Recently, the author currently known as Jessica Hall in the romance genre posted a blog entry stating her stance on reviews. One of the perks of being known as a cantankerous mean old biddy is that whenever someone starts saying things like this, people assume that I am either the cause of such outburst or I would have something to say in response to that outburst. Whenever someone asks me a few years ago about what my response is to such stance against reviewers, I probably had plenty to say. After reading through that blog entry, I figure "Tell her to stick her head up an exhaust pipe" will be an answer as mature as her outburst which pretty much says that all reviewers are going to hell because they hate her books.
Now, however, I'll just shrug and chalk that off as another case of online drama that I am starting to get so, so tired of. Maybe it's just my age, the culmination of years of having to deal with people online, or maybe it's the fact that I had to be insane to accept a job recently that had me working at a morgue from nine in the morning to seven in the evening, but I don't have the energy or patience to care anymore. It's all the same anyway. There will always be authors who don't like reviews, reviewers who don't like being made to feel that they are just vandetta-stricken poison penners, and readers who will take sides and add to the drama. I've encountered so many crazy authors that sometimes I'm surprised that I can even give keeper grades to some of the books. How do I manage to dissociate their books from their crazy antics, anyway? 
But the romance community is far from the reason of my online fatigue where communication with other people is concerned. I haven't been active in the romance community for a long time now, mostly because I don't feel that I have the influence, authority, linguistic abilities, or eloquence of people like Laurie Gold. No, what brings on the fatique is the detoriation of the general quality of the reality TV fan scene.
Reality TV fans. Oh yes, some people are snickering. I will be upfront now and confess - I am a reality TV junkie where a few shows are concerned. I enjoy watching Survivor and The Amazing Race while American Idol is a guilty pleasure that simultaneously exasperates and fascinates me. I recap these shows on the TV section of my website, Idiot Box Chatter. I also watch The Apprentice although I have no time to recap that show. I draw the line at any reality TV show that involves "love" or "relationship tests" because I am too cynical not to watch those shows without putting my foot through the TV screen ten minutes into an episode.
As a fan of the abovementioned shows, I lurk - but don't participate - in various forum-based sites where fans get together and discuss these shows and the antics of the participants on these shows. But recently things have taken a turn for the worst as far as I'm concerned.
It all started with the introduction of that overrated, obnoxious egomaniac Rupert Boneham on Survivor Pearl Islands. He attracts some of the stupidest fans I've ever seen like dung drawing out flies. I'm talking about fans that worship him to the point that they start swamping the discussion boards with incessant ramblings about how Rupert is the most worthy Survivor because he is "honest" and "worked the hardest". I've tried to explain why Rupert is far from honest and he is just an emperor with no clothes in my recaps of that Season. Normally, these fans would vanish after a season but Rupert hung around for All-Stars Survivor and by the end of the double-Rupert madness, the damage was done. These fans would not go away. These idiotic, idiotic fans who start the trend of stirring up dissent and hatred for any Survivor who lied, cheated, or backstabbed (in short, who are good players on Survivor) are here to stay and discussion on Survivor soon changes from who is the most cunning to insipid ramblings like who is the most honest and therefore the most "worthy" of winning.
After Rupert comes Clay Aiken on American Idol. Kelly Clarkson fans can be crazy enough in that they always swamp discussions of Ruben Studdard and Fantasia with stupid flames and other nonsense designed to stir up fan wars in meaningless board-wanking competitions on which Idol is the best. But Clay fans? Words cannot describe the complete lunacy of some of these Claymates. Sure, I find their prayforclay.com thing rather weird but as long as they keep to their turf, I'm happy to stay out of their way. But take a look at the boards. Claymates and Kellybeans are the biggest culprits in stirring up flame wars between them and various factions of fans. What is the point of these fan wars? I try to understand that these people are either teenagers or people who have not outgrown their teenybopper days but it is hard to be understanding when these morons infiltrate every discussion about Ruben, Fantasia, or anything really, and turn these threads into either yet another thread about why Kelly or Clay is better than everyone. We are now into the fourth season of the show at the time of writing but fan wars all the way from the first season are still going strong. It is ridiculous and nearly all those boards are practically unreadable.
Then there are the The Amazing Race fans. Now, if American Idol fans can be generalized as territorial little mongrels biting at each other's tails, The Amazing Race fans are self-appointed arbiters of the values of the Racers as human beings. Take a look at those boards where this particular species of fans proliferate. There is hardly any more discussion about Team strategy. Instead, fans come up with pages and pages of repetitious, mind-numbing, mind-boggling amateur psychology tracts about why they think so-and-so are worthless human beings or angels who can walk on water. Everyone claims to have a book on some personality disorder or worked with people with such-and-such disorder ("narcissistic disorder" is a popular disorder to drop among such discussions) so everyone comes up with amazing theories about the Racers that they extrapolate from a few minutes of footage on a TV show.
For example, in the sixth season, Gus took too much delight in drinking some beer in Germany. This leads to a ridiculous uproar among fans who just knew that Gus was an alcoholic because they had read a book about alcoholism and could somehow see the SOS in that scene so they would implore Gus (whom they know, via the same ESP skills they had that allowed them to detect Gus' alcoholism) to go into rehab. But no one got demonized worse than Kendra Bentley, one half of the winning team. Now, Kendra deserved some flak for her tasteless comments about the poverty-stricken Africans but it is bizarre, really, the insane hatred from her that erupted like a volcano among the community. The term "racist" and "KKK" were bandied around until I wondered whether these people even understand what these terms mean. Even better, some people started saying that it was Kendra who said that Africans were happy to escape their country (actually, Rebecca said that). Kendra hate was such that these fans even began distorted the truth. For example, they said that Kendra was whiny, useless, and slow. Kendra was one of the most proactive female partners in coed teams in the history of the race. They said that Kendra hated all the countries she went to when she clearly stated on the show that she loved some of the countries she visited such as China. Even her partner Freddy wasn't spared. He had a temper outburst that he later admitted was petty and he regretted it minutes after it happened on the same show but until now, there are so many people willing to brand him as a brute with bad temper. Things became so out-of-control that every action of this Team was overanalyzed and blown up into ridiculous proportions. Freddy used phrases like "in a timely manner" on the show - that means he was an elitist racist snob because he spoke like a British colonial! These fans knew that because they had read a book about such complex!
On the other hand, the other team Kris and Jon are so ridiculously canonized that I don't know whether to laugh or cry. Do you know that I have emails from weirdos accusing me of being a Nazi symphatizer because I took a few snarky shots at Kris and Jon in my recaps? The problem is, with so many fans of the show acting like the show is a mirror of human civilization and we will all go to hell when someone cusses at a cab driver, Kris and Jon, admittedly nice if boring people on the show, become the magnet for these weirdos' overblown sense of importance. If you don't like these two, you must be an immoral human being. But when I read endless posts about how their fans started wearing the same clothes as Kris on the show because they respected her so much, or how they wanted to bring their families to Jon's bar so that they could all tell him what a wonderful human being he is, I'm starting to feel relieved that I don't have such an overwhelmingly creepy fascination with someone I only see on the TV screen.
My point is, there are very few places online where I can find sane people anymore. Forumites on Survivor Sucks and televisionwithoutpity.com are coming off more and more like stalkers with no grip on reality and no sense of perspective. Fametracker is a hangout for cliquey people who rip apart thin and beautiful women using the same posts reworded six thousand times to give a fifty-paged thread while going stalkerish over their favorite male celebrities. What happened to watching a TV show for the fun of it? Or making fun of the show and then letting go once the show ends? Nowadays everyone is just screaming and raving, taking the shows so personally that whenever someone on The Amazing Race cracks a joke, there are sixty thousand posts dissecting whether this joke is racist, appropriate, or funny with everyone having a word in about what mental affliction this joker must be suffering because they have read a book about the affliction. I want to scream at these people, GET A LIFE. Or LIGHTEN UP. For heaven's sake, it's just a TV show, not the rise and fall of human civilization! So what if Rupert didn't win Survivor? These crazy fans actually sent him envelopes of money after Pearl Islands ended because they felt that he needed compensation for losing on that show! And of course, Mark Burnett gave him a million dollars anyway at the end of All-Stars, another season where Rupert repeated his same egomaniac schtick and lost.
I really try to stay away from message boards and online communities in general because I'm overdosed and rendered numb by the ridiculous melodrama taking place across the fanboards. Sure, I will miss being in the loop when it comes to rumors and gossips but I believe the peace and quiet will be worth the loss. But of course, knowing me I'd probably go back and lurk at those threads discussing media reports, gossips, and scandals because I'm a sucker for punishment that way. This is why I am writing this down here, to release some steam because I steel my breath and open up Survivor Sucks on my browser. Sometimes it really takes a lot of willpower to be a reality TV fan! 
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