Young @ Heart Gets His Just Comeuppance : To B3TA Or Not To B3TA

The other day, whilst surfing on this inter web thing, some young boys were very rude to me.

It was a painful experience, being bullied in that virtual playground called the internet. It brought back memories of having my glasses smashed by an overgrown school boy who had repeated the year three times already.  I believe that he’s still there, managing the school parking lot.

When Crunched! started life in mid January, I started posting a weekly update on www.b3ta.com

B3TA (pronounced to rhyme with “Peter”), if you don’t know it, is one of the oldest online communities, and one which from the start encouraged its users to create their own content. Their productions have for years fed the streams of viral videos and jpg jokes and kept you amused you at the office.

Remember a little thing which yelled “The Boss is a C*t” as soon as you opened the attachment and nearly got your fired back in 2000? Uh-huh, that was B3TA. Remember the one with a trippy kitten singing “I love you, I really really do”?  What about  Tramp Santa? , this one comes round every year.

Rob Manuel, you simply are an unsung genius.

B3TA users consist of a broad mixture of mostly talented and smart people. Professional web and graphic designers, creatives, copywriters, wasters, groovers and heads, art directors and web whizz-kids; there are database guys, computer geeks, science boffins and even a few middle aged young-at-hearts having an identity crisis and too much time on their hands. All that matters here is a warped sense of humour, and the time to express it online.

The reaction to Crunched! from this lot was not bad: I was certainly no Next Big Thing, but it did make some people chuckle (”I can’t stop singing ‘Thank You For The Meatballs ‘to Abba”. Yes, it was intentional. “Pretty funny blog man have a click”. Thanks, um, man).

I chose to interpret this modest success as that it was OK to carry on with posting updates to Crunched! on this public, made-for-hit-or-miss, specifically no-flaming forum.  So once a week I dropped my little links, and I felt good about it . I got some traffic.  I felt like I was giving back someting, and making someone crack up in the process, even getting the odd comment like “Get a job hippy!”.

And then it was over as soon as it started.

Two weeks ago, 8 posts into my Crunched! blogging adventure, I checked the B3TA forum for comments and suddenly felt the colour drain from my face.

Five B3TA forum members had ganged up on me, and had deposited, turd-like, a considerable amount of abuse for me to peruse, written in that confident and brave tone perfected by those who habitually hide behind technology.

The first one said: “I’ve had it with that ‘The Bald One’ ” (I know, I know, I had it coming but everyone has silly user names on that site). “Enough is enough”

“Let’s get him!” wrote another. And so it started in earnest.

“Stop f****ng posting here you c**t!”

“You are not smart or clever, or funny”, seethed one boy.

“You are also misinformed”, wrote another one smugly. He did not say which bit I was misinformed about, which was quite misinforming.

“Your blog is not funny, crap and poorly designed”

Ouch.

Tears started welling up in my eyes. B-b-b-buh……I put so much love into those orange and white motifs which adorn Crunched!.  It resembles the Easy Jet logo, does it not? Orange and white, it goes together. How can it be badly designed? I used a professional template and everything. Please, please I’m 39 and have two kids and a stern German wife, how am I supposed to master CSS and all that stuff? I have no time! Look, I’ve already worked out how to register my own domain names, set up Wordpress and MY SQL. For you I have edited my style sheets, played around with widgets, set up email subscriptions, RSS feeds and social networking.  I’m a geek, just like you guys.

Is this not enough? Does this mean that this has all been for nothing? Is my journey over? Am I flunked? Won’t any of you early adopters, you upholders of Eternal Design Truths, you Masters of Funny, give it at least a 6/10?  

Please?

I walked the streets of blogging despair with sad violin music as soundtrack. And then came the worst part:

“Blogs are so 2001“, opined yet another virtual soulless soul.

So 2001? My God suddenly I felt about million years old. I was an just an old rancid fart, the type you get when  you do one in the car right before you leave and lock up. What was I thinking, posting links to my blog here? I was  just a sugar daddy trying to get down with the kids. Nothing but an old man with homo  erotic memories about his Amstrad 80s micro-computer and playing Jet Set Willy and Arkanoid

And suddenly, a miracle.

“Words are so boring” 

And suddenly B3TA was no longer the seat of cleverness which I remembered and I realized that it had descended into the facile visual 2 second gag, admittedly cool high frame rate computer animations, into more stupid shit than clever shit, spoofed ads, dirty gags, crudity and pornographic jokes.

There was a even a video of a young Jamie Oliver lookalike, webcammed from the bedroom which had been lovingly been decorated by his doting parents. Their prince of a son was singing a spoof song about Jade Goody to the music of Elton John’s Candle In The Wind :

Goodbye, Jade Goo-dyyyyyy…

You get the picture.

He had intelligently altered the lyrics to include a line where he asked Jade if she had finally learned what a cervix was yet.

This did not create the uproar which I had predicted, but brought the house down instead amidst collective backslaps. There it was for all to see, a bad spoof of a great song and a laugh at the expense of an ignorant girl with terminal cancer, performed in a croaky voice by a smug middle class boy from suburbia.

And then, I knew. My time here, at B3TA,was finally over. It had been good while it lasted, and it lasted for a long time, but you guys are right, I am totally old, and can no longer be your type of funny. For starters I use boring words and not Flash animation, and Photoshop to me is a tool which professionals which I pay use to do work for me, not a toy.

Well, maybe just a teeny bit.

Also, I now realise that I actually know very little about this inter web stuff and will respectfully leave you all to ride the next ephemeral (google it) wave of new technology. Enjoy your 160 Twitter characters and making funny videos on You Tube and amassing millions of Facebook friends.  Enjoy. Really. I mean it. It is fun, I’m just too old for this shit. See you all on Linked In when you grow up.

But if you want to know what a naked lady in real life is like, I have seen one, for real. More than once, even.  I’ll tell you all about it if you like.

Tagged as: b3ta, Blogging, farts, Internet, Losing Job