March 17, 2009

• Episode 3: Anger

  This is Episode 3 in a multi-part story of how I crossed paths with a Web celebrity. Episode 1 is here. and Episode 2 is here. I will be updating this story throughout the week with new episodes. It's a dark, depressing story, but I think it's time to share it in the hope of teaching others. You can read more of how I feel about each Episode in retrospect by perusing the comment section. Minor details may have been changed to protect the identities of the people involved.

  About 9? months later, I came back to the "Kylie" profile, expecting to see the profile shut down now that Reverend Creep had been exposed. However, to my surprise, I found that the profile was there and had more friends than ever! It appears that Reverend Creep had started to search for friends in his local area that he could add by way of using Kylie. And nearly everyone was saying yes.

  What changed my apathy to anger was how reverential everyone was being. You would think this profile of a fake hot girl was the Pope's profile! Pretty girls were thanking Kylie profusely for the friend request. Handsome men were falling all over themselves to construct prose paragraphs praising Kylie's looks. It sickened me, and scared me a little when I saw just how enslaved our culture is to sexy women. Just one friend request from a beautiful woman seemed to have such an impact on people's lives!

  Now I wanted revenge, badly. I wanted to wipe Kylie off the social networking map, and drive to Reverend Creep's home and punch the smile off of his face. The worst part was I knew Reverend Creep's location, his wife's myspace, what church he pastored now (he had been promoted in the meantime!), everything! But, what good was fighting fire with fire? Being a vigilante always sounds good in theory, but what if sending anonymous threats to "Kylie" revealed my own identity to Reverend Creep?

  And still, I could not really discern RC's motives. As far as I could tell, he hadn't engaged in criminal behavior. There was no valid reason to ask the huge social networking site to shut down his profile. And he had erased the comment that revealed his e-mail address, so I could no longer provide real evidence that this Kylie profile was a fake. It would be my word against his, and no bored computer administrator would care.

  Then, one day, I was on a date-n-rate site. I did a double take when I saw that the next picture was...Kylie! I had found the real identity of Kylie at last! But the site didn't give me a real last name to go with the pictures! All I had to work with was "Carly Lee", which probably wasn't even the real name of the person whose pictures were shown. And even if I found out who "Carly Lee" was, all it meant was that I could answer for myself whether I was more attracted by the pictures or the profile details. The question was academic at this point, wasn't it? But I love mysteries, and I was angry, so I dug deeper...

  Episode 4: Attack will be posted sometime this week. As always, feel free to guess in the comments as to what happens next. And I haven't even said who the web celebrity is yet! Trust me, you have probably heard of them...

  • 1:01 pm
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