On the George Washington Bridge Project: June 18, 2008
In which The Gay Recluse becomes increasingly obsessed with The George Washington Bridge.
Today we were reading on Gawker about how to be a successful traffic whore blogger.
Number one was “listicles,” which we sometimes do. This is sort of a list, right?
Then “creating coherent characters.” We definitely could use some work in that department.
Next was to use Digg, which we tried for a while. It drove some traffic our way, but omg, we hated it! We deleted our account the other day. It’s worse than Facebook.
Next was sex. Since we’re gay, that’s kind of implied, right? Sort of? Maybe? As if.
One thing they didn’t mention: obsessively photographing the GWB.
I, too, have an obsession with the George Washington Bridge. However, mine involves a nagging compulsion to complete a football pass from the deck of the bridge to a buddy on the ground below.
Filed under: Architecture, GWB Project, The Gay Recluse, Traffic, Washington Heights | 6 Comments
Tags: Breakthroughs, Rain, Summer, Sunsets, The George Washington Bridge
The Gay Recluse 
I miss your opinion on opinion pieces. Lately I have been forced to read them myself. That means I am apt to accidentally take them seriously as I am without your sometimes satirical, sometimes facetious, always spot-on opinion on opinion pieces.
I want more OOOPS in my blog reading please.
Leaving comments on Emily Gould’s blog also helps increase your traffic as well (although it hasn’t seemed to work for me yet).
Yes, I like Emily–or at least her writing (i.e., I don’t know her personally!). It’s kind of crazy to admit, but I only started reading Gawker right around the time she was leaving, and I liked her posts then. I’m not sure why that NYT piece inspired such hatred; I mean, you would have thought she was Hillary Clinton or something…lol (but sadly, because even though I support/ed Obama, I never disagree with those who say there’s a lot of sexism at play in the world of media/politics and pretty much everywhere else.)
Humans are a competitive species and attacking an individual’s weakness to get the upper hand is not yet hardwired as a no-no into our moral DNA. This atavistic survival trait takes many ugly forms such as age discrimination, sexism, racism and hatred of obese people, poor people, uneducated people and tall or short people. It is frightening sometimes to think that our moral evolution is only sohpisticated enough to make us recognize discrimination as being bad only when it is employed intentionally without any compunction whatsoever.
It may have been better for all of us if we had been born thousands of years from now when the utopic dreams of so many writers and thinkers will have fully manifested.
TGR! one thing they did mention, but that you didn’t: “cute!”–failing to acknowledge the wildly successful contribution your editorial assistants have made to your traffic whoring, er, to good, intelligent content about (cute,) coherent characters. where’s the love? also, i am aghast you failed to mention one of the cutest non-lolcats ever, featured on the gawker article. not truly aghast; but that cat is so ridiculously cute, i find it hard to believe anyone could resist making note.
Jesus–true! The only reason I didn’t mention it was because I ran out of pictures…lol. As for the editorial assistants, also true! They have been most reliable, cute and coherent! Mostly I was thinking about my correspondents, who as much as I love them all have not always developed a presence on these pages in the way I originally anticipated. Not that I’m complaining! And finally, yes–it’s always great to see a cute pic of a kitten, because as we all know: not every cat is a lolcat!