Absolutely beautiful commentary about the state of the blogosphere:

"Having had access to it their entire lives, most kids these days have a far better understanding of how to use the internet than most adults. I think maternity wards are handing out Geocities websites to newborns now. Sadly, these infants do not wait to learn the fine art of the English language before attempting to update these websites. That's why this generation has produced, and is currently producing, and endless stream of nonsensical blathering that only bears the slightest resemblance to English after long and dedicated study. Every sentence, if these effigies of punctuation can really be said to actually form sentences, contains between zero and two words spelled correctly, and that's counting "LOL" as a word. In past generations, massive linguistic handicaps were something that held people back. Social workers and speech therapists helped people overcome their fear of embarrassing themselves by using the wrong word, pronunciation, or spelling. Sadly, this generation does not feel even the least bit hindered by their total inability to put even one-syllable words on the page without fucking them up. Instead, they seem to think that everyone else simply suffers from proper grammar and spelling. In order to fight this problem, the current generation feels that they must share every single pathetic detail of their inconsequential, uninteresting, and barely developed lives. Hence, the livejournal, a black mark on the face of the internet. And let's be honest, the internet's face already has enough black marks to pass for a lead in the cast of The Wiz.

Ellie's atrocious livejournal, which I rate alongside Dachau as one of mankind's most grievous cruelties, makes use of many of the most common techniques that this generation employs to let everyone know that not only should everybody care about their worthless lives, but that they intend to make the English language their bitch in the process. She misspells every word with such precision that I immediately assume it's intentional and move on to wondering whether she can type like that without having to think about it, or whether she labors over each word, thinking, "Hmm, how can I best mutilate this first-grade vocabulary so as to make it almost completely unrecognizable?" Then there is the substitution of numbers for letters. This used to be an annoying method of communication used only by hackers and other computer elite, who were eventually became "Leet," then "LEET," then "L33T," then "l33t," and finally, "1337," which officially signaled the transition of these individuals from human to cyborg. And you thought there would never be such a thing as a retarded cyborg. However, this technique was appropriated by huge swarms of internet denizens wanting to show how hip and with it they were. I've gotten so used to seeing the letter "E" replaced with the number "3" that I almost don't notice it anymore. Of course, eventually I do notice it and immediately fly into a murderous rage, stalking the streets, brutally killing all I encounter until I am eventually stopped by Batman.

Ellie also uses a technique - although not as much as many others do - in which she capitalizes basically at random. The standard practice is to not capitalize anything. After all, if you don't capitalize anything, you'll never capitalize the wrong thing. There are those who decide to eschew this, though, and capitalize every other letter. For example: lOvE iN aN eLeVaToR - lIvInG iT uP wHiLe I'm GoInG dOwN. Note how the first letter of the sentence is not capitalized. Now, I could understand this tactic if the letters that are capitalized represented something. If a person capitalized carefully chosen letters which, when strung together, made some sort of secondary comment about their main point, that would be one thing. It would still be more annoying than a twenty-four hour Survivor marathon, but at least there would be some reason behind it. The capitalization of alternate letters is just blatantly irritating. It makes the writing itself into an eyesore. Furthermore, it's actually hard to do! Just try writing out a couple sentences like that. The rhythmic holding and releasing of the shift key actually becomes fairly tricky. That means that members of this new generation actually have to put concentrated effort into making their already boring, abrasive, pointless ramblings even more of an assault on the remaining brain cells of anyone foolish enough to read it. This technique is frequently used when these kids are choosing their incredibly tough internet moniker. In order to properly convey the size of their e-penises, these individuals create names like xXkIlLaJuGgAlOxX, XxSkAtRsAtN701153449xX, and xXdEsMoNdTuTuXx. The use of "X's" before and after the name alert the public that the user's name is approaching, then give notice that the user's name has just passed. Naturally, people who do this are to be hated unconditionally.

Despite their slacker stereotype, many members of Generation X have grown up to be useful and productive members of society. That tends to happen. A generation starts out being annoying and useless, then eventually steps up to the responsibility of keeping the nation running. If history is any indicator, we should not waste time worrying about the current generation, as they should manage to pull themselves out of this fog of utter IQ deprivation and get to work. Nonetheless, I am worried. I'm very worried. Sure, they might grow out of it. I'd love to see these kids thirty years from now when they look back on the way they used to write and laugh about how moronic they were, except that I don't intend to let any of them live that long. But even if they did survive, there is something in me that doubts that they would really turn themselves around. There are certain inventions that irrevocably change human behavior. The first generation to grow up with the telephone didn't stop using the telephone. The first generation to grow up vegging out in front of televisions has largely not yet learned to stop vegging out in front of televisions. The first generation to grow up with the internet might stop posting infantile bullshit with the grammatical skills of pastry products, but then again, they might not. When this generation of wiggers, sluts, and wannabes grows up and takes over, we might well have a President who, in order to understand what it says, has to read the State of the Union address off a teleprompter that looks like this:

"Mai f3loOoOoOoOoOo uhm3ricnz:

3vriithiing z kewl!!!111!!!1 Xpt 4 diz t3rrizt gai. Hii suxorzzzzZZZZZzzzz!!!!!!111!!!!@1

K Gawd bl3zz uhm3ricuh."

Actually, come to think of it, that's not a whole lot worse than what we have now.