Month: March 2016

No One Fucking Thinks Anymore And It’s Driving Me Crazy

It takes all I can muster to not be an insufferable cunt on Facebook every day. If I had less self-discipline, I would comment on every single fucking social/political meme that had 4 brain cell’s worth of thought put into it, which was then reposted a million times by people who agreed with a premise they refused to research or verify. I would comment on every single fucking one with facts and analysis to show them how dumb they were for sharing an idea or statement that is fundamentally flawed with only 10 minutes of Google-Fu.

And it wouldn’t do a damn thing.

No one wants to know anything, and that’s the problem. They want their feelings formed into a bullet point, and that’s good enough. Fuck reading, fuck research, fuck fact-checking, fuck verification. Someone took two minutes captioning a picture, so it can’t be all wrong, right?

This happened today:

Someone who I thought was smarter than they actually are reposted the following on their Facebook feed:

dumb

Hey, that’s not a bad point at first blush. If I pretend like I only have a few hundred brain cells, I could probably conjure some rage and follow that up with “Yeah, how dare they!”

First: should risking your life be the only path to affordable higher education?

Second: tuition has increased at least 1,000% over the last 30-50 years (depending on who you ask), and that’s with adjustment for inflation. So yeah, I guess risking your life does seem like a good fucking idea now.

Third: Note that the veteran in the picture is white; not surprisingly, that makes it more accurate. There is a long history of minorities, specifically African-Americans, getting a shaft of some sort or another regarding their G.I. Bill benefits.

Fourth: Like many veteran’s benefits, the G.I. Bill has received numerous cuts in recent years.

Fifth: This meme distorts the overall message of the outcries from millennial/GenX young people who are often identified as the people “whining” and “complaining” about “life.” The overall message is that they were sold a bill of goods (work hard, be smart, have a house and family and dog and comfortable life) that hasn’t been delivered upon. Costs for everything are higher today than they were only 20 years ago, let alone 40 (adjusted for inflation, of course). Hard work can still get you places, but not the same places it got your parents, or your parent’s parents. Most people who are “crying” about getting their student loans forgiven are mad because they paid more for college and got far less than their parents (and their parent’s entire generation) did.

I spent maybe 10 minutes searching all that information up. I’m not a genius. But I am now more informed than what feels like half the people in America. I’m not special, so that makes things even sadder.

The worst part of this is that the righteous indignation that people spew along with their opinions, opinions that have been poorly (if at all) researched, or opinions that they got from a fucking meme. The person I know on Facebook probably posted that with an internal “yeah, those lazy fucks!” Not only have they internalized a really weak opinion, but they have paired it with the entitled condescension of someone who you would have thought would have done a search or used their brain. In reality, all they did was nod at a picture and click “share.”

This isn’t just obnoxious, this is deleterious to society, and has spread like wildfire. Many, many people just don’t research for themselves. They take the spoonfuls of information they’re willing to eat, and accepting that it is right. It is reducing our culture to that of bullet points and sound bites. I know this is happening because Donald Fucking Trump is going to win a nomination for President Of The Fucking United States while treating every debate like it’s a wrestling promo. He has provided zero detail on his plans, only surface-level proclamations, yet there are people hailing him a savior.

I don’t have a solution for this. I can’t understand it. The way I’m wired, if I read something that I’m not sure of, I go and research it. I can accept that not everyone is like me. But isn’t it good to, y’know, know things? Isn’t it good to make sure you’re right before you call someone lazy, or worthless, or wrong? Isn’t it good to base your arguments on things like facts instead of emotions or fucking memes?

Just fucking burn it to the ground, we wouldn’t notice anyways.

My Second D&D Experience

My first D&D experience was confusing at times, but solid. While the openness and free-form play can be daunting at times, it’s clearly a unique experience that I feel everyone should at least try. There really is nothing else like it.

I was DM again, which I’m OK with for the moment, though I desperately want to play a character soon. This time it was with Pathfinder rules (available at a gigantic discount from the Humble Bundle people for another three days…jump on it, it’s a huge value!), which weren’t terribly different from 5th edition, at least in the very small frame of reference I have. However, it was with a different group of people, with a different level of experience and dedication. Two of the other players had actually created back stories, and all three players had known each other very well, which boosted interaction greatly and made things much looser overall.

(Note: this isn’t slighting the first group, but really, the four of us that played last night have been friends for a very, very long time. Hard to stack up to that level of familiarity.)

We rolled new characters instead of using pre-generated ones, but did use the beginner dungeon to get our feet wet. Luckily the documentation made my job as DM pretty simple, which allowed me to be creative and relaxed while corralling the adventure as best I could. Everything was pretty great, and here it truly showed how awesome D&D could be.

I kind of resent myself for taking this long to try and experience it.

Anyways, we surely messed up some of the rules (I think combat math is still going to take some time to remember every time), and we didn’t quite finish the entire adventure as we had to call it around 2AM. However, it’s an experience we will surely continue, and I hope to write more about it when we do.

I just realized this sounds like a love letter to not just D&D, but the friends I played it with last night. I suppose it is.

My New Favorite Podcast: The Dollop

Two of my major obsessions are comedy and history. I’m a huge fan of stand-up comedy, to a point where I follow and cheer for comedians not unlike how some cheer for sports teams or political candidates. On the other side, history probably would have been my major if I had completed college, and that’s probably a good thing that I didn’t, because having a history major usually means you have a lot of student loan debt without a matching career to justify it.

Anyways, The Dollop is a bi-weekly podcast hosted by Dave Anthony and Gareth Reynolds, two excellent stand-up comedians who explore weird parts of American history. The format is simple: Dave reads while Gareth reacts, though they will often go on tangents where they act out possible situations in the story they’re telling. The end result is informative and hilarious. I love it to pieces.

The true genius here is that there is an endless supply of material to mine. They confine themselves to American history, but there are so many weird things that have happened in America’s relatively short history that there should be no end in sight for what they could do. And even if they do run out, I don’t think anyone would fault them if they expanded their net to include the rest of the world.

Above all else, even if you don’t think the idea of a history/comedy podcast is a good one, you should listen to what is so far my favorite installment of The Dollop, The Rube. I won’t spoil anything, but it is one of the most ridiculous sports figures in the history of all mankind, who I sadly had never heard of before I listen to Dave and Gareth. The Rube is now my favorite baseball player of all time, full stop.

Anyways, do yourself a favor and give them a listen. You’ll learn a thing or three, and laugh while doing so. It’s typically difficult to get me to full-gut laugh these days, but these guys manage it on a bi-weekly basis.