miss u bb

March 25, 2011 3:51 PM

Goodnight, Hipster Runoff. <3 u Carles.

(Carles has 'quit' before, but he seems especially sincere this time. In true HRO fashion, it's kind of hard to tell.)

posted by naju (43 comments total)

We're also still in the dark about who Carles is. Though some intriguing ideas are floating around.
posted by naju at 3:52 PM on March 25, 2011

Yikes. Clicking around there I can only think that this is a positive development.
posted by nevercalm at 3:58 PM on March 25, 2011 [6 favorites]

In respect of Carles's demise could we please have this thread's text in Helvetica instead of Verdana?

And so help me god if it's made Arial. If I see a slant on any of the glyphs there will be hell to pay.
posted by Talez at 3:58 PM on March 25, 2011 [1 favorite]

I AM CARLES.
posted by yellowbinder at 4:04 PM on March 25, 2011

Meta99 deleted miss-u-bb because A7 (bio): Real person; doesn't indicate importance/significance.
posted by clvrmnky at 4:08 PM on March 25, 2011

Who can blame him? It got so mainstream; all these new people just ruined it.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 4:13 PM on March 25, 2011 [2 favorites]

HRO became irrelevant 'a million blogyears' ago.

Do u care abt the other alt bloggers [via tubmlr]?
Do u think there is now tension within the indieblogsophere bc Carles was more famous?
Will Carles become an authentic journalist?
Did Unchill Asian Bro kill Carles?
Who should b the new face of the now defunct I AM CARLES brand?

SOOOO confused...
posted by Threeway Handshake at 4:18 PM on March 25, 2011 [10 favorites]

And nothing of value was lost
posted by SansPoint at 4:21 PM on March 25, 2011

Thanks for the memories. We had a good run. I apologize to every one who I have hurt.

Goodness. How many people has he hurt? What did he do to hurt them? Has he issued any apologies before, or is this just a little crumb he's tossing over his shoulder on his way out while the door is closing?

SO MANY QUESTIONS!!!!

(I've never heard of this before, actually.)
posted by hippybear at 4:26 PM on March 25, 2011 [1 favorite]

It's probably time to move on and find a real career & some challenges that can actually make the world a better place.

The first hipster casualty of the Japan tsunami, perhaps?
posted by shii at 4:30 PM on March 25, 2011

Hipster Victory Conditions: Withstand being run off
posted by dhartung at 4:30 PM on March 25, 2011

As if a million entry-level alts cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced.
posted by kersplunk at 4:33 PM on March 25, 2011 [2 favorites]

Enough with the Banksy posts already.
posted by cjorgensen at 4:36 PM on March 25, 2011

whut. for real?
posted by thsmchnekllsfascists at 4:44 PM on March 25, 2011

HRO was pretty funny whenever I got linked to an article there, although I never read the site on a regular basis. It was always a fairly succinct satire of hipster culture as well as the weird hipster-hate that built up in anybody who took a Marge Simpson-like pride in being militantly uncool. Can't help but draw parallels to Onstad quitting Achewood -- even if your assumed voice is brilliant, it has to get old writing and thinking that way every day. We'll see if this one is for real.
posted by codacorolla at 4:51 PM on March 25, 2011 [2 favorites]

Carles is The Stig?
posted by Slackermagee at 4:54 PM on March 25, 2011

Viva Marge!
posted by jonmc at 4:56 PM on March 25, 2011

Talez: "In respect of Carles's demise could we please have this thread's text in Helvetica instead of Verdana?

And so help me god if it's made Arial. If I see a slant on any of the glyphs there will be hell to pay"

And 3D.
posted by Splunge at 5:00 PM on March 25, 2011

I've never liked the site, but has anyone else heard the radio show on Sirius XM's' XMU's "Blogradio?" The tone was perfect. No matter how I felt, as soon as he (I guess, Carles) began speaking I'd immediately become annoyed. It didn't even matter that, after the first time, I knew it was an affected "annoying indie rock hipster fan" character. It still annoyed me.

(I should say now that the site has always had this tone, too. Just imagine the site being spoken aloud.) It was where each segment went that got me. What began as Andy Kaufman imitating a Pitchfork writer would unpredictably transform into something genuinely funny, thoughtful or melancholy. I'd catch the end of the show on my way home from class all the time, and it never ceased to amaze me how easily his spoken segments could affect me. I'd always be annoyed at first, but I'd always be bewildered by what I felt at the end.

He also once strung together this wonderful paragraph that consisted only of Postal Service song titles. I thought that was remarkably cute.
posted by byanyothername at 5:00 PM on March 25, 2011 [3 favorites]

NSFW - booby ads
posted by kenaldo at 5:17 PM on March 25, 2011

.
posted by subdee at 5:17 PM on March 25, 2011

Good for Carles, though.
posted by subdee at 5:24 PM on March 25, 2011

Carles has 'quit' before, but he seems especially sincere this time.

So... it's something like disabling your Metafilter account, then?
posted by George_Spiggott at 5:45 PM on March 25, 2011

I found it "hard" to read the "Village Voice piece" because he littered his answers with so many "scare quotes," even after they asked him why he was "using them."
posted by chococat at 5:49 PM on March 25, 2011

And nothing of value was lost

Is this very annoying phrase a meme? I saw it in the Screeching Weasel thread too.

And Mitch Clem returns to comics. Hmmm... nah

I hated HRO because I know too many people like what it's satirizing but I kinda loved it for the same reason. The fact that I didn't get it made me feel both uncool and awesome, but I dunno. I dropped out of hipster life ages ago, but I'm still kinda part of it? Carles aggressive shallowness articulated alot of why people don't like hipsters.
posted by Lovecraft In Brooklyn at 6:52 PM on March 25, 2011

Less than a week to April 1?

Oh, noes, he must be sincere! Come back, we'll miss you! We know you're not fooling...
posted by Slap*Happy at 6:58 PM on March 25, 2011

firsties???
posted by jeremy b at 7:15 PM on March 25, 2011

Obligatory: "A hipster walks into a bar . . ."
posted by Zonker at 7:35 PM on March 25, 2011

I thought Tao Lin was Charles
posted by Ad hominem at 8:24 PM on March 25, 2011

I loved his wedding video.
posted by the young rope-rider at 10:22 PM on March 25, 2011

Entry level alt Metafilter.
posted by PostIronyIsNotaMyth at 10:27 PM on March 25, 2011

Seems like the real deal.

Gawker story, including an email update from Carles:

Sup bro.

I am closing because I don't really enjoy content farming any more. Blogging used to be a little bit more fun and rewarding when I had a more naive outlook on what modern journalism meant. Now in a world filled with tumblrs, twitters, listicles, and an intense meme cycle, I don't think there is any thing very fun or special about it. I probably started HRO when I was insecure and felt like I needed a tribe of people to understand me to feel validated, but now I have predictably 'grown up.'

The money was pretty decent (usually took a long time to actually reach my pocket due to advertisers delayed payment schedules), but being a one person blog it is probably not a solid long-term career choice. Plus on top of that, ad networks usually take at least 50% off the top.

I have a few career options, one of them being the editor of a pre-existing blog where I would basically be doing what I do now except with a little bit more stability and less pressure. The other option is working for my uncle's family business where I could have a better idea of what I am going to be doing in 20 years as opposed to trying to farm as many hits as possible and crossing my fingers every month for ad revenue.

If I could have sold out, I would have, but that opportunity never came, and probably wasn't going to for HRO.
posted by naju at 10:35 PM on March 25, 2011 [1 favorite]

I had a wee look at this site when it first hit, but for me the satire was obfuscated by my annoyance with text speak and my propensity to get migraines.
posted by mippy at 3:51 AM on March 26, 2011

Yeah - was I the only one who caught all b00bie links for "You like this article? Try these other 6 right on this site!"

I dig that he was running advertising on the site, but I was looking for, I dunno, "hipster" things.
posted by cavalier at 5:31 AM on March 26, 2011

So does this mean I can't listen to the radio show on Monday mornings, too? I liked it, I thought it was funny.
posted by tylerkaraszewski at 9:47 AM on March 26, 2011

I love(d?) this blog and it was very important to me. He captured so much of what I think a lot of people in the alt.scene were feeling: that our insecurities about the unremitting positivity we were supposed to be experiencing were justified because we were being lied to and maipulated, but also we are all being full of shit which is pretty funny if you think about it.

I hope he take over this new blog and makes it even more awesome than HRO. He's a natural born meme.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 11:02 AM on March 26, 2011 [2 favorites]

cavalier - it's interesting. All those sex-related links were part of Carles' recent fixation on the 'slutwave' micro-genre he coined (which has since been endorsed by Rolling Stone as 'Genre of the Year', which HRO mocked.) It was all very tongue-in-cheek, and on one level it was making a point that there seems to be an arms race among people like Ke$ha and Katy Perry to be more over-the-top than ever before in selling music by way of selling sex (Ke$ha giving lap dances to fans at her shows, leaked pictures of her covered in semen, etc.) But the other point was that while Carles seemed to be making fun of it, his character was also obsessed with it (creating the paradoxical image of an 'above-it-all' indie hipster obsessed with looking at naked top 40 pop starlets.) Then there was another level of the joke that was about Carles pinning the 'slutwave' label on rather obscure indie artists like Puro Instinct and Vivian Girls.

But it seemed like the posts with those pictures got overwhelmingly more pageviews than anything else, and maybe the extra money he got from sellling the sex made him ramp it up more to the point where he was blatantly posting sexy pics nearly every day. So maybe he became what he was mocking. Or maybe that was self-aware too. It makes my head hurt trying to figure out where the joke ends and where it begins.
posted by naju at 11:07 AM on March 26, 2011

my bb is back. let's go to denny's, bro.
posted by Partario at 6:33 PM on March 27, 2011

MeFi/the blogosphere got trolled. nice
posted by Lovecraft In Brooklyn at 8:03 PM on March 27, 2011

HRO was/is what the late, lamented Lincoln Park Trixie Society would have been like had one of the Chads moved to Williamsburg in order to become more "authentic." The site's tone was perfectly balanced between satire and an alternate (alt?) reality, which worked much better in print than on his XMU radio show as I always could hear the verbal winking in his voice. Every time Carles would talk about going to Chili's for some "fa-jie-tas," I couldn't help but bust a gut laughing.
posted by stannate at 8:38 PM on March 27, 2011

Is HRO the most alt 'troll'?
How do u feel abt being manipulated?
R U one of the ppl Carles 'hurt'?
Are reunion tours too mainstrm?
Who is most relevant member of AnCo?
posted by Threeway Handshake at 7:37 AM on March 28, 2011 [2 favorites]

Yep, I admit I was trolled hard. At least we got an HRO FPP out of it. The new podcast is hilarious, so all is forgiven!
posted by naju at 9:46 AM on March 28, 2011

Falling further down the internet black hole of postpostpostmodernism, if I don't comment in 24 hours send help.

Relevant Funeral
posted by naju at 12:16 AM on March 30, 2011