Hello Reality, Earth Calling

I give up; I’m caving in because I don’t understand. What’s with the sudden surge of people relying on their age as a get-out clause for anything and everything that they see fit? If it’s not teenagers and young adults blaming their stupidity on age (“I’m only 15, I couldn’t possible know HTML properly!”) it’s naive and holier-than-thou webmasters who think that anyone under the age of 18 is still in nappies and need to be molly-coddled or wrapped in cotton wool.

I’m not interested in your “they’re just kids” argument. You obviously forget that I’ve worked with little shits of the same age, and if there’s one thing they’re not it’s sensitive little darlings that can’t take criticism. Teenagers are particularly resilient to it, in fact. I’ve found that a teenager is much more likely to tell you to fuck off than they are to go and slit their little emo wrists and jump off a cliff. They call each other names and criticise each other in ways that I’d not even dream of putting down on paper/in my blog.

I don’t care for your “just starting out” whining, or the “I’ve had no HTML lessons” crap either. The average 13 year old will have had access to at least one computer since the age of 7 and 69.2% of the US population (source) have Internet access — that kinda beats the 13% of the population (source) with Internet access when I was that age. When I first started learning HTML there were a handful of decent tutorial sites none of which seemed to cover the same material. These days you Google “tutorial” and get “about 120,000,000” results. That means the only excuse for shoddy webmastering in teens who’ve been doing this for a couple of years is out-and-out laziness.

I might be mean, a big old witch, horrible, hurtful, [insert insult here] but my methods work. Here, why not check out some non-staged testimonials from people who were asked who from the Internet has been most influential on them:

If it weren’t for [Jem] picking on me back in the day, I would probably never changed my webdesign ways and would have continued making girlattherockshow-esque layouts.

..or:

I’d say Jem too. Even though / because she once called me “dipshit”.

..and:

Jem calling me a tit has put my life into perspective…

..there’s also:

[Jem] reviewed my site back in the day and I changed absolutely everything about it as a result.

At the end of the day, I’m not interested in the hypocritical preaching from those of who like to pretend that you’ve never done wrong by anyone. I’m not interested in hearing excuses from teenagers who use their age to say “look how great I am!” until someone turns out to be less than impressed. I get results, and that’s just the way it is. If you don’t like it, go tell the world how wrong I am… but don’t blame me if nobody cares.