Considering that I used to look forward to midnight so that I could go and read his new daily update, this is a strange state of affairs.  And it's hard for me to figure out why I no longer tolerate him and what went wrong.  Somehow, while I was looking, he just grew dreary.  Reading him feels like a chore now, and every couple of weeks when I've got a bored minute and I'm looking at my blogs bookmarks, I consider clicking over, but can't quite bring myself to do it.

Fortunately, I saw some discussion of him on another blog just a couple of days ago, and they had a link to lilekswatch.blogspot.com.  It takes approximately forever to load and it hasn't been updated in almost a year, but reading the comments there really did help he figure out just what it is about him that finally lost me as a reader.  I was annoyed by his ridiculously efforts to personalize the neocon agenda of Middle East domination, and his relentlessly apologistic nature when it came time to defend the latest idiocy from Bush, but there was something more about him that curdled even the most banal commentary.  And some of the posts on the lilekswatch site encapsulated it nicely.

I'd say it's more like the man begins picking his nose, or flows smoothly from a hilarious story about collecting antiques to one about his great great grandfather buying slaves fresh off the boat in Baton Rouge with seemingly no appreciation (or tolerance) for why that story is going to offend many of the listeners.

Of course the irony of it all is that anything I criticize Lileks for is something I could easily be criticized for myself. In a general sense, at least. We're obviously very different in political views, life experience, location, etc. But ignoring the specific details; we both write long opinionated blogs about whatever strikes our fancy, focusing far too much on our own lives and the essentially-meaningless minutia of them, and we both think we're far more clever than everyone else.

If there's a major difference it's that I can actually admit this, without doing it in a snarky, "aren't I so much more clever that I can actually admit I think I'm more clever" sort of way.  And I'm much more in touch with my self-loathing and less in denial about the world than he is.  I of course think he's hopelessly naive and full of wishful thinking about the world and politics, and think I'm more firmly grounded in reality.  But getting back to what I said in the previous paragraph, I'm sure he'd say just the same thing about himself.

Whether that would prove my point, or prove that I'm just as self-delusional as he is remains open to debate.

While thinking about Lileks I kept trying to remember another site that I at one time loved, but that I eventually lost all interest in, perhaps to the point of even deleting the bookmark.  Andrew Sullivan is a good example; he's another blogger and a pretty famous one.  I like his writing, much of the time, and he's very good talking about gay issues (he's gay) or Catholic church issues (he's a Catholic) but most of the time he covers politics, and his relentlessly right wing point of view bores me terribly.

I often read right wing blogs or comments and sometimes even agree with them.  Or I disagree, but I can see that the person writing the comment really believes it and has something valid to base it on, other than his opinion of how the world should be.  Sullivan used to do that, or perhaps I was just fooling myself, but since 9/11, when the ever-increasingly-partizan Republican movement in America seized upon terrorism as their excuse for everything, he's just become unreadable. He spends nearly every update defending anything and everything that Bush has done or is considering doing, no matter how insane, but more than that it's his style of doing it that is so loathsome.

I'll correct that; it's not loathsome, it's lacking in integrity, which I find dishonest. Sullivan lives to make ridiculous arguments (like the one about how BushCo didn't imply in every way that Iraq was an imminent threat just because Bush never actually used the word "imminent") and he makes them in ridiculous ways.  He parses quotes and takes things out of context and just generally engages in every sort of intellectual and journalistic dishonesty in an effort to make his pre-determined point.

But that's not a good example of a site I've lost interest in, since it partially overlaps my reason for no longer reading Lileks.

Looking at my bookmarks now, I'll throw out a few other examples.

Overboard: This comic strip is in lots of newspapers and I loved it about 2 or 3 years go when it first started running in the San Diego paper.  They eventually canned it in SD early in 2003, and I missed it and hunted it up online, and kept reading it as one of the dozen or so comics I read online once I moved up north to live with Malaya, since we don't get the paper here.  Sadly, I've pretty much given up on it since about September or so, for a simple reason. It's never funny anymore.

Several years ago it was great, very dark and cruel in the humor and peopled with amusing characters. Unfortunately, it's since lost all of the edge it once had and has become a predictable, poorly-drawn, three panel sitcom with the same jokes repeated endlessly. The dog is probably the worst element of the strip now, with his one-note early-Garfield antics.  He either lies down on the watch dog job, steals food, or makes a mess in 95% of the strips he's featured in, and he gets into at least 2 or 3 a week.

This strip has so completely jumped the shark that I almost want to get a collection of early strips and read them again now, to see if it really used to be good, or if I was just fooling myself somehow.

CAP Alerts: I used to love this site for the comedic value of the uber-Christian PoV of the reviews, but as I look there now I realize I haven't visited it in months.  I'm not sure why; there wasn't any conscious decision to stop reading it, and I can still fondly remember some of the old reviews.  The South Park review is one of the funniest things I've ever read in my life, and is about the best promotion for it possible.  I can't see anyone reading that and not wanting to see the movie.  While not an amusing review (too much of the "tut tut" type commentary), I still think of the bullet-listed "cohabitation" and laugh every time I see any mention of The Bourne Identity.

But for whatever reason, I never seem to check that site anymore.  I'm taking a look now, and whaddya know, I'm getting a bit of that old magic back.  His Haunted Mansion review is pretty good, and I laughed out loud at a few remarks.  All humor in the CAP reviews is entirely unintentional on the part of the author, of course:

I suppose that for me, the novelty of this guy's worldview has worn off.  After you read a couple of dozen reviews they all begin to sound the same, and it takes an especially outrageous comment to break through my boredom to reach my funnybone.  Here's a typically wandering excerpt from his Brother Bear review that had me yawning until the end, when I cracked up.

God he is such a douche bag. So pompous, like if someone doesn't respect him when he's old it's entirely their fault for being a bad person, and in no way might reflect upon the fact that Mr. CAP Alerts was an idiot when he was young, and nothing has changed now that he's old.

Some of his writing depresses me as well, I suppose since I'm always bothered by a person who is so willfully ignorant.  I can't watch those Jackass type shows, where some stupid kids set themselves on fire or fall down stairs since it's depressing.  This guy is basically engaging in a life long Jackassian act of self destruction, but with philosophy and belief, rather than physical pratfalls.

I'm trying to only mention ones that I've stopped viewing for site-related reasons, rather than changes in my personal tastes. I never look at any gaming sites anymore, other than the one I work on, since I'm not spending any time gaming or following upcoming games any longer. So while it's true that I haven't visited gamespot or gamespy or others in months and months, it's not due to them sucking (any harder than they used to).

And on a related topic, I view Penny Arcade about once a week now, and just skim over the news updates while viewing the comics.  And it's not that they suck now, it's that I don't care about the console gaming they mostly talk about. If not for the frequently-funny cartoons, I wouldn't visit just for the blog-style updates, even though Tycho does write pretty well at times, when he's not obviously trying so hard to be clever with a simile or metaphor that you can almost see his keyboard bleeding.

I may continue this topic some time in the future, if the urge strikes me, since it leads me to self-analysis, and I enjoy that.