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Posts Tagged “
Boing Boing
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Back to our regularly scheduled Xeni Space Pr0n
Save your blog drama for Obama. Boing Boing starship trooper Xeni Jardin posted close-up photos of fun-loving Virgin billionaire Richard Branson's new space tourism plane, Eve, from yesterday's big debut event.(Photo by Brian Lam) MORE »
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nerdfight
Violet Blue tries to restrain critic with court order instead of sexy rubber strap
Internet sex educator Violet Blue has asked a court to serve a restraining order against Ben Burch, a Wikipedia editor. Blue's entry on Wikipedia has been home to almost as much conflict as the fallout from her deletion from the popular blog Boing Boing: her boyfriend, Jonathan Moore, is responsible for at least eighteen of the entry's edits (as "Wikiwikimoore"), prompting Burch and others to question whether he can observe the site's requirement for a neutral point of view regarding all subjects. Blue's response, based on documents forwarded to Valleywag, is to ask a court to declare Burch a threat to her physical safety. More »
boing boing
The glamorous way out of a Web drama
What's the classiest finish to an Internet catfight? The shining example will be July 2008's Boing Boing vs. Violet Blue. It wasn't about player-hating and girl-on-girl sex, we'll all say. No no, it was about freedom and blogging and privacy and good versus evil. Now that we've all moved on, the New York Times steps in a week later to clean things up with a G-rated rehash that suggests Violet Blue may be the real winner. What have each of the participants learned? More »
100-word version
Boing Boing's unapologetic eleventh-hour apologia
Boing Boing's readers, hopped up on free-speech rhetoric, continue to find the tech-culture blog's act of unpublishing unspeakable. Hoping to put the Internet's most enduring drama llama this month to bed, the Los Angeles Times rounded up four members of Boing Boing's staff yesterday for a late-night confab. The result is transcribed here and there, but for those about to launch into a three-day weekend, we salute you with only the most wonderful bits, perfect for around-the-barbeque reblogging. It is at once brilliant and brain-numbing in its inconclusiveness. But if the answer to bad speech is more speech, why not answer an act of unpublishing with more nonwords? More »
nerdfight
Boing Boing's relationship with Violet Blue comes full circle
Sex blogger Violet Blue may have tried to ride the Boing Boing coattail express to microfame by airing grievances publicly. But once upon a time she waged the same kind of war on Boing Boing cofounder Xeni Jardin's side against Matthew Neal Sharp, curator of xenisucks.com, and the New York Times. Now, after the bad breakup between the two bloggers became serious business, another gentleman has put a thumb in the third eye of the popular catalog of eclectic ephemera by creating violetbluevioletblue.net — a directory of formerly wonderful things from Boing Boing that featured Blue, deleted by Jardin from the site a year ago. More »
metafilter
1,259 insults on one page
As a human being with a soul in there somewhere, I've avoided blogging about the Xeni-Violet scandal. But as a wannabe comedy writer, I found myself obsessively poring over the 1,200-plus Metafilter comments on our report. I'd forgotten why I love-hated Metafilter: It's a boyzone of spiteful, pseudonymous insult comics, but many are snappy with the English language. "Instead of calling it what it is, they're going to clown us with semantics." Red meat for you guys at MeFi: The "homophobic" headline on yesterday's post was added by big gay Owen Thomas himself. Discuss.
full disclosure
The Valleywag-Boing Boing sex map
"Did you sleep with Violet Blue? I can't keep track," my editor IM'd me. He's not nosy; he's just trying to stay on top of things. To help him — and you — out, I've dashed off this sex map of l'affaire Boing Boing, including my own involvement. (Why didn't Xeni Jardin just do this in the first place? In retrospect, that seems easier than taking the abuse she's now getting.) Jardin thinks blogging one's personal life is "stupid," but then, I get to report for an operation where my seriously gay editor factchecks the difference between "lesbian" and "girl-on-girl." And if we're fucking the people we're reporting on, we'll tell you. So no, I did not sleep with Violet Blue. Even though she asked. More »
geek love
How Xeni and Violet's Boing Boing affair went sour
What turned culture-jamming tech blog Boing Boing into the kind of censorious monster it normally ridicules? Beyond its initial statement that the reasons are "personal," Boing Boing hasn't elaborated, but all signs point to the foundering of a once-romantic friendship between Boing Boing editor Xeni Jardin and Violet Blue, the sex blogger whose many links from Boing Boing were erased last year. (Full disclosure: Jardin is Valleywag's favorite gendertastic sex-robot space princess from the future, while Violet Blue has contributed to Fleshbot, a porn blog published by Valleywag owner Gawker Media. Blue once approached Valleywag contributor Melissa Gira Grant for sex, but was rebuffed.) In an email to Valleywag, pasted below, Blue continues to profess ignorance of what she did wrong; she also dismisses her entanglement with Jardin as a friendship laced with casual sex. Blue's own photo of the two at Kink.com party, shown here, suggests, in its entangled limbs, that the relationship was more serious than that. More »
Boing Boing
Did the Internet's free-speech guardians try to hush up a girl-on-girl love affair?
As new media gets big, it remains small at heart — and not in a good way. Boing Boing, the popular tech-culture blog, has offered a tardy defense of its mass deletion of posts mentioning a sex blogger from its archive, and it amounts to this: Because Boing Boing started as a personal blog, it's entitled to be as petty, as hypocritical, and as inconsistent as a 14-year-old girl with a MySpace page. Never mind the fussing about so-called "censorship" — though one would be sure that, had this happened at another website, we'd be reading all about it at Boing Boing, with its editors in a righteous nerd froth. The excuse that "it's personal" would ring more true if we weren't talking about a media enterprise whose audience exceeds that of Conde Nast's Epicurious.com, or the publicly traded finance site TheStreet.com. While Boing Boing's revenues are unknown, the site formed the cornerstone of Federated Media, an online-advertising startup which has already made founder John Battelle — Boing Boing's "band manager" — a multimillionaire. Oh, and did we mention that Violet Blue, the sex blogger in question (and contributor to Gawker Media's Fleshbot), shown here at right, used to be the lover of Boing Boing editor Xeni Jardin, left? More »
12:00 PM on Tue Jul 1 2008
By Melissa Gira Grant
20,401 views,
31 comments
Latest by dodgit: "The Internet's free speech guardians"? That's hilarious. I'm amazed that people actually read Boing Boing. 80% of it is shameless commercial more »
