Great idea + general population = Visual atrocities

I’d like to take a brief break from my full schedule of doing fuck-all to talk about a fascinating internet phenenomenon that I am neither the first, nor the last, to have a love/hate relationship with:

Myspace.

The above name will either induce a groan of disdain or remind you to go check your messages in your profile ’cause hey, it’s probably been 5 minutes. At any rate, everyone and their dog (I have a terrible feeling that I’m not exaggerating with that line) has an account these days, including myself. But that’s just thing: I’ve been traipsing around the internet for a large part of my life, and one thing I’ve discovered is there’s a large section of the human population that should be blocked off from web-page design by a 100 foot thick concrete barrier guarded around the clock by personnel with automatic weapons and attack-badgers. And a small percentage of that population, well, should just be shot for even thinking of accessing the internet.

Now before I launch into this next bit, don’t get me wrong: The principal behind Myspace is one that I whole-heartedly support. However, with every great idea are a few side effects, often negative. Myspace’s shortcomings just happen to show off the depressingly fast decline of civilization, that’s all. Here’s how:

- Retarded, color-blind monkeys can make better pages that are easier on the eyes than some of the shit I’ve seen: text the same color as the background, color-schemes of hot pink and puke-green, black text on dark background, and ridiculous static-image backgrounds that you can’t see text over because when you scroll the text is the same fucking color as the picture. You know, it’s the sort of thing that takes common sense, chops it into little bits, and throws it screaming in agony from twelve stories up.

- Streaming media and the halfwits that don’t understand “no, listening to two tracks at once is NOT appealing.” Thankfully Myspace wised up and now allows you to disable music from automatically playing on profiles, but I STILL come across pages with two, sometimes three streaming windows media files that love to buffer all at once. Not only that, but 90% of the time it’s some overplayed shitacular excuse of a music video and RARELY anything you’d want to see. No no really, I WANT to see the latest hip-hop video that looks EXACTLY like the rest of the lot, or Marilyn Manson because I didn’t get my fill when MTV whored the shit out of him in the late 90′s.

- Ebonics inbreeding with chat lingo. There is no larger concentrated effort of raping and pillaging the English language than Myspace. Not only do you have people who are well over the age of 15 that don’t know TyPiNg LiKe ThIs is something 10 year old girls typically do because their parents didn’t slap any sense into them before throwing a keyboard at them, but you have people (“gangsta-g”s, wiggers, and other suburban degenerates) that somehow COMBINE the verbal excrement that is Ebonics with the typing equivalent known as chat lingo, forming sentences like “u kn0 dat’z hawt b1tch”. Now as fascinating as the evolution of a language is, this is like watching the average Arkansas family tree form from its roots: Starts off amusingly enough, but by the end there’s so many deformities and syndromes that you want to vomit and murder all at once. Hell, as I write this Myspace is down (a whole issue unto itself), and have a look at their notice. Sure, in chat no caps and missing apostrophes is a given, but on the main page of a site getting tens of thousands of unique visitors every hour? That’s not an assertion of style- that’s being a lazy incompetent moron. Go Tom!

On a side-note to the picture, it was at least 5 hours before they came back online. Nice estimating, dipshits.

- Glitches, errors, and generally more technical difficulties than you would think possible given the site’s popularity (then again, I guess patience could be a side effect of stupid) . Oh it’s a blast: You leave a comment, but there’s a solid chance it’ll hang/generate an error, making you either a) wait it out for eternity or b) re-post it and then BAM, your comment is double-posted and you look like an assclown. Then there’s the lovely “server is too busy!” message- you know, Fox gave them $580 million for rights, but by the looks of it they pissed it all away on hookers and crack instead of something equally fun, yet far safer: Bandwidth! As for the whole “routine maintenance” on profiles… I think someone needs to explain to Myspace what “routine” means, because it’s certainly not spots of time ranging from 5 minutes to 2 hours at any random part of the day. With the amount of traffic that Myspace generates on a daily basis, it would seem logical to have a large unit of professional technicians caring for the servers daily and working out kinks. So either these people don’t exist, or it’s actually a tight-knit group of mentally handicapped 5 year olds. I’m betting on the latter.

- Encouraging the proliferation of comment fishing. Let’s just toss self-esteem issues out the window- nobody is gonna post a picture of themselves if they really think they’re ugly because short of being forced to do it, that’s just not how reality works. Yet still you have girls (and occasionally, guys) posting a self-pic with a caption like “zOMG I’m hideous”…. Followed by a dozen comments telling them how great looking they are. And I’d almost despise these people for using their “friends” (more on that in a moment) just for a self-esteem boost but you know what? Fuck the people responding to them as well, because they could be teaching said person a valuable lesson by posting “yeah jeez, you ARE hideous. Did you get hit by a bus?”

- Friend whoring. Myspace took the word “friend” and sucked all that was good and right from it, because there’s an overwhelming abundance of people with 500+ friends. Now I understand bands or people that have done something legitimately popular having that amount of people added, but when you see an average 17 year old kid from some no-name town with nothing of any interest on their page and 1200 friends, you just want to smack them. No moron, I’d bet my left pinkie (and I LOVE my left pinkie) that you have 2, maybe 3 friends tops in real life and play with the imaginary ones/yourself far more often. This is like the kids in my town with over-sized trucks that make a shit-ton of noise to compensate for their short-comings as men; no, that big impressive number does not make you impressive by association. It does, however, make you look like a senseless, pathetic failure at life.

But aside from the technical issues (and what I mentioned above barely scratches the surface) the creators behind Myspace can’t really be blamed- after all, it’s not entirely their fault that most people who find their way to the site lack any grasp whatsoever of aesthetic value or the English language. As I said before, the idea is one I’m behind: It’s easily the greatest free tool on the internet for promoting yourself, your band, art, etc. And aside from that, it makes it mildly more entertaining to keep in touch with friends. At least, the ones that aren’t color blind monkeys with down syndrome.