Respect Authority

Zero Tolerance is a weekly feature, appearing on Saturdays, that briefly covers some unacceptable offense from the prior week. This is far from a hard science, in fact, it’s entirely likely that it’s not even fact based — indeed, this is pure opinionated ranting because it’s my website and I can cry if I want to. — RA

In the age of the Internet, print magazines’ place in the world is deteriorating rapidly. Every week another once-heralded publication trims its pages, reduces frequency, or in the hopelessly ironic case of PC Magazine this week, goes all-online. It won’t be too long before picking up the latest issue of Time or People simply means checking your e-mail.

Since RA is already a blog, we can’t explore the all-online option anymore than we already have, yet in the actual trickle-down effect of nationwide economics, our staff is just as beaten down as the underpaid and ever-laid-off employees of print magazines. After all, we have other jobs, and can only go so long before questioning how much time and energy to put into this little effort (once called masturbatory by a reader, who we’ve since killed) at the expense of things like social interaction, or excessive drinking. Seriously, I haven’t done any excessive drinking in hours because of this blog! It’s killing me.

I’m whining, you say? How hard could it possibly be to knock out a few witty and irreverent blog posts a day, you say? Alas, the development of a blog such as this takes hard work: we have to find these interesting factoids and hard-won opinions, we have to produce luxurious prose, rich with metaphors and similes, while simultaneously presenting our points of view in a clear and efficient manner. We have to Google search for things like “puppy cam” or “celebrity lesbians ugly.” We have to create art.

So in the name of economic improvement, masturbatory decision-making and sheer laziness, RA will be making some cutbacks of its own. Fewer posts, but posts of a greater variety. Shorter posts perhaps, but better. This way, we can devote more time to creating a stellar product - without holing up in our respective apartments until our friends forget we exist - and you dear readers, can maybe get some work done during the day instead of finding yourselves lost in the undulating waves of genius that is RA. Everyone wins.

Maybe when the economy rights itself and we can all afford to quit our day jobs and write full-time, well maybe then we’ll get back to a Gawker-esque level of production, albeit without slave driver Nick Denton as our boss.

At least I’ll write more once we make it big. Then I can afford to hire someone to write my blog posts for me.