Leftovers 6 October 1998

I'm sorry but I just cannot take Leonard Cohen seriously. In fact, I salute the recording engineers who managed to keep their howls of hysterical laughter off the tracks....

So I've been trying to avoid naming names, but now... well, let's see what we can do.

I work for this company based in San Francisco, that used to publish a magazine and run a Web site. It was - is? maybe - a very trendy place to be. Sometimes deservedly so; ours was the first commercial media Web site ever. I think we invented the banner ad. And the magazine wasn't shabby either, spawning words and imitations and bad newspaper sections and worse columnists, and some questionable fashion choices. But it helped make geeks hip, and we appreciated that. Even though the ascendancy of the True Geek was brief, and soon overtaken by the Faux Geek - your standard-issue frat boy with some slightly-different clothing - the result was still an advance. Girl geeks are still top of the heap, although I'm biased because they always were to me anyway.

Well, what we did, some of us, we got a little silly. And by "we" I mean "those bastards." Hubris. Some starry-eyed stoners in positions of unfortunate power wanted to be Media Tycoons. So they tried to take us public. And it sort of didn't work. Twice. Which left us enslaved to the Owners (the Lenders specifically, but the functional amorality is the same).

The result of that is that in this last year, the company has been broken into pieces and sold off. Our great good luck is that it ended up being only two pieces. The first kids to be sold off were given to Rapacious Corporate Landfuckers from New York, and it shows. I had actually been employed by that part of the original company, strictly speaking, but I jumped ship before it sailed off into the suited sunset.

And now, yesterday, the remaining bit of the company got sold. We were luckier, our new owners are another Web firm. So we can keep Snack, and dogs in the office, and important things like that. Any further differences remain to be seen.

I don't think it's going to make life worse, really, and probably it'll get a bit better. A steady income and a stable future have never hurt anyone, after all. (I'm talking about the company. Like anything about me is stable. Please.)

But... geez. We used to be cool. Now we're just tools. How will Ian Shoales or Tom Tomorrow make fun of us now?

Ooops.

Willfully blind self-indulgent nebbish or amusingly quirky old coot? And how bout that local sports team? Discuss among yourselves.

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All names are fake, most places are real, the author is definitely unreliable but it's all in good fun. Yep. © 1998-1999 Lighthouse for the Deaf. All rights reserved and stuff. The motto at the top of the page is a graffito I saw on Brunswick Street in Melbourne.