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dietary proclivities as a metaphor
Saturday, February 9 2002
What with all the notoriety surrounding it (including a well-publicized investigation by the FBI and a role in my firing from CollegeClub.com), my Trenchcoat Mafia Webpage manages to maintain 100-200 hits per day, even though it is never updated. Judging from its messageboard posts and the people linking to the site, its principle readers fall into three general categories:
- Christian high school students concerned about the kids who hang out in the smoking area.
- Neo-nazi wannabes and would-be rebels having any or all of a wide range of adolescent prejudices.
- Morally-agnostic E/N people on the prowl for shocking content to link to in between their links to one another.
I assume that a good fraction of these people would be similarly interested in my other satirical and shocking offerings, especially newer, more relevant ones.
Whenever I've made a fantastic new satirical website and want to generate a little traffic for it, I face something of a dilemma. I've been banished from a number of publicity engines I've abused in the past, particularly community.cnn.com (they're pretty smart - even my freshest fake logins are barred). So I've had to turn to my own homegrown traffic cows, particularly the Trenchcoat Mafia Webpage. Today I resorted to desperate measures to generate heavy traffic for my Powered by Osama site: I made it pop up from the Trenchcoat page. It does so in the most benign way possible; actually popping to the back of the window pile and forming in a conventional browser window, complete with address bar. I see it as "leafletting" the computers of random people, exactly like I used to do with physical sheets of paper in the culture-jamming dark ages that preceded the Web. By the time most people find the page, they have no idea where it came from. Mind you, it's not trying to sell them anything, it's only trying to rock their world.
Still, having made my first pop-up-promoted page leaves me with a slightly sleazy feeling. I myself hate popups in any form, mostly because Internet Explorer hangs for something like ten seconds before launching them (on pop-up heavy sites like Astalavista, I'm forced to use the much more responsive Opera web browser).
For the past couple days Gretchen has been off in Silver Spring, Maryland, and since I'm doing the bachelor thing by myself, I've reverted to my bad old bachelor ways, feasting on a dinner comprised of Ben and Jerry's pistachio icecream and a forty of Old English malt liquor. Gretchen occasionally mentions my "corn chips and malt liquor" dietary proclivities as a metaphor for other forms of neglect in my life, including occasions when I neglect our relationship.
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