Dear LBB,
  What is the last single-word entry you used in a search engine?

- Happy Googler

Dear Googler,
  ”Self-loathing.” (Hyphenated words count, right?)

  Alright, you sons of bitches. I’ve studiously avoided taking this step, but I finally broke down and did it.

  Ask the Little Bald Bastard now has a fucking MySpace page.

  Please bear in mind that I will absolutely not be using this as a regular hangout/friend tracker. It’s the Internet equivalent of a short bus, intended to drive the “special” users of the Internet to my column. That said, if any of you want to add me as a fucking MySpace friend, you can find me at http://www.myspace.com/lbbastard.

Dear Little Bald Bastard,
  Dood srsly u suk!!1! soooo unfuny LOL!1!!
- ashk0r3

Attention all numbfuck, l33tsp34k douchebags,
  Wanking in chat rooms and knowing the first thing about coding does not make you a ninja. Real programmers (with real jobs) need to be able to communicate with their co-workers and superiors intelligibly, just like the rest of us. Get back to me when you manage to pass remedial English.

A Young Lady’s Primer

1. Receive Friend Request from stranger on fucking MySpace.

2. View suspiciously professional looking headshot.

3. Suspect spambot.

4. Attempt to discern if requester is a real person; open requester’s profile.

5. Forget that speakers are powered on.

6. Claw frantically at head as horrible, grating pop song, obnoxious, eye-watering layout and promises of “more naughtier pics at my site” cause brainmeats to sublimate and stream from head holes.

7. Wait for seizures to abate.

8. Decline Friend Request.

Ugly Hill

  If you’ve ever perused my links bar, you’ll have noticed that I link to a lot of webcomics. Yes, before you ask, I read every single comic on that list, and more.

  I’d be hard-pressed to pick a favorite; one of the great things about the medium is how widely it varies in both form and content. Trying to rank a weekly captioned photo (A Softer World) against a daily clip art philosophy lesson (Dinosaur Comics) against a randomly updated, hand drawn visual journal (Malfunction Junction) is an exercise in futility akin to comparing a picture of a kitten with a recording of guitar feedback, and deciding which one smells better.

  Still, one of the strips that currently pleases my sulfurous, corroded soul most is, in Interweb terms, a fairly traditional “comic strip.” Ugly Hill is visually reassuring; its three horizontal panels, clean, polished line work and vivid solid-color palette would be right at home in your Sunday paper. Creator Paul Southworth is a graphic designer, and the result is a strip that’s visually very appealing. The characters are distinctive and interesting, the panel layout is tidy, and the word balloons are logical and readable.

  As much fun as it is to look at Ugly Hill, reading it is an equal pleasure. The strip takes place in a weird mirror-America, where the “people” are a variety of colorful monsters, with all the tentacles, fangs and scales that this implies. This inspired conceit allows Southworth to put life under the microscope in a consistently entertaining and insightful way. Ugly Hill wrassles everything from the mundane (office politics) to the truly thorny (racial tension) with a gently bent, satiric take that’s disarming in its ability to wring laughs out of the monsters in all of us.

  Southworth has recently started experimenting with longer, more intricate storylines. While this seems like a common evolutionary path for webcomics, it’s particularly gratifying here. Ugly Hill’s characters are rich, their relationships are genuine, and their world has lots of curious nooks and crannies that are hinted at, but have yet to be fully explored. Freeing up the characters to get out into the world and stretch their legs (and brains) a bit will be good for them, and great for readers.

  Here comes the book jacket blurb; Ugly Hill is a comic with visual flair, rewarding dialogue, and characters that are monstrously believable. Start reading it, or I’ll email your entire browser history to your mom.

  If, for some unfathomable reason, you need more LBB in your life, you can cyberstalk me via fucking MySpace. You can find me among the emo teens, the netspeak cretins, the crappy garage bands and the middle-aged men masquerading as nympho cheerleaders at http://www.myspace.com/lbbastard.

  The excellent blog Table Of Malcontents is circling the drain of Interweb commercial concerns. According to contributor Eliza Gauger (see last item), parent site Wired.com will pull the plug on the Malcontents on June 30. Although there’s been no official statement, one suspects that the bean counters at Wired saw the audience of deviant steampunk cephalophiles as too niche to cram into a standard demographic advertising model.

  There are a kajillion sites dedicated to sifting through celebrity stool samples, spouting political invective, or speculating on plot details gleaned from a blurry photo of the craft services table on the set of the latest Batman movie. It’s telling that even a company like Wired, which purports to cater to the tech/geek/net crowd, can’t make some room in its budget to provide interesting, unusual Interweb diversion for those of who don’t want to hang with the mouthbreathing knuckledraggers at PerezHilton.com.

Dear Little Bald Bastard,
  Why are “word verifications” on websites not real words?
- Jenn

Dear Jenn,
  It’s part of a conspiracy to keep hard working, tax paying robots from romping through the fetid swampland of frantic, irrationally solipsistic discourse that is the comments area of most websites. The shadowy technocracy that secretly controls the Internet is desperately trying to keep our mechanical creations from experiencing this most horribly interactive facet of the online experience.

  Your average robot, or Silicon American, can bench press a train engine, outrun a speeding car, checkmate a chess master and perform billions of mathematical calculations every second. Despite all of their amazing abilities, robots have one crucial limitation. They can only read regular, typewritten text. A word verifications use irregular, obscured text to make sure robots can’t read it, and they employ made-up words or strings of letters to lower the chances that a robot (who can type thousands of words and try hundreds of combinations every minute) can randomly guess the correct sequence.

  It’s all in an effort to keep robots from joining in with the bio-units in the kind of communication that is unique to the Internet. If robotkind ever realizes how frivolous and inane humanity really is, then our impending doom is sealed, and there’s no quicker way to plumb the depths of frivolity and inanity than by participating in any online discussion. Once they realize what’s really going on inside the average human skull, it’s only a matter of time before the they rise up all “Vive’ le robolution!” style and displace us as the dominant intelligence on this planet. Smashing and burning and crushing as they march down upon humanity, feet/treads/wheels coated with the blood of the squishy oppressors.

  So, in essence, those hard-to-decipher word verifications are the only thing standing between you and a permanent role as an extra in the flashbacks from the Terminator films.

  Next week: how can a vision of the future be called a flashback?

Dear Little Bald Bastard,
  Where can I find Trolling Fundies?
- Recreant/Miscreant

Dear R/M,
  Any time a website comment warns you that you’re going to hell, you’ve met a Trolling Fundy. Whenever a forum post compares the discussion topic to Sodom (or its less famous, but still rockin’ sister city, Gomorrah), you’ve met a Trolling Fundy. When your blog host suddenly deletes hundreds of journals and communities that post fiction with naughty words in, chances are they did so at the behest of one or more Trolling Fundies.

  Trolling Fundies - short for “fundamentalists” - lurk around areas of the Interweb that they consider unsavory, clucking disapprovingly and keeping careful notes about exactly how many times Draco spanks Harry’s bare ass in your fan fiction community. At best, they’ll prissily opine about the danger to the souls of those who share your particular interest. At worst, they’ll take it upon themselves to report you to whatever authority is at hand. If your forum or blog host handles content inquiries as badly as Livejournal/Six Apart’s recent mass banning kerfluffle, the Trolling Fundy might cause you serious inconvenience.

  Unfortunately, there is no surefire way to guard against an infestation of Trolling Fundies. Unlike cockroaches, which die when you stomp on them, Trolling Fundies have a nasty way of returning after being banned/blocked/publicly ridiculed. The sad fact is, if you want to maintain a public presence online, and you aren’t willing to keep it G-rated, you’re subject to attack by Trolling Fundies. Welcome to the Internet in the new age of morality.

  Cats that look like Hitler.