A long time ago, in an internet far far away, there was once a place called (yes, I’ll say the name out loud! I’m not scared of you, Voldemort NickAlan! The cash fan-shaped scar between my eyebrows is proof enough of my valor, thank you very much!) Gawker. I used to hang out there all the time, like many of you and unlike many others of you. At one time, it was a Big Fucking Deal that one its past editors left and was subsequently maligned and then became embroiled in an imbroglio revolving around things like “oversharing,” “narcissism,” “betrayal,” and (after the parsing became exhausting), over-performed internet “yawn”-ing by studiously disinterested interested observers.

In other words, it was a typical internet contretemps; indeed, at the time, it struck me as maybe an archetypical one. Why did I care? Why did anyone? To answer these questions, I did what any self-respecting internet citizen does – I wrote an unreadably long, meanderingly idiosyncratic post about it on my completely unread blogspot-powered personal blog!

Hello. I hope you had a shit great Halloween. I watched movies and drank some tea and ignored the door. I spent most of the early evening cuddling little Jake, my cat, because some inhuman fuck-heads decided to let off fireworks early, which prompted him to fly through the kitty door at a great speed of terror, belly to the ground, scared out of his kitteh-wits.

Oh tits – I’m not getting too far into this because crazy people who believe crazy things for 35 years before deciding they’re crazy scare me. Really. Just, go away. And shut up. And keep your craziness to yourself. Anyway, this WHOLE THING is crazy enough without Gawker making wild and patently unsubstantiated claims about people. I mean – how did something this blatantly untrue make it past Alan’s or Gabby’s keen editorial eye? Of course, I’m talking about Foster Kamer’s statement that Paul Haggis is “one of the most revered, successful writer-directors of the last decade”.

Oh Alan! You sound like a nice guy with a nice apartment with maybe a nice cat who does comical things with toilet tissue to celebrate whenever a post gets Lifehacker numbers on Gawker. And maybe, Alan, you get your expensive hi-def camera out and record your pleasant cat doing comical things and you upload them to ratemycomicalkitty.com under the username “r_murdoch27″ and you clap your hands with glee whenever you receive a LOL relating to your pleasant cat video – Alan Denton’s Comical Kittehs aside, your underlings sound as if they suck big-time, according to the lovely Cajun Boy.

I want to start out by saying this is not a William Jefferson Denton take-down or an “I’m still recovering from Gawker redesign-induced seizures” post.

I honestly want to know what has happened over there. Is it the August slump or does Gawker seem to be bravely enduring the almost total absence of commenters like some kind of hipsterforsaken Brooklyn neighborhood in which the “hip new dive bar” has become a dive bar for people with new hips?

The Washington Post is featuring an opinion piece with the intriguing headline The Death of Journalism (Gawker Edition) that explains how evil liberal media reporters, undoubtedly whilst sitting on big beanbags full of moneys and smoking hashish, put in hours of work to write articles that are then picked up by blogs like Gawker, which then make money off the content they never really generated to begin with.

Hello Possible Donaters and Donatees! Do you dream? Do you day-dream like me? About, you know, The Usual Things – having a “Slut Army” of well-paid, well-dressed and highly-intelligent women at your beck and call who’ll help me take over the world and run it a little better while we constantly engage in the type of sexual practices that would raise eyebrows in even the most liberal areas of Amsterdam? Yes – I haz a dream!

It’s raining here. Torrential. Midnight has already gone and somehow that fits. I’m sitting here, smoking at my desk, thinking about the past – all our pasts – how we got to be here in all our versions of the present. I cried a bit. Big man tears. They ended. I lit another cigarette.

It’s been a long day.

I’ve thrown myself on the kindness of strangers, some of whom I also consider the closest of friends.

Why, you may ask? Oh lawwwdy, for many a reason. Here goes my top ten list for why this would be totally awesome:

1. Obviously, this would mean that any response to how I feel about a subject (whether it be one regarding news in politics, technology, science, entertainment, feminism, etc etc etc) I could just fade it out and pretend like it never happened. Oh wait, I already do that HAHAHA

Like a turd on your head,
Like a skunk under your bed,
You have stank up what was good.
Like a mote in your eye,
Like a boil upon your thigh,
You can keep your attitude.
If I, if I have been unkind,
I hope it’s personal in your mind.
If I, if I have been untrue,
I hope it still can make you blue.

Meh. The whole subject of Owen Thomas is so depressing that I can’t finish this weak parody of “Bird On A Wire”. Typeshit another verse and chorus if you want in the comments.

Oh yeah – here’s a link to his last post – it’s fucking horrid, self-serving, condescending, and made me ball my fists so much I had to literally bang this post out on my keyboard over several noisy hours.

Apologies to Sir Leonard Of Cohen

Gawker's Owen Thomas, for whom size apparently matters

Remember when Gawker was just about snarking on media execs, ripping on PR doofuses and unintentionally hyping up attention seekers? Actually, that’s still going on.

In what now seems to be a disturbing pattern of visual suicide, Gawker went and bought itself some more plastic surgery yesterday. At an un-named and up-market boutique, consultant surgeons Dr CSS Badly and Dr Moar Ajax accepted what’s called in media circles as a “don’t-care share-swap” with one N. Denton, erstwhile proprietor of GawkerMedia, in lieu of actual cash or common sense.

Okay. It’s hard to knock a Sheila McClear article on Gawker. She recently got fired, she finishes there just after Christmas, and she’s incredibly hot in a real Karen Allen circa 1982 kinda way. And she’s a very talented writer. So – I’m not going to knock the fact that Gawker’s got fictional-non-fiction “author” James Frey in for a day to act as an intern.

By Rosa Luxembourgeoise

Sheila McClear! She writes well! In the Observer!
Oh, and that blogging lady who wrote about her Beltway welts or whatever got married and Sheila has great quotes of her being paranoid about her husband and how they had M&Ms at City Hall!

Read Sheila’s great piece!

(yes – a great piece by a great piece – Ed)

They told me this would be Guerilla Gawker, and asked if I would write for them. Of course, I was privileged to, right after we finalized the details of how I’d be paid every penny as much as Nick Denton schilled for the one and one-half pieces I did for Gawker. $200.

In pennies.