@mcsweeney's

Sigh....

McSweeney's did a feature making fun of Twitter.

The thing that really pisses me off about it is that it was so incredibly obvious they were going to do so; I should have posted something myself about "OMG, can't you just imagine how weak the McSweeney's piece about Twitter is going to be, once they finally get around do it?" And then I could have lovingly patted myself on the back once they did.

Anyway.

I have a lot of gripes with McSweeney's, many of which I admit are formed directly in the jealousy centers of my ego. But some are actually valid, and perhaps interesting to others. Such as the fact that they take obvious material and somehow twist it into the most obvious ironic hipster-esque literature-simple overhand knot.

Take this piece, which I might have read on April 1 in the "Internet Age" section of the Des Moines Register, or some such place.

Here is a list of the pop culture references in the piece:

Lost
iPhones
Lolcats
Huffington Post
Perez Hilton
Guitar Hero
Facebook
Kindle
Segway
"I can has ____"

Here are the list of classic writer's mentioned in the piece, so we could know it was actually ironic:

Hemingway
Stein
Pynchon
Sontag
The latin name of a tree frog?

Conclusions draw about Twitter:

You write shorter
You may say things that are not true
You ignore real people while you Twitter
You're spelling is probably bad or non-existent
You hypelink stupid pictures

Wow. Very good. These comparisons and conclusions made a hilarous point that wasn't entirely obvious.

The part of this that is really depressing is, these people have a well-reknowned print journal, and what they choose to print are stupid jokes fit only for late night TV, which have already been told in 140 characters or less, about a thousand times by anyone who knows what Twitter is. This does not bode well for us.

I will give credit to the end of the piece, which was shaped in the form of an "Internet Age Syllabus". They marked the grade gamut as from "A" to "A----". Now, a send-up of the decline of our education system, that's funny!