Thread for the critique and possible explanation of new Pfork layout

Yes. Okay, I’m not supposed to spill Pitchfork shop secrets like this, but here’s the thing. It all starts in 1975, when Brent D and Ryan were born fraternal twins in a hospital in Nicaragua, to a married couple in the employ of the State Department. Fearing a massive downturn in the political situation of Central America as a whole, the parents sent their children off to two families in the US, where they were provided by the government with entirely new identities. But early in 1993, at a Local H / Loud Lucy show at the Double Door in Chicago, the two of them bumped into one another at the bar and felt a strange and inexplicable intimacy, and intimacy that was only complicated by the fact that their drinks, mistaken for the drinks of two attractive girls sitting nearby, had been spiked with sedatives by a member of Loud Lucy’s road crew. They woke up with complete and total amnesia, lying face down in the parking lot of the Home Depot on North Avenue, surrounded by the usual North Avenue prostitutes, who then took them in and taught and shaped them into the fine men you know today. (The prostitutes were, at the time, trying their best to exploit the burgeoning indie-rock scene in Wicker Park, and as such schooled Brent and Ryan in all relevant musical issues.)

Fast forward to 2003, when the last Pitchfork redesign takes place. Brent D, out of devotion to the women of the night who raised him and Ryan to their present stature, suggests offering an old prostitute previously known as “Champagne” the job of designing the site. Ryan, against his own better judgment, allows this to happen. Last week, due to a complex series of misunderstanding involving a large whitefish and some misdelivered mail, Ryan discovers that the reason Brent was so keen on farming this work out to Champagne was that Brent had information that Champagne was the pair’s actual mother, reduced to destitution after ditching her husband and identity to avoid being tracked down and killed by Nicaraguan narcotraficantes. Ryan, while shocked to discover his true origins and his hidden bond with Brent, is also furious --- furious that Brent, having known this for upwards of three months, never revealed it to him. He is even more angry to discover, later, that Champagne, who has frittered her web design money away on fishnet stockings and top-shelf lubricants, also knew, and agreed with Brent to keep this secret from Ryan.

Thus Brent’s acrimonious departure coincides with Ryan’s decision to replace “Champagne’s” design with a new one, one that will not remind him of the pain, the endless confusion and pain.