• 1. MIB Vs. Tucker Max/ Sedaris: Yes, Michael Ian Black is a funny and tolerable guy. But variety is the spice of life, man. How about an online encouragement of somebody?
• 2. Jakob Lodwick Quits The Internet: This one is lame because it will not stick, we guarantee. For one, he runs an internet company. Yea.
• 3. Julia Allison Quits Blogging: *Scoff*. Also: other things.
• 4. Patrick Moberg And His Subway Dream Girl: A guy sees a cute girl on the subway, draws a picture of her, puts it on a website, and gets famous. The two finally meet! They go on national TV! Everybody writes about them! Then they end up not really liking each other that much, proving that love is a dirty sham and we live in a cold and heartless world. Thanks for nothing.
• 5. The Keith Gessen Middlebrow Remix Book: We muddy the clearcut sides of this tedious feud by having Gessen remove the objectionable references to Harvard in his objectionable book and replace them with references to Florida State. Btw, bidding on this for-charity item ends tomorrow so bid bid bid!

Know the Sharing/Oversharing Divide. A bit of personal info—we have a kitty!—makes you a friend. Too much personal info—check out my facial!—makes you a target. This is not even a fine line. It is a very obvious line. It is the line that drove Julia Allison off the net before. Since her return, she, surprisingly, has not really crossed it!

Don't Write Like An Asshole. Kinda hard to quantify this one, right? Especially because some of us make our livings acting like pricks all day. But writing assholish things and writing like an asshole are different! Keith Gessen often Tumblrs like an asshole. Yes, you have a fine little magazine, but the I'll buy you a beer if you are half as impressive as me when you're my age thing is one of the douchiest things we've ever read, especially because dude is not actually Norman Mailer yet. Ditto for Lodwick's contention that his pretty websites "change the world." No, they don't! Maybe "asshole" just means "solipsist?" It does seem to, doesn't it. Which brings us to:

Manage Your Narcissism. Please. And:

Have a Sense of Humor Please.

STOP DIGGING. You're mocked or attacked. Respond with a cutting counter-attack, a reasonable and self-reflective defense, or DON'T RESPOND AT ALL. Or email the author and make friendly! This secret tactic usually works wonders. DON'T flail about helplessly in the comments section, where you'll be piled on. Don't post something hurt and whiny that reinforces whatever real or imagined fault you were attacked for. Bite back and enjoy the game or ignore it and move on with your life. Mr. Keith Gessen sort of did this, which is why we'll link to his cute puppy pictures.

Man Up. This advice is very sexist but also sadly useful.

Own Your Terrible Gimmick This is basically summed up as "fuck the haters." It means that when we (or anyone else!) do things like this to you, you do this.

Read This. Will Leitch is leaving the internet, but he imparted wisdom on his way to print.

Be Like Doree Everyone likes Doree. Everyone! Look at how she deflects criticism!

Don't Storm Off the Internet In a Huff. It's embarrassing. Also it makes the entire internet indistinguishable from LiveJournal, which is depressing.

We hope this helps all you Tumblrs and Tweeters out there! You whiny idiots!

Q: What about the homeless guy who can’t get hired for the $5/hour minimum wage job, but would be qualified for a $3 an hour job?

A: He will have no job, because no $3 jobs exist. He will dig through trash cans for empty bottles and pizza crusts.

Q: But that’s not fair. It is my belief that no one should have to dig through trash cans.

A: Then why do you advocate laws that make digging through trash cans inevitable? Why do you eliminate the role of the least skilled people in the economy? Why do you insist that the ladder have no bottom rung?

Q: Nobody’s talking about ladders. I’m talking about the basic human right of a well-paying job.

A: What about the right to earn a living that, while meager, is better than no living at all?

Q: Easy for you to say! You’ve made plenty of money — you’re just trying to squeeze every last penny out of the underpriviledged!

A: I’ve made plenty of money because I’m good at evaluating complex systems and understanding how they could be made more efficient. There is an inefficiency here that hurts everyone. It bothers me because it could so easily be reversed, because it causes so much misery, and because it makes the economy worse off for me! But nobody wants to learn basic economics, so they go on repeating the same reality-denying mistakes that have been made, putting forth an agenda that cannot work but sure does sound nice [...]

Q: Do you think the girls who attack you on their tumblrs have crushes on you?

A: No comment, you’re adding an unnecessary distraction to this post.

Q: Ok, one more question, what’s your take on this debacle?

A: GOOD NIGHT.
[JakobLodwick.com]

Jakob and Julia from Loren Feldman on Vimeo.

Here's the key passage from Julia Allison's personal blog, in which she writes of her boyfriend's betrayal.

Instead of close friend, try "little sister." Leven Ramblin is a young actress on All My Children, the daytime soap opera, on which she plays an autistic teenager called Lily Benton Montgomery. It's a role once occupied by Mischa Barton.

Julia Allison, always quick to attach herself to a rising celebrity stock, took the young ingenue under her wing. In May last year, she even hosted a media coming-out party to mark Leven's 17th birthday. It was a fun party, until the doorman cottoned on that some of the party guests might be underage. The Gawker tag on that story: BARELY LEGAL.

Lodwick's fortunate that, in New York State, the age of consent is lower than the legal drinking age. But, still, an affair with someone Allison called her "adopted little sister" — that's just cruel. Even if she has several adopted little sisters.

The techie, one of the four first employees at the College Humor site, refused to comment. "I don't want to talk to you guys - anything I say will be used against me." Julia Allison was unusually discreet herself: "Please don't post anything on that. People will assume i told you, and i'm not okay with that. i really need it to end." The end.

(Photo by Katy Winn/Getty Images for IMG)

Here's the thing: the gossip reported in Page Six, on Pagesix.com, on TMZ, in the Daily News' gossip columns, and in every celebrity weekly, has never been lamer or weaker than it is right now. Take it from me—I've spent the past year skimming those news outlets daily. And, okay, obviously I'm insanely burnt out, but I think that as celebrity-focused coverage has mushroomed and our standards for what constitutes "celebrity" have become incredibly broad—come on, we're supposed to care about Hulk Hogan's divorce?—whatever was once juicy or appealing about paying attention to "gossip" has, for many people, disappeared entirely.

One of the reasons gossip has become boring is that many self-styled stars are letting it all hang out just as much, if not more, than Jakob and Julia. You want "universal transparency," Ricky? Look no further than Britney Spears' underpants, or Amy Winehouse's shirt.

But then there's also the fact that "second hand information, information embargoes, secret sources, tips, etc." have never been as fundamental to the "gossip industry" as publicists, managers, deliberate leaks, strategic appearances, and press releases. And by controlling the dissemination of information about themselves 100%, Jakob and Julia played the game in the most old-fashioned way possible.

So Ricky's right: something to do with the kind of thing Jakob and Julia have done is eventually going to put "Page Six" and its ilk out of business. But Jakob and Julia haven't wrested the means of production out of the evil gossip overlords' hands. They've only hastened the demise of the whole enterprise by adding their own voices to an already out-of-control cacophony.

I don't think I'm the only one who's so overwhelmed by the whole shebang that I just can't bring myself to care about any of it anymore.

Look, I don't care if you don't care about Vimeo founder and recent firee Jakob Lodwick or his girlfriend, Star Editor at Large Julia Allison. This is funny, and for now it's my job to let you know about stuff like this. Okay? Sooooorry.

Like it or not, the holidays are upon us. I'm sure when you were stumbling home in the wee morning hours of November 1st in your slutty Madeline Albright costume, you saw the shopkeepers ripping down witches and vampires and putting up pictures of a fat old man who breaks into your house and tries to woo your children with toys. But there's also that other holiday in between, that one dedicated to an afternoon spent face-down on the shag carpet, woozy from tryptophan and big-bottle wine. A time when you listen to and look at your family and wonder "Who are these people??" I was thinking about this the other day and, in the immortal words of Mr. Ed: later that night, I got to thinking. I've decided we'll have a new Thanksgiving. A Gawker Thanksgiving. It's so corny! I know! But, I get sentimental this time of year.

So. How will this work? I think we'll start with the location. Naturally Laurel Touby, founder of MediaArby's, will be our "cyber hostess." (Ugh.) We'll all meet sometime around noon. Julia Allison will bring her darling dog Lilly and Jakob Lodwick will bring his darling fashion lenses. Tinsley Mortimer will arrive wearing an old, soiled Santa suit and just blink confusedly at everyone. (She'll disappear for much of the night, only to be found in the backyard, stuck in a bear trap.) Kristian Laliberte will arrive with his new boyfriend, Elijah Pollack. They'll be so in love! (Later, during dinner, Anna Wintour will lean in close, her breath reeking of gin and clamato juice, purring into your ear "Aren't they just divine together? They're like Paul Newman and Katherine Ross in Butch Cassidy. Except, you know, gay and, um, young.") John Fitzgerald Page will come crashing through the foyer in his Beemer, Eiffel 65's "Blue" blasting loudly, and shove a sweaty bucket of fried chicken into Laurel's hands. Then, just as we think all the guests have arrived, we'll hear a strange hum, a demonic orchestra tuning. As the whole house rumbles, Sean Hannity will shriek, jumping up and down and clapping his hands, "Rupey is here!" Mr. Murdoch will disembark his flaming humpback whale nuclear stagecoach and shove a sweaty Judith Regan into Laurel's feather boa.

James Lipton will utter a dinner bell clarion call from deep within his diaphragm, and all the guests will be seated at the long oak table. There will be a beautiful centerpiece fashioned out of the rawhide remains of Jocelyn Wildenstein's face. The feast will consist of many bottles of Coppola Vineyards wine, PinkBerry soufflés, and turducken. Robert Olen Butler will be the first to get drunk and hurl recriminations at people. "Elizabeth!!" he'll shout across the table at Jann Wenner, "No one poops in South America! It wasn't a sign! It was nature!!" Chris Crocker will defuse the awkward situation by stripping down to his skivvies and doing an old-style fan dance/Britney Spears hyper-sexual mash-up that erotically incorporates Janet Robinson's famous green bean casserole. ("It's the fried onions that really make it work," he'll say in a post-performance YouTube interview with himself.)

Once all are sated and sufficiently boozed up, plates will be cleared by Laurel's faithful butler, Neel Shah. Then, it's on to charades! Mandy Stadtmiller will start. She will pantomime long walks on beaches and summers spent murmuring on porch swings about the big, bright future. In mere seconds team partner Alyssa Shelasky will shriek "SuperPreppy!!" Commenter KarenUhOh, who has been quietly assessing the legal ramifications of all this, will dryly deadpan: "I thought the category was real people." Mandy will run out of the room weeping and farting, having had her hideous secret revealed. Graydon Carter will be next. He will act out a strange series of lilts and affectations, and Lizzie Grubman will yell with delight "Spike! Spike! It's your little fey creature of a son!" A few more rounds will come and go, and of course it will end in a tie and all will be smugly satisfied with their own accomplishments.

The rest of the evening will be devoted to that most revered and corny of Thanksgiving traditions, the actual giving of thanks. The list of thanks will be long and varied. Selected highlights will be:

Tionna Tee Smalls: The film Ishtar
NewToJezebel: Jewish people.
Jeffrey Epstein: Those High School Musical: The Ice Tour tickets he managed to score.
Christopher Hitchens: Religion and Bic razors.
Atoosa Rubenstein: The well-meaning gypsies who style her and, in a bold extension of an olive branch, the Omega Kitties.
Senator Larry Craig: Feet, and a willful spirit.
Josh Schwartz and the rest of the Gossip Girl team: Blacks and Asians.

And, finally, the yoga stick of thanks will be passed to yours truly. And your friend LolCait will say this:

"I find the word 'thanks' inadequate, or even inappropriate. 'Thanks' implies expectation, a resigned 'Phew! Of course these good things were coming after all.' So I'm not thankful, I'm grateful. Things of late seem pretty awful and, truth is, I've Done Nothing During The War, and yet some good things keep coming to me. Six months into my participation in this bizarre social experiment, it is quite baffling to have found both silly entertainment and keen insight on this most cold and unfeeling internet. So I am grateful for a strange new home, for precarious new friendships."

All will be quiet for a moment, and then I will fall down, completely drunk. I will be scooped up by the ever-friendly Josh Ferris (swoon!) and taken from the room.

The night will end as nights do, with sloppy hugs and prolonged, slurred goodbyes. Dear James Kurisunkal will be passed out in the broom closet, spooning a snoring Spencer Pratt, who will still be in his 'Vincent from the Beauty and the Beast television series' Halloween costume. (Or is it a costume??) Ira Glass will dejectedly try to coax Merry Miller into his cab. The Gawker editors will wander off into the night, a bottle of champagne shared between them (with a pour to the sidewalk, remembering Balks, Shafrirs, Spiers, Oxfelds, and others long gone.) Nick Denton will open his umbrella and float whimsically away into the purple night sky. And I will ramble off, thinking of puns and light bulb jokes for the next week. But, before I turn the corner, I will feel a tap on my shoulder. "Don't be alarmed," a voice will say. "It's only me, Douglas." I'll messily grin at him, this most famous of Queens landlords, and say "Oh Douglas. I'm not alarmed. I'm just grateful... Just wonderfully, queasily grateful."

Douglas will shrug his shoulders and walk away, headed off to yuk it up with Michelle and Emily, happy to have been included at all.

"Who are all those strange people?" Patrick Moberg will ask as he stands on the stoop and watches this all unfold. "I don't know," his new wife Camille will respond, robotically petting his arm.

"I've only just met them."

"Weird thing about Julia #1: The woman has almost zero cultural knowledge whatsoever ... I like her, so I see these bizarre traits not as something to laugh at, but as a great potential," blogs Jakob.

Ooh! Cosmo headline idea! 'Is 'Condescending' The New 'Cute'?'

But don't worry! Jakob is going to introduce Julia to all the important cultural touchstones she's been missing out on. "It's the chance to expose her to classic art that all my friends and I have loved for years. For example, she doesn't know who Radiohead is. This is not a joke. I can't wait to sit her down with a copy of OK Computer, dim the lights, and melt into that incredible album."

Really.

For her part, Julia acknowledges that blogging the flowering of a romance might seem a bit odd to most people. "Perhaps you wouldn't want to discuss this sort of thing online (or maybe anywhere!)," she writes. "I get that - I wouldn't expect most people to be comfortable with this. That having been said, I've been a dating columnist for over five years now; it's a natural - and fascinating - next step to analyze a realtionship as it evolves. I couldn't imagine a better learning experience."

Maybe she'll even eventually "learn" the "fascinating" truth that she's been the best promotional tool her fameball boyfriend's business could ever hope for! Or maybe not.

A couple of years ago, around the time when Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston were splitting up, I got hooked on celebrity weeklies like Star and Us Weekly. They were fascinating because they purported to give their readers behind the scenes access to people whose public personae were larger than life, and for a while I was really into knowing these details. Information about famous people, no matter how banal—Angelina Jolie bought a baby sweater at La Petite Tresor! Britney Spears likes chocolate-covered pretzels! Reese Witherspoon wore the same sweater three times in a week!—seemed entertaining.

But my tastes got a little bit more bloodthirsty and ravenous once I burned out on this quotidian stuff, and so did the tastes of the tabs, or so it seemed. I wanted: more cellulite! More weight winners and losers! More hitting rock bottom! And then, after I started writing about "gossip," it became far less possible to delude myself that any of the weeklies actually had privileged insights into the lives of the stars. I'd pick up Us Weekly and feel sorry for the writer who had to eke 1500 words out of a paparazzi photo that showed Reese Witherspoon frowning. "REESE AND JAKE: ON THE ROCKS?" Uh, right, either that or she just didn't feel like smiling for the camera for the thousandth time that day. The thing is, though, that even though we all know it's bullshit, the idea that we could be privy to a tiny bit of insider info is compelling.

So when Internet microcelebrities like Julia and Jakob compulsively display their dirty laundry online, it fulfills a need that celebrity culture has instilled in me and come on, admit it, possibly you too. Instead of extrapolating what's going on in these self-proclaimed fameballs' largeish heads based on pictures snapped on the way out of a party, we can read about it and read about it and read about it on their blogs, or we can watch them fight and offer them relationship tips in Vimeo comments. Instead of musing about how Jakob's immaturity probably will make Julia cry eventually, we can actually watch her tears. She's letting us! She wants us to watch.

Which is probably exactly why we should turn away.

After all, there are plenty of things he could to that would change his trajectory! For example, he could quit blogging. He could quit dating Julia Allison. He could quit blogging about dating Julia Allison. Those are three things!

But doing all those things is just part and parcel of Jakob continuing to be his terrible self. So he probably will continue snowballing! Or maybe not. We talked about this a lot over here. One of us thought this: "Jakob has *NO IDEA* what he's talking about. Once he hits 30, he'll notice all the missing seats in the front row of fame, conspicuously not occupied by all his fameball cohorts."

Jakob's having a moment, a moment he'll be unable to sustain for much longer unless he takes things to the next level by, say, dumping Julia for Heidi Montag and marrying her on live TV.

But whatever. He'll probably still be rich, though. And maybe he'll make yet more money off this whole "fameball" concept. It's at least as punchy as "The Long Tail" or "The Tipping Point," right?

This is the first time I've blogged a public apology for a breakup, but I feel right doing it. And here it is: Julia, you deserve better than I treated you. I'm sorry I broke up with you for standing up for yourself; I'm sorry I fixated on and attacked your flaws; I'm sorry I blew you off because I was tired from shrooms; and I'm sorry I selflessly agreed to hang out with you when I didn't actually want to (which was the root of this dilemma).

Before blogs, if some dude you were dating didn't have the balls to break up with you in person, you might show his Dear Jane letter to a few of your closest girlfriends. Dating advice columnist and Star talking head Julia Allison, being Julia Allison, sent her friends the email in which CollegeHumor and Vimeo cofounder Jakob Lodwick dropped her like a hot potato minutes after he sent it to her.

Later, of course, she posted it on her blog.

She had sort of broken up with him first, though, or tried to—she was upset because he'd blown her off, but somehow found time to update his blog, Obeastiality. "I'm upset with you because I feel like you're putting me in a position where I have to—for my own self-respect—stop seeing you," she wrote to him.

FYI, ladies? Never do this! When you send the "I'm sort of dumping you but leaving the door open for you to say you still care" email, you are basically sending a letterpress-printed hand-calligraphied invitation that says, "Dump me please."

And that's what Jakob did.

You deserve more respect than I've been treating you with. I think you pretty much nail it in this email. I tend to walk all over girls I date, in the sense that they aren't as high a priority as they ought to be. You are not an exception, and I will only grow more selfish (inconsiderate) in the future. For example, this week will be worse than last week.
I am not capable of giving you what you deserve in a relationship, even an "alternative" relationship, so, we should stop seeing each other. I think you are awesome, but I think it's impossible to be together.

Now, the high road to take in an instance like this is: Get angry, sure! Bitch about the jerk you wasted a few months with to your close friends. Take a lot of hard yoga or kickboxing classes or whatnot and buy yourself some new shoes and have sex with a 23-year-old! But bloggers don't think like that—at least, not right off the bat. Their first impulse is, of course, to blog it out.

"And so there it is, the demise of a budding relationship. All over... what, exactly?" Julia wrote. Well, if we had to wildly guess? We'd say that writing about a relationship while you're in it, especially in a public forum, always kills it, unless you're Calvin Fucking Trillin. And if we wanted to delve a little deeper, we'd say that the funny thing about the critiques of each other that Julia and Jakob have posted on their respective blogs could just as easily be about themselves.

Here's Julia on Jakob: "He's an intriguing, colorful, free-spirited, deeply creative soul. He is also aloof and self-centered and unapologetically narcissistic, which in moderation would be fine, but he pushes the boundaries towards 'asshole.' He's incredibly erratic—immature with bursts of maturity. Myopia with bursts of self-awareness. Selfishness with bursts of... well... there were a few moments—tiny glimpses—of who he could be if he took into account the feelings of others. It was something very special. I really liked that person—there I saw joy and an energy, an active curiosity, an exploratory mind with a lot of passion."

And here's Jakob on Julia: "You cannot build a media shrine to yourself when your self is shaped primarily by someone else."

News of College Humor fella Zach Klein's departure from the lucrative website he co-founded got us to thinking: Who are these twenty-five-year-old millionaires, anyway? I mean, sure, we all read the New Yorker article two years ago, but the boys must be slightly different after a couple years of living in New York. Like: they probably watch Sex and the City way less! And maybe they've slept with some famous ("famous") people.

Ricky Van Veen: The Funny One

Notable quotable: "It's hard being taken seriously when you are our age. But, here, people can walk in and say, Obviously, these guys are doing something right."

Josh Abramson: The Boring One

One of the burger competitors (and sharemate with Leventhal) was Mo Koyfman, who kind of serves as a chaperone to College Humor on behalf of their boss, Barry Diller. It's weird that he was grilling cheeseburgers, since he's supposedly kosher. Anyway, he lost.

Schoeneman even brought her gay albino housecleaner Marco, who cleaned during the party. Momofuku's David Chang was there with Frankie's Spuntino owner Frank Falcinelli as a judge, as was Peter Meehan of the Times. Ken Friedman of the Spotted Pig showed up too late to judge anything. This girl I went to N.Y.U. with was there and now she is married to Bob Vila's son, Chris. That made me feel old. [Ed. Note: Jesus Christ, you're like 12, Josh.]

That goofy-looking actor from 30 Rock, Lonny Ross, was there with his cute girlfriend. And though the party was first reported on New York magazine's Grub Street, its editor Josh Ozersky was noticeably absent, or not-invited. Chalk that up to the fact that David Chang and a few of the other attendees absolutely hate him.

[Photo: Ricky Van Veen/Flickr]