Taking a dump on Bogue's 9 points

Recently Everett Bogue posted a blog called HOW TO CREATE AN A-LIST MINIMALIST BLOG IN LESS THAN 6-MONTHS, a title which I could spend at least a few paragraphs picking apart. I have no idea how caps lock is supposed to emphasize how FUCKING MINIMALIST THIS SHIT IS or why he hyphenated "6-months". It makes so little sense I could puke. Which would be awesome, because then I wouldn't have to count the contents of my stomach as a possession.

Bogue goes on to name the nine key elements of any successful minimalist blog. Not just any blog, mind you, but a minimalist blog. Most other types of blogs are irrelevant. Except this one.

Here are Bogue's key points, plus my delightfully snarky take on them:

1. Live the change you want to make in the world.

Holy shit, Ev, that was my senior yearbook quote! But wait.. it sounds a little different. Do you mean "Be the change you wish to see in the world"? Because Gandhi said that shit. I think you just tried to one-up fucking Gandhi in quote form. Shit, Gandhi! Now there's a minimalist! Dude didn't even eat, and he got shit DONE. Namaste, bitch!

He continues:
How do you live a minimalist life? Well, I went over that in a book I wrote. If you’re still stumped, rent a dumpster and throw all of your stuff in it. Take your car to the center of town and light it on fire (but don’t tell them I told you to do it.) Living with less than 50 things is a good benchmark for most people these days, if you’re into counting your stuff.

I’m sorry, but you just can’t have a raging minimalist fan following if you’re living like a normal person. It just doesn’t work that way.

Terrorist acts give me a raging minimalist boner fan following. Bogue not only urges us to burn our cars (confusingly, he wants us to do this in heavily populated areas, which kind of reinforces the point I brought up in my last post: he's fucking culty) but also completely fails to realize that he's living like a normal person. Time and time again he pretends that he's just barely getting by with the fewest possessions a human could possibly need, but he blithely writes about the whole thing on his laptop, or maybe his iPhone. He has more higher-end electronics than I do, and I'm a "normal" person.

2. Fight for freedom.

Like these guys?

This is some Bogue's best writing. Observe:
Humans weren’t designed to sit at desks until their lumbar spine fuses irreversibly to their inner thighs. Humans weren’t meant to eat meal worms (my codename for any product made out of processed corn) for breakfast. Humans weren’t meant to drive around in solitary stupid people pods. Humans weren’t meant to be popping pills every morning in a desperate attempt to find artificial happiness. Humans weren’t meant to wander around fluorescently lit shopping malls being told what to buy by huge corporations.

I wonder at which co-op he purchased his sustainably-farmed iPhone. Does Apple no longer count as a huge corporation, just 'cause they make stuff that appeals to trust-fund hippies?

I won't even comment on the "meal worms" term or the biological impossibility of lumbar spines fusing to inner thighs. This shit makes me tired. I hope Bogue is one of those people who are rabidly opposed to vaccines. I hope he steps on a rusty nail and gets the flu and smallpox and cervical cancer all at once.

3. Challenge and prepare to be challenged.

He's challenged, all right. Hurrrr.

4. Be a human.

FUCK!

I'd just like to note, he closes this section with, "No one cares about your creative use of photoshop, what we care about is seeing your beautiful eyes." Is it possible to be molested via open letter? Because I feel violated on behalf of mankind.

5. Link link link link, link one more time.

When bloggers see you linking to them in every single post, they want to buy you dinner and a million beers, because they start to see traffic coming from your site.

That's our goal, Everett: to link to you in every. single. post. You will buy us one million beers, and you will be discredited until you are forgotten.

6. Establish an all star inner circle.

This is the section of the blog where Bogue starts whining about how like-minded asshats are always approaching him to promote their blogs. He adopts a Mafia-esque stance, saying, [W]hy would I want to link to you? Have you done anything for me? Why would I want to pimp out my audience for your blog if you’ve never done anything for me?

I thought this shit was all about being nice and kind and universal and not at all a douche chill. Oh wait.

7. Make this inner circle out of similarly sized blogs.

This is such a boring point it doesn't even need to exist. So I'll just keep my commentary to a simple FUCK YOU.

8. Don't apologize for being awesome.

You’re writing a blog, that’s an amazing thing. You’re doing way better than the other billions of people who aren’t writing a blog. Don’t apologize for being awesome, instead keep creating awesome stuff.

Thanks! I will!

9. Support yourself by supporting others.

Which directly contradicts the point he made in #6, where he railed against people who asked for his support. Keep on truckin', fuckface.

10. Bonus rule! Keep working towards your destination.

In other words, don't stop:

a) believin'
and
b) thinkin' about tomorrow.

It's all been said before. Without pretense. And with awesome power chords and/or a danceable beat, however unlistenable it might be.

I'd like to close with just a little bit more copyright infringement by posting a song that always lifts me up when I'm down, when I remember that my F-list blog that rides the coattails of an A-list blog has four followers and has not yet spawned a self-help ebook or a line of stick-free cookware. Sometimes I just have to remember to... TRUST MYSELF.