Napoleon complexity explodes into the Bakersfield News Scene - By N.L. Belardes

You’d think I was Sonicrusk attempting to take over a Monopoly board. Oh, now you want to talk Napoleon complex. Have you seen Sonicrusk laying waste on games.com, right out of the Bakersfield blogger backyard?

Talk about evil intentions.

I even challenged him. You know what he said? Go online. He wants to play in his backyard, in his cheater territory where he lays waste to people like me who just happen to like the wimpy light blue territories and old tattered boards with real faces arguing over how money changes hands with a drunk banker.

Fucker. I know what he’s up to. He’s a goddam Napoleon in the making.

And N. Frank Daniels. He’s up to shit too like some kind of crazed monopolistic king of the Internet lit riot. He wrote on my website,

We are all in the same battle. We have to fight that battle for a conceivably long time to come. Fuck this in-fighting bullshit. Make it work. And if the egos encountered are too big, then move on. But I will tell you my personal philosophy on it: the person who finds a way to unite all these warring little factions is the person who is going to make the greatest impact, whether locally in Bakersfield or globally on the world wide web.


Maybe he’s just trying to take over. He could be one of those Napoleon fucks—self-promoting, taking over territory, duping the masses, and fucking with your senses. Better poison him too.

I don’t trust him because he knows JAMES FREY! He talked about him as if they're sucking each other's cocks! And James Frey duped us all. Oprah said it. And you all know she’s the real life Oracle from this Matrix you and I live in. If she says James Frey is a worthless piece of shit for writing a fake memoir and calling it a memoir, then, shit, she’s right. Hang him.

She’s Park Place and Boardwalk. She’s what everyone wants to own.

Or is it the other way around? Might as well bulldoze litpark.com and riotlit too, and thenervousbreakdown.com. Brad Listi and Susan Henderson? Napoleons.

Bonnie Hearn Hill, Cindy Wathen, THE SWAMI (Hazel Dixon-Cooper) of the Yosemite Writers. Napoleons. Matt Munoz. Conga Napoleon.

And me, starting on such a tiny scale. Me with my tiny book and tiny pecker, and trying to make up, to compensate with a mad love for that nappy headed bitch who somehow sees more in Pedro than he does me? Fuck him.

...I think blasting a publication and its stories before it's gotten a chance to print, shows not only signs of unprofessionalism, but also insecurity in your ideas and a major case of Napoleon complex.
-Mistidawn

Oh God, why do I have to blur the lines between narrative and journalism? It’s doing me in. I’m boring people. But I must take over. I have to.

Everyone is right! I have to conquer newspapers with bad names, and N. Frank and Sonicrusk and Oprah! I have to conquer Baskin Robbins and Krispy Kreme! (I did conquer KK! They’re out of this town! I fucked them over royally. You just never knew…)



And Bakersfield, this little bitch of a town, I have now had my chance to take over an alternative press before it went to print! I could have done it, you know. But I failed in Russia once again. I could have played those fuckers like Sonicrusk plays snot-nosed cyber sluts at a virgin Monopoly tournament.

But now, alas, I am on my island of Elba only to escape and be forced to St. Helena Oildale, where in the old Honky Tonk prisons I can listen to country karaoke and scrawl my last vestiges of poison prose onto bathroom walls: I must take over everything and everyone I touch. I’m a walking dildo. Grab me and pump your vagina or ass with me and I… I will tell everyone that I made the world orgasm!

Or maybe madness will set in once again!

I will bully my way through bad bullying jokes and drive over the geeks of alt writers and squash them where they lay: at beerless pizza joints where a punker eats calzone and gets ignored…

I will show them. I will show them all!

But alas I have an ally, even greater than the lies of N. Frank Daniels and Sonicrusk’s fake monopolistic smile…

That Howard Owens. That failure! That cocksucker of Bakersfield! He passed through and pretended to take a dive, only to head East, to a greater job. I must take him over, even though he wrote:

I love this: N.L. Belardes, who has been a thorn in the side of the local MSM for a couple of years, the ultimate media gadfly, is being slighted by a group of would-be alternative journalists because of his ties to Bakotopia, the TBC-owned social networking site.

The deeper layer there is Bakotopia is supposed to be alternative itself, but clearly has established a reputation among some locals as just another mainstream game.
I love the irony.

The would-be alternative journalists are trying to replace the now defunct Blackboard with "The Elistist Press" a name N.L. does like:

The name of the paper had already been decided before the first meeting: The Elitist Press. I get it. It’s some joke that really states that mainstream media are the elitists showering down their perspectives of the universe on innocent readers. Kind of silly and stupid—definitely arrogant. A trap waiting to slam shut on itself perhaps? I think so. For instance, what if the tiny Elitist Press became successful, or mainstream? Would they change their name? “People aren’t going to get the joke,” I said to Black Dog. “You’re going to take heat.”

Black Dog is John Jones, one of my all-time favorite bloggers.

Read the comments on N.L.'s post -- quite a controversy is breaking out over The Elitist Press before it even launches.

I still say they should do it all online as a sort of group blog. From the description N.L. gives of the meetings, they're all still thinking very old media -- the meeting sounds a lot like many MSM budget meetings all over the land -- instead of just going out and doing it and filing as much shit online as they can, and letting the readers decide what's important. They're thinking about their own egos as journalists instead of putting the audience first. The ultimate ironey.

Meanwhile, BD isn't happy with N.L.'s post.

And Blackdog. He claims I’m not Napoleon as has been claimed by someone from The Elitist Press who sees me for who I am! He speaks out of the side of his mouth in phone conversations saying one thing, and now calling me a simple minded muckraker looking for traffic rankings.

How dare he!

This isn’t about traffic!

This is about taking over!

A muckraker? Ohh, how the other half lives, Black Doggy. You hide online behind your real name. And you’re a blogger. Such a low upon lows.

I shall in the name of Sonicrusk, sink your lies just as soon as I can get Napoleon to stop paying so much attention to Pedro!



*For the record: Black Dog, in further response to what you wrote on howardowens.com about me being a muckraker just trying to gain traffic, the piece you just read could be construed as muckraking journalism as can my second post, "Writers for The Elitist Press accuses N.L. of slander". My first post, "The Elitist Press accuses N.L. of working for Bakotopia" was straight up blog news, no different than any other blog news I have posted. Time and again I get support from people who read my blog news, until I shine my no-holds-barred voice on some bullshit that might be coming from my very supporters, or something they are tied to. Isn't that the best kind of news? News that isn't part of a good ol boy network that will ignore and not publish if it shines a light on the good ol boys? Just because you write the news doesn't mean you're exempt from the news, especially if you're writing the news and hiding. That's a contradiction. There are many contradictions within this little group who wants to write newspapers. Working for the Californian while working with a press who claims hatred toward them is a contradiction. I would have pointed that out whether with The Elitist Press or not. And it says a lot about my comittment that I would have written great news stories and still put my name beside their stupid name. Of course I was already strategizing how I would have stepped out of those flames as soon as the ship started burning through the atmosphere. But instead of lending a guiding hand and being inspiration for writers, I wasn't. And that's OK too. Just shows narrow-mindedness, conspiracy thinking, and failure on the part of those running the paper.

Yes, hopefully they learn something. I'm sure one aspect they learned is the power of the blog. The conversations here on Paperback Writer should teach them to listen to the changing world of media. People came to talk. That's conversation journalism at its best. The high rankings of my posts on their paper will haunt them, but it can be in a good way if they play their cards right.

Sure, they can become more secretive now, more inclusive. It will just make them look more elitist, no matter what they name their paper. They should talk constructively, openly. Obviously they wouldn't reach out until I made my voice heard. The Net is powerful when you build a powerful engine. And it's free and easy to do.

And since they wouldn't listen, and pre-judged in their pizza meetings, they now learned that voices in small places can reverberate on a national scale through the RSS-built Internet and beyond. I guarantee conversations have leapt from computer screens to coffee houses.

What people do with their voices, time and lives makes a difference. People listen, and ideas are heard. The Elitist Press, whatever they become, if they're smart, will take advantage of all the talk and become something better. People are listening and waiting all over... if they fold now, they won't have the guts to restart under another banner.

Why not? Because likely they will fear one simple article about them again, which no matter their name will take over page rankings when folks google them... I'm just one writer. They're a group. There is power in numbers. And if I am meaningless to them, they shouldn't feel intimidated by the power of this blog that flies under my name.

And yes, Blackdog, traffic and readership is what any decent writer wants. Otherwise, why have The Elitist Press at all? Might as well just write emails to each other and masturbate over them.

This entry was posted by N.L. Belardes, on Saturday, October 21, 2006. You can leave your response.