the battle of lyric and grace
Kevin Fanning chronicles the battle of Lyric and Grace. Worth quoting at length, if only to convince you to click through, dammit.
As the girls grappled high above the mean streets of New York, the bloodthirsty crowd gathered online, each side supporting their champion by decrying the other side as being retarded, the comments written all in caps. The event was sponsored by Google and TechCrunch, although no one was entirely sure how that’d happened. Amidst the flurry of impassioned commenting and trolling, there were murmurs here and there, vague details about similar situations from the recent past. Some said that the two boys whose births had been the first ones announced on Flickr and del.icio.us had died in a car crash in San Francisco, in a game of Chicken gone horribly wrong. Someone remembered the story of a girl who had committed suicide recently; hers had been the first birth announced on MySpace, but no one had ever noticed. And wasn’t the Pownce kid in juvie?