It's Monday morning, I have a headache, and that means it's time for a rant.

A friend sent me this link of one of her younger sister's friends blogs to check out last week...

IcAnBeScArY's Xanga Site

Services like Xanga and DeadJournal that allow people to create blogs for themselves without any actual coding skills have to walk a fine line. On the one hand, they don't want to offer too few customizable options and risk alienating more experienced users. On the other hand, when you give the general public too much freedom, you get shit like this.

In terms of content, IcAnBeScArY's Xanga site isn't anything particularly distressing. Sure, she's got one of those incredibly annoying screen names with the pointlessly alternating capital letters that take forever to type, but in this day and age, that's a minor sin, up there with putting "Xx" before and after your screen name or having a screen name with the word "juggalo" in it. Her actual journal entries are fairly standard bitching and regulation moaning.

"it's sunday about 1:30am and im at krissy's house and ..im bored. break is about over and i have h/w for back-2-school and.. break was actually pretty gay. umm..im havin more chick drama but whats new.. i wish everyone would die cause these stupid problems are nonsense..people need to get over themselves and realize that just because they dont have the same interests as someone doesnt mean theyre different and should be treated different. people need to stop believing rumors too ..those are gay like people who believe em. im tired of this bull..crap so yeah. comment if you want.. im out ((literally)) ..goodnight. ..me"

See? Pointless? Yes. Boring? Sure. Totally without any merit that justifies posting these thoughts on the internet? Absolutely. But still, we've all seen much worse. Where this site really stands out is that it has one of the most questionable design schemes I've ever seen. And when I say "questionable," I'm talking about questions along the lines of "what sort of god would allow this sort of thing?"

Let's begin at the beginning. Opening up this site causes a pop-up window to appear with the all-important message:

MeTaLLiCa RuLeS!

You can click that one away, but a second later another just pops up.

ha DON'T BE HATIN! ha

Uh... huh. Yeah, that's the sort of crap people get killed over.

I would happily make this site the worst page of the decade just for having those two pop-ups. But sadly, that's just the tip of a horribly depressing iceberg. As far as I can tell, the only purpose of the pop-ups, other than to present IcAnBeScArY's stance on "hatin," is to buy the viewer a little more time to fully download the entirety of the page. It takes a while for most browsers to come to terms with the kind of moronic shit this site wants to do. I think I actually heard Internet Explorer whimper as it loaded the site's animated, tiled background that features changing text with such angst-affirming messages as "hate me," "smash me," and "kill me." The first time I opened this site and saw the changing white text over a black background, I had mixed thoughts. On the one hand, I couldn't believe anyone would be stupid enough to actually use an animated background, but on the other hand, as far as animated backgrounds go, this one didn't actually seem that bad. That's when I noticed it wasn't done loading.

Moments later, the true horror of the site revealed itself as the background began flashing, with the text and the solid background alternating between black and white. I was dumbfounded. I had never expected to have to face such a hideous design. I'm not even an arti director or anything. I didn't know what to do. I contemplated having a seizure for a while, as it seemed like a fairly appropriate response, but ended up deciding against it. The real marvel of the flashing background is that while the animated text is always visible, the actual journal entries are written in black, so naturally they don't show up over a black background. That's right, this idiot actually designed her site so that you can only read her content half the time. You have to put in a huge amount of effort just to read enough of her babbling to figure out that she has absolutely nothing of value to say. It's just twisted enough to be some sort of sick psychology experiment, but nobody with enough of a brain to engineer such an experiment would be able to design a site like this without vomiting up his internal organs. The sheer stupidity behind this site's layout obliterates all faith I once had in the essential intelligence of mankind.

As always, thanks a bunch, internet. And to my friend who sent me that link...you might not be hearing from me for some time.