Clearing the Air
Rants

So.

finger.jpgA handful of acquaintances started a blog and somehow the Guardian gave us so much credit that we became the focus of an op/ed piece written by the paper's own Opinion Editor.

This site's legitimacy, now out of our hands, snowballed from there.

Once a wide enough audience had seen YouCSD.com, complaints were numerous enough that the administration thought best to shut us down, and attempted to do so with scare tactics channeled through Ann Parode. Being bull-headed and idealistic, we decided to stand our ground.

By this time, enough Guardian staffers—Vladimir Kogan, Bryan Tsao and Brian Uiga, to be precise—were so fascinated by us that our continuing spat with Parode became the biggest story of that Thursday's newspaper. The unwarranted snowball grew rapidly. The next Monday, the Opinion section unfurled probably the most inane Pro/Con editorial the student body shall see all year.

Around the same time, someone—unbeknownst to us—submitted our over-dramatized legal tale to Slashdot. The popular tech-culture blog, which serves up about 3,000,000 page views each weekday, unleashed an insane number of new visitors on our site. Letters poured in as we sat in front of our screens, mouths agape. A couple of emails packed with legal defense information from law school students strengthened our resolve to hold onto our name, and one such letter also took the time to undress the "idiot" Guardian staff writer who penned the "School justified in protecting rights" argument against us.

We were quite pleased, and our cheeky little blog was attracting an absurd number of visitors.

In the bedlam surrounding these past few days, we brushed aside a flock of asinine emails from cocktards associated with UCSD's biggest embarrassment, the Koala. A post-graduation Bryan Barton, under the same curse as Koala editors before him, still considered himself a member of and contributor to the student sphere and tried to goad us into publishing his favorite photo of himself. His co-ambassador to high school, Steve York, quickly mimicked him. York, however, claimed to have knowledge of our identities and attempted to blackmail us into publicly rehashing his 15 minutes of fame from 2003. He, as is now the standard, also insisted that we publish his favorite portrait. Perhaps you're starting to understand the type of drama queen we are dealing with.

UCSD has a rather dedicated population of fame whores, and our arrival threatened them enough that they became obsessed with our efforts. No doubt they'll read this and deny feeling threatened, perhaps adding a "They just suck" or "We fucking hate them" to explain their actions, but they are only kidding themselves. Their clumsy, groping efforts to access our various net accounts were constantly setting off alarms behind the scenes, and their impotent thrust to unveil us soon became an obfuscated smear campaign carried out on the Internet's day care centers: web forums.

Without irony, York later crowed that "a few boozards and stoners" (himself included) had obtained solid evidence of our identities. The problem with his assertion, however, is that he and his fellow divas are actually highly intelligent, capable individuals—the simple fact that they are UCSD students can attest to this fact. The tragedy here is that they take their drama so seriously it spurred several days' worth of effort towards piercing our little bubble of anonymity.

Frustratingly, it still seems that people misunderstand our reasons for writing under pseudonyms. One of the worst plagues on UCSD's student community are these very gadflies who dedicate their lives to fetishizing their own names and faces. Narcissistic megalomaniacs like York, Watts, Uiga, Barton and Nitzani have learned that if they yell loudly enough, they can command the attention of the student body. My co-conspirators and I have been immersed in this campus' diseased culture long enough to see things for what they are, and YouCSD.com was created to provide a source of information, free of names, which would work (in part) towards dispelling the onanistic auras these recognizable names surround themselves with. Watts even lists "getting on television as often as possible" as a personal interest on theFaceBook.com, and one can see this same ethos manifest itself in his embarrassing Jerk Sessions From Japan that the Guardian is foolish enough to print.

We don't desire name recognition, and we don't need you to recognize our faces as go about our business on campus. What we want is for people to realize that they need not be such a passive audience to the spastic gyrations of the few students who influence UCSD's incestual media outlets. Our goal is to be a clearinghouse for student voices--one which is rigid enough to avoid the anarchist haze impeding SDuncensored's noble efforts to encourage communication, and personalized enough to dodge the hyper-objective yawnfest that is the Guardian. Of course, we have our particular bias, and it is unfortunate if it rubs you the wrong way. We're still growing, and you'll have plenty of opportunity to express your personal views once our comment system is ready in a few days.

And if a few pitiful bullies try to derail our efforts by publicizing, then smearing our real names? What then?

Fuck 'em.

We'll keep on doing what we aim to do, and if we do our job right you'll ignore the unnecessary context and drama behind our message. This message will rarely be objective, and we aren't keen on bottling up our vitriol, but that's the stuff you giggle at—the meatier themes should be apparent enough to your average, literate college student. We are a group of authors each with his or her own agendas and opinions, and if one of us wants to slam someone or something, that's our own prerogative. We all occasionally get on our soapboxes and strike out at things that displease us; YouCSD.com just happens to be a platform with a bit more engineering behind it. Welcome to the world of blogs.

Before you go, heed our call for submissions. We want to hear about your professor's unzipped fly, your hostile altercation with RSOs, your successful parties and your flatulent roommates. The student body has plenty to say, and we want to make this communal narrative more accessible to everyone, including staff and faculty (we know you are sitting on the juiciest gossip). Once you invest yourself in such a dialogue, you'll find your time here at one of California's finest revolving-door universities much more interesting and much more engaging.

Post script:

(Coming soon.)

Nom de Guerre, Oct 14 2004, 09:00 PM

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