girl (Giant Robot Monster)

    Konichiwa. My name is Mai, but I also sometimes uncontrollably transform into a demon hybrid name Ubuku. I have emerald green eyes that take up roughly 1/3 of my head and my mouth is impractically small. My hair is an orange hue that does not appear in nature... usually. I'm looking for a guy, preferably an upperclassman in a highly permissive high school, who is skinny and somewhat effeminate and who doesn't mind going on mind-bending adventures into archaic evils. I used to live with some friends, but now I'm currently in the clutches of a sentient robot of gargantuan proportions, so it's a big plus if you're into rescuing things. Pic for OVA. No tentacle shots.



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  • Deconstructing the Flame War

    By msarko on 3/9/09 4:38pm
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    Though the Internet as we know it is the youngest of media, it is a fast-moving beast. In little more than a decade it has developed venerated traditions and even a fundamental sense of etiquette. The earliest iteration of public-use Internet was purely text, so some of these traditions have a foundation in the long-abandoned halls of Gopher. Perhaps the oldest and most frequently practiced custom is the Message Board Flame War. Armed with the false empowerment of anonymity and an army of straw men, two individuals at odds on a message board can go on for days at a time, slowly devolving into messy, embarrassing contest in which even the ad hominem begins to look like a clever gambit. Today, I will be using a sample debate to demonstrate the violent ballet of text that is the Flame War.

    The Civil Opening

    Every Flame War begins with one individual making a contentious claim that is, for the most part, well-phrased. Commas tend to be in the right place, terms like "ergo" are more likely to be used properly and the all-caps button is safely set to the "off" position.

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  • Craigslist Files #11

    By msarko on 3/4/09 1:00pm
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    It must be difficult for craigslist people. I can't even begin to imagine what it must be like to want things no one in their right mind should want and also feel compelled to share those desires with the entire world. Maybe one day, after months and months of commenting on them, I'll be able to sympathize with these people. One day. But today is not that day.  



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  • Miracles of Science

    By msarko on 3/2/09 6:21pm
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    I'm sick. No, not in the figurative sense. Well, yes, in the figurative sense in addition to the literal. I've complained about a lot of different illnesses in the past; shocked monkey, total eclipse of the heart, great balls of fire, and other song-related maladies. Today, it's an old-fashioned rhinovirus, the common cold. I don't know how I got it as it obviously doesn't have anything to do with physical contact with other human beings. Maybe it has some connection to walking drunk, in the rain, at night,  with a hole in my spirit that could only have been filled by pancakes procured at an international house thereof.

    But enough about my Saturday. Regardless of how it got here, this bastard disease is going to be hanging onto my life for the next week. Unless...

    Yes! Unverified Internet medicine from a disreputable "doctor" who probably lives next door to the Nigerian prince who's just always strapped for cash for some reason! Ladies and gentlemen... aw, who am I kidding? This is the Internet.

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