Local bon vivant Broke-Ass Stuart broke the mold with two decades of hustling as a travel writer, TV host, and mayoral candidate, and celebrates 20 years of his SF penny-pinching shenanigans with a Public Works party Thursday and a new zine.

It was 20 years ago when a young San Diego lad fresh out of UC Santa Cruz named Stuart Schuffman arrived in San Francisco, and would slowly transform into the local celebrity persona known as Broke-Ass Stuart. He’ll celebrate these 20 years Thursday night at Broke-Ass Stuart’s 20th Anniversary Party at Public Works, and despite becoming “Editor in Cheap” of his popular eponymous local blog, a go-to journalistic source on dive bar closings, and San Francisco's non pareil puller of publicity stunts, Schuffman does have some regrets.

“If I knew when I was 23 that I would still be doing this when I was 41, I might have chose a different name than Broke-Ass Stuart,” he tells SFist. “When people don’t know me, and I’m introduced as Broke-Ass Stuart, they’re like ‘Dude, he’s right here, why would you say that right in front of his face?’”

“I was on the local news, I was on ABC 7,” he adds. “And they couldn’t say ‘Broke-Ass Stuart’ on television. They had to say ‘Broke…Stuart.’”

How exactly does one become a “Broke-Ass Stuart?” This joker’s origin story goes back to 2002, when the new kid in town was an intern for Bill Graham Presents while crashing on his girlfriend’s couch and working odd jobs.

“I was working at a candy store in North Beach called Z. Cioccolato,” he says, remembering a customer who handed him a business card saying they were a travel writer.  I said ‘shit, I want to be a travel writer.’ So I decided to become one. And that summer I put out Broke-Ass Stuart’s Guide to Living Cheaply in San Francisco, and it was a 33-page zine. And that was the genesis of all of this.”

A second “Volume 2” of that zine caught the attention of travel publisher Lonely Planet, who hired him in 2006 to rewrite it as a full-length book. That did well enough they brought him back on for a Broke-Ass Stuart’s Guide to Living Cheaply in New York, then sent him to Ireland where he wrote books for their “On a Shoestring” series.

“I literally got my book deal on Craigslist, of all places,” he says. “ My joke was I was looking for a blow job and I got a book deal instead.”

The Broke-Ass Stuart website launched in 2005 as an online store for books, zines and t-shirts. In those days, profanity in the names of our favorite blog names was common: Fucked Company, Sex Pigeon, and Capp Street Crap. You didn’t have to worry about “search engine optimization,” and swear words in your website’s name did not inhibit the site’s success. Broke-Ass Stuart got a 2009 New York City interview on SFist’s formerly affiliated parent site Gothamist, which led to his next (ultimately unsuccessful) big break.

“They said ‘What do you want to do next?’ and I said I want a motherfucking TV show,” Broke-Ass recalls. “A few different producers read that, and they reached out to me.”

In 2011, Young, Broke, & Beautiful premiered on IFC. (There will be clips from the show playing tonight at Public Works featuring the late Vicky Marlane and Jack Hirschman.) But IFC put the show in the not-very-coveted Friday night 11 p.m. time slot.

“It was Friday night, it was not a great time slot,” Schuffman tells us. “We shot this really great travel show, and it was funny. After we shot everything, we had it in the can, they’re like ‘Oh, by the way, we’re a comedy network now.’”

IFC was pivoting towards screwball comedy shows like Portlandia and Comedy Bang Bang, and a travel show did not fit the format. Young, Broke, & Beautiful was canceled before its first season ended.

“I was like, I have a TV show, I’m a TV star!,” Broke-Ass Stuart says. “Six months later I was back to tending bar.”

But Broke-Ass Stuart set his sights on a new job — the one held by then-San Francisco mayor Ed Lee.

When he declared his candidacy for mayor in the 2015 election, he told SFist it was a “journalistic experiment.” That may have been another way of saying “shameless self-promotion.” And it kind-of worked, he came in fourth place with nearly 10% of the vote. But he also earned a $2,500 fine from the SF Ethics Commission. As SFist wrote at the time, “True to his moniker, he'll pay the fine in installments.”

Broke-Ass Stuart will celebrate 20 years of staying true to his moniker at a Thursday night’s anniversary party show, featuring Sunset Sound System, Juanita MORE!, Kat Robichaud, plus comedy, burlesque, and other variety show aspects. (A portion of the  proceeds will go to Planned Parenthood.)  He’ll also introduce his new zine, Slouching Towards Neverland, a treasury of 20 years of his writing in San Francisco.

Ironically, the Broke-Ass Stuart website is now written primarily by people who are not Broke-Ass Stuart. (Full disclosure: I was one of those people for six years.) “The brand has changed a lot, it’s not just my voice,” Stuart says. “There's many voices, and we amplify voices, people get their early clips, they kind of grow with Broke-Ass Stuart.”

“It’s 100% independent,” Broke-Ass Stuart insists. “There’s no funding besides my credit card.”

Related: Writer Broke-Ass Stuart Running For Mayor In 'Journalistic Experiment' [SFist]

Image: BrokeAssStuart.com

TechCrunch writer Kim-Mai Cutler, who was responsible for the widely shared April piece "How Burrowing Owls Lead To Vomiting Anarchists (Or SF’s Housing Crisis Explained)," is back with a new piece that's all about the Mission's "digital divide" between young tech workers and poor Latinos. She blames this issue, in part, on the tensions over housing development that she discussed in the earlier piece, though this is a bit of a stretch.

Just to back up, Cutler, while mildly sensitive to the city's progressive politics, believes she has the solution to all of our housing-deficit issues, which sounds a little something like this (though her extremely long and fairly well informed earlier essay was long on background and short on solutions): Embrace the laws of supply and demand, alleviate some of the bureaucracy around development, and stop blaming the tech industry for the current housing crisis, because the city should have known to build much more housing in previous decades to anticipate current demand.

But it's hard not to see a cause and effect here, with rising rents and evictions, when she cites the estimate that 32,207 moved into S.F. between 2010 and 2013, and quickly notes that "we have several companies right now headquartered in San Francisco that will need to grow their headcount by a significant amount over the next five years... Dropbox. Square. Salesforce. Twitter. Uber. Airbnb. Stripe. Not to mention all of Y Combinator’s other up-and-comers, many of which want to be headquartered in San Francisco."

Her advice right now is for the tech industry generally to court better press by alleviating the "digital divide" that is keeping lower-income residents disenfranchised in our currently booming economy. Cutler cites a figure from the Mission Economic Development Agency which says that a fourth of the schoolchildren in the neighborhood don't have internet access at home. She also notes that the tech industry is notoriously male-dominated and white, and that all these "young techies" are increasingly seen as interlopers in a community they don't take part in.

As of February, a bunch of big tech companies had pledged donations to schools to help bridge this divide, as President Obama discussed in his State of the Union.

All of that being true, it's definitely over-reaching to say that more participation by tech volunteers in after-school programs and more tech money funding outreach to close the digital divide is going to result in more housing and more affordable rents.

But yes, it will probably result in better PR for the companies who do it.

[TechCrunch]

It's been four years since Valleywag, the blog-of-record for Silicon Valley gossip and tech industry machinations, folded. Now, Gawker Media has relaunched the site "dedicated to mocking the stupidity, incompetence, and avarice of Silicon Valley and the gargantuan grift known as the 'tech sector.'"

The relaunch comes as part of a Gawker redesign that places more emphasis on the site's commentariat with tools and structure designed to "make it more likely ... that informed sources and subjects will bring their voices to bear on our stories, unmediated and of their own volition" and "banishes untrusted or new sources to the outer reaches in a "pending queue." Good luck with that!

The new Valleywag will be run as a Gawker syndicate and helmed by Sam Biddle of Gizmodo, who issued a rousing mission statement that should strike fear into the hearts of half-baked start-up wannabes and tech titans alike:

"The extent to which the bubble blowers of today make, do, or really generate anything of any worth is irrelevant to their sycophants—investors, groupies, conference organizers, and beat reporters, all of which now usually overlap. Your startup doesn’t need to be good, it just needs to be disruptive (read: daringly convoluted), if only for a moment. It doesn’t need to be competent, it just needs to be impetuous. It doesn’t even really need to be—a “Coming Soon” website with a nonsense name is enough for a seat at the table. Get a computer science degree, head west, think of a silly title, drop the vowels, shake hands, and wait for free-flowing millions you don’t deserve in exchange for a service no one needs.

Today’s tech boom isn’t an economy of ideas, but an economy of fantasy: the fantasy that anyone wants a company to digitize their paper junk mail, the fantasy that Pictionary on your iPhone is worth a $180 million acquisition, the fantasy that any half-baked idea will eventually lead to a job at Facebook, and whatever status that lends at a bar in Palo Alto. Fad economies are nothing new, but never has so much cash floated atop so little: at the end of the day, tulips still looked pretty on a table. Hawked above all is the fantasy that all of this posturing and programming represents the American best and brightest, some new pixel-industrial vanguard. That insane dream that our national future has little to do with creating, building, or even selling, and more to do with... Chat Heads? At least Wall Street bankers have the decency and self-awareness to hate themselves.

The days of reckoning for the silicon wunderkind are near, and so here we are: to watch them stumble, catalog their hypocrisies, their excess, their layoffs, and the gradual abandonment of their dreams. The Zuckerbergs who bought the household name recognition they always wanted will be given due scrutiny at a time when they’re rarely getting it. We’re picking up right where Valleywag began because nothing's really changed: seven years later, everyone else is still either too conflicted or craven to bother speaking truth to the Valley."

We're hoping the new Valleywag can avoid the pitfalls of its last incarnation (poor leadership, inaccuracies, an inordinate fixation on people's sex lives) to succeed at its rather grandiose mission. For now, this.

Well, this is enthralling/depressing. A new Tumblr account (noted in today's Morning Links) called Lower Haight Sleeping Bag Lady asks obnoxious Lower Haight residents and its fans to submit photos of a presumably homeless lady noteworthy for carrying around her sleeping bag and sleeping in it. The unidentified woman might be mentally ill (again, presumably), and she looks downtrodden... to say the least. Ha ha? Anyway, it would be nice if the owner(s) of the site had some sort of donation page for their target of amusement/ridicule. Or whatever. Just a thought.

Granted, we've posted countless images of Frank Chu. But that's TOTALLY different. Ahem. The more you know...

Update: The anonymous blogger who created the site has responded to today's criticism thusly:

why does everyone seem to think we hate/”poke fun” at sleeping bag lady? Where is the hate in this blog? Where is the judgement? as anyone who lives in the LH can agree, we see her in the hood all the time. simply documenting a LH staple.

Some people are so angry at this blog/bloggers, and the way they express that is by a RT or a blog comment. Hats off to ya, keep fighting the good fight.

it’s 8 pictures of a homeless woman on the internet that we all see, everyday. take a step back from the keyboard and take a deep breath.

If we may: the "life choices" text affixed to this particular image comes off as a tad judgmental. (And, boy, do we know about being judgmental!)

We couldn't help but read this piece in the NYT Magazine over the weekend in which writer Maud Newton points the finger at the late David Foster Wallace (Infinite Jest) and Dave Eggers for creating the loose conversational tone that came to be embraced, perhaps to a fault, by a generation of bloggers. We know that, um, at least a few commenters like to carp when we get too liberal with our pepperings of the word "um" in our writings, so if only for them, we salute Newton's observations and will try to be, like, less obnoxious in our blogger-y prose.

To wit:

In the Internet era, Wallace’s moves have been adopted and further slackerized by a legion of opinion-mongers who not only lack his quick mind but seem not to have mastered the idea that to make an argument, you must, amid all the tap-dancing and hedging, actually lodge an argument...

I suppose it made sense, when blogging was new, that there was some confusion about voice. Was a blog more like writing or more like speech? Soon it became a contrived and shambling hybrid of the two. The “sort ofs” and “reallys” and “ums” and “you knows” that we use in conversation were codified as the central connectors in the blogger lexicon.

Newton's conclusion is that all this "umming" and casualness is just an effort by us writers to make you like us, and to not sound too certain in our arguments so as to leave room for disagreement. She concludes, "Qualifications are necessary sometimes... But the idea is to provoke and persuade, not to soothe. And the best way to make an argument is to make it, straightforwardly, honestly, passionately, without regard to whether people will like you afterward." Amen.

While news that AOL's Arianna Huffington plans to dip her toes in the crowded Bay Area media pool is nothing new, she went into further detail about a looing SF HuffPo. Huffington revealed the following tidbit to Nick Lucchesi of Westword at at a launch party last night in Dever:

​WW: Where do you want to expand next?

AH: We're looking at San Francisco. They have a lot of Patches. We're putting MapQuest into everything we're doing, whether it's food or art or architecture. Everything you need to know when you go on a trip. We can also offer editorial content to people when they search for restaurants, amusement parks, art galleries on their vacations.

When asked about possibly compensating bloggers from their work, the following exchange occurred:

WW: Do you think that the bloggers who blogged for free for Huffington Post deserve any sort compensation in the wake AOL's acquisition of Huffington Post?

AH: The Huffington Post and AOL are two things: a journalistic enterprise that pays great wages and benefits, and they're a platform. And as a platform, we are basically inviting people who want to blog and who clear the bar of quality, to blog and use that platform to disseminate their ideas, their books, their movies.

Find out more on Huffington, including how she keeps her "Greek peasant hair" bouncy, over at Westword.

Ladies, before you fooled yourselves into liking bourbon, cycling, and major league sports to trap yourself a man in your mid-to-late thirties, you probably suffered through a gay boyfriend or four during your high school days. We feel your pain. So does My High School Boyfriend Was Gay, a site that's "a celebration of our most tragic, hilarious and heinous teenage memories." That is to say, those of you had pre-closet relationships, and just didn't know or didn't want to know. A few of the images are startling and captions chortle-worthy: "Dressed up for the opening night of Spice World," "Rod touched up his roots then requested a shot in front of the baby grand," and our personal favorite, "Claire and Jeff likes: 10000 Maniacs, Winona Ryder films, The Bell Jar." Check it out now.

Thanks goes out to Alissa Mach for the tip!

Tablehopper founder and writer, Marcia Gagliardi, who singlehandedly changed the way people write about food in the Bay Area, announced today a new venture about Bay Area grub joints, watering holes, and more. Behold:

So, you ready for my big news? No, it’s not on the scale of Oprah’s secret sister, although the actual news isn’t that far off topic: tablehopper has a new sister site, Deep Dishing! It’s a new kind of forum about Bay Area restaurants: a positive one, focusing on the best dishes, drinks, and hot tips! The Deep Dishing community and site will guide you to what to order and what’s delicious the next time you’re heading out (especially useful if it’s your first time somewhere, or you’re just looking for inspiration). If there was something you didn’t like, well, on Deep Dishing, you don’t talk about it—it’s only about what’s good.

Delightful.

Gagliardi goes on to describe Deep Dishing as "a friendly place for the tablehopper community to share and quickly find details about what’s good in restaurants in the Bay Area (and beyond)." While the new online food presence will start locally - i.e., Bay Area, wine country - "the site's locations will expand soon."

What a way to kickoff your five-year anniversary, Ms. Gagliardi!

Next to creamy thimblefulls of yogurt and sinfully dark chocolate, women love nothing more in life than a bowl of salad. If food commercials are to be believed, that is. Seriously, females cannot tearing apart greens, covering it low-calorie dressings, topping it with tomato wedges (seasons be damned!), and then smiling like lunatics over their fresh lettuce meals. See, many frail women, for unknown reasons, get unusually excited about all of that leafy, green flavor they're about to digest. It fills their lady parts with unbridled glee, or so we assume. Don't believe us? Check out The Hairpin's Women Laughing Alone With Salad to see for yourself.