Tumblr: Misinformation Superhighway
I respect self-aware idiots. There’s honor in looking at the mirror and recognizing that a Neanderthal is staring back. The honorable idiot politely removes himself from intelligent discourse to enjoy a calm life of Wendy Williams reruns and Twitter updates about nothing. They don’t hurt anyone. They quarantine their cognitive diseases in their living rooms. The majority of them don’t even bother to vote. If every idiot had the grace to be self-aware, the world would be a brighter place.
The idiot in denial is another story. Instead of leaving cultural discourse to the big children, the idiot in denial finds the tallest unoccupied soapbox and shouts at other idiots in a never-ending chorus of trendy buzzwords and animated gifs. The soapbox landfill is called Tumblr. It is the most efficient bullshit distribution system in the history of mankind. As Tumblr metastasizes, I feel nostalgia for the straightforward lies that William Randolph Hearst brought to the table. At least he didn’t believe them.
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Reddit: Wasteland of Mediocrity
In the scramble for recognition that has characterized the Internet age, we’ve left a few things like radio, CDs, and shame by the wayside. None of it is the exact fault of this monster we’ve created but barely understand. It has, however, done a disturbingly good job of creating outlets for the worst of us by giving them voices and an audience. It was Penny Arcade that coined the term “GIFT,” or “Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory,” but it’s so much more marvelously complicated than their original definition these days. All they said was that if you give someone a voice, an audience, and a degree of anonymity, they will turn into a complete fuckstick. I’m here today to tell you that they were right. They were far more right than we ever could have thought.
On all four corners of the internet are little hubs of terrible, ranging to a blog I found that likens anorexia to a religion (the authoress of this blog also has a photo stream where she finds pictures of female celebrities eating and calls them fat), entire websites dedicated to the adoration of a show for little girls about horses, and an until-recently hidden subculture who call themselves “transabled.” That is, they are physically capable men and women who choose to identify as physically crippled. Only in this day and age could a group of hypochondriacs come together and demand that we believe them and put them on disability just because they say we should. Because they may be physically healthy, but in their hearts, in their souls, they’re missing their left leg from the knee down.
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The After Earth Letters
The NSA employee responsible for tracking known dissident Will “Big Willie Style” Smith recently leaked the following e-mail exchange between Smith and director M. Night Shyamalan.
Dear M. Night,
Opening weekend! I haven’t felt this much positive energy since my first album dropped. After Earth is going to be big, man. Titanic big. We’re going to make Avengers look like one of those Ernest movies you walk by in Wal-Mart. I should clear some space on my shelf for another Oscar.
I couldn’t have picked a better director. Or a better friend.
Sincerely,
Will Smith
At the Movies: Game of Thrones
Jaime Lannister tries out the “Braveheart” look.
The ongoing adventures of the last three twenty year olds on Earth paying for movies.
Alan: Not as smart as he thinks he is.
Byron: Hodor.
Cammy: Prone to madness and greatness.
Others rotate in and out.
The night is dark and full of spoilers.
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Youtube Comedy Week: A New Low
On May 19, comedy died. Two passing vagrants found the emaciated corpse of comedy in a ditch in North Las Vegas. The body had a single self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. There was no note. At the family’s request, comedy will be buried next to journalistic integrity. On an unrelated note, May 19 was day one of Youtube’s “Comedy Week.”
Youtube is one of the greatest modern success stories. Which makes the cringe-inducing storm of bullshit that surrounded Comedy Week even more baffling. The immediate reaction to Comedy Week isn’t laughter. It’s irritation followed by rage. It all began with a simple promotional video.
This video serves as a healthy reminder that Arnold Schwarzenegger could never act. His most famous role is an emotionless robot that speaks in a monotone, and bad things happen when he leaves that territory. At this point, the event still appeared to have some potential. The ad might have been a reheated serving of stale pop-culture, but I was still optimistic. A healthy reminder to never believe in anything at any time for any reason.
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Nothing Happened
This piece of mine ran in Tiger Magazine‘s Daily Princetonian parody.
In spite of the pressure of a daily news cycle, absolutely nothing worth commenting upon occurred in Princeton University today. Five thousand undergraduates carried out their mundane daily routines with no events of remote interest anywhere on campus. Instead of printing eight pages of unreadable dross, we’ve decided to face the truth. Nothing happened.
Crime remains a non-factor. There were no arsons, stabbings, shootings, sexual assaults, beatings, muggings, curb-stomps, bombings, floggings, flayings, defenestrations, hangings, or disturbances of the peace. None of the racial, religious, or social factions in the university have established any organized crime groups. Shirley Tilghman has not embezzled the university budget and fled to an undisclosed location in Nicaragua. No domestic or foreign terrorist cells have revealed themselves on campus or made any demands towards Nassau Hall. As far as we know, no serial killers have taken their victims amongst the residential colleges.
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Deaf Monkey Mission Statement 2013
I don’t really know where my head will be at writingwise for the next however long (a year I’m guessing?), so I’m just going to throw out a few general ideas that may show up:
Nothing that is new is ever good anymore.
Nothing was ever actually good, and you liking it isn’t going to change that.
Everything you like is actually bad. You just enjoyed it with the wrong approach and therefore under false pretenses.
Anything good is never as good as its advertised, and we are all promised lives that literally no one can have, not even those that allegedly do. It is all fabrication and exponentially self-replicating in the realm of the imagination of collective misery. We are all wearing blinders and that carrot on a stick’s made out of cardboard. That whip, on the other hand, is real and hurts quite a bit.
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