Non-RebloggingNonSociety

Scaaaaary 404

Scaaaaary 404

Not “Non” as in “Nony” or “Non” as in “NonSociety” but “Non” as in poof, gone, doesn’t exist anymore.

The Website Formerly Known as Reblogging NonSociety is no more. It was suspended or deleted for a violation of WordPress‘s famous Terms of Service, and let’s just say that the self-hating Julia Allison fangirl community is taking it hard.

Some vague background, because really all I know is vague background here, and for that, I am deeply thankful. Having gone about as far into fandom as one can do without getting a restraining order, I know the level of passion involved, and it’ll be no stranger to anyone who saw that rather unfortunate DeNiro movie. No, not the Fockers, the other one.

Anyway, there’s this person, Julia Allison. She’s an actual person and a decent writer, but she behaves like a fame-seeking android at all times except when she is renouncing fame and talking about settling down with her Rich Geek Boyfriend Du Jour. Let’s call it 99.842% of her life that the android is dominant, and the remaining 0.158% of the time she’s really only link-baiting Gawker.

Nick Allison, by CVXN

Nick Allison, by CVXN

Gawker. Oh yes, Gawker. This was all their doing, actually, because long ago, in a city far, far away, they plucked an obscure little blossom from her mundanity and bestowed upon her that most current of currencies: fame.

Fame Whore

July 6, 2010 Urban Word of the Day

An individual who is willing to do anything, regardless of how humiliating or demeaning, to achieve notoriety.

More often than not, this involves appearing on multiple reality television shows and/or having “private” sex videos “leaked” to the press.

Behold the reason for Julia Allison’s first major coverage in Gawker:

Julia Allison dressed as the Condom Fairy, Halloween 2006. Oh, has it really been four and a half years?

Julia Allison dressed as the Condom Fairy, Halloween 2006. Oh, has it really been four and a half years?

Actually, the condom dress was the most awesome thing she ever did. That took audacity, even for a sex columnist in a gimme paper, and before you laugh reflect on the fact that upon some very flimsy corsets great empires have been built.

Thus, from Gawker to Wired: not just to an article in Wired, but to a COVER STORY in Wired, on how to become an internet fameball (the gender-neutral, sex-trade-worker-positive replacement for “famewhore” that Gawker favours). And, really, who better to explain/personify/demonstrate it? Five years ago she was bumming around New York looking for a gig, any gig in front of a camera or behind a keyboard and within three years she’s on the cover of a Conde Nast glossy, albeit the geekiest one. She even got some venture capital for her website/lifecast/whoknowswhatthehellitwasreally, NonSociety.

One does not rise so far, so fast, without attracting several things:

  1. attention (see all of the above for details)
  2. fans
  3. haters
  4. that very complicated, metamorphic and unstable substratum of people who hate themselves for loving you and express this by dogging you, as publicly and as frequently as they can.
Haters Gonna Hate!

Haters Gonna Hate! Hatters Gonna Hat!

It is of these last that Reblogging NonSociety was formed, back in the early days of the interwebs, say, January of 2009 on Tumblr and, after a short, sharp shock in the form of the blog being taken down by Tumblr, on Blogger. After awhile, they decided to move to the (obviously superior) WordPress platform.

So what happened today really shouldn’t come as any surprise.

Continue reading

Operation Global Media Domination: The Cusack Effect

 

GO on, John, rt anything!

John Cusack will rt anything!

 

I was gonna let it go. Gosh, you know raincoaster by now: never one to make a fuss over a celebrity, or drop a name (which reminds me, I owe a blog post to my old sparring partner and blog buddy, Boris Johnson, Mayor of London).

But.

I.

Just.

Can’t.

You know how it is when it’s over; when something that you once counted upon, day in and day out, dries up and crumbles to ashes, then blows away, leaving nothing more than a giant hole in your stats chart?

 

 

Google, didn't we once mean something to each other? I'm even using Chrome!

Google, didn't we once mean something to each other? I'm even using Chrome!

 

Yeah, like that. So that’s how it’s been chez raincoaster lately, now that Google has dumped me (in an apparently bottomless pit). But I’m not bitter. Not me! No, I’m completely SO over that.

And you know how a situation like this, a dumping followed by a deep depression (just LOOK at it! like I spend hours a day doing…but I’m OVER it, I’m telling you!) can often lead to what is known as a rebound relationship? Well, I’ve got one, and it’s even better than Google and its millions of mindless robots. It’s got a mind of its own (to say the least, and I’ve said a great deal more on the subject from time to time).

Well, I’ve found my rebound: John Fucking Cusack. Suck it, Google. Even The Sister dm’d her congratulations; it’s like I got engaged or something!

 

That’s right. The Artist Formerly Known as Shockozulu, John Cusack, who is being followed by 262,116 people, is Following 85 people.

One of them is me.

Then he rt’d my post about Paul Newman three times and this happened.

 

The Cusack Effect

The Cusack Effect

 

Can’t touch this.

Quote of the Day: Paul Newman on character

1969:  American actor Paul Newman in a still from the film 'Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid', directed by George Roy Hill., with a bloody scratch on his cheek.  (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

If you don’t have enemies, you don’t have character.

Paul Newman, via bklynfather

Justin Bieber meets Gordon Pinsent (raincoaster)
Sean Penn is a big drag (Ayyyy)
Mister Rogers’ neighborhood is kinda rough! (Lolebrity)
World’s Worst Couple Award shoo-ins (CelebrityBeehive)
The Recession has been hard on everyone, even Monte Carlo call girls (AgentBedhead)
High, Angelina! (BusyBeeBlogger)
Lindsay is free, LOCK UP YOUR COKEPANTS (CelebDirtyLaundry)
Kanye Kant help himself (HaveUHeard)
Lisa Marie on MJ (INeedMyFix)
You can’t Sh!t on the Shat! (SeriouslyOMG)

Flamewar of the Day: Gawkers

Rear Window: no parking in rear

No parking in rear

This actually happened last week, which is right and natural when you consider what a shitstorm last week was: when ELSE would it have happened, right? Instead of our usual fun flamewars, toying with the early drinkers and short bus riders of the blogosphere, this one went a little bit sideways and turned into something akin to watching hara kiri right there in the comments section on Gawker. What people are willing to do in front of strangers, and blame upon those strangers, never ceases to fascinate me.

There’s no question I was guilty, but what of exactly what, nobody is quite sure, except for the victim, who is quite sure of many things despite being quite wrong.

What is pretty much certain is that some grownups still have to learn that lesson about when to keep your mouth shut, the one most of us learned around the time we first encountered those savvy genii of the interwebs, Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, not to mention Socrates, who came later (what with him being an old man and all).

Judge for yourselves, as always. This is from the comments section of a Gawker post about a “Spiderman” who freeclimbed a 58-story building with suction cups and was arrested for trespassing once he got to the top.

If residents gave him water en route, he can persuasively claim to have been a guest who was there with their permission.

@raincoaster: How about the floors in which nobody gave him water? If I invite you to my apartment does that mean you get to visit all my neighbors? How about reckless endangerment of parked Dodges? How about his impending Darwin award nomination? Questions, questions for the jury..

Seriously, this will be only a misdemeanor, no? 

raincoaster promoted this comment

@lethedrinker: Presumably even if you don’t invite him in, if your neighbors are okay with him walking by, he’s allowed to walk past your door via the hallway. He didn’t invade the apartments.

@raincoaster: Well, he climbed past their windows without their permission. I’d consider that an invasion of privacy.

This happened to me a few months ago. I live in a high rise condo looking directly at a bay, so privacy is not usually a concern. It’s a 1BR with a window in the BR; the LR has floor-to-ceiling doors to the balcony.

I got a notice saying that the window washing crew would be there on a certain date, and that they did not clean the windows in the LR, so I shut the blinds to the bedroom and thought I was all set.

Imagine my surprise when I was seated in the LR wearing only panties, and the crew appeared in my LR window to clean the glass balcony! I gently sank lower in the chair and raised my kindle to try and hide the tits. Not that they are anything to look at, I just prefer that people don’t.

They took 30 minutes to clean the damn balcony, and I couldn’t move in all that time.

So, with respect, your defense fails.

raincoaster promoted this comment

@Registered: Isn’t there some merit to the argumenet that by keeping the blinds up or door open, one implicity lowers the threshold for reasonable expectation of privacy. According to my lawyer friend, cops often use this excuse (made up or otherwise) to get around fourth amendment restrictions – not directly relevant to the privacy argument..

@lethedrinker: I don’t know about open front doors – they’re against the fire code here, must close automatically – but if I live in, say, a 26th floor condo that faces directly onto the ocean (or bay, in my case; you’d need the Hubble telescope to look in unless you are on a scaffold cleaning the windows ) then I would say the police lose their case.

Also, are you suggesting that people should live in caves with the blinds shut and the doors closed, or else lose any right to privacy? Bushish. 

raincoaster promoted this comment

@Registered: I said reduced not lose any or all. Bushish? I bet such dubious arguments existed long before either Bush and will continue to be used till 2084.

Anyway, it was a generic comment not specific to the 26th floor dwelling, bay watching, automatic door closing kindle readers.

@Registered: If you got a notice that the window washing crew would be there washing your windows on a certain date and you’re sitting in your apartment topless in your panties, SOMETHING ain’t an accident. And it ain’t invasion of privacy, either.

what did you do today, raincoaster?

i hate facebook

What did I do today? You mean besides become enraged by Facebook? I spent the better part of an hour first trying to get it to accept an ad without churning, churning, churning, churning, finally had the brilliant idea to disable Adblocker, which was successful at getting it to finish churning, whereupon I moved on to the second step where I put in all the details about who I wanted the ad to be shown to (don’t worry, it wasn’t you; you’re smart enough to use Adblocker, like me, right?) and how much I wanted to pay and goddamn if it didn’t really, REALLY want me to pay in British Pounds and use Dawson, Yukon time.

I think Facebook must be secretly controlled by Richard Branson from an underground lair he has in Dawson, Yukon.

So! So I get through that part, I get through even the pricing part. There’s a part where you can set limits on how much you want to spend in a given day, and a place where you can say how many days you want the ad to run. Now, I figure you multiply the how much by the number and you get the total maximum cost for the campaign, right? Oh no, how could that be right? We’re talking about Facebook!

So you can pay via Visa, Mastercard, or Paypal. Yay, I have Paypal. So I click Pay By Paypal.

And it asks me for a credit card.Going round and round and round and round: the Facebook customer service experience

Sure, you can pay by Paypal. But not if you have to. It’s rather like the retail banking system, where anybody can get a loan as long as they can prove they don’t need it. What’s particularly annoying is, thanks to a couple of good months I actually have enough in my Paypal to pay for the whole campaign, even if it cost the maximum every damn day. I could pay for it right now, and they could just refund me the money it didn’t end up costing me. But will they? Nooooooo…

Anyway, Facebook sucks, which I’m sure is not news to you savvy readers.

What else did I do today? I’ve been astonishingly productive, and it’s obviously not ME, but some alchemical magic reaction between the Diet Coke and pasta salad left over from my birthday party along with the Evening Primrose that I’ve been trying to remember to take.

I did this:

Posted:

I also listed Blogging for Writers online workshop on (yes) the dreaded Facebook, so if you know any English-language based people who are interested in learning how to blog and use social media while improving their writing skills, pass the link along to them.

Made some aesthetic decisions about my new site at Making My Life which is a network of various social media platforms including audio, video, and blogging. I’ll be moving raincoastermedia over there and focusing more on my social media teaching and less on all the hyperlocal blogging that I’ve been doing such a bad job of.

Had to put out several fires, only one of which was mine. If anyone finds their life boring and staid, I have quite a collection of second and third-hand social media drama that you can take off my hands for free any time. Also, apparently an email went out saying my course on Social Media for Nonprofits was going to be fantastic (great, so far so terrific!) but alas, it also went on to say that there were several free places available. Guess what? Nobody wants to pay. The free spaces in my courses aren’t supposed to be for agencies on the Downtown Eastside, they’re for clients of the agencies: you know, poor people. I think I negotiated a compromise everybody can live with, but god help me, I didn’t get into this to give stuff away to the middle class. Also, BOB is charging me full price for the room anyway, so one free seat just evaporated so we can give the money to Shirley. All of which prompted the post outlining the social media scholarship policy. There, it’s in black and white!

Posted everything relevant from raincoaster media to the SMCYVR Facebook page and to the raincoaster media page itself. Sigh. At least THAT worked okay.

Deleted all the outdated emails from the Shebeen Club mailing list. Attempted to buy a Facebook ad for the Shebeen Club meeting but, crunching, crunching, crunching…gave up.

Promised this woman who messaged me on FB (it’s FB day, I swear; the CanadianPolice on Twitter just pinged me to complain how crazy things are lately, so it’s not just me or Vancouver, it’s everywhere) I’d read her MJ post (she was polite YAY and said she’d read mine, so reading hers was the least I could do, and she’s right about that) but OMG it’s a big one and I’m not sure I’ll get it all done today.

Bitched on Facebook about not being able to buy an ad on Facebook and promptly got two emails offering help. Problem appears to be solved, but I’m too sleepy to finish the job tonight and besides, the bank’s not open yet, it’s not even 7am.

Oh yes, sent three pitch letters to editors today. Sure, it’s spec work and probably free, but it’s ink and paper AND it’s tremendous profile-building. It’s nice to be able to put “President of SMCYVR” on an email. Which reminds me to put it in my signature too.

Tuned up the professional profile on raincoastermedia: what do you think?

What did I not get done? A podcast. Sometime between now and 7pm I’ve got to record and upload a podcast. It was an assignment I gave everyone last week in the Blogging for Writers online course, and the least I can do is try it myself! Wish me luck!

Will in all likelihood go for a walk/jog now, provided I can find my Zune, which is the only portable timekeeping device I have that still has a working battery.

Then: I will have a Martini and collapse. Yes, gin is not in the diet. But it’s very good for collapsing with. With which to collapse. Whatever.

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