I think in the near future, there is some silly little Pat yourself on the back sort of promotion called Book Blooger Appreciation Week. Here at the OF Blog, we don't believe in such niceties. No, we are more entertained at the thought of people nominating the SFF Bloggers (or general fiction/essayists as well, since some of us don't stick with just one genre) who "suck."
Yes, you heard me right. It's about damn time that we recognize those whose suckitude deserves to be recognized. Talking about it on Twitter today, there were certain names that were put forth as being candidates for this umm..."august" award: A Dribble of Ink. Empty Your Heart of Its Mortal Dream. Dazed Rambling. Robert Stanek. C.C. DeVille. Snooki. And of course, the favorite to win the William Shatner Award in Blogging Putrescence again, Pat's Fantasy Hotlist.
Voting for these or any other sucky blogs (or MySpace, Twitter, Facebook) will be open for the rest of this week in the comments section here. The person who wins shall be ranked up there in the minds of those who voted with this glorious piece of kitsch. So vote now, vote often, and vote for the suckiest of the suckymost!
Knight Errant
8 hours ago
Posts
39 comments:
My vote goes to Dazed Rambling, that blog definitely sucks.
Larry - you should at least do the courtesy of stating why these are the suckiest, if only as a matter of interest for those not on twitter for the conversation.
Oh, and I nominate myself, Grasping for the Wind for this "august" award. There is much I could do much better, and don't.
second comment just to sign up to follow.
John, I would, but sometimes, when just polling for Suck, I don't want to think about why it is full of Suck ;)
very understandable. Still, I'd like to know. Can anyone else give me some reasons?
Maybe James or another will stop by and supply the Suck. I know I certainly can't explain the Suckitude of C.C. DeVille or Snooki.
This post cracked me up. I'm not sure if it's supposed to, but it did.
It can be whatever you want it to be, Sarah. ;)
Seriously, can anyone but me win this thing!?! :P
I don't know, Pat. Snooki is your toughest competition, I'd think ;)
You know, it does take a lot to win a suckitude contest. I have to think about this. Can I vote for more than one or must I limit myself?
You can vote for several. You can vote for the Pope and/or Tinkerbell for that matter.
Well, in that case I'm going to vote for the Pope, the guy who ran for office in TN (I bet his blog - if he has one - really sucks), and all the people self-nominating themselves to be put on a list of suck. :-p
A fine list. And yes, BasilMarceaux.com has a site. Too bad it's not BasilMarceaux.com.com ;)
I think Adventures in Reading sucks squirrel balls, especially this year. It's just gone down the crapper.
And the guy who runs it, can't think of his name, he's a real asshat who wears clown shoes.
T-S-S! T-S-S!
Come on. I've been blogging just about every day for eight months. You all have to be bored witless at the least.
Damn it, but I feel like I could finally win a thing now... :/
I'm not sure if I should be offended that The World in the Satin Bag is not on your list of suckage. Either that means you think highly of me, stopped reading a long time ago, or you hold such contempt for what I do that you did not deem me worthy of being linked in any capacity whatsoever. If it's the latter...then I tip my finger to you, good sir :P
As for who I'd vote for: Stanek. Done and done. I think A Dribble of Ink is good for what it is, which seems to be more of a book news w/ an occasional aside style, rather than a more general specfic book blog. I couldn't stomach more than two posts on Stanek's blog. It's basically him saying how grateful he is to people that may or may not exist...I don't have a problem with being grateful, just with someone blogging about it every three seconds. We get it. You're grateful. Give your fans something other than your stupid thanks...
Plus, I'm sure that all those fans who supposedly email him are his multiple personalities. Seeing how he's known for creating multiple accounts and spamming review sites and what not, it seems quite likely.
And that's enough of me...
Hmm. Firstly, all of you nominating yourselves should man up and grow a pair. It's a cheap cop out. We all know there are bloggers whose styles/opinions you despise. Don't be shy now.
Secondly, I can only comment on those blogs I actually read. My blogroll is pretty short because I don't have a great deal of time to spend reading hundreds of opinions on the same topic. Most of those bloggers who Sucked went the way of the buffalo long ago. Of those I still occasionally peruse...
I can't stand the Bibliophile Stalker. Which isn't a personal slight on Charles Tan, who is quite obviously an ardent fan of the genre, but rather an indication that I want something more than a couple o' hundred links looking me in the face when I visit a blog. Every time I stop by I'm overwhelmed by the number of new links and ask myself why I bother coming back. It's just not for me.
I'm not a huge fan of Pat and his Hotlist either. Back in the day, back when he actually posted content in the form of regular reviews, as opposed to musical interludes and NYT lists and publisher's blurbs and contests and the like, I was a fan. Not so much of his reviewing style, which rarely goes beyond comparing the book in question to one of his favourite authors, but of the energetic zeal that showed through in his early posts. Way back when he was blogging for himself.
But if there's one individual blogger (not blog) who I least enjoy reading, it would be Liviu Suciu over at FBC. I enjoy his format and obviously intelligent commentaries well enough, but we just have completely different tastes. We look for totally different things from a novel and prefer totally different types of story, and that just leaves me with little to no interest when it comes to reading his articles/reviews.
And there you go. I realise that this was all rather tongue in cheek and thus my contribution, serious as it is, may seem a little out of place. But then, the fact that I'm not a blogger myself but rather just a reader of blogs immediately marks me as out of place anyway, since it seems every other contributor is a potential nominee.
I'll leave you all now with the admonition to put the gloves away. Get your claws out and tell it how it really is. This little exercise will be far more entertaining for it.
Of the blogs originally posted...
I own Dazed Rambling and will be the first to tell you that it sucks something awful and I will do it with a straight face. Yeah, it sucks, but then so does most of what I work on.
Moving on.
Paul's blog, Empty Your Heart of Its Mortal Dream, is fantastic and one of my favorites. It is everything I wish my blog could be. His blog will only suck if you sneer at the word literature.
Aidan's blog was one of the first I started following and he does well bringing us the latest news, excerpts, and cover art and providing his opinion on them. His blog only sucks if you are a fan of Goodkind or prefer a blog with more review content. Personally, I am not a fan of Goodkind and can find reviews everywhere else, so his blog doesn't suck.
It may sound strange, but Robert Stanek's blog doesn't suck. One man speaking to an imagined audience, sometimes defending himself from the vile accusations of people around the world. This is entertainment and amusement and it does not suck.
C.C. DeVille and Snooki both get ignored because I have no idea who they are.
So then we come to Pat's Fantasy Hotlist. Pat's blog is one of the few blogs that I do not bother to follow. The absolute fact of the matter is that our opinions rarely align and because of that, I have never found his reviews to be particularly helpful. I do occasionally visit his blog, but having to wade through all of the extraneous crap to get the actual Pat-created content is not really worth the trouble. And well, that makes it suck.
Why hasn't OF Blog of the Fallen been nominated?
I'm glad to see that you've included such a pernicious, repeat offender as the infamous chatterbag and hierophant of pomposity, Paul C. Smith author of "Something-something About Your Moral Life or something."
If I have to wade through one more insightful, painstakingly constructed article of his where he engages fully with the work he's reviewing, provides keen insight into both the book and the author's larger oeuvre, and manages to link all of this to the very development of human civilization - well, I think I'll choke. Who wants to read such tripe?
Oh, and I'm tired of all his references to philosophy and his use of tiresomely big words.
Get over yourself Mr. Smith! Yoohoo! Review some books that people *actually* like for a change. How about some Robert Jordan or SoT novels? Novels that aren't either obviously rip-offs of fantasy greats or in the latter case, aren't even fantasy at all - but rather deal with really big important things like, life and courage, and how to be a man (or a woman I suppose - he's that good).
Also: Not. Enough. Book. Giveaways.
There. I've said it, and I"m sorry but someone had to.
Eric
You can't nominate OF Blog of the Fallen. His legion of squirrel ninjas will attack you, James. That's why nobody has said anything. We don't want to die...
I am not afraid of his acrobatic tree rats, not matter how militarized they are.
You'll be scared when the squirrel hentai is unleashed upon you!
I don't count Sooki and deVille as blogs. One's a silly wannabe celeb twitter and the other obbiously wants to sell his noise ... erm, music.
I admit to reading Dribble of Ink regularly, it's quick and easy.
Stanek - well, so that guy has written 100 books? How then comes that I first heard about him in a mocking thread on Westeros (or was it Malazan?). He should at least appear in the Readers Who Bought That May Also Like section on Amazon. Sounds full of himself, but that's a pretty common trait.
Empty your Heart sounds a very boring read. Coulnd't make it past the first post. Dazed Ramblings I should browse a bit before deciding whether it sucks; it doesn't look too bad.
Remains Pat's Hotlist with those ANNOYING ads all around the text. Set my virus alarm off twice, at which point I stopped opening the site. He wins. :)
Nick, I'm with you on Liviu. His taste is too different from mine, though I don't think his reviews suck; they're just for a different sort of reader.
I'll follow Nick's example and be serious about it. First of all, to me the most important thing in a blog is the update rate. I generally just stop following blogs that are updated less than once a week as a bare minimum. Of course, that is not all I care about, but it's important.
That said, I really like A Dribble of Ink. True, it is more of a news site, but I find a lot of cool stuff there and it is updated on an almost daily basis.
Robert Stanek' s blog is a joy, I don't know how anyone could say it sucks. I mean, delving into the mind of the demented is always fun, come on!
As for Pat's blog, it is a love-hate relationship I have with it, but I think this is where my nomination goes. I really used to love it back in the day. In fact, I found many great authors (Hal Duncan for example) through Pat's reviews. He used to have a lot broader range of taste back then, and like someone already said, he was writing for himself. But then his tastes began to shrink, he started to write half of his review texts based on a template with stock phrases, and he got way too full of himself. Which, mind you, wouldn't bother me so much (success is cool, I'd be full of myself if I got successful too) if he wasn't trying to act like "one of the gang" and "down to Earth" while demonstrating at the same time how much of a big man he is. It is hypocritical in my view, and combined with other things I don't wish to write here, creates a pretty unflattering picture of his character. So I gradually developed a chip on my shoulder with his personality, and even though I still respect him as a blogger and still follow the Hotlist, I rarely find anything of interest there anymore, which - with all honesty - sort of saddens me as I have many great memories connected to that blog.
Now, I would nominate myself, but I doubt anyone here has even heard of my blog as it's barely two months old. Also, I'm doing my best to make it good, and immodest as that sounds, I'm pretty sure that even if it's not the best it could be, it doesn't suck either.
Sorry for being so serious. I just like taking those things seriously as it is such a rarity for people to be honest about who they dislike...
http://rolandscodex.blogspot.com/
In defense of Pat's Fantasy Hotlist, the Glen Cook interview published there a while back is simply amazing. Maybe the best thing to emerge from the whole blogging boom.
- Zach
Thanks to Glen Cook. :)
Zach,
Even those of us voting Pat's blog as the suckiest blog are fond of that interview. Pure gold, though I imagine not too pleasant for Cook or Pat.
That Cook interview made me very, very happy.
Pat also just posted a fairly solid interview with Ian Tregillis, which I rather enjoyed (go read Bitter Seeds, people!). It had moments of the stock questions, and was a touch self referential, but it wasn't bad. And Tregillis gave good answer.
If I were to play this seriously, which I'm not, I would probably say something along the lines of: "the worst bloggers are probably the ones I don't read, because if I read them on a regular basis, i hopefully don't think they suck."
I'd give my left leg to suck as much as Dribble of Ink or Pat's fantasy hotlist. In the meantime, Imma go check out the other guys.
I don't know that you could say one criticism of a blogger that couldn't feasibly apply to all of them.
That's easy, Sam. I could criticize the worst for being Canadian and since I'm not a Canadian, it couldn't possibly apply to me!
We are all Canadians at heart.
I'm not. I'm a half-tamed fennec at heart.
It's not possible to have a 'worst blogger' discussion, only a 'mock my rivals' discussion. Because there are millions of SFF blogs, and most of them none of us have heard of. [I even have my own - well, I sometimes review SFF books on it, though I wouldn't say that was its main purpose. It doesn't really have a purpose].
All the ones we can name, let alone the ones we can expect others to recognise the names of, are better than the unknown blogs in at least one respect: they've got themselves publicity. For the worst blog you can think of, there's going to be another blog out there with all the faults that one has, PLUS nobody's heard of it.
--
More seriously: the worst blog I read (semi-regularly) is this one. I'm praising with faint damnation, since I only bother reading a couple, and although this blog often makes me annoyed, I still find it worth checking from time to time.
Why is this the worst? Because obviously Larry has some literacy and intelligence and capable writing and occasional insights, which is why it's worth reading: but he could do better. The big flaw with this blog is its arrogance, which seems over the years to have strengthened from off-putting to damaging: now, I think Larry is genuinely blinded by it (more arrogance in his identity-affiliation-class-thing than in he himself, but whatever). That Borges/Tolkien spat being an example (where his report of what others had said to him was borderline delusional in support of his thesis).
Anyway, I don't mean to be rude, but I think anyone who writes such a rude and arrogant post as this one is surely announcing that they're willing to hear criticism of themselves as well. I just think this blog could be (and sometimes is) brilliant, if the preconceptions, the status-affirmations, the tribal warfare (against sometimes imaginary tribes) could be set aside in favour of a more balanced and well-rounded exploration of possibilities.
Your lack of percipience is rather telling. Thank you for illustrating it in a post that was clearly satirical in nature. Drive safely!
When the dust has fallen, this will leave Neth Space as the best (apparently everyone else thinks they suck - I simply can't lower myself to suck, I am just that god-like).
Just one step closer to world domination.
Have I mentioned that Neth is probably the worst blogger ever? Seriously.
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