Password Problems

Something odd happened on GTBT last week. It appears that Sam leaked the password to someone. There was a password change and some confusion, but all is well. GTBT will be back to the regular nonsense in a day or two.

While we were gone, the perpetrator did some blogging of his own. Was it good? I don’t personally think so, but I tend to prefer personality over cold hard facts (like the fact that you should consider wearing linen in the summer).

However, the perpetrator did gather himself some acclaim. It was a small badge, but it was still a badge. He was featured on the web-zine Valet. I like the Valet crew. They bump good blogs and do some quality reviews and promotions themselves. They’ve bumped GTBT a few times so I suppose I should thank them for many of my hits that I get each day.

But this? They bumped a kid who I don’t know. He probably sits in his basement, plays Roller Coaster Tycoon 3, and is served Nilla Wafers and milk by his mother when he returns home from school. Does he even wear adult sized pants? What does he know? I don’t know how much he knows. I supposed he reads menswear blogs because he has heard of Grenson and such, but does he have first hand experience? How can you tell when people have had first hand experience? Pictures or it didn’t happen? Being well-versed in the appreciation of expensive clothing?

At the end of the day, Valet is a business. They sell ads and try to create traffic. The best way (apparently) to create traffic is to bump blogs that feature products. But is that really the case? Is that a current truth?

I talk a lot about the contradiction of consumerism and the human drive towards what I may suppose to be a utopia: a place where people aren’t petulant and small. At this future, humans could get beyond the need for differentiation (which in menswear is product driven) or need for place (or perhaps it would be inherent in us, but the result would be the same). We are quite a long way off, aren’t we?

-John