[this is funny]

February 8, 2003 / / 2 Comments

Representatives of The Irish Government’s Department of Education and The INTO (Irish Teachers Organization) have advised its qualified teachers to “exercise extreme caution” when accepting a teaching contract in South Korea. It goes on on to state that “due to the overwhelming number of complaints routinely received by various Irish government departments from Irish teachers in connection with their experiences in this country, we feel unable to recommend it to our citizens as a safe or viable career option and furthermore impossible to resist the conclusion that the current Hagwon system in South Korea is endemically corrupt”.
Endemically corrupt, indeed. Nicely spotted.
(‘hagwons’ are private schools (primarily for English), by the way, of which there are literally tens of thousands in the ROK)

Pray For Death! Pray!

February 7, 2003 / / 6 Comments

Thanks to the eternally irate Mr Golby for this little nugget.
Yes! Bless us, lord! Let’s pray for our troops, pray for our politicians, pray that the bleeding hemorrhoids that have been plaguing us will disappear, let’s pray that those pesky raghead pagan f–ks die in their thousands, let’s pray that more war will stop war, let’s pray that killing will put a cap on killing, let’s pray that the sweet light crude manna will continue to pump through the fiscal veins of our great nation, let’s pray that our god has a bigger dick than theirs, let’s pray that the dazed halfwit apathetic scum that allowed us to take over the most powerful country in the world won’t wake up and cut our throats like the vermin we are, let’s pray goddamnit, let’s pray the great game will continue, let’s pray that jesus doesn’t f–king come back and rip us from crotch to sternum like trout, let’s pray, let’s pray, let’s get down on our knees and pray to something bigger, let’s pray, let’s pray our children don’t have to do the same evil things we did, it’s not our fault, god, please, it’s not our fault, we’re not bad people, we just did what we had to do, what we were told to do….

bomb.jpg

[Audio : Dead Kennedys – Kinky Sex Makes The World Go ‘Round]

Coin of the Realm

February 2, 2003 / / 1 Comment

In light of recent ruminations in some places about the politics and social implications of hyperlinking and blogrolling, I find this amusing, no less so because of my opinions about some of the names involved. What a sad and silly game it is, and how inconsequential.
For my part, were I asked, I’d have to say that Jim Cappozzola, whoever he is, can take a flying f–k at a rolling doughnut, even if I do agree with him about the virulence and unpleasantness of the Little Green Cesspool. The proper response, I would say, to his threats (is it a threat if the consequences are so completely and laughably trivial?) to de-link people if they do not comply with his demands that they de-link Little Green Poosticks is : “So?”
Fun to watch the fur and feathers fly, I suppose. But it’s something a little embarrassing for adult people to be so concerned about, even if it does touch on important issues that go well beyond blogdom, like censorship and freedom of expression, like tolerance and bigotry. My response to LGF and its ilk, though, is a little like the one I have to those fat, 40 year old men who dress up in Sailor Moon costumes : “Yay! for expressing your inner dipsh-t and striking a blow for repressed losers everywhere, Mr Man, but please take it out of my face, OK?”

Pundits-r-Us

February 1, 2003 / / 4 Comments

It’d be fun to get some statistics on Blogspot bloggers, or blogs in general, I suppose, to get a handle what the blogly zeitgeist is like. How many would characterize themselves as political, how many consider themselves part of a community, how many try to use the word ‘f–k’ on a daily basis, how many insist on writing posts without the use of capital letters…
And how many call themselves ‘pundit.’ A whole hell of a lot, would be the answer for that one, it seems.

C students from Yale

February 1, 2003 / / 5 Comments

Say what you will about his recent fictional output (or his older fictional output, for that matter), I still have a soft spot for Kurt Vonnegut. At the age of 80, he’s still saying things worth listening to.
And he’s not an asshole, which still counts for something, I hope.

I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers. Sometimes I wish it had been. What has happened, though, is that it has been taken over by means of the sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d’etat imaginable. And those now in charge of the federal government are upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka ‘Christians,’ and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities, or ‘PPs.’
…
What has allowed so many PPs to rise so high in corporations, and now in government, is that they are so decisive. Unlike normal people, they are never filled with doubts, for the simple reason that they cannot care what happens next. Simply can’t. Do this! Do that! Mobilize the reserves! Privatize the public schools! Attack Iraq! Cut health care! Tap everybody’s telephone! Cut taxes on the rich! Build a trillion-dollar missile shield! f–k habeas corpus and the Sierra Club and In These Times, and kiss my ass!
[more…]

While we’re talking authors here, another writer whose work I’ve always enjoyed reading, Gunter Grass, is also speaking out against those murderous C students and psychopaths in Washington.
Edit : This is as good a time as any to share some statistics about Korea with you. I ran across these numbers a few days ago, and they would seem to explain much on first glance. Whether that is actually the case or not is up for debate.
There are a total of 450 public libraries in Korea. In the whole country.
These facilities serve a population of approximately 47 million people : it works out to about 110,000 people for each library, the lowest in the OECD. The ratio is actually worse here in Seoul – which is home to the equivalent of about a third of the population of Canada, a fact that never ceases to boggle me a bit – there’s one library for every 330,000 people.
The comparable figure in Europe is about 1:10,000 and in America it’s 1:20,000 or so.
Some ad-hocratic systems have arisen to compensate, as is always the case here. There are privately run shops, even in the nasty little suburb where I live, that rent a few books (mostly home-grown manga for the schoolkids) alongside the standard racks of action movies. There’s a bookmobile that comes around the human beehives once a week, too, with a couple of hundred Korean novels onboard. Small compensation for the few who have the time or energy to read anything.
As for me, even if any of these few libraries were near enough for me to visit, I’d be out of luck. None carry books in English, of course.
If any webblogger should have an Amazon wishlist and wheedle and beg for books, it’s me, by crikey. Maybe I should get a webcam, start peddling my wonderchicken pulchritude, and demand payments (“Put it on! Put it all back on! Please!”) in literature….
Nah.

Redneck

January 31, 2003 / / 2 Comments

When you’re a secret redneck like me, an only-partially reformed small-town Norther BC boy, and you’ve got 10 or 11 beers in you, it becomes clear that “Can’t You See?” from the Marshall Tucker Band is one of the greatest songs ever written.
Then again, the next random-shuffle Winamp playlist entry started just as I was hunt-and-pecking that out, and now I’m gonna have to vote for “I’m Right You’re Wrong” by Vancouver stalwarts DOA as the pinnacle of (punk) Rock And Roll Bliss. Songs of my youth…

i’m right, you’re wrong – and we both know it.
i’m right, you’re wrong – and it’s no secret.
i’m right, you’re wrong – but you got the power.
what do ya mean – when ya stare at me?
you think we’re nothing – but things will change.
we may be crazy – but we’re not insane.
i’m right, you’re wrong – but you got the power.
i’m right, you’re wrong – and we all know it.
i’m right, you’re wrong – so let’s break it.
you’re gonna fall – you set yourself up.
you can’t stall – it’s crumbling down.
out of the way – it’s been standing too long.
i’m right, you’re wrong – but you got the power.
i’m right you’re wrong – and we all know it.
i’m right, you’re wrong – so we’ll have to break it.
i’m right, you’re wrong – but you got the power.
i’m right, you’re wrong and we all know it.
i’m right, you’re wrong – so we’ll have to take it.

Best Asian Weblog? Hooo-hah. f–k that noise.
Heh.
Edit : Another beer, and I changed my mind again. This! Is! The! Best!
Tom Waits – Heart Of Saturday Night

Well you gassed her up
Behind the wheel
With your arm around your sweet one
In your Oldsmobile
Barrelin’ down the boulevard
You’re looking for the heart of Saturday night
And you got paid on Friday
And your pockets are jinglin’
And you see the lights
You get all tinglin’ cause you’re cruisin’ with a 6
And you’re looking for the heart of Saturday night
Then you comb your hair
Shave your face
Tryin’ to wipe out ev’ry trace
All the other days
In the week you know that this’ll be the Saturday
You’re reachin’ your peak
Stoppin’ on the red
You’re goin’ on the green
Cause tonight’ll be like nothin’
You’ve ever seen
And you’re barrelin’ down the boulevard
Lookin’ for the heart of Saturday night
Tell me is the crack of the poolballs, neon buzzin?
Telephone’s ringin’; it’s your second cousin
Is it the barmaid that’s smilin’ from the corner of her eye?
Magic of the melancholy tear in your eye.
Makes it kind of quiver down in the core
Cause you’re dreamin’ of them Saturdays that came before
And now you’re stumblin’
You’re stumblin’ onto the heart of Saturday night
Well you gassed her up
And you’re behind the wheel
With your arm around your sweet one
In your Oldsmobile
Barrellin’ down the boulevard,
You’re lookin’ for the heart of Saturday night
Is the crack of the poolballs, neon buzzin?
Telephone’s ringin’; it’s your second cousin
And the barmaid is smilin’ from the corner of her eye
Magic of the melancholy tear in your eye.
Makes it kind of special down in the core
And you’re dreamin’ of them Saturdays that came before
It’s found you stumblin’
Stumblin’ onto the heart of Saturday night
And you’re stumblin’
Stumblin onto the heart of Saturday night

A-list Ruminations

January 29, 2003 / / No Comments

Steve has some interesting thoughts, and beautifully-expressed, about some metabloggy issues that have been on my mind lately as well. Go, read.

“I absolutely think that the blogosphere reproduces the mechanisms of reward and reprisal that we see in the offline world. Like rewards like, as I said. But not absolutely: I think there are more potential routes to ‘success’ as we define it in this unspace than there are in that other space; we may yet fall victim to offline patterns but we are also more able, I think, to reject them and work toward new patterns. I hope so, anyway.”
[more…]

Masks and Mirrors

January 28, 2003 / / 4 Comments

This is going to be one of those posts that starts : “So, I….”
I usually hate those kinds of posts.
So, I get an EGR send in my inbox today. Rageboy – or Locke, or whichever mask he was wearing when he hit ‘send’ or ‘go’ or ‘cry havoc’ or whatever the button said (assuming that both personas are masks, to one degree or another, and assuming that it was an actual button he pressed) – included a couple of quotes in the header, and I got as far as

“Sentimentality is a superstructure covering brutality.”
– Carl Gustav Jung

before I got distracted, as seems to happen so often to me. All that youthful experimentation has left me with an attention span that is somewhat unreliable, I’m sad to report. Don’t worry your pretty heads, though, dear readers : I make do.
So, this Jung quote (I did read a lot of Jung when I was young – har!) is one that I’ve never run across before, oddly, unless of course I did run across it, but forgot about it because I was in the middle of one of those youthful experimentation sessions I mentioned above. My memory has a few holes in it too, unfortunately. Again, though, I make do.
It resonated in the echo chamber behind my nose and I was keen to see what had been said, and when, and by who. It seemed to apply to something I’ve been turning over in my mind lately : one thing that a filthy foreigner in Korea who spends any time watching his hosts will learn quickly is how inspidly sentimental these folks can be. I loathe sentimentality, but I’m keen to understand more about it, ’cause, you know, I’m such a groovy guy. The other bit of data is the fact that Korean soldiers, in the Vietnam War and elsewhere, were universally feared for their ‘casual brutality’.
So, off to Google. Shiver me timbers, boy wonder, who should be at the pole position for this interesting phrase, gunning his virtual engines, but the excellent Jonathon Delacour!
He was talking about warbloggers in his post, which interested me not at all at that moment – “We’re on a mission from God, ma’am.” – but he does quote the equally splendid Joseph Duemer :

Sentimentality is the substitution of emotion for intelligence; sentimentality requires of the reader assent to heightened feelings not legitimated by the matter at hand; sentimentality seeks to manipulate the reader’s emotional response by calls to conventional wisdom or attitudes; sentimentality seeks approval by reference to the vast warm blanket of majority opinion; sentimentality never, ever risks the disapproval of any member of its intended audience.

Now this sounds like the kinda dirt I’m trying to dig up, here, tonight. This sounds like words I can get behind, and apply to something that at least has the odor of insightfulness.
But then, I notice this in the comments :

At least part of the problem here is that Duemer’s, and Jung’s, definition of “sentimental” is contrary to the definition held by 99% of Americans.
“Sentimental” has positive connotations, not negative ones. We associate it with things we know are not necessarily true but things we would love to believe.
Things like Santa Claus, things like joyous Thanksgiving reunions with loved ones, even if we only love them at a distance, are considered “sentimental.” Even when we consciously know these things are not entirely true, we would like to believe them and see nothing wrong in believing in them.
Kitsch at least comes closer to the meaning Duemer is assigning to “sentimentality” because it has somewhat negative connotations for most, though certainly not all, people.
People are going to resist transforming a word they have positive connotations with into a negative idea, even if they might otherwise be convinced that the argument itself is sound.

and I wonder if that’s true. Does sentimentality have a positive connotation for most Americans? And how about for Koreans? And am I unusual in hating it so?
Back to Google I went, feeling the need to dig some more, and came up dry. Serried ranks of quotable quote pages, with no commentary to sink my nose into, truffle-hunting webpig that I am.
Then I tried a bit of wiggling with my search terms a bit, and found this :

In his overview, [Dr. Luke Kim, whom many regard as the godfather of Korean American psychiatry says] Koreans regard cheong (he spells jeong) as “one of the most important ingredients that would make [Korean] lives enriching and meaningful.” He agrees there is [no] equivalent English word that translates the meaning exactly.
“However,” he says, “Jeong itself embraces all the meanings to such words as feeling, empathy, sympathy, compassion, emotional attachment, trust, pathos, tenderness, affinity, sentiment and even love.
“If I were to choose one English word among these, I would choose the word empathy.”
Kim observes that Chinese, Japanese and Koreans all share the general concept of jeong with a somewhat different emphasis in its concept.
“For example,” he observes, “Koreans tend to stress the aspect of emotional attachment and bond, while Chinese emphasize the aspect of loyalty and reciprocity.
“The Japanese equivalent word – Jyo -tends to emphasize sentimentality.” Jyo-ni-moroi means one is weak and vulnerable with sentimentality.
Jeong among Koreans denotes a special interpersonal affective bond: a trust and closeness between two individuals. That’s why, Kim believes, Koreans attach great importance to the presence or absence of jeong in their relationships with a person such as mother-child (mo-jeong), two lovers (ae-jeong), or two friends (woo-jeong).

This set me back for a minute or two, and led me to remembering my wife’s stated reason for sticking with me, when asked why she had a couple of years ago, despite her parents threatening to disown her, in the face of her friends’ avowals that she was nuts to shack up with a nasty foreigner, ignoring the stares we got when we walked arm in arm down a Korean street. She said that she remembered me saying one night not long after we first got together something along the lines of :
Love is love is love. Mother for child, friend for friend, lover for beloved. It’s all one, even if it is different in the ways that it is shown and shared.
That simpleminded belief of mine dovetails micron-close with this ‘jeong’ idea, doesn’t it? Not that I had the faintest idea at the time that such a belief existed and was so important to so many Koreans. It’s not particularly insightful, certainly, but it’s true, or true at least for me, and that’s more than enough. It was enough for her, too, it seems.
So. At this point I kind of ran out of steam. I lost track of what I had been thinking about when I went off searching for some background on the Jung quote (which was probably going to end up in something mean-spirited anyway) but I ended up remembering something that has made me a better man.
And Rageboy? Well, I guess I gotta thank him, for starting me wandering down that track this evening, which ended for me in a happy memory and a cuddle with my woman. And feel ‘jeong’, a bit, for the guy, because the very public road that led him to his pressing that ‘send’ button today hasn’t – at least as far as I know – as happy an end as my short road did tonight.

Big Fat Pipes

January 26, 2003 / / 2 Comments

After having lived in Broadband Sibera (the land down under, where techies moan and telcos blunder), and paid extortionate prices for competely inadequate service, Korea has been a pure joy in terms of bit aquisition. Reading this, I was reminded that even porn-thirsty America is way behind the curve : US$95 for 3.5 Mbps? I get that now, for about US$20, with no download cap.
Shortly, though, I’m moving to the recently-introduced VDSL service. It comes in 10, 20, 50 Mbps speeds (and higher, I think), and the 50 Mbps pipe will cost me around $US30 a month, unmetered.
Of course, Korea’s way out ahead in terms of wireless broadband, too. There are some compensations for the hassles of living here, if you’re a geek. Sorry to gloat, but wheeee!
[in a brainfart almost completely unrelated I recall my Grizzly-Adams-esque mountain-man friend and roommate (with whom I have since lost touch, sadly), back when I lived in Whistler BC for a few years, insisting that almost anything was forgiveable while skiing (or doing anything else for that matter) except saying ‘wheeeee!’. Sorry, Brock.)

Whiskey Is Good

January 25, 2003 / / 5 Comments

I guess I should be blogging my tits off, here, proving to all those visitors from the bloggies that I’m The Hardest Working Blogger In Show Business, but f–k that noise.
I got me a bottle of cheap whiskey, it’s Friday night and I’m on the elevator gooooooin’ up. Leave me be.
All the kafuffle about this bloggie stuff makes me giggle like chrome-plated steam-powered giggling machine, though, I gotta tell ya. Go, look how worked up some people get about these silly things. [via OW™here] I don’t know who these people are, but they really need a tall cool glass of perspective and soda.
Hey, you big boneheads! If you’ve got all that energy to spare, why not try getting worked up about the bumbling corporate turd masquerading as a president, sitting in the White House, chuckling like a waterhead, and jerking off over his (laminated, crayola-bright) plans for war, instead? Or the continuing determined erosion of your rights and privacy by his wingèd minions, maybe? Or even about the fight over copyright law, which is a massive wank as well, in this wonderchicken’s opinion, but not nearly as gargantuan a waste of time as these awards. Save your vitriol for the things that merit it, kids.
And have a drink, on me.
Edit : Or if you’re not the drinking type, amuse yourself by reading this semicoherent ramble from last week, which in light of this Bloggie nomination, is Ironic As f–k (now featuring Comedy Capitalization©).
Edit again : Or : what the ever-reasonable mathowie said.

Fun

January 24, 2003 / / No Comments

What I don’t need is another shiny thing to distract me, but this is some kinda fun, pilgrims. I know it’s been around for a bit, and the alpha is almost over, but it’s new to me, and it’s very cool, and scary addictive. Reminds me, in a good way, of IRC (to which I’ve never been that attracted), crossed with the mind-expanding, imagination-tweaking, eyestrainy old days of all night text-adventuring on my big grey TRS-80.

Zork.jpg

>READ THE SIGN
“Warning! These are poisonous oranges, not meant for human consumption.
– Farmer Bozbar”
>EAT AN ORANGE
Aaarrrr! It burns your tongue and your throat!
***You have died***

I really sucked at text adventures.

Holy Crap

January 22, 2003 / / 8 Comments

I’ve discovered thanks to my gadgetry over on the right that I’ve been shortlisted for a Bloggie this year, in the Asian Weblogs category, along with such noble and noteable friends and neighbours as BWG, Cheesedip, Weblog Wannabe and Geisha Asobi. Last year, when I was nominated but didn’t make the cut, I threatened to perform acts of random and extreme violence on anyone who actually voted for me. Which had a certain chilling effect on my popularity, I’m guessing.
This time around I’m not sure how to react, given my recent semicoherent rantings about popularity and such. The cool kids all feign disinterest, I know. Me, I guess I’ll just sincerely thank whoever nominated me, and thank those who put me on the shortlist, and have a celebratory beer or 12.
[Jeez, now I feel like I oughta actually write something more about Asia….for those who are interested in that stuff, my musings about Life in Korea are here.]
Edit, the next morning : I guess I should make clear that even though I am pleased to be given some recognition for my fiddle-f–king around here over the past coupla years or so, I am firmly aware that popularity contests of this kind are a massive wank, and destructive to community feeling in a multitude of ways.
I do not take this seriously. What I do take seriously is the conversations among very smart and very kind people in which I’ve been allowed to take part as a result of having this weblog, the things I’ve learned, the skills I’ve honed, the friends I’ve made.
I’ll let my nomination stand, and I will gladly accept your vote, with thanks – because, goddamnit, I kick ass – but I say to you once again, with flashing eyes and floating hair, I do not for a freaking second take this seriously. If I win (which I’m pretty damn sure I won’t) it won’t be because I’m better than any of the others nominated, or better than a multitude of other creative people out there howling into the void, it’ll be because I bribed people with sexual favours I have way too much free time, and spend it on this pointless but enjoyable hobby, and have settled in for a wee drink or two with friends all over the virtual place in my time.
But it’s life that counts, and the careful stewardship of your soul, my friends, not pretty words and tricked-out css. And beer, of course. Crikey, let’s not forget about the beer.

There must be a way…

January 22, 2003 / / 6 Comments

I wish there were some way that some sort of reliable device for parsing out and evaluating text could be created, one that was capable of remotely applying painful shocks to the testicles based on the results.
This device – let’s call it the Fiery Parser of Comedy Justice™, for lack of anything else that comes to mind – would deliver the scrotum-singeing amps say 7 out of 8 times that it caught someone posted an ‘amusing’ one-liner to Metafilter, just to help them be certain that they were indeed posting Comedy Gold and it was worth the risk.
(I feel comfortable in choosing the testicles, as I’m pretty certain this is a Boyzone phenomenon.)
Ideally, it would be 6 or 8 metres high, with a huge On/Off lever, be topped with buzzing Tesla coils, and throw off random crackling bolts of electricity through the darkness. A tiny almost circular 50’s-style cathode ray tube would sit at its foot, connected to the main apparatus with monster alligator clips and greasy, wrist-thick cables, casting a small, comforting, #006699 glow on the broken concrete and piles of skulls nearby.
I’m aware that this probably won’t happen. Pity.
I am also fully aware that (pot, kettle) probably 80% of my MetaSchtick for the first year I was there was rubber-chickening and merry pranksterism, but that was before it became an epidemic. The monkey house (and god bless its every byte) was created to siphon away all that stuff, but now there’s a whole new generation in the blue, this growing and seemingly unstoppable crapslide of quipsters who seem bent on being The Wackiest MeFite, and they’re beginning to give me the sh-ts.
OK, I’m done now with my little rant now. Just had to vent. Back to the (much-beloved) ‘filter I go.
Edit :

“It’s funny how the colours of the real world only seem really real when you viddy them on the screen. Now, all the time I was watching this, I was beginning to get very aware of like not feeling all that well. And this I put down to all the rich food and vitamins. But I tried to forget this, concentrating on the next film, which jumped right away on a young devotchka who was being given the old in-out, in-out first by one malchick then another, then another. When it came to the sixth or seventh malchick, leering and smecking and then going into it, I began to feel really sick. But I could not shut my glazzies. And even if i tried to move my glazz-balls about I still could not get out of the line of fire of this picture.”

Things like this, over at MeFi, are part of the reason I keep going back there, even after I have a little half-serious spaz-out like I did earlier. It may be a hoax, but if not, I am fascinated in equal measure with being repelled. It’s a strange, wonderful, horrible new world we’re building ourselves.
Another Edit : See, this MetaTalk discussion about the previously mentioned thread is a great thing too.

[excised strip-bar reference]

January 18, 2003 / / 6 Comments

Steve and Alex have revealed their novels-in-progress, and I know some other friends and neighbours are girding their loins to do the same.
I’m just drunk enough at the moment to be tempted to open the kimono too on the humble beginnings of my thus-far-unrevealed (except to a few blogly amigos) semifictional tale of the vida loca del pollo magnifico, but it’d be deeply embarrassing if it sucked, so perhaps I’ll just wait a while on that….
I’m still trying to figure out if I stole the cheeseriffic title, which has been circulating in my brain since the early 90’s – The Night Smells Like A Dog – from the Beatles of Surrey, No Fun, or if they stole it from me.

You scratch mine, I'll scratch yours

January 17, 2003 / / 12 Comments

Recently, Burningbird, who’s been having some major stresses in her life and thus can be forgiven for being a bit cranky, had this to say about blogrolling and linkloving, and the whorespiders like Daypop and its ilk :

It’s about links and popularity and one upping each other, and posting and running around seeing who links to us and checking our ranks. How many of you check your popularity in the morning before you read your so-called ‘favorite’ weblogs? There’s no ethics or honor, friendship, pathos or beauty in the hypertext link; it just is. But we use it as a judgement of worth, and that’s the saddest thing I’ve seen since high school. And I quit high school.

After being a smartass :

I will not rest in my endless search for *more and MORE* recognition and pointless linkage, until I am Supreme Blog Overlord, and can direct the meaningless lives of all the little net people I stepped on in my egocentric rush to the top!

I actually started to think about it, again, and why I…well, if not disagree precisely, see things a little differently. Part of the reason it was on my mind this morning was that the night before, I’d made a post here, linking to the PBS show on blogging (starring OW™ and Anil Dash and others), with the sole comment being ‘Oh, f–k off.’ (There was also some goofy sh-t about Orson Welles eating your soul, but that’s not germane at the moment.)
I deleted that post almost immediately – there goes my blogging verité credibility – but my unthinking nasty response, seemingly at odds with what I believe about the no-impact socialization implicit in what we do with links, continues to disturb me a bit. I’m happy for Anil and Oliver, although I think they are two very different kinds of blogistanis, in many ways, which was perhaps the point, in part.
I’m not attempting to characterize either of them, here. I’m just following my somewhat muddled thoughts where they take me.
Where they take me first is on a bit of a tangent : there are those with ‘personal web sites’ or journals or blogs who pay little to no attention to what others are doing or saying. There are those too who whore themselves – who use links exclusively to curry favour, or elusive popularity, or the strangely compelling ghostly yardstick of blogly self-worth that is measured in hits. There are bloggers – a lot of them – who seem to do give recognition to others primarily – or exclusively – to increase their ‘juice,’ and spend most of their time trying to attract that sort of attention from others.
I mean, most of us do a bit of that sometimes, probably, and sit somewhere on the fence. But the true ‘look at me! look at me!’ folks – amusing and enjoyable as their antics may be – are the ones who spoil the game, because when some people start to think they can win a game that in its very nature is designed not to have winners, it starts to poison interaction. It’s just like Real Life™, ain’t it? Having a drink with a group of folks, one (or worse, two) of whom will not stop jumping up and down and pulling faces, or steering the conversation inexorably back to themselves – that just ain’t no fun, and it kills the joy of socializing.
I guess that it’s this kind of behaviour that set BB off. It’s this kind of behaviour that makes me want to withdraw from the whole game, too, sometimes. But I don’t. ‘Cause there will always be folks who are more into self-aggrandizement than conversation, and folks who are more into grandstanding than socializing, and you have to choose to get with ’em, or ignore ’em. Hell, get a few drinks into me, and I can be one of them myself. But one can choose to ignore the siren call, and the bleating of the self-nominated popularity contest participants, and get on with the hardcore relaxation, and the slow to and fro of languid conversation.
I think my kneejerk reaction to the PBS thing was somehow spawned both out of my utter contempt for the Old Media and my feelings about blogging and bloggers in general : that we’re people who are sure that we have something to say, whether or not anyone else thinks so too, and damnit, we’re going to say it, and self-promote so that as many people as possible are going to hear it. If that’s one of the core motivators for all of this for many people, it’s only natural, annoying as it may be sometimes, that there is going to be a subset that push the envelope, and cross the line into Human Brands. And I have always been resentful of people who are recognized for jumping up and down and shouting ‘look at me!’. I’m not accusing Oliver or Anil of doing this, I hasten to add. I’m just thinking this through, aloud.
Despite this, I do still think the blogosphere is a meritocracy. Merit is most assuredly not measured in hitcounts or rankings. It’s pretty clear that hitcounts and blogrankings are a factor of how good a self-promoter you are, how much juice your virtual neighbours have, and only in small part how much merit can be found in your actual creative output. There are bowel-looseningly good writers out there who get little to no traffic, and there are determinedly mediocre ones who are inundated in visitors. This, we all know. Life ain’t fair. But merit in this place (an old discussion about what kind of place it is comes to mind), one way or another, whether it’s quality of ideas or writing or simply the honest goodness of the person behind the words shining through, well, it seems to me that that’s recognized eventually, organically. Mostly.
Back to the issue of linking and blogrolling and Blogdexery, again taken from my comments on Shelley’s post of a few days ago, and written in part in response to this comment from Mike Golby, who said :

[…] Blogdex and [P]opdex and the other crap is lowest-common denominator stuff. If necessary, warn others not to be seduced by it but, jeez, don’t let it get to you. It’s just not worth it. It’s not what this is about.

I said, in semi-rant mode :

Sure it is. It’s *precisely* what it’s all about, Mike. Anyone who tells you otherwise is at best disengenuous and at worst a liar, or would be better off writing privately, or paying for therapy.
The *mistake* is to take it seriously and allow it to be anything but tangent to and very much secondary to your writing, and to the rest of your life. Unless it’s your *whole* life, in which case good f–king luck.
It’s like the old saw that madness is an in-joke of one. If one is writing one’s heart out and no one is paying any attention, blogging is probably not the best outlet for one’s creative urges or demonic possession or whatever is pushing one to create.
Bloggers are self-selected from the ordinary population to be attention-seekers, self-regarders, self-promoters, needy f–kers to a fault. To claim that the act of giving and receiving recognition for these avatars of ourselves we present online is ‘not what it’s about’ is rank silliness, I reckon. It’s human nature, pure and simple, and it’s something we do every day in our regular lives. This medium simply uses different mechanisms. Ones that reward and reinforce the kind of behaviour that Shelley bemoans in her post.
Shelley is quite probably an exception, and I love her dearly, so I’m perhaps biased, but I tend to believe that many a blogger annoyed with linkstroking and linkwhoring and the automated tools that have appeared to foster them is a blogger who feels they are being undernoticed and underpraised by those very mechanisms.
I should acknowledge that it’s entirely possible that I’m seeing this too much from my own perspective – that linking and being linked is *fun*, is a social activity, is not freighted with massive significance, and is certainly not massively important to my sense of self-worth, but is the coin of the realm, as it were – and erroneously believing that that perspective lies somewhere in the middle of the spectrum between utter linkwhores at the one end and those who totally ignore the existence of other bloggers at the other.
Although I do tend to think the bell curve is weighted more towards the former than the latter, for reasons I went on about above.

I don’t think of this as a zero-sum game, smart-assery aside. It’s an infinite game – a game in which one of the tenets of play is that the game should never end, and in which a goal of play is to keep everyone playing.
The more observant amongst you might notice that I’ve got, if not the longest, at least one of the longest blogrolls in christendom blogaria. This is due to simple policy : if you link to me, I reciprocate, when I find that link. If you pull me off your blogroll, I don’t care. You linked to me at some point, and that hasn’t changed. If you publicly declare that I’m a lame goat-blowing sh-tweasel, I might pull you, but then again, I might not. It’s not a zero-sum game. There are no winners, and that’s the way it’s meant to be. It’s not political, it’s just common courtesy. When someone speaks to you, you acknowledge them. If they engage you, you have a conversation. If not, you make eye contact, nod, and move on.
In weblogging, the nods leave tracks, is all.
[Edit : I sense that this is a bit disjointed, but I don’t have time to edit it right now, so I’ll just leave it up, with apologies if I have been unclear.]


Now be nice, or Orson Welles will eat your soul!

We're a Happy Family!

January 11, 2003 / / 12 Comments

I was a little let down, as the taxi pushed through the rain into downtown Vancouver, at how little had changed. This feeling intensified over the next few days : other than a few new buildings scattered here and there, and a new colour scheme on the buses, it seemed to me as if nothing much had changed in Vancouver in the five years since I last set foot in the homeland. In fact, not much that I could see had changed in the 20 years since I first moved there as a thirst-bedeviled freshman.
After living in Korea, where the entire country reinvents itself every five years or so, and the one constant is change and ferment and fresh concrete flowering skyward fast as bamboo, it was a little disconcerting. I had never thought of Canada as…well, stodgy, until now.
But over the next couple of weeks there, I noticed that at least one significant thing had changed, other than the amount of grey hair on friends and family.

“And if ever, by some unlucky chance, anything unpleasant should somehow happen, why, there’s always soma to give you a holiday from the facts. And there’s always soma to calm your anger, to reconcile you to your enemies, to make you patient and long-suffering. In the past you could only accomplish these things by making a great effort and after years of hard moral training. Now, you swallow two or three half-gramme tablets, and there you are. Anybody can be virtuous now. You can carry at least half your mortality about in a bottle. Christianity without tears – that’s what soma is.”
-Brave New World

I had read that the drug companies were getting more aggressive with their carpet-bomb marketing in North America over the past few years. Read about the scattershot Ritalin-dosing of children, read about the emergence of the Prozac nation, read about the drug companies inventing ‘female sexual dysfunction’ in order to manufacture a market for more of their pills. But I wasn’t prepared for the fact that there wasn’t a single commercial break that I can recall on network TV over those couple of weeks that didn’t have at least one drug advertisement. When did heartburn become ‘acid reflux disease’? How many cold medicines do people actually need? ‘I love my Tylenol PM‘? How putrid is that? f–k you lady, why don’t you try loving your children instead (yelled I at the television screen, much to the long-suffering chagrin of my lady love). There were ads flogging drugs for conditions I haven’t even heard of, ads with happy grinning families running across manicured green parkland with their lassie-like dogs, free of the ravages of anal warts or whatever the hell had been plaguing them before Smithcline-Beecham showed up on the scene.
Now, I’m not one to claim, ever, that drugs in and of themselves are a bad thing. Better living through chemistry, say I. But I’ve always been more inclined to think that the body should be allowed to deal with minor illnesses on its own, and that drugs are better employed in the context of recreation than medication. Indefensible position perhaps, but I don’t really give a sh-t. Unless I’ve got Ex-lax™ to ease the way, of course!
I also have a strong tendency to think that the habit of medicating for every minor complaint is a sign of weakness, and creates and fosters weakness, and weakness is bad. Weakness in mind or body invites the triumph of evil men, evil deeds and thoughts. But that’s a whole other rant, perhaps.
So, anyway, unprepared as I was for the constant deafening barrage of druggy blandishments on the TV, I was substantially less prepared for the fact that half the f–king people I know are apparently now on SSRI’s : you know, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. Prozac™ and Zoloft™ and Paxil™ and I don’t know what-all else. When did this happen? When did all these people decide that they couldn’t handle their lives anymore without being constantly medicated? Or when did their drug company whore-doctors convince them of it?

“All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects.”
-Brave New World

Now, look, I know (based on extrapolation from what I’ve seen amongst friends and relatives recently) that probably half of the people reading this are on scrips for one of these drugs, too, and I don’t want to antagonize or insult unduly. There are, certainly, some people for whom these ‘miracle drugs’ (given us by the gods) are a means by which they can live a normal life, overcome the ravages of aberrant brain chemistry, fight clinical depression.
But I’ve got to think that there are way too many folks out there who are just too goddamn lazy and irresponsible to take responsibility for their own mental states, just like there are too many people who think of themselves as victims, who blame their parents or their spouse for their problems, who refuse to take responsibility for their actions, who don’t vote and then complain about the government they get (and so richly deserve), who drive an SUV because, hey, if I get into an accident, it’s the other guy who’ll get hurt, who dismiss concerns about environmental degradation with a wave of the hand and a demand for incontrovertible proof…
Sorry, I’m ranting again.
But hell, I’ve taken just about everything there is to take at one time or another, and I didn’t do it to escape, I did it to explore. Hooray for me, right? Well, sure, why the hell not? I reckon that if your life is bad enough that you have to stay perpetually medicated, you need to change your life, change your doctor, get off the SSRIs, and get the hell out of the house. Find some people to drink a beer (yes, I see the irony) with and dance in the rain on a beach somewhere. Find someone new to have sex with, if that’s your thing. Climb a mountain, sail a boat, or if you’re too fat or lazy or poor to do that, find someone who loves doing it, and ask them about it, and watch their eyes as they describe the joy it gives them, and find something that makes you feel that joy too. Something other than chemicals.
You know, unless you really are f–ked up. In which case, pop those puppies like gummy bears, I say.