The Art of Whore

Two posts in one day!? Is this madness? No dear friends, this is war. The art of said noun in fact. Quite simply, Shady has received some bad news and is feeling a bit down. However, there is a simple remedy concocted from shame and the exploitation of it!

Schadenfreude, my dear friends, Shadenfruede.

Quite simply, today I will be taking the status of a facebook broadcaster and comparing it to Sun-Tzu's The Art of War to properly pinpoint exactly where it went wrong. While this sounds like a particularly tricky, even finicky procedure, do not despair! Because the status in question allows me to broadside it with the equivalent of about 30 tactical warheads of pure, unadulterated ridicule. If you are one to enjoy the killing of a fly with 30 fly swats composed solely of lightning and rage, this should be something you'd want to read.

Here Goes. All names are kept secret. All similarities and likenesses to any other status you may have read are perfunctorily apt and analogous.

Our mysterious facebook "whore", as they have been known since the rise and fall of Myspace in the mid-high school era, posted this status:

"where can i get a new happy place? ive seem to have lost mine..."

Now, this is somewhat related to my previous article. I (or my "internet-self" as I concluded last blog, herein referred to as my iSelf thanks to an infuriating naming revolution of my generation) have no sympathy for this broadcaster. I barely know thee, I barely want to know thee. Don't clog up my news feed with this. But since you asked for it, mysterious stranger, here goes.

I believe the primary purpose of this poorly punctuated post is to garner some attention in what could be a possibly bad time for you. However, over the course of 6 hours since you made this post, there were 0 comments and 0 likes. This makes the post completely unsuccessful in concurrence with it's initial aim. This is further compounded by the posts around yours which have gained far more facebook success then your feeble post. This status' are:

a) This car ride just doesn't end : |

AND a wall post simply stating;

b) dislikes the cold

with each getting 3 "likes" and 1 "like" and 7 comments respectably.

How did your status go so wrong?

Well Sun Tzu is here to help. His Art of War is instantly recognisable and relational. For instance, Sun Tzu states that:

He who knows
Neither self
Nor enemy
Will fail
In every battle.

If you do not know where your happy place has gone, how can you know thyself? How can you succeed? If you post annoying posts to try and gain pity and compliments from your friends, then how could you possibly know your enemy? How can you succeed? Shortly, you don't.

You fail.

This is, of course, assuming your friends are your enemies in this scenario. You must metaphorically defeat them to have them comment on your status! However, I am sure if one were to keep up this incessant abuse of the news feed, it may not be metaphorical much longer.

Sun Tzu goes on to say:

Of old,
The Skilful Warrior
First ensured
His own
Invulnerability;
Then he waited for
The enemy's
Vulnerability.

You see! You have admitted your vulnerability! No wonder you fail, you've been going about things the opposite way! What a goose you are. You've become like a sponge finger, not a mighty warrior! You are meant for cake, not the emotional battlefield!

But it is not all your fault. People must have been adept at noticing the subtle cues to your unhappiness. You went fishing for compliments, but your iFriends must know

Do not swallow
A bait.

For we all know the trap of the compliment fisherman. They will pull you out of the water, scale you of all your compassion and slowly gut you with a knife of such unbridled despair that you feel free to let your inner beliefs (here represented by a carps entrails) go just to make them leave you alone with their self esteem raised just enough that they wish to fish more, while you are left filleted and lonely with your eye-balls a bit protruded and your bowels moved for the experience.

The final comparison for this puzzling fisherman is to strike the final blow, to put the nail in the coffin of your victory and to prove that your way of waging emotional war on those who have no choice but to listen to you is misconceived and wrong.

In War,
Victory should be
Swift.

Six and a half hours after you waged your battle, naming the field of war and warfare components, you have not won. Any victory from here is protracted.

No Nation has ever benefited
From a protracted War.

Thanks Folks,
This has been Shady

**as a side note, after I published this the status was deleted by the person who made it after no-one continued to comment on it. This person does not read this blog. Nor any blogs I do not believe.

***ALSO
goats:
g

The YouTube Menagerie and their Bastard Keepers.

Readers, today Shady finds himself in the dense, sweaty jungle known as YouTube. It is a sad place filled with memorabilia of the past flogged within an inch of its life, videos meant to suck your bandwidth through it's pleasuring of your curiosity of only the most morbid and sadistic happen-stances of the world today and a gargantuan number of videos based purely and simply on the premise "Animals do the darndest things".

It is whilst wading through the marshes of YouTube Poop and trashy replies to Ke$has latest music video I found myself pondering the latter of the above options. Why are animals so entertaining? If it was a member of the human race we'd find ourselves repulsed and possibly infuriated by their similar antics. But once given that it's only some dumb animal, not only does our sympathy leave but so too our empathy. Does this make animals the best blank canvas for comedy ever?

For instance:


This, discovered within a dusty old Mayan temple filled with contorted faces of fury imprinted on to each and every gargoyle one could find, worshipped on a pedestal of aimless rage, is nonetheless hilarious. What is that cat thinking? on his shelves like that? Thinking he is some sort of tiny, feline Billy Ray Cyrus covered in hair, thrusting it's away along it's self made stage?

But people, think about it. If that guy started yelling at someone randomly, how unfunny would that be? is it because we are used to the "lol-ing" at cats we have become completely unsympathetic towards their kind and their plights? Why are we so completely disenchanted with our animal kin?

Because, folks. We are bastards.

The internet has helped information become a true freedom enjoyed by any who can access it, for now at least. I will leave my furore against such red-barrens (thanks to Damacus for this bit of cryptic naming) and inappropriate, rabbit eared speedo wearers until another time. Right now, we must scrutinise how this relentless incoming tide of information has quite possibly washed away all sense of feeling we ever had.

Exhibit A: 4chan

Why anyone has to post a picture of a pregnant horse being raped by bears dressed in waist coats and fez hats is beyond me, but I'm sure those Betards at 4chan have already got 3 threads devoted to it. Trolls are mythical internet creatures which seek to ruin everything you have ever thought. Forever. These Trolls do this by making obscene images mixed with similarly obscene phrases. Perhaps they feel a need to uphold Rule 43. Perhaps 4chan are our saviours of free speech. Perhaps they have connected every PC throughout the world to take over the better part of our 1st world countries and spread the freedom of speech.

Or maybe they are all bored 12 year olds with too much time on their hands, simply the modern day parallel of a kid with a magnifying glass over an ant hill. Either way, they continue to desensitise us further with their photo shopping abilities and general trolling attitudes. They hammer on the heavy ornate doors of ur minds fortress of righteosness, slowly eroding at our walls like acid rain, perpetuating the never-ending flow of racist cats, dogs, bears, courage wolves and poke-parents that slowly invade and inhabit every space of our internet consciousness.

4chan. It's the kryptonite to our web-superman.

Exhibit B: Facebook

This follows on from the very cool Liutenant Renji and her post on the problems with Facebook. Eventually, it is inevitable the shouting box that is Facebook will eventually bottle-neck enough irrelevant problems from irrelevant people into your mind that you cease to notice them. You stop posting on that birthday girls wall, you stop replying to the suicide messages, the messages of anguish, the break-up sadness that envelopes so many adolescent girls who can no longer pester the boy who dumped her and so equally shares it among her internet "friends".

You stop interacting with people who have problems that they broadcast.

If this was real life, you'd be looking a bit jaded by now wouldn't you?

Exhibit C:onclusion?

Perhaps this is the whole point though. Perhaps your internet self is not your real self. Do we have harder persona's that preclude our far more fragile self from the dangers of the internet? Is it a detachment method in which we act like the proverbial Batman to our inner Robin? The Mario to our Peach? The Condoleeezza Rice to our flimsy George W. Bush? Of course, without it we would become embittered and completely lacking in our trust of fellow beings around us. How can we trust those who don't think for themselves, but participate in meaningless, anonymous and ultimately stupid memes intended to insult and breed fear, misapprehension and hate?

Men In Black put it perfectly:

A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it.

To save our Person, we must protect it from People.

Another slice of unimportant and ultimately aimless babble from me folks,
This has been Shady.

Also, I don't understand the obsession with cats.
Goats are much better.

A tear is made from 1% water and 99% feelings.

Actually Mr Facebook Group, I think you'll find that in the chemical composition of a tear, there is no trace of 'feelings'; in fact this molecule has not yet been discovered and I assume you have mispronounced the name of some other molecule that is produced in the tear ducts of a human. It must not be very viscous if it makes up 99% of a tear.

Hello all, and welcome to my "let's make up for the sub-par standard of the last post" post. Hopefully I do not embarrass myself by presenting a post that still lacks anything interesting; I fear that it may be the case because now I am thinking about it. On that topic, there was a good 45 minutes between the last sentence and this one because I was thinking of something else interesting to say. With the opening paragraph and title of this post, the content could consist of a number of topics so I am deciding which one would be the least boring to read and the least boring to write about. As I think about which one would be more interesting, I realise that I have already lost interesting in writing the blog and so I must slap myself and move on with this post about feelings; Facebook feelings.

Let me share with you a story; a story of great heartbreak and of the collapse of the world's greatest love, the devastating downfall of the dynamic duo, the utter tragedy of the expiration of the most perfect, the most amazing, the most beautiful relationship in the history of the universe. That's how it was presented to me via Facebook anyway. These two young lovers were apparently born to be together and managed to have a long and joyous relationship, until they hit a speedbump; a speedbump of DOOM! Their relationship crumbled, and so did the young girl's Facebook dignity. Let's be honest here people; everybody thinks that their love is the greatest love in the world and that nobody understands how special it is, but I have some terrible news for you all. It isn't special, and you are not different; but my views on love are better saved for another time because I am a little bit ill and far too tired to rant about how all it does is cause pain until that short time in which you see hope, only to have it crushed once again. ANYWAY, so the young girl is the one that I have on my friend list, let's call her Rose for now, not that Rose reads my blog, but I feel better if I protect her identity. For the weeks leading up to, and the month or so after the break-up, the only things that were on my news feed were groups, fan pages, and status updates by Rose, all relating to the traumatic time in her life. To be fair, she obviously needed an outlet for her immense sorrow, but does this outlet have to be somewhere that is seen by everyone? If I was one of her close friends I would be more than happy to listen to her complain about her relationship and let her cry on my shoulder, but I am not one of her close friends. I spent one week with her on a camp and then barely kept contact with her aside from the 40 million statuses per day that I had to read about how sad her life is. I'm sorry but maybe posting two or three statuses over the week about being upset or having a bad day is tolerable, I'm sure I did it when my last relationship ended, but I don't need an update on your feelings every single minute; they cannot have changed that much.

To move away from the specific example of Rose, there are just a few names of Facebook groups that I have seen that I feel the need to share with you. The first is, of course, the title of this post. "A tear is mafe from 1% water and 99% feelings". A few more of these include: "having those moments where you miss everything that used to be", "(i) shou(l)d be (ove)r (you)", "I just wish you felt the same", "sometimes you get to the point where you just cant cry anymore", and "if I could go back and fix things I would". These groups, when joined in moderation, can be your way of trying to make your ex see how much they meant to you and to hold onto that tiny bit of hope in some form of reconciliation, but joining every single one of them just makes you look sad. It is the same issue as posting a status update with depressing song lyrics or a quote about how your life is over without your true love.

No matter how bad your break-up is, I garuntee that someone has it worse than you. No matter how perfect you thought your relationship was, someone else's was better. Thinking that you were meant to be, doesn't make you meant to be. This doesn't mean that you are not allowed to be upset, but it isn't necessary to let us all know that you are on the verge of a homocidal rampage because if you can't be loved, nobody can. My last boyfriend cheated on me on three separate occasions with three different girls, and is now regularly fucking one of them, and also fucking someone else. He cheated on me three times, I knew about the last one... the commerce camp whore as I like to call her, and he didn't know that I knew, I found out about the other two afterwards. Then I decided that it wasn't worth ruining our relationship over because I loved him so much so I didn't mention it, but I skipped two uni labs to go see him since I had not seen him in a week, and he dumped me while I was sitting on his couch and then I walked home. HE cheated on ME three times and then HE dumped ME. Yes I loved my boyfriend more than I have ever loved anything but that doesn't mean I loved him more than someone else loves their boyfriend, and yes I have never felt as depressed as I did when I got my arse dumped by the bastard, but that doesn't mean that other people in my situation did not feel just as terrible. When all of this happened, I remember posting one status about having a terrible day, and then that was it. No long statuses about how I wish I was dead, no updates every 10 minutes about how I felt like my life was meaningless, no song lyrics that perfectly outlined my awful moods. That doesn't mean that I didn't feel all those things, it just means that I didn't want to bore Facebook with my love life woes. A good friend of mine dated a lovely boy for three and a half years and they broke up 2 days before my last boyfriend and I did. A relationship lasting that long obviously involves SOME feelings, duh. Obviously that break-up would have been awful and terribly sad, but both of them managed to keep their sadness out of Facebook-land and in friend-land. I was happy to listen to what she had to say about the situation because she didn't plaster it all over the internet asking for sympathy. These are examples of what you SHOULD do with Facebook, although I am awware that I just posted it all over Blogspot, but for the purpose of an example; see the big idea people!

Ok, so enough about tolerating angry and depressing status udates. I have to say that there is something that I hate more that these life-hating statuses and that is the 'I'm so in love with my boyfriend slash girlfriend' statuses. This will be a brief section as I have been writing for too long already and even I want to kill myself reading this. Normally this gross lovey dovey crap is reserved for 13 year olds who have been dating for 2 weeks and think that they know what love is, but I was shocked to find out that it can extend to someone my age. This is an old example, but last year (year 12) he was dating someone 4 year younger than him (year 8) which I think is absolutely rediculous, I mean, does it even classify as a vagina at that age? I'm sure they were having lots of gross, illegal sex. Anyway, the point is, an 18 year old guy posting about how he can't live without his 'gorgeous baby girl' because he is 'so in love' with her after 2 weeks and one and a half clumsy sexual encounters, is just sad and I really do not want to know about it. I would rather see my news feed clogged with unfunny 'lol jks' groups than have it filled with these status updates.

So that is my rant for the day, hopefully it was more enjoyable than my last post that was just for something to do. Thanks for reading.
-Renji

Something to do.

Holy long time since there was a post! I would just like to apologise for our lack of effort that we have put into this blog in the last month; and by 'our' I mean 'mine' since Shady was the last person to post and he rarely posts anyway, so this is an improvement for him. Good work Shady.

This will be a slightly average post as I am only writing it so that I have something to do and so that the blog doesn't look like it has been abandoned like an old mattress on the curb of the internet.

Right now I am sitting at home watching The Bachelorette because I am waiting to be taken to my mother's house so that I can retrieve Ratchet and Clank and play it for the rest of the day. My amazing sister somehow managed to LOSE our PS2 memory cards and so I must restart the entire game. This will be the first day these holidays that I have been able to do something like that and I am looking forward to it so much that I am not really concentrating on this post so I apologise. My mind is elsewhere.

"My mind is elsewhere". This seems to be a common occurance in my life at the moment. No matter how much I enjoy something, I can never focus my mind on it entirely, and I can never take in everything that I should. I spent last weekend in Rosebud with 4 of my closest girlfriends, and I had an amazing time, but everytime we did something, I couldn't help but imagine something similar that I have always wanted to do, or remember something similar that I have already done, or even think of something completely different that is almost unrelated. Usually this does not cause any issues or problems besides the occasional embarrassing moment in which I am asked a question that I can't respond to due to lack of attention, but sometimes it can be a bit more of an issue. So far I have not had any dangers arise from this, but just yesterday I was trying to make mashed potatoes, one of the most simple foods in the universe to make, and as I thought about how I was jealous of my friend Sam because HE was eating artichokes, I added a hugely excessive amount of milk. The potatoes tasted awful and I suffered due to my lack of attention. This may not seem like an extreme example but I was REALLY looking forward to mashed potatoes because it is one of the only things that I can cook!

Apologies for the short post but I have other things to do now including eating and finally playing R&C! There are a million examples of annoyng things that result from my lack of mental commitment to what I am doing at the time, but I won't go through them all right now, or any more at all for that matter because my mashed potatoes that I made today are nearly ready... I will have to take extra care when adding the milk now because I'm determined to enjoy them! Thanks for reading.
-Renji