Episode Report Card Wing Chun: B+ | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Scribbling Rivalry
By Wing Chun | Season 2 | Episode 9 | Aired on 01.16.2001
But enough about me. Over breakfast, D.B. Sweeney thanks Lily for meeting him. She asks why she is meeting him, and he tells her that what she wrote "blew [him] away." Oh, puh-LEASE. She simpers, "Really?" and he asks if she doesn't have confidence in her abilities. She diffidently says, "Yeah," with an implied "but," and he tells her that he thinks she should be confident in her work. She seems about to thank him more graciously, and then leans forward and tells him that she's involved with "someone." He mumbles, "Of course you are. Well, no ring." She wrings her hands, and he adds that he's a venture capital guy, and that he's used to taking risks: "And I really do like your idea. And I like you! It gets a little tedious hanging around with twenty-two-year-olds all the time." She agrees, and then they both agree that they're glad they straightened that out. She asks him what he sees happening with the magazine, and he drops this pile of buzzword bullshit onto the nice clean breakfast table: "I see it being run by people with a profound understanding of the marketplace -- how fast it moves, how it eats new ideas for breakfast every day. PagesAlive is a stagnant little pool right now. Someone needs to churn up the water so all the little fishies can live." Lily swallows hard and says, "Right." "Stagnant little pool"? Now I'm sure this is a pseudo-Salon.
Lily brings a couple of coffees into the office, where Crusty -- her hair up in messy pigtails, still wearing the same outfit she had on the day before -- sits yawning in front of a terminal. Lily asks whether she'd been at the office all night, and Crusty bravely complains that with Artie gone, someone had to "run the magazine." Cut to a screen, where Crusty has just built the header of a single page. A big site like that with daily content and they don't use templated pages? Oh. Kay. Perhaps this is one reason they're losing money. Lily hands her a cup of coffee, and Crusty exhales her gratitude. Lily asks if she needs anything else, and Crusty says she's going to take a break. A break? She's seriously done about one percent of the work involved in posting a page of content -- all that HTML they show would do is create a single table cell in which would appear the words "PagesAlive Information." And she's been there all night. Yeah, she totally needs a break. Not. Whereas it's 5 AM as I write this and I just finished a can of Coke. That, my friends, is an all-nighter. (I'm sorry to get all Lily on your ass; I regarded this episode as one big shout-out, so I'm having a hard time remembering that it's not, in fact, all about me.)