A Gilded Age

We here at Twee Affect don't generally go in for close reading of forums, since we find it difficult to follow any line of reasoning that does not contain a reference to ourselves, but oh! We have been alerted, to a criticism of our blog, by someone with a very young man's belief in the absolute rightness of his own cause and the absolute wrongness of everyone else's. This young gentleman said:

the Twee Affect as a whole i find a never ending stream of narcissistic, destructive criticism that does nothing for the community.

Now it is true that we tend to disagree to be disagreeable as much as most people in the community agree merely to be agreeable. We should not point out the irony of his criticizing us for being critics, but we will remind this young gentleman and anyone else who holds such an opinion that if everyone was in perfect agreement, there would simply be nothing to say.

And if you should only chuse to read agreeable things, we should direct you to our sister blog, The Brothers Brick! Yes, our two blogs are quite like two sisters, in a novel! A modern-day Misses Elinor and Marianne Dashwood! Or, perhaps, Miss Jane and Miss Elisabeth Bennett. Yes, we rather think this characterization is quite fitting: the Brothers Brick as the older sister, who is agreeable and complacent and is disinclined to see a fault in any body; and we flatter ourselves to compare our blog with the younger Miss Elisabeth, who is quick-witted and perhaps too quick to judge. It is ultimately, however, up to our dear readers to determine the justice of these portraits; but we shall present a bit of evidence concerning the Brothers Brick: when one of their own bloggers engages in questionable behaviour, they seem unwilling to consider that he might have less than noble motives.

We are speaking, of course, of Brothers Brick blogger Nannan's unseemly relationship with Chromebricks.com. Nannan's recent mention of them is not the first: he first posted about them last year, and let us examine the last few sentences:

If you’re making an order, feel free to drop a mention that you’re a reader of our blog. If many people show interest, we will be featuring a review of these products in the coming weeks.

In short, he wanted to impress on Chromebricks the number of readers his blog has, a number which the Brothers Brick monitors with precision. We here at Twee Affect keep no statistics whatsoever, which is just as well because our vanity is already beyond any thing! And it was a matter of course that Nannan did give Chromebricks a review, and a favorable one, and there was no mention of how he came by the legos he reviewed. And in his latest post, Nannan goes even so far as to demonstrate the quality of the product! He writes:

To show the quality of the new metallic colors, I built a vignette integrating metallic silver parts from both LEGO and ChromeBricks. I bet you can’t tell which parts are official and which ones are custom. Indeed, the new metallic colors are a perfect match to LEGO’s palette. In addition, the metallic colors are much more affordable than their chrome versions.

Such direct advertising is all very well if it is a charitable organization, but Chromebricks is a for-profit enterprise, and it would be a very odd sort of thing to do so much for them without any compensation. So the question before us: Is Nannan using his posting power at the most widely-read legos blog on the internet to get kickbacks in the form of custom blinged-out chrome legos? Are his fellow bloggers aware of such unethical patronage, but unwilling to say any thing? Or has our community's flagship blog become entirely corrupt? Is editor Andrew on the take from Brickforge and Brickarms? We here at Twee Affect would like to know, and the community deserves an explanation of the Brothers Brick's accountability practices!

So while it may seem that Twee Affect suffers from an excess of sensibility, our dear readers should be equally on guard to the dangers of an excess of sense: calculation and vulgar self-interest.