Last week, I was updating the blogroll for the re-launch of this site and remembered that not only do blogrolls no longer exist, no longer do most blogs.
I’m not talking about Tumblr accounts where teenagers achieve new and thrilling scientific breakthroughs in Giff.ery each week. I’m talking about the wave that crested in the middle years of the last decade, when each day it felt like another talented self-publishing amateur emerged to write thoughtful essays or share rare music.
Of course, there were plenty of not-so-thoughtful rants and hyperbolic raves about how Serena Maneesh or Camp Lo would change your life. I wrote many of them and don’t stand by much other than that Uptown Saturday Night can cure the swine flu. What I remember most about that time is that the Internet itself felt like a wide-open canvas. Many major publications lacked regularly updated websites, social media meant Myspace, and blogging felt mildly subversive and communal. It was a medium waiting to take shape and that felt exciting.
This site started in 2005. Its lifespan has witnessed the blog era flourish and fade. Most of the original bloggers shuttered their blogspots sometime around Obama’s first inauguration. Many others got swooped by media corporations who employed them to churn out listiciles, “think pieces,” and 50 daily posts of sponsored Travis Scottent. Shout out to the survivors still subsisting despite not posting Iggy Azalea videos.
That’s not to dismiss the dozens of excellent articles scattered across your timelines every day. Great writers and independent websites still exist, but sometimes seem marginalized amidst the avalanche of clutter and click-thirsty digital panhandlers. If this site has any mission at all, it’s to be an alternative to the slideshow sideshow—without being too self-serious. It’s not like any of us are finding lost Malaysian planes or figuring out who killed 2Pac or Tim Dog.
The goal is to do good work for the sake of doing good work, and hopefully exist with the same unhinged spirit that marked the first years of online writing. It goes without saying that Passion of the Weiss is a collective effort and without its staffers, it would inevitably had gone to the same mass grave where they buried Birdmonster, Kidz in the Hall, and (Someone Still Loves You)Boris Yeltsin.
If you like the re-design and the site itself, please tell a friend or share it on one of your preferred social networks owned by an Ivy League techno-hoodie. As resistant as we are to the hard sell, neither the site’s design nor upkeep come free, and most of our writers are taking time away from paid jobs to contribute. Doing something “for the love” is a wonderful idea, but landlords and web hosters don’t operate with the same utopian principals.
A caveat: this is very much in Beta mode. There are still bugs and new features will be gradually rolled out as soon as we can. Credit for the complete aesthetic overhaul belongs to designer, David Bartholow and developer, Nathan Binford. If you catch any glitches, please don’t hesitate to mention them in the comment section.
Lastly, thank you for reading. It’s pretty staggering to think that something that originally started as a fan site for an obscure low-budget Mel Gibson passion project has evolved into the web’s #2 home for animated anti-Wale cartoons. Hopefully, with your support, we’ll get to #1 soon enough.
