There's something about the news of a mid-grade disaster that brings out the appetite for a full-blown apocalypse. With fewer than one thousand shopping days 'til the end of the millennium, it almost makes sense - pile a little bad news here upon a little bad news there, and soon some kind of theological tipping point is reached. One minute it's Wired woes and news of Suck's imminent demise, the next minute the site is gone, and by the first commercial break, the faithful are disappearing from behind the wheels of the cars in mid-traffic jam, leaving the tailgating heathens more irate (and doomed) than ever.
Which isn't to say it's not the end of the world, but for the time being, you're stuck with Suck. Had our facility with the arcane methodology of media manipulation extended a lick past the tips of our tongues, we'd have played make-pretend and disappeared for a few weeks or a few hours, depending on how many vacation days we'd kept tucked away. But while an infantile mortality hoax might have been good for a headline or two, our reappearance would likely have seemed less like a third-day resurrection than a post-lost-weekend walk of shame. At best, we'd have enjoyed the fate similar to the Violent Femme's dopus opus "Blister in the Sun," celebrated 10 Web-years later by people so pleased by familiarity they completely forget that their nostalgia isn't rooted in the tune, but in how passionately they hated it in the first place.
We think it was Beckett who wrote "the day that you die will be like any other day, only shorter," but when you're creeping into year three of your coma in SoMa, that's hardly helpful. Or as one of our silver-screen heroes once mumbled, "S.O.S. Kill me." So, with apologies to those lucky enough to have kept their hands clear of the rumor mill - the ones who never had the opportunity to contemplate a Web that doesn't suck - we present instead these three brief paragraphs of ominous protestations instead of the much-more-agreeable business as usual.
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This article appeared originally in Suck.
