swampman posted:yes, i admit, i've lost my ability to cram endless quantities of empty nutrition through my digestive system like forcing a boot through a pant leg, i truly miss getting diarrhea immediately after eating, as the impact of fresh pizzas into the surface of my stomach would send shock waves through the long tube of previous pizzas crowding my bowels, as if radiohead were doing a surprise live show for pizza particles in my fucking asshole
oh yeah i forgot for a while that being hardcore and vegan are the same thing
STR 17
CON 21
INT 21
VEG 11
HXC 9
LUK 3
littlegreenpills posted:why do you people eat so little
cigarettes and dexies
swampman posted:IDK understand why my anti gluttony posting is derided like this.
because you, umm, well, you know, touch yourself at night.
HenryKrinkle posted:here's what i'm currently reading:
http://books.google.com/books/about/Black_Struggle_Red_Scare.html?id=gGpMrxnZZHEC
Black Struggle, Red Scare: Segregation and Anti-Communism in the South, 1948-1968
Jeff Woods
LSU Press, 2004 - Social Science - 282 pages
A spellbinding account of the alliance between the forces of southern segregation and anti-Communism. At the height of the cold war, southern segregationists exploited the reigning mood of anxiety by linking the civil rights movement to an international Communist conspiracy. Jeff Woods tells a gripping story of fervent crusaders for racial equality swept into the maelstrom of the South's siege mentality, of crafty political opportunists who played upon white southerners' very real fear of Communists, and of a people who saw lurking enemies and detected red propaganda everywhere. Concentrating on the phenomenon at its most intense period, Woods makes vivid the fearful synergy that developed between racist forces and the anti-Communist cause, reveals the often illegal means used to wash the movement red, and documents the gross waste of public funds in pursuing an almost nonexistent threat. Though ultimately unsuccessful in convincing Americans outside of Dixie that the civil rights protests were run by Moscow, the southern red scare forced movement activists to distance themselves from the Marxist elements in their midst--thereby gaining the sympathy of the American people while losing the support of some of their most passionate antiracist campaigners. A product of exhaustive research including the latest literature on this increasingly popular subject, this is the first book to consider the southern red scare as a unique regional phenomenon rather than an off-shoot of McCarthyism or massive resistance. Addressing the fundamental struggle of Americans to balance liberty and security in an atmosphere of racial prejudice and ideological conflict, it is especially relevant today and will be equally compelling for students of civil rights, southern history, the cold war, and American anti-Communism.
Jeb Lund was, within the context of the part of the Internet where he last routinely appeared, a dick. I was a dick. This was on several message boards, where I wasted thousands of hours, taking my ever-diminishing allotment of physical vitality, sunshine, and mental acuity, and pissing it all away on discussions like, "Is Ben Roethlisberger more morally repugnant than Ray Lewis?" (Trick question: Fire both of them into the sun.)
I wasn't a dick because I was trading insults and jokes all day. That doesn't make you a dick, by message-board standards. Short of sites like "Is Anyone Up?" or dedicated cyberbullying, joke/insult boards are probably the most sociopathic venues in a medium whose dissociative qualities already engender sociopathy. The point is to reduce people to posting styles, categorizable tropes, parades of strawmen and cutout-people set on fire to public delight—because, hey, there were no humans involved. Being an unempathetic prankster, malcontent, and gossip is doing it right.
In the name of having a spirited free-for-all, these boards operate on the conceit that to use proper spelling and punctuation, or to refrain from calling someone a "drizzling fuckstain" because they prefer Lou Reed solo to the Velvet Underground, presents something like an oppressive burden. While plenty of users are only there to give and get laughs, plenty of others embrace these boards because they conflate any tenuous and mildly inconvenient enforcement of human decency with oppression, censorship and the stifling of the spirit. These are angry people.
The boards I favored were the better ones of the type, where members were socially and politically liberal and unserious, devoted to a meritocracy of jokes. Thinking up a great one-liner—the briefer the better—kicked off an endorphin rush. But they were still closed systems. And when you see the same people, or representations of people, all the time, familiarity overpowers the anarchy. Power structures and cliques assert themselves; what would have been an innocuous burn gets added to a growing list of resentments, framed by an e-feudal caste structure. Are you up or down? What did that post mean? You now have a serious relationship with stupid shit.
And that relationship comes with implacable rules. One is that no matter who you are, in the hierarchy of the board, you will—through some terminally white version of the logic of The Wire—get got. If you are a bad and unfunny poster, they will come for you right away. If you are un-bad but still unfunny, they will tolerate your white noise for weeks or months, then get sick of you and come for you. If you are good and funny and popular, well, what goes up goddamn well has to come down again. People don't like being bested. Only a tiny set of people are so big-hearted and talented that they won't find themselves receiving more jabs than they have the gloves to block. I was not one of those.
The other rule is that there is a golden mean to online disclosure. You invite less ridicule by telling people your age, gender, and a general idea of your schooling, job type, and location. Oversharers are begging to be overanalyzed, but if you're too protective—disclosing virtually nothing of yourself while dishing out punishment to others—you provoke the desire among others to expose you and beat you down. You don't have the decency to meet people on a democratic level. You're cloistered, inhuman, privileged.
That was the kind of dick I was. I admitted nothing but a vague age, matrimonial status, job and location. You couldn't find pictures of me or any other web presence. I had walled myself off like Montresor.
Meanwhile, I was obnoxious and vile to people. There was one guy kept posting despite being completely unable to recognize humor. It was like someone with no hands trying to build a bicycle by screaming at a cat. He would get dogpiled by people, delete his account, register a new one, and start posting again. Within days everyone would figure out who he was, and the dogpile would start again.
Unfortunately, he also looked unreal. Off the top of my head, I believe I probably described him, publicly, as "like the bob's big boy knocked up a cpr dummy and blew town the next day and mom drank during pregnancy" and "poor little dude got taken to mcdonalds every birthday to sit by the ronald statue and see what dad looked like" and "kid accidentally put his hand on the stove, got taken to the hospital for third-degree melting."
Eventually he sent me a long email, asking for advice. "Tell me how to become a great poster," he asked. It was a document of genuine human need for learning, understanding, and acceptance. I ignored it, and him. I assumed he was trolling, waiting to post whatever self-important reply I came up with. That was the prevailing value system. The only redeeming thing was that I didn't post his question myself and point and laugh.
I was funny enough for a while to get away with this kind of behavior, bolstered by whatever chops came from my relatively advanced age and maybe my years of writing. But I tore through other people who stepped to me (or simply appeared, oafishly, in the crossfire) with an ease that should have nauseated me and lamentably did not.
In the narcissistic spell of these interactions, I didn't consider the possibility that while other posters were hurting my feelings, I might be doing the same, or worse, to them. When everyone's trying to be a dick, you assume that you're the only one so candyassed as to still have feelings. All I cared about was revenging myself on anyone who made me look bad for the tiniest instant, because losing face in that environment is more important than it is to Japanese people in Michael Crichton novels.
Little did I know how bad I could be made to look. I had mistaken being circumspect about myself for real privacy and security. And I had given people enough motivation to get together and find answers on their own. Eventually they posted a dossier of personal information about me online: pictures of me, spanning a decade, from multiple sites. Below the pictures were links, personal correspondence, and details that could only have been collected by asking multiple people for transcripts of IM chats with me. Printed out, in real life, it would have been the sort of inches-thick legal manila folder, bound with a ribbon, that thwocks down on the prosecutor's desk in a crime drama.
I took one look at the abundance of the Jeb Lund file and signed out. I was scheduled to go on a big vacation in two days, anyway. I checked my dog and cat into a kennel, visited family, and my wife and I boarded a plane to Italy. Aside from one group email to three friends to assure them I wasn't dead, I ignored the Internet for two weeks.
The boards I favored were the better ones of the type, where members were socially and politically liberal and unserious, devoted to a meritocracy of jokes.
mods change the name of the rhizzone to A Meritocracy of Jokes
gyrofry posted:lol,just lol
Ironicwarcriminal posted:just got two new books.
http://www.strelka.com/press_en/across-the-plaza-owen-hatherley/?lang=en
http://www.amazon.com/Crowds-Power-Elias-Canetti/product-reviews/0374518203/ref=cm_cr_dp_see_all_btm?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1&sortBy=bySubmissionDateDescending
woa that first one looks cool, did you read any of it yet? i've been thinking of the same thing, about how ineffective the 'totalitarian' analysis of, say, milan kundera is in explaining the mass spectacle. maybe 'spectacle' isn't the right word, but there's something hypnotic about those spaces:
But yeah those enormous public spaces are pretty alien to Anglosphere types so I’m looking to see what the dealy-o was and how they were used.
Also I got this hankering to watch Falling Down again and I don’t know why so I’m going to do that
stegosaurus posted:I just bought that book and had it sent to my kindle with one click cos my cc data is apparently stored somewhere and my amazon account somehow linked up with my kindle... this shit is dangerous
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2286227/Amazons-human-robots-They-trek-15-miles-day-warehouse-dictated-computers-checking-work-Is-future-British-workplace.html
Thank you for shopping with Amazon
Ironicwarcriminal posted:Just about to knock off work
Ironicwarcriminal posted:Also I got this hankering to watch Falling Down again
noo don't do it, IWC, they got families
Ironicwarcriminal posted:stegosaurus posted:I just bought that book and had it sent to my kindle with one click cos my cc data is apparently stored somewhere and my amazon account somehow linked up with my kindle... this shit is dangerous
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2286227/Amazons-human-robots-They-trek-15-miles-day-warehouse-dictated-computers-checking-work-Is-future-British-workplace.html
Thank you for shopping with Amazon
my job is that, in a truck, in a subdivision, with a dumb computer telling you where to go and you ignoring it most of the time while your dispatcher pulls her hair out