Twilight of the Blogs

I am the Watcher. My sleepless eye surfs perpetually the ether waves called "the internet" by mortals. I have seen blogs created and destroyed, and I was present at the Great Inception of the skateblog called "Fakiegrind". I have seen the blog struggle in its early days, as the Field Agent known as the Flatlander wrestled with inner demons
that told him he was too old to yet skateboard.

But, with the encouragement of the entity known as Kill-joy, skateboard he did--and them some, proving to the new generation of boarders that the old-to-intermediate school could still, indeed, bust it out. And as spring passed into summer, Fakiegrind accumulated more Agents, just as a popular skatespot will accumulate signs of its usage in the way of blackened curbs and "tagged" embankments. In these months the blog flourished, branching out from its original theme of wheeled self-propulsion to incorporate new themes such as poetry, religion, music, film criticism, extra terrestrial speculation, and cooking recipes. And yet the blog retained a certain perspective, an outsider's view of its material, that kept the comments from readers hovering at a predictable level of less than three per day.

A Pope of Fakiegrind was named, and this most auspicious personage helped smooth things over between Fakiegrind and the Dairy Farmer's Confederation of Canada, who had sought, for a time, to shut down the blog due to a seemingly irreconcilable difference in nutritional philosophies. And so the blog found a small but steady readership, and attracted the attention of friendly robots who were yet the authors of their own blogs. The humans and robots shared a common vision of the absurdity of it all, and so exchanged many a Cryptic Comment, which scholars, to this day, pour over in the hopes of discovering the Keys of Irony. But they will fail.


"It was a great blog! Never jumped the shark once!"

Comment postings skyrocketed, hitting, at one point, twenty-three for a given post. And yet, while the bloggers continued on in merriment, a darker force was gathering strength, biding its time until the day when it might make a bid to usurp the blog and put and end to the fun-loving cyber dance. This force was known under several names, appearing first as a hyperbolic fundamentalist super-villain, The Endtime Adjuster. Just when it was revealed that this personage might have been a farce, created by the Flatlander for his own amusement and distraction, the entity disappeared, and a new, more mysterious figure known only as Xister took the scene.

About this time, the robotic assassin Maskatron from the popular seventies television series The Six Million Dollar Man resurfaced after years of laying low in a storage warehouse housing dismantled threats to the public welfare. Strange rumours of a secret project known only as Operation: Black Cheddar were circulated, and the blog community was made somewhat uneasy. When the group known as the Black Cheddar Consortium finally revealed themselves it turned out to be a coven of hypnotists bent on gaining control of the entire internet, then the world.


"Count your blessings they have not succeeded....yet."

Happily, about this time, a certain four-armed, jet-propelled spiritual warrior known as Bhakti began frequenting the blog, and her intrepid canvassing roused several aging bionic celebrities from early retirement. Less fortunately, due to simmering resentments amongst the group the bionic celebrities of yor were unable to assist in neutralizing Maskatron, who is thought to have possibly disguised himself as Flatlander's cat and obtained sensitive files, the publishing of which on the Black Cheddar blog threatened to undermine the entire Fakiegrind enterprise.

It should be noted that at this point, the Black Cheddar Consortium, which at the time was composed of Maskatron, Xister and a female hypnotist and dairy advocate know only as Spirella seems to have joined forces with the mysterious entity/entities know as the Anonymi. This enigmatic collective was present when the Burning Sub-Blogosphere was destroyed by a temporal flux that caused the entire realm to implode upon itself, trapping the Evil Bob Dole inside, it was thought, for good.

Responding to the threat, Flatlander invoked the prophetic Book of Oldness, claiming that the great endtime Smorgasbord of the Blogs was immanent, and that only one blog would survive the pending cataclysm. However, due to the impending western holiday season once known as "Christmas", Flatlander proposed a truce between Fakiegrind and the Black Cheddar Consortium, suggesting that the Endtime Smorgasbord be postponed to March, at the earliest.

This truce was eagerly accepted by Fakiegrind's hypnotic opponents--perhaps too eagerly, for no sooner had it been established than did the Gyrobian nemesis, the Evil Bob Dole (somehow having escaped from the collapsed Sub-Blogosphere) disguise himself as the ruler of the realm know as the Frozen Lower Blogosphere and attempt to infiltrate Fakiegrind's comment page. This he actually did, but to inconclusive results. It was at about this time that the Black Cheddar Consortium launched an underhanded blitzkrieg-style attack on the Fakiegrind blog, instigating the terrible Blognarok prophesied in the Book of Oldness, and causing great casualties in both camps.


Readers danced while Fakiegrind burned.

The carnage was terrible. Flatlander's cat turned out not to be the assassin-bot Maskatron after all, but a Deceptacon Transformer who, changing into a rampaging robot cat, tore through Fakiegrind headquarters causing damage to Fakie Agent and Black Cheddar hypnotist alike.

Em (who was suspected of being a "double" agent) was the first Fakie Agent to fall to the robocat, despite performing many a slight-of-hand vanishing trick in an attempt to stupefy the beast. The seductive hypnotist Spirella was the next to fall, her mysterious Eye of Hathor proving ineffectual in neutralizing the transforming cat. With considerable struggle, the remaining Agents managed to lure the robocat into a microwave oven where its circuits were melted into a smoldering mass, rendering the unit inoperative.

Then the intrepid Agent Rock-steady braced himself to do battle with the evil Maskatron, only to find that the robot had disguised himself as the Flatlander. There was a moment of hesitation when it appeared that the robot would outsmart the Agents, until the quick-thinking Rock-steady threw a skateboard in the direction of the two identical-looking Flatlanders, reasoning that only the real Flatlander would have the ability to stand on the thing without falling.

And right he was. In attempting to meet the Agent's bluff, Maskatron fell off the skateboard, knocking a desk and causing his head to explode. The headless Maskatron still attempted to partake in the fray, but only caused himself further, irreparable damage when he unsuccessfully charged at a near-by refrigerator.

It appeared that the tide of battle had turned in Fakiegrind's favour, with Rock-steady and Flatlander standing to face the sole threat of Xister, who attempted to hypnotize his opponents with a Scrying Spoon dangling from a string. Flatlander, luckily, had donned a pair of 3-D glasses that neutralized the power of the Spoon, and so set upon Xister, eventually overpowering him and knocking him to the ground. Rock-steady was not so fortunate, and was fooled by Xister into believing himself to be a marmoset, and so started scampering across the floor and climbing the furniture.

Flatlander was just about to remove Xister's battle helmet, revealing his secret identity and nullifying his hypnotic powers, when Dr. Flavour materialized in a time machine, accompanied by a horde of ravenous cannibal dwarves from The Negative/Neutral Zone. While the good doctor had hoped to aid his companions in the fray, the dwarves actually proved beyond his ability to control, and so set upon Flatlander and Rock-steady (who still believed himself a marmoset) knocking them unconscious and devouring their flesh.


Scary!

Xister took advantage of the confusion to escape in the time machine, while Dr. Flavour hid himself in the Fakiegrind Vaults or Radicality, where he listened to many a record on the Wheels of Steeltown in order to calm his nerves before finally resurfacing to inter what was left of his friends. However, when the good doctor returned to ground level, he was surprised to find that the digital entity known as Q*bert had somehow erected a large ziggurat-style monument over the battleground, thus immortalizing the fallen bloggers until the day when city zoning by-laws demand the structure be removed.

The whereabouts of the entity known as Xister are, at this time, uncertain.

And so was brought to pass all that was foretold in the Book of Oldness.



*posted by The Watcher, via telepathic webpath.