Proud to be Pre10tious.

Updated version of the graphic courtesy of the Imperial Animatrix! Changes generated by Liz's comment below and my own coffee preferences!

Not that I have ever pretended otherwise. But it's good to get some validation from some pony-tailed, self-absorbed, narcissitic code phreak or scribe over at Kuro5hin. I mean, gosh. I feel vindicated now.

Yo, Jim - here's my thoughts on your thoughts - worth what you paid for them and just as valid as the tar you brushed me with. Here's your vision of me.

You are all pretentious twats Every last one of you. You're all latte-sipping, iMac-using, suburban-living tertiary-industry-working WASPs who offer absolutely no new insights on anything whatsoever apart from maybe one specialist field if we're lucky. Most of you think that you're writing original content and that you're making a contribution by licensing your spewings under Creative Commons "Some Rights Reserved" licences, just because it's the hip thing to do. You think you know all there is to say about blogging because you understand the concept of HTML and CSS, but the horrible truth is that 40% of you are all using the same shitty default layout. Then you take pictures of yourselves looking pensive or making vague allusions to mythology.

Oooo. Dummy. Picking on Venomous Kate? She's a lawyer, lame brain.

You make up irritating jargon for the sake of it

Of course I do. I'm a retired soldier - we invented jargon. Well, no, religions invented it. Ya wanna know who generates the most meaningless blather and word butchery? Twits like Joyce, self-appointed Guardian of the Word. Y'know, blowhard, back in Samuel Pepys day they were lamenting how the common folk were debasing the language. He11, look at what two generations have done to the word "Awesome". Now it just means 'cool'. Or, if you're cool, kewl. To me, the Race to Baghdad was awesome. Tony Hawk's skateboarding is cool. But the great thing about language is: The People Own It. Despite my annoyance, your annoyance, and the literati's annoyance - the language is what the people make it to be. It's the one thing that the elites have trouble controlling, you societal dingleberry. And the people exercise that power because it is the single most important tool they have to twit self-important assholes like you.

The word 'weblog' is acceptable. 'Blog' is just about tolerable.

Oh thank you thank you thank you, you snarky twit.

The following are simply galling:

Blogosphere
Travelblog
Blogroll
Moblog
Blogstream
The puns just make them worse.

Tough doodoo, dude. The supercilious "crie de coeurs" like yours remind me of bad essays written by college students. Snort.

All of your blogs talk about the same crap It's worthwhile to have one blog about a subject. It may be worthwhile to have twenty blogs about a subject. However, having 20,000 blogs about a small number of subjects is absolutely useless. See, the vast majority of all Movable Type blogs are written by those living in the United States. And the content of virtually any US citizen's Movable Type blog is about these subjects, in order of precedence:

Presidential elections
The economy
Political parties
Blogging
Open source software

Lessee, the vast number of things people want to talk about are the things which impact them directly, day to day, in significant ways. Gee, what a surprise. Though I must not use Google the way you do - I just don't stumble across that much Open Source Software stuff.

You read a couple of blogs, and you can get all of the "grassroots" information about North America's politics and economy that you need to know. All the rest are superfluous.

So, all we need are two newspapers and two television networks then. With some local community newletters. And only one weather forecaster.

This is really all about you don't know how to use Google, isn't it? Here, try this, mebbe it will help.

Just for the record, aside from trying to crucify General Clark, I'm going to show up for guns and things military. Oh, and nekkid, too. So I doubt I'm clouding up your Googling too much.

Remember, Salam Pax got popular because his blog was fresh and didn't just contain the same rubbish which your blog does.

And while that's true - he's also a bit of a simpering wimp who is able to share all his pensive angst because people like me went and rearranged Iraqi politics. And I'm proud to have been peripherally involved in helping him do something he and his kind weren't willing to do themselves.

As for your other characterizations...

I don't own an iMac and because of the way Apple dumped us Apple II users (right after selling us our IIGS's of course) I will NEVER own an Apple again. I don't care how good they are. When I hate, I HATE!

And please, I am not a WASP. I am a DWEM-descended Hiberno-Celt-Saxon-Visigoth Catholic-lite.

Latte? Puh-leeeze. Diesel oil. I'm a soldier, dammit, not some pissy angst-ridden college student, or yuppy stockbroker (who I don't mind, they're making me money right now).

I live in the core of a small town, not some yuppyville full of huge houses (all painted some damn earth tone and six inches apart with postage stamp yards) with no furniture and less character - but full of drones with an overwhelming need to measure the height of your grass and check for toys on the porch. I've got blue collar to the left of me and blue collar scrubbing to make the collar white on the right. And behind me I've got construction laborers who make more money than I do - and good on 'em! The public high school (from which my son graduated) is across the street.

Tertiary industry? Well, I am guilty of that now, being a Beltway Bandit. But only after spending decades killing people and breaking things, in one of the oldest primary industries in the history of the species. Unless you are a farmer, hooker, or artisan making useful tools, what's your contribution?

I've killed better men than that pimple. Faugh! And, in most cases, I regret the need to kill them, but this arrogant overweening dunderhead's obitiuary will slide by unnoticed by me. (And no, you silly git, that is not a threat - it's an observation that after this post ends, you are going into my mental bit bucket and getting a DoD wipe on that sector of the disk.

And my SUV is a 10-year old pick-up with a well-used bed, pissant.

Ah. Now that felt good. I skipped lunch for it, so I think I'll go back to work on designing the future army and then go home, shovel the 6 inches of snow and fondle a gun or two. In honor of the Commissar for bringing this to my attention, I'll clean the Berdan, Tokarevs, Mosins, Simonovs, and Kalashnikov. Already did the Makarov a couple of days ago.

UPDATE: It's been fascinating to read the response threads of James A. C. Joyces infantile rant. More and more it's apparent he's a code snob, who makes a living working at code level and therefore finds the rest of us who don't have the need or time to become Perl experts to be beneath his contempt. Same kind of guy like the Unix users who think people who use MSWord vice VI and do everything from the command line are parasites who should not be allowed near computers.

He's as tedious in his way as he thinks we are in our way. I will give him this - he's generally civil in his responses, only getting hot in kind.

Bottom line - enough of us talk about this for a few days - he's going to be what he hates - a useless twit coming in at the top of Google searches. Funny thing is - he's as curmudgeonly a fossilized stick-in-the-mud as those guys who thought the automobile was a horrible invention that would ruin the world - because he's a horse-whip maker.