This is probably a little bit late, because I know Myspace has been around for quite a while and a lot of people are really into it. Some people, however, have well-founded fears of it and are still unfamiliar, and others just don't know what it is. Here am I, Chas Shaughnessy, to offer you my first person account of the hideous realm of Myspace. Nerdier and more time-consuming than both Halo 2 and tennis combined, Myspace is a home away from home but accessible from home for thousands of loners and creeps across the country.



And I'm one of them, needless to say.



I wasn't afraid of Myspace until I actually started asking people if they "had a Myspace" within five minutes of meeting them for the first time. And that was AFTER it became the world's first unofficial pedophiliac porn site.



If you don't know what Myspace is, I'll fill you in. It is the current King of the Hill on the internet, holding a position once occupied by Friendster, SubProfiles, Xangas, and "friendship quizzes," which everyone had a link to in their AIM profiles. Myspace is like CampusHook, if you've seen that (click the link, it's over there somewhere). You set up some online profile, tell a bit about yourself, post n00dz, and then let loose upon the world. From there on, you find people with similar interests, people you haven't seen in a while, or hot girls you don't know who you can shamelessly hit on, and you get to send them cute little messages and add them to your "friends" list. It's nothing new, of course. This kind of shit has been all over the internet for years. So why the hype?



Because Myspace is a guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty pleasure. And yeah, it's kinda fun.



Why is it a guilty pleasure? That answer is obvious: Myspace is clearly the gayest thing on Earth, but it's cool anyway. Do you know any full grown, straight, and masculine men who regularly watch the OC? It's kind of like that.



Why do I waste my time with it? Boobies, my good man. Lots of them. Girls, for some reason, have taken full advantage of the shameless internetness of Myspace, jumping at the opportunity to take pictures of themselves half-naked, Photoshop the ugly out of them, and post them on their "pictures" page.



The downside to that (yeah, a downside. Surprising, right?) is that Myspace is crawling with more jailbait than a preschool next door to a prison, and a lot of scandal has been surfacing (on the news of all places!) about how easy it's been for underaged girls to get attacked by internet stalkers. Obligatory tasteless prison joke aside, it actually is unnerving how many young kids are actually crawling around on that site, and even more unnerving how slut-slut-sluuuuuttty the country has become. When I was 15, girls were only just starting to enter the slut phase. On Myspace, however, some of the girls who leave me random messages (another scary thing about the damn site is the freaks I don't know leaving me messages) must have had the whole slut thing going for them well since they were about two years old. It's seriously disgusting and scary. Then again, I probably just led a sheltered childhood or something. If so, that was a damn good shelter.



But anyway, that's Chas' take on today's most popular guiltless plug. So if you've never heard of myspace, that's what it is, and if you've been having doubts about joining, keep them. For the love of God, don't get sucked into that horrible pit of cyberblackness!



Oh, and yes, here it is of course:



http://www.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewProfile&friendID=2640290&Mytoken=20041128180453