Happy International Blog Remembrance Day

As a fact-checking intern at Washingtonian magazine, I started a blog called WHY METRO SUCKS TODAY, a series of daily diatribes about the Washington DC metro that I started, apparently, because “THE FARE CARD MACHINES WERE NOT WORKING AT NEW CARROLTON” one morning roughly seven years ago.

The idea was to find something new and specific to rant about each day. Reasons metro sucked were mundane: rate hikes, track maintenance, “stopping at the platform, then moving again.” And they were specific: tourist babies, the hot car, “they don’t notice when you die.” Finding something to write about was surprisingly easy: With a friend of mine, we ultimately posted 200 blogs over the course of a year, which is a lot considering that I often wrote them while I was eating lunch.

I didn’t stop blogging because Metro stopped sucking, I stopped blogging because I started having to do “reporting” and “journalism,” which are things I love doing and are ultimately much more important than my personal thoughts about “zig zaggers & lolligaggers." But I loved ranting about Metro, too.

This is all to say that I’d like to share with you this incredible Twitter thread, which is simply Too Real if you know anything at all about Metro or DC:

There is a reason I’m sharing this with the readers of Motherboard, I promise, and only part of it has to do with the fact that I can't find my WHY METRO SUCKS TODAY login right now.

The general decline of the blog—not the news blog, but the BLOG BLOG—is a bummer. No offense to the many cool and worthwhile bloggers still posting to Wordpress, Tumblr, XANGA(?), and good ol’-fashioned websites, but for the most part, the best blogs of our generation are being wasted in tweetstorms, Facebook rants, and reddit comments. I am not just making this up: There are entire conferences dedicated to preserving Web 1.0, back before our computers had become Facebook and Twitter machines.

So, for a day, or two, we’re going to empty our brains a bit and try to have some fun on this International Blog Remembrance Day, a holiday I just made up. To celebrate, we will write … blogs. And you should, too. We’ll still have plenty of news, features, and reporting, but the staff is also going to *blog* … thank’s.