Eating durian and Vladmir Nabokov...

...are two things best enjoyed without the company of others. Sad as it is to put the "king of fruits" and one of my favorite prose stylists in the same category I hold masturbation and listening to Nickelback, but it simply must be. Durian is too pungent to allow anybody near you while eating it, and it's better to keep to one's self for longer still as the odor sticks for several hours. Nabokov is too good to allow distractions while reading, and usually if people see you reading a book with a title like Lolita in public, you run the risk of getting Chris Hansen blindsiding you and asking if you can have a seat over there.

This is the point in the blog post where I write something that's supposedly pertinent to the theme of "media criticism." However, I don't have anything.

The only thing that I'll say is that I have become extremely aware of people who do things in public that should remain private. Much worse than that, I'm aware of people who take private things of others and put them in public. It's like somebody somehow capturing the scent of your breath after a big mouthful of durian, and then somehow putting that scent on the internet. A good example is Documenting Reality

I don't know what to say about that site. The owner, Chris Wilson, traded a free pass to his amateur pornography community in exchange for grisly photos of just about anything, which became at least as popular an attraction as pictures of people who would have likely looked better with their clothes on. That landed him in trouble in Florida, where his computer was seized. Considering somebody sent me a link to his sight to see what are supposedly photos stolen from a "closed community forum" for cutters in which an emaciated, scarred young woman flays open her arms in some of the most horrendous ways imaginable, I feel perfectly justified in saying that Mr. Wilson has earned my utmost contempt. Not only because of his glee in publishing photos of a person at their most vulnerable, but for his refusal to own up to how he came across those photographs. Of all places, Something Awful actually had people who were in a position to figure out who the girl was and how to alert others of her self-abuse. Some calls were made (to Germany, apparently) and that was that.

I still want to know how that creep managed to get those pictures, since the forums this young woman posted on are closed to outside registrations (for good reason, apparently) and even the people who managed to get onto these web pages while in search of this girl didn't find anything like the pictures posted on "documenting reality."

Moreover, looking at his forum, it hardly documents much of anything aside from hearsay. I've seen photos with descriptions like "crack baby" and the accompanying picture looking very much like an infamous deformed child that was born in the aftermath of Chernobyl. Simple Google image searches would have yielded that result.

I despise this person. I'm terrified that he can apparently run a web site like this legally, and I'm even more horrified by the people who post on his forums. It's an unpleasant, ugly view of humanity. I'm not talking about the pictures he posts either.