The Magic of the Internet: Or, how I suddenly became somebody who (apparently) knows something

Hi. I’m Matthew Lubin. You might remember me from such articles as “PS3: The good, the bad, the costly” and “Nintendo’s Revolution.” But today I’m here to talk about something far more serious: Bro Rape. It’s bad stuff.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you need to see this video:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=3zvTRQr7ns8

 

Funny, no? Anyway, I do have something real to talk with you, the loyal reader, about. And that is the internet.

 

It’s pretty cool.

 

Scratch that.

 

It’s very cool.

 

Scratch that.

 

It’s the internet. We all know how cool it is.

But something interesting happened to me a month and a half ago. I, somehow, became a part of a higher level of the internet community. Now, I have obviously used the internet for years, and I have participated (to a limited degree) in certain community websites, like message boards and Facebook, for a long time as well. But at the beginning of this school year I was hired (considering I’m not paid, is “hired” the right word?) as a columnist here at the Daily Colonial, covering the Technology Beat. I am, in fact, the only nerd covering that particular field for this publication. And so far, I have enjoyed myself. I haven’t really contributed to the greater good of society by writing semi-snide articles about video game consoles and MP3 players, but a few people have read my work, and I hope they have been made somewhat more informed by them.

 

So, about two weeks ago I was lurking on a message board I like to lurk on, when I saw a thread titled something like “Diving Website Reveals New Information on ‘Forever Blue.’” Now at that moment all I thought to myself was “cool.” For the few of you who read my article from a few weeks back on Nintendo’s new Wii console (Hi Mom!), you might (probably not) remember that, at the end of it, I mention a game planned for the system titled “Forever Blue,” a game that is basically a diving simulator. I mentioned how I thought the idea was interesting, how it used the innovative aspects of the Wii controller, and how I was looking forward to it.

 

So, much to my surprise, when I clicked the thread on the message board, and followed the link provided to the so-called diving website, I found no new information at all.

I found somebody at DiveNews.com, an honest-to-God diving news website, had posted that excerpt from my story as a news article here.

 

And then I found that people in the message board thread were debating the content of that article.

 

And then I posted that I was the original author of the article DiveNews was referencing, and how they shouldn’t really treat it as anything more then a little piece theorizing that was written by someone who had no more accesses to information relating to this title then any one of them.

 

And then I was told I was a liar. I think the exact response was something like “Shut the **** up you ************. Your **********ing ***** isn’t even worthy of ******* Matthew Lubin’s ****. So why don’t you take your ****ing *** back to your **********ing **** and eat some **** before I take your **** and make you eat it.”[1]

 

And that is when I realized, wow, now that I write for a website, even a dinky- albeit absolutely, stunningly wonderful- little college online publication like the Daily Colonial, people will actually listen to me. Some people will take what I write as fact, or at least learned opinion, and then parrot whatever drivel I manage to spew out to others. This is an incredible power I now have. And I really, really, don’t deserve it.

 

But, hell, I’ll take it.

 

P.S: No really, keep reading. Everything I say is true.[2]

 

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[1] May not be true.

[2] See above.