Tuesday Roundup

Favorites and duds from today's commenting.

Favorites, in no particular order:

Here's a funny goofball question from WyclefChen in the Daily Screencap post. I have to resist the urge to call him "unstarred guy WyclefChen" now. To me, all you stars are still stars and anyone else is a gray job.

David Hume kicked ass today, first killing me with this awesome impersonation in the Chris Berman post and later bringing the house down with this amazing chef-tip in the Lance Armstrong post. That's a real doozy, the latter one. I'd also like to draw some attention to the reply from SavetoFavorites in the first comment - I know it amounts to a +1 and probably isn't intended this way, but the fact that he totally flubbed the naming of his Taco Bell selection strikes me as a perfectly SavetoFavorites kind of thing. Later, down the line, when I start acting like an adult and am no longer obsessing over Deadspin on a daily basis, it's this kind of stuff that I'll remember more than any particular joke: the real and specific and unique and wonderful voices and personalities of the individual commenters. Without recalling a particular Hume joke, for example, I doubt I'll forget his particular brand of humor any time soon.

You guys are the best.

Speaking of SavetoFavorites, here's a damn funny sneaky recontextualization in the Chris Berman post. I enjoyed quite the giggle at this. 

I laughed at this Harold Reynolds dig from RMJ=H, also in the Chris Berman post. So good. There are some jokes you read and enjoy and move on from, and then there are those jokes you wish you'd made yourself. What's the difference? I can't put my finger on it, but this is one of the latter. It has something to do with the punchline relying upon something lifted verbatim or (in the case of a photo) unedited directly from the post and turned on its head, that feeling that you could have hit that same homerun had you just been as sharp and clever as the author.

IronMikeGallego cracked me up with this sharp dig at the Tweeters(?) in the Chris Berman post. No shit, they deserve it.

Here's a funny shot at Yon Sports Dipshit from MaverickIsAirborne in the Lance Armstrong post. Nicely done.

I suppose I'm the only person who laughed at this simple sequence from Same Sad Echo in the Berman Mix post. Was I also the only person who laughed, like, a lot at the mix itself? God, I'm a moron.

Sponsored by V8 earned a mighty haul of +1s for this funny one-liner in the Bryce Harper post. I really am a moron. I needed a lot of time with this one. A lot. Had there not been a giant thread of +1s behind it, I might not have bothered to get there at all.

And finally, I really enjoyed this dialogue joke from The Amazing Sneijderman in the Bryce Harper post. The real shame is how this comment is buried under the also-ran arrow. I'm glad I checked.

Total Fucking Duds


Yes, you missed the joke, dailylama, you fucking idiot. Grow a sense of humor, jackass. Christ.

Really?! We're still doing this, cobra, brah!? Surely, surely you can do better than that. For crying out loud, you had a star. 

We Need Ninjas

I'm sure we've all seen this fucking abomination from Joe Gordon in the WFAN post. Clearly there's a difference between a dud, which is usually a bad joke or a spectacular misstep or brain-fail, and this kind of shit. If it were up to me, a little notification would pop up on my phone every time this kind of shit is said anywhere on earth, and with the push of a button I could send a hard wooden fist shooting up out of the ground directly into this person's genital area, right where they stand.

Whatever else is wrong or right about Kinja, whatever can be said in its defense, it cannot be argued that this kind of thing would ever ever ever have made it into any discussion on any post anywhere on Deadspin before the transition. Pink commenters have been lobbing this kind of shit at the filter since I've been around, but the approval system ultimately always won. And when approved and/or featured commenters went off the reservation, it wasn't long before the Comment Ninja Squadron came along to deliver (at best) a solid hip check.

Something's got to be done about this exact kind of thing, because behind all the tedious moaning and wailing and rending of garments, the chief concern, poo-pooed at every possible checkpoint, was the fear that these fucking yokels, these aptly-referenced Yahoos would suddenly have a voice and a presence on Deadspin that they'd never been granted before. And I was among those who dismissed that fear, but I'm given pause nowadays.

Look, I understand approvals and the hierarchical system ain't coming back. I'm encouraged to see cheese-mac make a reference to steps that may be taken to quiet the burner noise. I still think Deadspin needs ninjas. Active, ass-kicking moderators with the power to ship the kind of thing that will flat-out ruin Deadspin commenting off to the void. We can't have this kind of stuff. How are commenters supposed to not respond to that kind of ignorance? If I'm standing in a room with someone who says that kind of thing aloud, am I supposed to just ignore it? There's just no way. Moderators relieve the commenters of that burden and lower the likelihood that this kind of thing will escalate and come to dominate a given post. We had the best moderators anywhere, and we want them back.

Hey guys, I meant it when I said I'd try to keep this thing going as long and as often as I can. It's been a wild and crazy couple of weeks, and I'm not sure I'm totally out of the tall grass just yet, but I intend to bang out another of these tomorrow.

In the meantime, I'll poke my head in DUAN tonight if anyone wants to have a big stupid conversation about, I don't know, norbizness or something.

Kick ass.