The cranks are out in full force now after that speech. There was a woman collecting signatures at Big Y on May street today. When she asked me what I thought about the redesign I said "I think people need to stop driving into parked cars". She didn't ask me to sign after that.
I wonder if there’s a coalition of cranks who have collective agreed to keep driving as if it was still the old design and screw the consequences…to others or even to themselves.
I stopped bothering with Kearney's site years ago because it was so clogged with browser-freezing ads that it took ages to load and his writing voice quickly slid from occasionally funny smartass to toxic hater - of, like, everything. But I know from personal experience (I got my start as a professional writer by being an amateur dumbass - but with better than average research skills - who got hired by a big crime site to cover major cases) that this probably won't end well for him. For me it was simply that covering nothing but crime proved to be a bad idea for a lifelong clinical depressive, and I crashed, hard, into a major, near-fatal bout of the blues. I stuck with writing but went more and more legit, acquiring solid journalistic training along the way, covering different, less soul-killing subjects.
Then again, I never got arrested or accused of harassing or intimidating anyone. I did get death threats and a subpoena to testify at a double-murderer's appeal of his life sentence (he lost, thank God), which was stressful enough. Either way, there's a flipside to coverage like the magazine gave him, potentially for the journalists tasked with publishing all 7,600 words and for him, and it's almost always bad. Like turning over a rock and finding an angry poisonous snake bad.
For a long time he was pumping out multiple variations of “this scuzzy-looking person raised $1200 on a GoFundMe for their utilities but I found their court records and they’re an addict” style stories and even then I was like “so what?” First, maybe they really can’t pay their gas bill — addicts often have trouble finding and keeping a job. And if they really are just scamming, who cares? So a hundred or so people gave them what amounts to their daily Starbucks order. There are a lot bigger scam artists in the world, except they wear a shirt and tie and work for Bank of America or Wells Fargo… who do you think is doing more damage in the world?
The cranks are out in full force now after that speech. There was a woman collecting signatures at Big Y on May street today. When she asked me what I thought about the redesign I said "I think people need to stop driving into parked cars". She didn't ask me to sign after that.
I wonder if there’s a coalition of cranks who have collective agreed to keep driving as if it was still the old design and screw the consequences…to others or even to themselves.
I stopped bothering with Kearney's site years ago because it was so clogged with browser-freezing ads that it took ages to load and his writing voice quickly slid from occasionally funny smartass to toxic hater - of, like, everything. But I know from personal experience (I got my start as a professional writer by being an amateur dumbass - but with better than average research skills - who got hired by a big crime site to cover major cases) that this probably won't end well for him. For me it was simply that covering nothing but crime proved to be a bad idea for a lifelong clinical depressive, and I crashed, hard, into a major, near-fatal bout of the blues. I stuck with writing but went more and more legit, acquiring solid journalistic training along the way, covering different, less soul-killing subjects.
Then again, I never got arrested or accused of harassing or intimidating anyone. I did get death threats and a subpoena to testify at a double-murderer's appeal of his life sentence (he lost, thank God), which was stressful enough. Either way, there's a flipside to coverage like the magazine gave him, potentially for the journalists tasked with publishing all 7,600 words and for him, and it's almost always bad. Like turning over a rock and finding an angry poisonous snake bad.
Yeah, I went back to covering crime, but much more on my terms, not letting it be dictated by a desire for attention or the news cycle churn.
For a long time he was pumping out multiple variations of “this scuzzy-looking person raised $1200 on a GoFundMe for their utilities but I found their court records and they’re an addict” style stories and even then I was like “so what?” First, maybe they really can’t pay their gas bill — addicts often have trouble finding and keeping a job. And if they really are just scamming, who cares? So a hundred or so people gave them what amounts to their daily Starbucks order. There are a lot bigger scam artists in the world, except they wear a shirt and tie and work for Bank of America or Wells Fargo… who do you think is doing more damage in the world?