A news legend bid his typewriter farewell; people planned their post-New-York-Times futures; and the new wave were overwhelmed by work. The Twitterati were at a fracture point.

Ruth Riechl got smug over her soul-food meal on a train and Michael Bauer's readers got porn from his tweets. The Twitterati learned to watch what they ate.

David Simon told television viewers to go screw themselves; Jane Fonda established a rallying point for her fellow travelers and Choire Sicha and David Carr watched a bust go down. The Twitterati celebrated troublemakers.

AT&T failed to give Adam Frucci a sense of childlike wonder about his iPhone; Jimmy Jane's mobile device proved more satisfying to Melissa Gira Grant and Ana Marie Cox damned an internet conference with faint praise.

How do you deal with a derailed relationship that's still on Facebook — and Twitter, and Tumblr, and FriendFeed, and a couple dozen blogs? Recently-outsourced Valleywag writer Melissa Gira Grant wrote a how-to for chick-culture site The Frisky after dealing with a breakup firsthand. It's aimed at young women, but applies to anyone. I'm happy to report Melissa's writing is tight enough that she needs no 100-word version.

Go ahead, call Melissa Gira Grant a "hooker." From the first, she hooked Valleywag readers with her provocative insights into how sex, money, and technology collided. We first hired her to write a column on the sex trade, and she became a sought-after expert when the Eliot Spitzer-Ashley Dupré scandal exploded on the Web. But her talents soon overflowed the confines of that narrow subject. What's next for Melissa? She's in the market for a programmer for her sex-map startup, Boffery, and she'll continue writing at melissagira.com.

We would never sugarcoat someone else's layoffs. Why ours? Gawker Media, our publisher, has told me to cut Valleywag's costs, in anticipation of an advertising recession. In response, I have laid off associate editors Nicholas Carlson and Jackson West and reporter Melissa Gira Grant. They have all been doing excellent work, breaking stories and needling Silicon Valley. But our ultimate boss, Nick Denton, has decided he can't afford them. Paul Boutin and I will continue running the site. Denton's memo:

Boffery.com is a beta (whatever that means now) social networking site by Valleywag part-timer Melissa Gira Grant and a few of her friends. Boffery lets you chart your network of hookups, making you valuable and accessible to 51-year-old newspaper reporters assigned to write about these crazy kids humping each other via Twitter. Who said you can't sleep your way to fame? Note to Melissa: Post some screenshots if you want any more press than this.

What turned culture-jamming tech blog Boing Boing into the kind of censorious monster it normally ridicules? Beyond its initial statement that the reasons are "personal," Boing Boing hasn't elaborated, but all signs point to the foundering of a once-romantic friendship between Boing Boing editor Xeni Jardin and Violet Blue, the sex blogger whose many links from Boing Boing were erased last year. (Full disclosure: Jardin is Valleywag's favorite gendertastic sex-robot space princess from the future, while Violet Blue has contributed to Fleshbot, a porn blog published by Valleywag owner Gawker Media. Blue once approached Valleywag contributor Melissa Gira Grant for sex, but was rebuffed.) In an email to Valleywag, pasted below, Blue continues to profess ignorance of what she did wrong; she also dismisses her entanglement with Jardin as a friendship laced with casual sex. Blue's own photo of the two at Kink.com party, shown here, suggests, in its entangled limbs, that the relationship was more serious than that.

Did Amazon.com run out of kneepads? Jerry Yang begged Rupert Murdoch to save his company from Microsoft. Rush Limbaugh begged Steve Jobs for tech support. Three of you sent emails begging us to stop running Melissa Gira Grant's posts about sex and money in Silicon Valley. Thousands of you begged us not to. And we all saluted Willie Brown, San Francisco's thoroughly corrupt mayor who legalized one other thing that brings us low.

We've created a monster. Moose's Friday has become a power clique for brainy women in heels. Tired of "cocky pretend business moguls" as one put it, the Valley's bad girls have chosen to hang out with us cocky pretend writers instead. Come on over from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. in North Beach. New pageview champ Melissa Gira Grant (left) will tell you how to raise your rates. DO NOT wear a hoodie, or Splunk VP of Fashion Christina Noren will drag you into the ladies room and make you over, like a ZZ Top video. Dress up, people, we got into this biz for the shiny shiny glamour.

Did you know some heathens ask for a martini on the rocks? And how many advertisers does AdBrite really have? That was just some of the bits of scandal I overheard at Valleywag's Bad Girl Friday, our happy hour turned welcome wagon for new writer Melissa Gira Grant. Check the photos for more evidence of revelry. Oh, and what is Valleywag emeritus Nick Douglas doing with Grant? Their Facebook profiles say they're "in an open relationship," but I've mentally slotted it under "it's complicated" — even I don't want to know the details.