In the interest of providing my readers a broader perspective, giving voice to diverse views, saving myself some work, and hopefully increasing this site’s exposure, from time to time I will offer guest bloggers a chance to speak.Today’s guest is long time Nite Shift capper Jazzsoda. In his spare time, he can be found bowling, shooting, clipping his toenails and spitting. In addition to writing for The Commune, Mr. Soda maintains the creatively named Jazzoda’s Caption Gallery which he will now go on about. Take it way, Jazz.

Ever wonder what it’s like to run a cap gallery? To peek behind the curtain and catch a glimpse of the Wizard, whizzing away and yelling at you to close the goddamned curtain, this stall is occupied? Well now, thanks to the magic of Gerson’s Blog-Pimping program…You Can.

Running a cap gallery is so fun I could poop, and often do. You get to spend your entire week pouring through thousands of caps the authors themselves didn’t give a second thought to, stoically holding extreme caption burn-out at bay as you plow through page after page of crap you’ve seen before. Usually, by about page 70, one of two things happens:

Either you’re so burnt out that nothing is funny at all, or else you’re so burnt out that absolutely everything is insanely hilarious, especially the word “poop.” Since this usually corresponds to the part of the cap session that took place around 5am, you were likely in a similar mindset while capping, and so the gallery is generously overflowing with references to hilarious poop. All is well.

Having the entire cap session archived is both a blessing and a curse. A blessing, because while you’re capping you don’t even have to read anyone else’s caps, and can instead conserve your late-night energy for hammering away at some half-funny idea you had in the elevator, relentlessly, cap after cap, until others join in and make it a thread just to get you to give it a goddamned rest already. It’s also a blessing since you can take your time pondering caps you didn’t “get” the first time around, and realizing that for half the ones you thought you got, they were actually talking about something completely different and you’re a dipshit.

The curse comes when at the end of a cap session, instead of a neat little file of favorites you’re ready to upload to your gallery, you’ve got a goddamned mountain of caps it’s going to take you all week to wade through, trying to ignore the handles so you can be fair and impartial, then you finally get to the end and realize you didn’t choose anything from your friend so-and-so, even though they’re really funny and what the hell were you thinking? So you have to go back and find something funny they did. And then you look and realize all but three of the caps you saved were your own, and how in the hell did that happen again? It’s not that you think you’re so funny, it’s just that… well, you wouldn’t have MADE those caps if you didn’t like them in the first place, plus of course you see all of your own caps and less-than-all of everyone else’s, and nobody else seems to think midgets are as funny as you do. So it’s back to the drawing board, and your boss is asking you if maybe you could squeeze in a TPS report around all your gallery updating and you say maybe next week.

So, if these are the gripes, you ask, then what are the perks? Ah, the perks. Chicks! Chicks dig cap galleries! Okay, that’s not precisely true. Geeks dig cap galleries, and as far as I can tell chicks dig Ricky Martin. Not sure what’s up with that. But the real perk comes at the end of the week, from knowing that a lot of really funny and cool people are checking out your gallery, and cursing you for not saving more of their caps. You’re welcome.

This entry was posted by Jazzsoda on Sunday, February 4th, 2007 at 1:25 am and is filed under Guest Bloggers, cappers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.