Although most normative people and pretty much everyone I know have long abandoned MySpace as a social networking platform, I am forced to stick around. Solstice Coil still receives friend requests every day and if I don’t log in to approve or deny request it gets piled up in no time.

Granted, most of these requests are by bands I don’t care about, rappers I don’t want to approve, strippers (that I always approve, of course) and scams of many persuasions, but every once in a while there’s someone there who genuinely wants to listen to our music and talk to us.

So I keep at it. I approve the friend requests I deem worthy and post a thank you comment with some information. And if I see a message or comment that’s not been pre-written, I will even reply with a non-pre-written message of my own.

Let’s get things straight, though: I HATE myspace. I long for the day Rupert Murdoch pulls the plug on this wretched site and finally release us from the cyber prison of faulty programming and tremendously bad taste. I’ve wasted hundreds if not thousands of hours on this cesspool of a site, only to see everybody I’d been in contact with on it leave, with me having no way to keep in touch with them since MySpace doesn’t display e-mail addresses or even the names of its users.

But until that glorious day – I keep at it. I squirm every time they present us with a new layout – always worse than the one before, always managing to fix one bug while creating ten others. But this recent change has lead me to one inevitable conclusion – they WANT us to leave. It’s basically a staring match – they want to shut down the site but they won’t do it until every last one of us leaves voluntarily.

What do the brilliant programmers of MySpace have in store for us this time? Let’s see now: there used to be an option to right click on links and open them in a new window/tab, so naturally, that’s out. Also, in the Requests Page, you can mark all the requests, only now there’s no “approve all” option anymore (or at least, they’ve hidden it well enough for me not to find it.)

But hey, there’s some good news too! When I placed the cursor on the new idiotic MySpace Logo (there’s right – it’s “My______” now – that’s surely going to bring back the stockholders) in the upper bar, a group of black tentacles shot out and started flapping about, while one of them was holding a heart-shaped lollipop. Yeah, that’s what the people need.

Apparently that’s what they’ve been working on: stupid animations that are meant to divert your attention from the fact their site sucks klingon dongs. I guess that’s actually good thinking. Much easier than just making a simple and intuitive user-friendly layout. It’s not like there’s another social network out there with a layout they can just copy…

Seriously, MySpace – just die already. It’s becoming embarrassing.