dooooomed — fuck advocacy

Posts Tagged ‘dooooomed’

sex as what to me

6/16/11 by Cyle Gage

sex is fun, but it’s complicated. it’s a great social construct built atop a simple biological function. really, i don’t think i’ve known a more contradictory facet of our existence as a species… i mean, i know that dolphins are one of the only other species on the planet that can consciously have sex for fun, but obviously there’s no other species that covets it and thinks about it as heavily as we do, or obsesses their being/culture around it in so many ways.

yes, so, sex is basically for reproduction. continuation of us. keep humanity going. this much is obvious. even though it’s a common myth that this is really the driving force behind everything we do, and why macho guys get more ladies, i see it rather as the greatest measure of self-defeating nonsense that plagues our lives. it’s a distinct color among the palette of human conflict. penis envy is a contributing factor to all war policy, correct? but having said that — that we make far too much of a big deal out of sex — i do not mean that i would want it to become no thing. it’s a deal, just not a big deal. (all of humanity’s pursuits should be the reducing of big deals into things to merely deal with.)

but sex is so basic and elemental. it is literally the propagation of the species (when done correctly). what an immense primal-psychological weight to bear. it seems like such a big deal. how fascinating it is to see how we deal with it. look at the last few thousand years and how we’ve oppressed women because of sex! look at how some parts of the world still brutally oppress women! it’s mind-boggling, it bears noting and knowing, though it is unproductive for all men to feel inherent shame for this. (it only makes sense to me that woman is actually the sexually dominant one; the last 2000 years only prove that man has simply been compensating for the fact that he’s not.) i mean, look at the chinese telling people whether they can have children or not. it’s serious business.

Tags: delicious, dooooomed, fuckin, sex

REVIEW, LOL: The Dumbest Generation

1/13/10 by Cyle Gage

If you are under 30, stop skimming this and go read it. The book is called The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future, or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30, by Mark Bauerlein. I like the title just because of how annoyingly long it is; you know everyone stops reading it once they’ve read the first three words. Also, the title of this blog post is funny.

If you’re still reading this, then I guess I’ll explain why you should stop right now and go buy that book. Firstly, I’m going to say that it was an extremely validating book, because it eloquently examines, with scientific backing, the same material that I myself focus on in my nonfiction writing (see: this blog). Basically, this blog is a lot like the book, but with almost nothing listed to back it up besides my own ego, and is much less hateful than my rants. However, about halfway through (starting with a chapter called “Online Learning and Non-Learning”) Mark suddenly gets a lot more biting with his remarks, much more flippant with his tone. I like that a lot. It excited me. Before this, you spend over a hundred pages going over statistics on literacy and intelligence aptitude testing scores and how they have changed over the last half-century. While this is interesting, and it certainly lays a foundation of scientific and statistical inquiry, it gets kind of dry. But dear reader, persevere through it, because once you get to the asshole side of Mark, there’s no end to the roller-coaster of awesome.

The latter half of the book is full of amazing quotes and themes, of which I’m not going to cover all here, but I’ll go over my favorites. (Oh god there’s so much text below this, I’m sure all of you people under 30 are going to have heart problems, but please try and wade through it. This information is vital.)

Tags: books are awesome, dooooomed, required reading, review, what's wrong

“friend” is just a word on facebook

1/9/10 by Cyle Gage

All right, I’ve been wanting to start hammering this out for awhile. Let’s do this, it’s big and ugly and gross, but it has to be done. I’ll start this episode of Trollin’ with using myself as an example, because I’m that kind of asshole. Every three or four months I open up Facebook and go to the grand list of “friends” I’ve “connected” with. I have found over the last few years that it gets increasingly difficult to get to that big list of friends, that stand-alone page which compiles the limits of one’s so-called “social sphere”. Anyway, every three or four months I scroll through it and start deleting people. Click, gone. Friendship ended. Click, remove. Relationship destroyed. I have a lot of fun doing this because never before in the history of human civilization has ejecting people from one’s life been so effortless.

I remove friendships every few months. I prune my friends, because apparently it’s that easy. When I “friend” someone on Facebook, usually it means I met them at a party or through a friend or something, and I’m humoring the idea that we could actually have something in common. Business-types have known this as “networking” (before there was “social networking” in any digital sense). While going through my big ugly list, maybe a dozen people come into question. Is this person someone I want to keep in touch with? Is this someone I have talked to a second time? Have they even been friendly to me at all? Are their status updates goddamn annoying? So I delete them if any of the answers are unfavorable. Often I’ll delete people just to see what will happen. It’s interesting to me. The mechanization of social life. Easy as a click, they’re gone.

What does all this mean for us? I’ve read a few essays and a couple books that speak specifically about this question, but all of them are rather distant and academic (mostly because they’re written by 30- or 40-year-old professors who aren’t even using Facebook regularly). However, some of the points they make are accurate. I don’t really want to go over statistics, because that turns trolling into scholarly pursuits, and maybe one day when I have nothing better to do I’ll start including numbers to back my claims. For now, I just enjoy making seemingly baseless statements, as much of my generation does.

Tags: dooooomed, facebook sucks, i don't have any friends, ugh social media

Short but Sweet: Fuck American Grammar

1/8/10 by Cyle Gage

American english does it all wrong. When using quotes, don’t let the punctuation invade the quotation. Like this:

He said “hello”. Or, their names were “Jean-Luc Picard”, “William Riker”, and “Data”.

See how the periods and commas are outside the quotation marks? That’s because it makes goddamn logical sense to do that. You shouldn’t write punctuation inside a quotation unless it belongs there. Think about it for a second.

This is okay: he asked me “why is The Next Generation the best Star Trek series?” That makes sense, the question mark being in there, because it’s a part of the quotation and also completes the sentence as a whole. Nevermind the assholes who try to tell you it’s always best to put the end-punctuation inside the quotes, because sometimes it doesn’t make logical syntactic sense to do it.

This was a strange rant, but writers should appreciate it. British writers already follow this rule, because they grew up in a better country, and probably write a lot more than Americans.

Tags: dooooomed, fuck america, grammar, penis envy

Education/Network Generation

1/2/10 by Cyle Gage

If you’re in college seeking a life contained within a “creative” field, you’re not supposed to be learning how to do things: you’re supposed to be learning how things were done. Eventually you should learn how things are currently being done. Not how to do them. Yes, your professor should tell you what words mean, what these forms are, what film is, what composition is, they tell you the way things are done. How Kubrick held a camera. How Picasso held a paintbrush. These are the things you should learn. And then your teacher should tell you to go and do them, follow them as rules and guidelines. Eventually they should tell you to break those rules. Here’s how this was done, this famous painting or short film or something, now go do it yourself how you want to do it. There is no right or wrong, no marketing or consumers or audience, just expression. That’s the way it should be, but it’s not the way it is. Kids these days want to Google it and find an answer if the answer isn’t fed to them beforehand. They think the way Kubrick or Picasso did it is the way it should be done. It’s not.

Tags: dooooomed, hahaha what, why so serious?

What’s Wrong, #2029: Crabcore

12/29/09 by Cyle Gage

[What's Wrong is gonna be my goddamn every-once-in-awhile examination of the obvious.]

Yeah so this is old, but it’s still funny and it’s still wrong. Crabcore. If you don’t have an IV pumping internet into your veins at all times like I do, you might not have heard of this. You are fortunate. Let me bring you down to my level, briefly.

“Crabcore” is a subsubsubgenre of hardcore (is that even a genre? Ugh, another post for another day) which involves adolescent males with very black hair and a complete lack of style pumping on easy chords and strumming like a crab. Exhibit A:

Tags: crabcore, dancemoves, dooooomed, what's wrong

Twitter Sucks, or Stay Secluded More

12/21/09 by Cyle Gage

[Ugh. A long rant in the ongoing crusade I have against Twitter and its bastardization of the self and humanity. Yeah, my rants get that big. I originally wrote this for my personal blog but I'm going to repost/update it here.]

Anyone who says they use Twitter to actually keep up with friends is lying. Twitter is used for one of two things: painfully dark, existential entertainment or shameless self-interest. I can’t say that it’s entirely useless – there are some rather hilarious uses of it, but they could just as easily be exhibited elsewhere, which is to say that the creativity does not depend upon Twitter. In fact, the very nature of Twitter helps to negate the possibility of creativity through it: the premise is a continuous stream of status updates provided by the user. It’s a painfully simple premise that is very simply executed. There are those who would argue that its simplicity is what generates creative uses of it, but spending a few minutes reading the crap that is generated through it in real-time proves otherwise.

Tags: dooooomed, humanity is doomed, twitter sucks