TERMINAL LAUGHTER

To: john@terminallaughter.haha
From: wikipedia@wikipedia.org

Subject: Tsk-Tsk

Hey, John.

Wikipedia here. Listen: I’ve long considered you a valued reader and sometimes-contributor. I can always count on you to read me when you’re at work, at home, and to recycle articles you find entertaining on your Facebook profile. You’re a link-happy user, and I like that. I also admire the valuable information you’ve added under the “In Popular Culture” subheading for my entry on Flatulists. But it’s time to get down to brass tacks. I’m disappointed in you, buddy.

I mean, come on. I didn’t spend valuable microseconds processing your search of “Apartheid in South Africa” and redirecting you to “South Africa under apartheid”  just so you can zip through it for forty seconds and then have your chubby, apathetic hand move the mouse back to the search bar to look up “Hunter (TV series).” I mean, sure, I’ll indulge you. But I’m not going to be happy about it.

You barely even give me a chance to tell you that  Apartheid was a system of legal racial segregation enforced by the National Party government in South Africa between 1948 and 1994, under which the rights of the majority black inhabitants of South Africa were curtailed and minority rule by whites was maintained before you’re off reading about some comparatively unimportant police drama because Ed told you how funny it was.

Sure sure, Hunter ran from 1984 to 1991 on the NBC television network, and when originally placed in a Friday-night slot against Dallas […] struggled to find an audience and drew criticism for its often graphic depiction of violence. I could have told you that. But don’t you want to read more about Bantustans, forced removals, and the Organization for African Unity. Don’t you want to peruse the 129 discrete citations listed in the entry, or grow as a socially conscious individual by checking out some of the books and articles mentioned in the list of Further Reading?

Do you even care?

And don’t get me wrong. It’s not like I’m all that personally invested in the issue of South Africa under apartheid. Hell, as a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project lacking a centralized consciousness, it’s really hard for me get worked up stuff like this. But some days, you know? (And I know you know. I’m able to instantly access the fact that in the past three years you’ve spent literally hours reading, re-reading, editing, and generally hovering over the entry for Falling Down, a 1993 film by Joel Schumacher starring Michael Douglas. So I know you think you know about bad days.)

You think this is you, you disenchanted piece-of-shit?

But this is the straw that broke the camel’s back, John my boy. That was a reference to any process by which cataclysmic failure (a broken back) is achieved by a seemingly inconsequential addition (a single straw), FYI.

I mean I let it slide when you managed to figure out in record time that the entry for the Einsatzgruppen is only four degrees removed from the entry for Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS. And I held my tongue when you read the sobering entry for Homelessness only long enough to get depressed and pitifully work your way to the more esoteric entry on Bampfylde Moore Carew, self-styled King of the Beggars. And I may have rolled my eyes when you followed up your search for Murder, being the unlawful killing of another human being with intent (or malice aforethought), with a fruitless search for an entry on “awesome guns.”

I mean, really. Awesome guns? Did you really think there’d be some kind of entry detailing the most awesome guns currently in use, or comparing awesomeness of gun by make or model? I even tried to nudge you into the related entry for The Guns and Dope Party in hopes that you might end up doing some light reading on Discordianism. But ultimately I did nothing, remaining as emotionally impassive as your beleaguered conscience.

Oh and look at you now, Wikipedia-ing “Wikipedia.” Pathetic. Trying to flatter me, John boy? Trying to flatter yourself by thinking you can outsmart me by luring me into some infinitely recursive, self-reflexive data loop? Come on. I’m goddamn Wikipedia. I’m the one who suggested that my article on metadata needs attention from an expert on the subject as recently as March of 2010. I’m hardly about to fall prey to anything like “Feedback (disambiguation)” or the sort of intellectual vanity that so motivates you. You think you’re so smart, smartass? Citation needed.

Keep it up and you’ll get nothing 404 standard response errors from me, tough guy. Then how will you manage to spend half of  a perfectly sunny Sunday afternoon cruising through pages listed in the category “Marvel Comics characters with accelerated healing” category hungover? Eh? Not very well.

You’re a disgrace to my symbolically appropriate logo and variously informative portals.

Not mad so much as disappointed,

Wik.