Humanity is fucking horrible, and I can’t wait until it burns itself off.

Part of that is obvious jest, but what’s left is a statement I fully back. I’m not that old, and I don’t remember a time when people were this loathable, especially for every possible reason under the sun.

On a deep dive months ago that led to a yet-to-be-published post that I’ll probably end up trashing because I won’t remember what pissed-me-off-all-over-the-place enough to initially pen it (thus meaning I won’t be pissed enough to care to finish it), I found this garbage, likely after getting riled up over some shit-tier list on Imgur of people getting mad that someone else at the table ruined their food ‘photo-op’ (read: chance to show-off).

Before I rant my riot act on that nonsense, I have to complain about the New York Times’s website, most of which has now become universal to most news outlets, especially the long-standing names out there.

What is the point of all this?

Why does the Times have this ticker-tape shit filled with clearly time-wasting tripe? This is the 2013 equivalent of the pop-up ads of yesteryear, or those side-bar ads that used to say ‘If you like watching people fall down the stairs, click here to see more!’ and would inevitably re-direct you to porn sites of gals taking it up the poop chute because banner ads were easily breakable to anyone with a modicum of website design and a penchant of messing with people for the fuck of it. I fully comprehend it’s in-house advertising, but why do none of the articles sound even remotely appealing? There are zero zippy headlines, there is no grammatical consistency, the pictures do the content no favors (which is even worse, since a great picture of food can sell a five-minute time-waster article on its own), and it never ends. Scratch that last bit, it does end, which is a blessing, but it ends on shit that has nothing to do with Food. No, I don’t give a shit about Urban Meyer, or the ‘plight’ political candidates face when they’re busying trying to convince & buy votes from stupid people, or some overly and overtly religious fuck who thinks interrupting the sermon (the only useful and objectively good part of mass) to emote about his disbelief in how the church mishandles its sex scandals (over a decade late, you cunt); by the way, big ‘fuck you’ to Naka Nathaniel because it’s really clear he doesn’t give a shit about how abhorrent organized religion in the modern day is and just wants to tell everyone that a high-profile theologian was at his church and his outburst ‘motivated’ her to say some stuff that people will forget about by the end of today. If you actually gave a shit, you wouldn’t be part of the congregation and would be pushing for competent law enforcement to handle these issues, but here you are, bragging to the world and searching for digital pats-on-the-back from slacktivists around the world. Way to care, bitch.

What a slap in the face.

The best way websites make money is not through advertising, it’s through traffic, and it always has been. Thus, the best way for these old paper-based information-dispensing news organizations to move from pulp to text should be to just put their shit online, because text takes up virtually no space on a hard-drive, and pictures are just as small of a digital footprint, meaning that as long as the outlet keeps writing and reporting, they should do fine since the general public needs to know & cares about what’s happening around it. Unfortunately, because these organizations are now run by fucking morons, the newest, latest, and ‘greatest’ strategy is to hold their readers hostage by effectively rate-limiting them (side note: nice job, Jack Dorsey, on that rate-limit shit. That’s one more nail in the coffin of your brain-child; can’t wait until your brain-child burns to the ground). That, as we all know, is clearly the best way to get your money; essentially grabbing your consumers, holding them upside-down, and shaking out their shekels is in no way predatory, invasive, and a completely shit-house move whatsoever. What’s truly great about this is that it reminds me every time I inadvertently make my way to the Times online that I will never come back after finish this one article, and I don’t until months down the road when that stupid-ass closing gate resets, meaning I never have to worry about being cut off. It also helps that I don’t give a damn about keeping up with the news, since most of it is designed to evoke emotions, especially anxiety & depression, and the other portion of it is rehashed nonsense, meaning it eats up time that could be better spent elsewhere.

Are you shitting me?

Who does this work on? I know dipshit soccer moms, which is the exact demographic this dumpster-fire of an article is made for, that wouldn’t sign up for this odious refuse. If a person wants a recipe, they’re going to go to a food blogger or to AllRecipes which, in a shocking turn of events, doesn’t have a limiter on their content. Holy shit, a website that wants its people to utilize what it has and not nickel-n-dime them to death? Sign me the fuck up, because that’s some good shit right there, right there *insert three one-hundred emojis followed by the ‘OK’ hand sign*. Also, if your website needs to use CAPTCHA, it’s fucking garbage, more so if you need a CAPTCHA in front of your own means of sending spam. Seriously, more email addresses help your business; it doesn’t matter if they’re click-farmers in China because a single click from the obnoxious spam you send out, NYT, means more traffic which means more ads served which means more revenue. How are you so stupid?

Leaving my personal issues with modern ‘web design’ aside, I can’t fucking stand people who take pictures of their food. That doesn’t include people who are professional photographers that have paid for their own equipment, are working for someone who is compiling travel brochures, advertising material, or writing a professional review, and have studied the methodology of great photos and how to take them. Those folks know what they are doing, and are good at their craft, so they get a pass. I’m talking about people like Kadia-Blagrove, who write articles defending the awful practice under several guises like ‘MUH MEMORIES’ or ‘BUT I’M A FOODIE’. No, you’re not. You’re an attention whore who needs to be validated and adored by your peers, and if you don’t get it, you’re forced to sit in silence and be left with your thoughts, and that scares the fuck out of you. If you and all the other people who can’t just live and need to see everything through a screen simply owned that, nobody would give you a hard time, but you don’t. You instead jump through hoops to rationalize your bullshit and give yourself an out, when all it does is put a brick wall in front of your escape. God, I hate you people.

Jesus, the poor bastard.

First, if you use a flash anywhere in the modern era and you don’t have a supremely expensive camera, you’re retarded. The vast majority of lenses and regular-ass cameras come packed with enough light correction and photo-altering tools, not to mention that any shot taken indoors or outdoors will likely have all the necessary light because we don’t live in the 1800s and have to use whale oil and wax candles to illuminate a whole house. Second, if you aren’t a professional but feel the compulsion to own the same equipment just to take photos you aren’t going to look at again later and never consider reselling for profit, kindly eat the fattest of dicks. You are the equivalent of the average Instagram person that is clogging up the hard drives of servers with their inane bullshit that’s carefully curated to make it look like they have great lives when they don’t and are just partying on a Tuesday afternoon because they’re two steps away from being alcoholics.

That’s one solution, I guess.

The only issue I have with this approach is that it’s catering to dumb bastards. Responsible and aware people wouldn’t just bring their burro into the restaurant so it can carry all their fucking paraphernalia, they would call ahead to find out a good time, set up a reservation, and either pay or offer some sort of recompense for wasting the restaurant’s time. At least, that’s what I would do if I was one of these barf-sacks, but then again, I wouldn’t even do this shit; I’d order my food, eat it, pay for it, and leave because I don’t need to show-off via photography and the best advertisement is word-of-mouth. Then again, I have a little patience for stupid bullshit, which is probably the driving factor why I don’t partake in any of this.

If anyone is posting ramen noodles, they need to be fired into the Sun.

I know this is lost on just about everybody now, because it’s a direct result of being ever-connected via WiFi, endless data, and social media, but just because you can do something, or just because you’re a customer somewhere, doesn’t mean you should do it and it doesn’t mean the business has to cater to your every stupid whim. Hell, for months I’ve been telling management at the store I work at that there is no reason to have our ovens running until close (which is at 4 AM) because it’s wasting money and the vast majority of possible clients are asleep; there’s a reason why most fast food and pizza places close around 1 AM. Just because our owner isn’t smart enough to get that he’s pissing away money to try and ‘get ahead’ of multi-national corporations that are far superior at putting out a dog-shit product than we are doesn’t mean you have to completely abide. Again, don’t do stupid things if you can avoid it. These food photographers are, in general, stupid asshats, and we need to stop catering to stupid asshats because hurt feelings can be fixed with a bowl of ice cream. Stupid can only be fixed by self-realization and continued efforts to increase one’s knowledge-base; it’s not something you can take a pill for.

Does the future really need this?

This, right here, is why I loathe these filter-finger-flicking fatheads. It’s always ‘for posterity’s sake’ or ‘in service of’ or ‘to capture the moment’ or some other cockamamie horse-shit that implies this amateur swill is information and data that we, as the entire human race, will absolutely need at some point in the future. No, you dolt, we don’t need this stuff. We don’t need you to capture four-and-a-half star idiot David Chang’s work; they already have pictures for their menu and likely for press releases and/or the restaurant’s website. Quick side tangent to directly address Mr. Chang: David, ‘Momofuku’ does not sound like ‘motherfucker’ at all. To believe it does says more about you than anything else, and it specifically says you might either have a severe hearing impairment, a severe comprehension impairment, or may just be flat-out retarded. The fact that you went to college to study religions is further proof of the latter.

Anyways, the notion that it’s perfectly natural and normal to take a handful of pictures of your food and then post those to all of your social media accounts rather than, you know, partake in the cuisine directly by putting it into your face hole (like it was fucking intended) is mind-blowing to me. I could understand the phenomena better if these people only took photos of them going to top-notch eateries and the dishes they purchased to consume there, but that’s clearly not the case. These dipshits do this for nearly every meal they make and/or ingest; there’s no sort of quality control or differentiation of caliber of meal. You’re equally likely to see a picture of some cheesy tater tots on this gal’s social media than you are dishes at Michelin star restaurants, replete with the exact same over-hyped attitude and over-expensive vocabulary, which is idiotic when the two meals aren’t even in the same hemisphere of comparability. Also, and I’m glossing over this, if you’re married to a chef and it bothers them that you spend your time snapshotting your meal rather than eating it, then you should probably stop being an attention whore.

What a baby.

There can be no question that the current generation of people, at least in the first world, is not fit to propagate the species. If you’re mortified to the point of needing to be anonymous in regards to a restaurant staff member telling you to not be a douche and to put away your phone (they’re not stupid, they know what you’re doing, you tool), then please kill yourself. I mean it. We don’t need your bitch-made genes in our lineage because if you can’t handle someone telling you to put away your overly expensive attention-seeking toy, you have no shot of making it in the most basic of survival situations.

Another red flag is that this gal apparently is ‘respectful’ to those around her, so sayeth the writer. Folks, this is something I’ve said before, and I guess it’ll be something I say until I’m dead, but if you have to say your a specific something, then you aren’t that specific something. I have zero doubts that this girl takes the most obnoxious pictures, physically advertises that she is doing so, and is a complete jackass. I mean, shit, the following line tells us she’s apparently a part-owner and knew exactly why she was being told off, but that ‘it caught her off guard’. No, it didn’t. She’s upset and playing the victim because she was being disruptive and doesn’t want to own up to her shithouse behavior.

Additionally, what most people don’t realize is that taking a ton of pictures of your food destroys the mystique of the cuisine. Presentation is a massive part of the culinary arts, and if you’re busy taking what would’ve equated to a full roll of film’s worth of pictures on your phone, which people absolutely do because ‘IT HAS TO BE PERFECT OR ELSE NOBODY WILL CLICK LIKE, BECKY’, then that presentation is now out in the world to people who will never eat your food. Half of the magic of the dish is now ruined, and that’s not even taking into account that this shit is a boon for chefs looking to steal the work of their peers to finally make a name for themselves.

He’s right, you know.

This is the other half of the reason I hate this shit. Yeah, the pretentiousness is unbearable, but at it’s core, it’s textbook shithouse behavior. If you need to ruin other people’s experiences and good times just to have fun, you’re a fucking asshole who needs to find another hobby, and probably someone who needs to a proper check to his/her ego. This is food paparazzi, and it’s baffling why nobody likes actual paparazzi, yet this stuff is seen as normal and acceptable.

Oy, fuck off, cunt.

I skipped over a chunk of the article because it doesn’t say anything I already haven’t touched on. I, however, wanted to include this bit as it shows exactly the kind of people who do this food photography. Jordy Trachtenberg is, without question, a moron. Hell, anyone who doesn’t grasp that a business is well within its rights to tell you to put your fag-ass phone away and to not take pictures is a complete and utter fool, let alone a person who thinks that he’s getting away with being a dick simply because he’s a fat, over-tatted dipstick. Yes, Jordy, it’s perfectly legal to bar photography at a restaurant, just like it’s medically accurate for a nobody like me to tell you that you don’t have ‘obsessive-compulsive disorder’, you just want to show off that you eat a ton of ramen and are some ‘mystical guru’ about it and then try to cash in on it hopefully. I’d have infinite more respect for someone who openly stated that versus someone who doesn’t grasp that taking snaps of their meals hoping to find the veritable ‘money shot’ is rude and textbook narcissistic behavior. I guess the only solace I can take is that Trachtenberg’s blog and work has been wiped off the face of the Internet, which is great since we really didn’t need one more pointless food blogger who is trying to make one last ditch attempt to not be a failure-to-launch lardass. None of this is to say he’s an inherently bad person, just to preempt that ‘argument’, just that he’s a selfish dumb-ass, which is probably the case for most of these people. Unfortunately, being stupid doesn’t absolve you from being a cunt.