When people ask us why, of all the things this site has blatantly ripped off (then improved) from Gawker, we have never done our own version of “Blue States Lose,” the answer is always very simple: The meta-conundrum presented by making fun of hipsters is a black hole of pot-calling-kettle, and besides, we’ve learned over the years that the only thing worse than BEING a stereotypical vapid hipster is COMPLAINING about stereotypical vapid hipsters. Plus, we always detected a distinct (and quite virulent) strain of sexual jealousy in this kind of thing that is almost too yucky to talk about. Thus, hipsterbashing as a sport hurts the offense more than the defense, and shit, if you’re going to project all of your insecurities on one strata of the social map, always knee suburban whites in the balls: They won’t (read: can’t) fight back, and it’s actually morally right to do so.

That said, and in the interest of full disclosure, we here at Philebrity have had our own growing pains with the whole party-pictures phenom. Whether readers just like to stare or stare and groan, there’s no denying that people like them. So, here and there, when we can, we’ll publish a set. This was what was on our mind when we ran this set taken by intern Caitlin Welge, which we knew was not the work of, say, Malik Sidibe, which is frankly the direction all these party photogs should be going in, since 2003 was already a long fucking time ago. (She was also harshly reprimanded for taking too many pictures of her friends, and we’re confident it won’t happen again.) But I’m getting off the point: The point is, even though we tried to shield you from it, the Blue States Lose mentality is, again, finally making its way to Philly, again, five years too late. So you get this, from Ugh News, and point taken, even though Little Conrad is really just dickhurt that he got cut from the Talkin’ Shit team and apparently, people seem to hate him even more than they hate us; and then Oh No You Ditn’t, a whole site dedicated to this shit which would be funny if only it was… funny. (Although, to bring the full hakuna matata here, they do get points for most likely unwittingly running a photo of Kelly White.) But look, these are just kids. And they need help. They need mentoring. So with that in mind…

A BRIEF LIST OF THINGS THAT COULD MAKE YOUR MAKING-FUN-OF-HIPSTERS/PARTY PHOTO BLOG BETTER:
· Any degree of self-knowledge whatsoever
· Dead baby jokes
· Dialogue from Back The Future (sample: “Hey, Chuck! This is your cousin, MAAARVIN BERRY? You know that NEW SOUND you been lookin’ for? Well, listen to THIS!”)
· As many pictures of this guy as possible
· Projection of one’s own sexual insecurities delivered as “snarky sociological critique”
· Links to your own MySpace profile

If we come up with anything else, we’ll let you know. In the meantime, keep snappin’, snappers!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 8th, 2008 at 11:33 am.