Build Date: Mon Sep 9 09:40:08 2024 UTC
It's important for us to explain to our nation that life is important. It's not only life of babies, but it's life of children living in, you know, the dark dungeons of the Internet.
-- G.W. Bush, Arlington Heights, Ill., Oct. 24, 2000
Alt dot Culture dot Long dot Dead dot Good dot Riddance
2000-04-27 16:08:37
Well, if you thought that content was KING on the World Wide Squirrel, baby, you need to think again. Colossal failures like the alt.culture Web site show that you can't make the big bucks gar-gar-garring about bogus hipster stuff till the cows come home.
First, let me cut to the chase: alt.culture is dead, and I am gloating. The site is completely torpid, all the feedback forums have been eviscerated, and repeated mail to the contact address goes unanswered. Bwahahahaha!
What, you may ask, is alt.culture? Well, the whole idea comes from a couple of doomed and dated books from the horrendous wasteland of the mid-90s. The books tried to catalog all the crazy and weird shit that happened in the strange time that was the late 80s/early 90s -- the techno revolution, rave culture, culture jamming, consumer-item-as-cultural-touchstone, media overload, blargh blargh blargh. It was a weird mid-90s view of a dead early-90s time.
Altculture.com, the Web site, started out in '95 as a gimmicky New Media promotional device for the books, but then kind of took off on its own. The whole idea was that the Net Generation could comment on itself in that weird self-referential way that post-modern theorists get all juicy for. Or WHATEVER. It was SUPPOSED to be updated every week or so, but they ran out of steam some time in 97 and pretty much have been limping along ever since. The most current stuff I can find is related to Todd Bridges' arrest in '97. Woo, those were the days!
I think they made some kind of evil pact with Time-Warner's doomed Pathfinder service that dragged the whole enterprise down into the deep end of the shit pool. Good to know, eh? Know who you're selling out to BEFORE you sell out! Anybody with a lick of sense woulda known that Pathfinder shit was a big lead career anchor.
So, alt.culture has been pretty much a well-preserved corpse all these years. There was some scurrilous talk in the New York Times last year ("ZINE SITES LINKING TO GET MORE $") about the site joining together with other culture-decree sites like suck.com, word.com, feed magazine, and The Smoking Gun to get lots of dollars and re-sell out again. Well, FAT CHANCE on that one, eh? Bwahaha! Idiots!
See, the thing is, if you have a ZINE, you love it. You make it LIVE. Watching it crawl along like a re-animated Mondo 2000 zombie, dropping chunks of flesh all over the Web like a disgusting leper, is just too much. You don't leave your zine out in the cold, is what I'm saying. Zinesters don't do that.
My advice to those regretful alt.culture leftovers is the same advice I give to any cheeseball ex-zinesters and wanky writer wannabes:
"hey, FAT BOYS! Ha ha ha! You need to get HUNGRY again. Lean and cruel, with one ear to the ground at all times, like a Real Pigdog Journalist. Try rubbing down with gasoline and doing 200 pushups and 200 pullups twice a day. Get ANGRY! Drink straight Everclear! Learn a little something about JOURNALISM and maybe someday we'll let you be our COPY BOYS. Muahahahaha!"
For now, the whole mess makes for an interesting study in hubris and bad attitude. There's just something pathetic and sad about people who bray that they sit on the border of a Brave New World, when you know and I know that that world never has materialized and never will. Who knows what'll happen to this dead site? I'm keeping an eye on the whois data -- hopefully I can swoop in and snatch up this domain. Maybe PDJ can move our Pooniedog stuff over there. Hell, culture doesn't get more alt than that.
T O P S T O R I E S
Another Nobel Prize-Winning Author Describes Drunkenness
This book won a Pulitzer Prize. Here's its famous paragraph on getting drunk... (More...)
'Why I'm pretty sure JD Vance had sex with a couch'
True or false? The answers await us in that magical land where all truths are revealed -- the internet. (More...)
In 2010 Dr. Cheng-Huai Ruan discovered a way to cause a patient with an abnormal heartbeat to get back into a normal rhythm by sticking a finger up the patient's ass. (More...)
WKRP in Cincinnati aired from 1978 through 1982. Howard Hesseman played Dr. Johnny Fever, a DJ from Los Angeles who was fired from his previous job for saying the word "booger" on the air. In the show Hesseman would do some dialogue, introduce a song, and start the song. You'd hear a few notes, but never the whole song. (More...)
SF Hippies Can't Get Their Act Together
The annual 420 Hippie Hill event in Golden Gate Park, where large crowds of hippies, wannabe hippies, and hippie poseurs drape themselves in tie dye t-shirts and gather on a hill on 4/20 to smoke weed, was cancelled this year because the organizers couldn't get their act together. (More...)
Mozart to be inducted into the Rock 'n Roll Hall of Fame
Joining such hard-rocking inductees as Abba, Chet Atkins, Nat King Cole, and Neil Diamond, the Rock 'n Roll Hall of Fame is proud to induct Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. (More...)
C L A S S I C P I G D O G
Hooray! At long last, a NEW Spocktail of the Week! Kid-tested, mother-approved! (More...)
Three Days and 25 Spocktails: A Cautionary Tale
Johnnie Royale picked me up from the dental surgery. I felt warm, safe, cradled in the anathesia's loving embrace. The pharmacy downstairs gave me a bottle of Vicodin and a few instructions: take it with food, don't mix with alcohol, don't operate heavy machinery. I put it in my pocket and we left. "Do you want to go home, or do you want to go to a bar?" asked Johnnie. (More...)
I just came across this coolio essay by Pigdog Journal Science Editor binky wedged between two staves in the back corner of the submissions barrel. It's on the origin of the cyberbilly and is definitely de rigeur for any serious student of this fascinating sociological movement. (More...)
You need to make a fruity tropical drink and you have no recipe? Here's a mix recently tested by Pigdog's crack bevertology team that's made with ingredients available from most any grocery store. It tastes sweet, fruity, and is perfect for guzzling on the last hot days of summer. (More...)
Brother Wayne Lays Down the Truth
Flesh interviews Wayne Kramer of MC5. (More...)
It was the night of the Leonid meteor showers -- the perfect opportunity to break out the evil opaline liquor, get madder than hatters, and test wireless ethernet hardware... Would the plunging meteorites interfere with the 2.4GHz band? What about our delicate brain waves? (More...)
