There's this idiotic echo chamber of web sites that bug the shit out of me. I noticed first on http://del.icio.us/ that a large segment of the most popular links were people trying to formulate to-do lists and lose weight and achieve financial independence or at least pay off their credit card debt but definitely and most of all they really wanted to have blogs that got more attention and to invent new web design techniques and tell other people about it.
Then, if you poke around the hifalutin websites that talk about hifalutin websites, like http://www.flickr.com/ and http://www.43things.com/ and http://www.backpack.com/ or http://www.basecamp.com/ and http://www.waxy.org/ too, somewhat, and basically anyone that's ever mentioned AJAX including all of http://www.oreilly.com/ and http://www.daringfireball.com/ especially and I fucking hate them all. If I ever see someone with a "hipster PDA", I'll probably drop to the floor in revulsion. It's some new kind of cognitive dissonance (on my part!) with which I have not been previously acquainted.
Little did I know that something sold in the container store could be so trendy and desireable and morally correct. I bought one of those little notebooks, and based on the "used by Picaso!" marketing copy, I knew at the time that I was making a mistake, and now whenever I open it up I hate myself.
The worst, the absolute worst of the bunch, is that asshole over at http://gapingvoid.com/. I want him to shut up and die. He wrote this idiotic essay about "How to Be Creative" as if he fucking knows because he doodles on business cards.
I get asked a lot, "Your business card format is very simple. Aren't you worried about somebody ripping it off?"
Standard Answer: Only if they can draw more of them than me, better than me.
What gives the work its edge is the simple fact that I've spent years drawing them. I've drawn thousands. Tens of thousands of man hours.
So if somebody wants to rip my idea off, go ahead. If somebody wants to overtake me in the business card doodle wars, go ahead. You've got many long years in front of you. And unlike me, you won't be doing it for the joy of it. You'll be doing it for some self-loathing, ill-informed, lame-ass mercenary reason. So the years will be even longer and far, far more painful. Lucky you.
Please explain wtf your "hours put in" on business card doodles has to do with creativity? I'm sure it's fun, and I can see that it's made you money, but Jesus. Once he's thought about what it will take for him to win in the business-card-doodle-rat-race, it becomes different from "How to Be Creative" and similar to "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying".
And the offensive part of his essay is that he thinks it's some kind of answer. As if anyone who follows his recipe will achieve his kind of "Creativity" and... Oh God, I hate him:
Back when I worked for a large advertising agency as a young rookie, it used to just bother me how much the "Watercooler Gang" just kvetched all the time.
... and they too can then sell tshirts; it's just a matter of putting in the hours.
It's not just a matter of putting in the hours. It's a matter of being a privileged douchebag and, as Immortal Technique puts it, "it's got nothing to do with luck. It just means that a million people are stupid as fuck."
Way to fucking go, Hugh Macleod of http://gapingvoid.com/, you've succeeded at applying your advertising skills to convince a million people that their personal deficiency is creativity, and you've got their cure. I don't know the "thbbpt" for shivering in disgust, but imagine it here. Then please disappear from the web. For me.
I guess my problem is that this whole genre of bullshit is somehow enmeshed in a certain part of the geek community, so I can't read about problems in operating system and network design and real geeky shit without running into someone talking about how much time Ruby on Rails has saved them when building their new AJAX based website, or how tags on del.icio.us are a folksonomy and a preview of the semantic web and there was so much to do at SXSW. AGH JESUS GOD. Ok. I'm not thinking about this anymore.
