Eleven Things I Hate About Your MySpace Presence

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1. Your profile has music. Nothing pisses me off more than listening to my music in the background, then surfing over to your little corner of the institution and being blasted with some piece of shit music track you like. Is there a good chance I like it as well? Sure, and I'm glad we might share that moment of joy-- but how about I just read about your favorite song in your profile and then choose to download and/or listen to it when I'm not rocking out to my own music.

People have to realize something: chances are on MySpace there are two reasons that people are visiting your profile. The first and most likely reason is that they think you're cute by seeing your picture either in a search or via someone who has you listed as a friend. Trust me, they won't care what music you're playing, they just wanna "get to know you" or flat out fuck you. In either case, they don't want to hear shit spewing from their speakers, because in either case, they're going to hear all about it while they're on a date or getting fucked. Otherwise, they're visiting your profile because they know you, and chances are you've either discussed or played your favorite music around them, or at least they have a good idea of the type of music you like. Besides, they could probably read your "favorite music" section or whatever if they're truly braindead.

If anyone else is as pissed off about this as me, I suggest a remedy: Disable background sounds and download FlashMute to block all the incessant din coming from your browser. It's also useful for retard sites that allow flash ads that have sounds in them. Oh yeah, and if you download flashmute, you are automatically testifying that you have removed all offending content from your profile as well. Otherwise, you're just a hypocritical dick :P.

2. You crash my browser. I can't fucking stand it when people add 40 different flash applets to their profiles in order to make it look... I dunno... cool? flashy? Oh yeah! I know! Absolutely ugly, bloated, and ridiculously retarded! That shit brings even the most powerful browsers to a screeching halt. It's kind of like my browser overhearing at IHOP, "If it wasn't for my horse, I wouldn't have spent that year in college."

Post your pictures to the fucking albums where they belong, or make use of flikr/yafro. In either case, I don't need to see a fade-in/out transition between stills taken of you and your friends, overlapped by a water effect in conjunction with a countdown to your dog's best friend's birthday.

In the case of this, I suggest using a browser where you can quickly disable plugins like flash. Opera is a great browser all-around, as it's nonstandard (which means less security exploits), renders 99.9% of sites just like IE, and has tons of great options to cripple amateur MySpace profiles. Oh yeah, Firefox rox too.

3. Your background sucks. You seem to think that putting a static picture that blends with your inline text is cute. And, you'd be right, but you're only cute in the sense of retarded-boy-in-the-special-olympics cute. What the fuck possessed you to put an image with sporadic, large black parts behind a page with black text? It's fuckin' beyond me the level of stupidity involved in accomplishing such a feat. What do you want people to do: read your profile or look at the completely irrelevant picture of Brittany Spears? Asshat.

Same solution as before applies. Opera has a "User mode" that overrides on-page CSS and body tag paramaters, thus getting rid of the silly pictures.

4. You alter my mouse. The epitome of pointless is when people think they're clever by using CSS to change the hover of my mouse when I'm on their page. Wow, you're l33t-- and UNIQUE! Plus, you manage to piss off all the people who were completely content with their mouse being a pointer as opposed to a crosshair. How inconsiderate. It'd be like forcing you to switch out your righthanded smileys :) for lefthanded smileys (: whenever you talked to me online. Does it hurt anything? No, it's just stupid.

Solution is same as above, use opera and use user mode to nullify any given page's css.

5. Your profile is private. Grow a fuckin' ball. You might even grow a complete pair if you have the time. Despite your world view, nobody gives a shit about you or your dirty little secrets. Depressing, isn't it? Plus, you're fucking up age-related searches, particularly if you're a 50 year old who's reporting himself as a 15 year old just to enable profile privacy.

There is an exception to this, and that's people who are actually in industries/organizations that openly discriminate against people's lifestyles (ex, you're a boy scout troop leader, you're in the armed forces, or you're a high school socialite who happens to be gay). Of course, it's still somewhat silly, as anyone who would have found your profile normally will wonder why it's private, then proceed to ask you to add them as a friend, thus defeating the purpose of private-ing the profile. By the way, if you’re gay and you’re in the aforementioned fields, you might consider a change of career before you’re forced to make one unexpectedly.

6. Your picture is ridiculously stupid. I'm not talking about sepia-toned or otherwise recolored pictures-- those are annoying enough. But, if you only have a picture of your shirtless chest, we all know at least one of two things about you: A.) You have an ugly face and would make a good underwear model and that's about it; and/or B.) You only want sex and don't want anyone to know who you actually are, in which case adultfriendfinder (or gay.com for those with private profiles) would be a better choice for you.

7. You post pointless bulletins. OMG! I'm going to have bad luck for the next nine gazillion years if I don't forward this message on! What's that? Your subject line is "Fucked a yak?" Wow, I should probably read that one to see how drunk you were last night! Oh, well shit, it's just another chain letter and you really didn't fuck a yak, it just stands for some stupid personality trait about yourself. You're sofa king we Todd Ed.

8. You have a boyfriend application. Yes, you might be hot, and then again you might not, but posting a "boyfriend application" makes you squat. Even if you try saying "oh, it's just for fun," you know deep down you want someone to fill it out and send it back to you to make you feel special. Tell you what, why don't you go ahead and delete the fucking boyfriend application that's on your profile or your blog or wherever you pasted it and save us the trouble of seeing how self-centered and lazy you are. Love isn't an application process, and it's not a job interview. If you think it is, you're doing it wrong.

9. It's littered with your quiz results. I'm actually quite surprised by the amount of external validation people need for their own personalities. People's profiles give this away right off the bat. If someone needs a quiz made by some thirteen year old in her Introduction to Computing course to tell them that they're a "playful kisser," "62 percent goth," or that the answer to their ultimate question is "42," then I think they need to spend more time sitting alone in a dark room void of the Internet and external worldly things in order to truly come to know themselves better. Maybe they just need to take the “How much more should I jerk off” quiz or the “how much of a depressed freak am I” test.

10. You have greater than or equal to 5,000 friends. News bulletin: you don't have that many friends, and I assure you less than 1% of those people actually give a shit about you. Sorry to burst that bubble, but someone needs to tell the people who slow down MySpace with the virtual table scans that result each time they login and view the bulletins, friends, or notifications applets. Get a fucking clue and drop some of those pseudo-acquaintances faster than a rancid cock.

11. You're misleading. This includes using a primary picture of yourself from greater than or equal to 5 years ago. Clearly, you're not as good looking today as you were five years ago. This is understandable, but it's misleading to make people think you are. Also, maybe it's my good old truthiness coming through, but it's totally foot-in-door to post a picture of some hot person as your primary picture (someone who looks like he's a ripped 19 year old), when you're actually a flabby 50 year old.

Yes, "aging sucks," "you're an eternal child," "true beauty is on the inside," etc, etc, but let us not delude ourselves: MySpace is a bastion of superficiality, and you're really sending off a bad message to people who actually ARE there for to find friends and people of any age who have great personalities; but, instead they find some dick posing as someone else. Do you actually think they'll stop to actually read your profile? No, and you'll be alone forever. Sorry. Want a shot of vodka to ease the pain?

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Okay. I feel better now. Carry on, nothing to see here.