I love me some e-drama. Really, I do. There’s nothing better than watching someone else melt down, implode, or go up in a mushroom-cloud of overwrought bullshit.
Well, okay, there’s quite a bit that’s better. It’s still fun, though, so when Zombie gave me a link to trainwrecks.net, I was filled with sunshine and flowers and these freakish little cross-bred cute furry things. There, all on one website, was whole months worth of wonderful badness that someone else put time and effort into finding for me. In a matter of hours, I learned that there were a thousand new reasons to never admit that I had a blog. Ever. Mommybloggers and infertiles and those weird people who blog about how broke they are or how rich they are or how much more self-involved than me they are. Stuff that belongs in another post entirely.
To be brief, I suddenly noticed that there were people in my internets. People. Can you believe it?
I found out that ‘everyone in the blogging community’ [there’s a community?] was all up in arms over a ‘new blog’ called Violent Acres, possibly because they were taking it seriously, and were so personally offended that they redefined satire to fit their own emotional state.
I lost incredible stretches of time reading about some idiot who left her husband for someone else’s husband, then left him, and even longer stretches to the motheringdotcommune forums. Trainwreck after trainwreck, sometimes happening in their own comments. It was like watching yeast reproduce. Or…something.
My most recent stretch of time-lost-to-trainwrecks was because of Leafycaust, a messageboard post nearing 100 pages that, if nothing else, is a great lesson in how not to run a web hosting business. This post was why I started setting up RSS feeds to everything else I might want to read at some point, including trainwrecks articles and comments.
…but, they stopped coming. No new posts. No new comments — and there were always new comments before. Was it just me? Did my RSS thingumie suck so much? Or did someone just really hate me? The questions were all so End-of-a-Soap-on-Friday, I just couldn’t stand it. I had to know, so I went to the site.
All that was there was this:
<html><head><META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOARCHIVE"></head>
<body>
<em> See You Space Cowboy...
</em></body></html>
Okay, actually all that was there was the stuff between the ’em’ tags. But you get the point.
I cycled through the stages of grief like Monk…except for the part where I got over it in about two minutes because there was Sudoku to be played and much Animal Crossing to do. Oh, and sleep, and that rather nasty headache I had last night.
Earlier today, I thought maybe I’d check again. Maybe there was just some sort of server problem, and that was their ‘down for maintenance’ page.
Still there.
And it could still be a down-for-work type page. If you’re into that sort of optimistic rainbows-and-glitter horseshit. Me, I tend to assume that if someone’s not online, not posting and not chatting, they’ve died. It’s more interesting when they show up again, that way.
Instead of going all crazy with the anger and denial and psychology again today, I decided to do a bit of googling, and this thing at answers.yahoo.com came up.
…which reminded me…wasn’t there a silly little…thing with another blog? Of course there was…there were loads of them. Trainwrecking was somehow at least one hundred times worse than being SomethingAwful’s Awful Link of the Day. But…there was one in particular, wasn’t there?
Oh yes. The Blog That Must Not Be Named. The one that Outed Trainwrecks. The one that was banned, and, right at the end, was commenting as other people. What was that blog? It was something stupid….
Oh, right. Heaven Nose.
Google! Help me now! If anyone’s going to be talking about it, the constant commenter will be. And maybe I can find some of the old trainwrecks commenters there.
I find. I click. I must know!
My initial reaction can only be conveyed by this owl image macro:
I’m just not sure what to say about all this. I guess I’m a little lost. This site is…a blog…all about ‘stinky smelling blogs’ and ‘sweet smelling ones’? And they seem to have a really big chunk of hate saved up just for trainwrecks. Hate that makes them bad with the Photoshop, and clouds their judgement enough that they post these bad photoshops. I guess they have other posts [that seem to ever-so-politely open in new windows], but mostly? It looks like a hangout and support group for victims of trainwrecks.net.
Maybe these people find this site funny because this site hates the site they hate. I hear it’s a wonderful idea to make friends with the enemy of your enemy, or something. Certainly. Oh, of course, how could that ever go wrong? I mean, really? Let’s just all prop eachother up over the internet like a bunch of fucking highschool losers. You know, the ones that hate those popular girls and their clique, so they run off and form their own clique so they can talk about how much they really hate cliques. The “We Hate Clubs Club. No Club Members Allowed.”
Whatever.
So these people fancy themselves as the great not-nice-guys that got someone[s] to take their website down. Except, while they claim responsibility for it, they also claim that it wasn’t hacked, and that it was taken down by the owners. And I suppose it was all because they, in their oh-so-amazing-not-niceness, somehow ‘outed’ these people on their blog. Somewhere. But who can really tell?
I guess the rest of us worse-than-those-not-nice-guys types should watch out. There’s no telling who might be next. I don’t know about you, but I’m sure I could never stand up to shitty images, worse jokes, and stupid polls. And lots of comments. Oh dear, no, not that. I’ve never been able to stand that. I’m dainty and fragile, and the slightest bit of meanness will do to me what a busy highway will do to a Precious Moments collection.
Now that posting links to other sites is either ‘leaking’ or ‘leeching’, and we can’t comment about those sites either, the internet might as well pack up and go home. There’s really nothing left that isn’t already covered by that one geocities site. Oh, wait, that had ads. Outside links. Yeah, it’s over….
Looking on the glittery-rainbows-and-Unicrons side of this, even in their absence, trainwrecks has given me one last bit of drama — and probably the sort that keeps on giving.
Thanks, Trainwrecks. If only you’d been half as mean as they said you were.
Edit at 05:23 —
I guess they’re gone for good.
Sorry, folks, but Trainwrecks is gone and it’s not coming back. Some deeply disturbed people with an irrational fixation on this site decided that stupid photo montages, libel, and obscene anonymous comments just weren’t enough, so they decided to take their little hate campaign into the real world. And since their information came from gossip and bad detective work, they didn’t exactly hit the right targets. As anyone might have expected, the people who suffered the most were not even involved with this site.
Once it became clear that the people posting at Heaven Nose were willing to cross the line between a one-sided flame war and real-life harassment, our web host decided enough was enough, and we agreed. This site wasn’t important enough to us to be worth having innocent people harassed at home and work. We’re done.
I thought they might’ve done that. Pathetic little PeeJish crybabies.
The good news? It looks like most of Heaven Nose is gone now, too.
So, what’ve we learned about being a big fat meanie on the internet?
Make sure nobody can tie you to your other websites. That won’t stop people from deciding that you’re person x or blogger y, but at least they’ll be wrong. If you can, make your whois information private, because you should never put false information in those fields or anything. I think that’s actually a rule somewhere.
Don’t post personal information, because if someone decides that you, as person x or blogger y, are responsible for this other website, things are going to get annoying for everyone. People are stupid and emotional enough to attack you at your workplace for something you didn’t do, and bloggers have been fired for less.
Don’t do it on a server where you have less control than usual. Like, say, blogger….
Don’t be a pussy. If you’re going to run around threatening people, stop destroying evidence. Unless, of course, blogger destroys it for you. And I bet they did….
This is all very sad. Fuck you, you fragile, obsessive fucks. Get the fuck off the internet. Do not pass Go. Go directly to the nearest padded room, where you’ll be safe from all those horrible, hurtful things with corners.