Meme, Myself and I

Competition and Community

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 23:44:00 -0500

This is in response to funsizebytes, who was responding trixieboots’ (which was reblogged by favstar) response to favrd’s shutdown and various other issues you could quantify as “the value of stars on Twitter and its sub-communities.” It’s well worth it to read the posts both for interestingness and context. I’ve snipped a fair amount.

I’ve been very uncomfortable about the conversations on Twitter and Tumblr around starring and Favrd’s demise, and I wanted to contribute in a way that I hope will be constructive. These discussions seem to boil down to questions about the value and meaning of the star, and while on one level this strikes me as a painfully petty issue for human beings to be nasty to each other about, it nonetheless points to what I think is a more fundamental fissure in the Twitter community.

Right away I need to point out that there isn’t “a” Twitter community. There are many of them, and they might overlap, but it’s a mistake to talk about them as one group….
I suspect that what you mean is the “Favrd/Favstar sub-section of the Twitter community” (and, even then, there’s not one cohesive “whole”.)

This is, in my opinion, unnecessarily stating the obvious. Twitter is, in fact, “a” community that itself contains countless smaller communities, which is what you say in the last paragraph above but contradicts what you say in the first paragraph by means of trying to correct her.

Sociologists and communications scholars have long observed that masculine discursive modes emphasize competition and the assertion of strengths, while feminine modes work toward community-building and the establishment of common ground….

Men are competitive and women like community? But this isn’t sexism because it’s science. ::eyeroll::

She actually didn’t say that it’s women vs. men — she said “masculine” vs. “feminine.” Men and women can have distinct qualities that do not uniformly conform to their gender or even sexual orientation. She’s speaking of ways to view the dynamics of conversation. There are certainly differences in conversational patterns and means of acceptance among men and women. To chalk up her statement to a perception of sexism is to either ignore her words or ignore much of human psychology.

It’s a false dichotomy. I’ve met plenty of people who knew me through Favrd and we’ve become friends. I’m not competing with Sween for followers or stars. It’s not as if Sween getting stars or followers means that I can’t get them.

The leaderboard was a competition, but that isn’t all Favrd was. Favrd was a common ground. It was a place to see old friends and meet new ones.

Sporting competition is the competition of preclusion — if one football team gets points, among other things it means that the other team doesn’t get points. Favrd and other starring systems that have grown out of Twitter are — and forgive me because I’m not good at remembering official academic terms for things — a competition of plurality. Any member of the community can star any other member of the community. So, as dwineman has pointed out, the currency always runs the risk of devaluation but it also, in my opinion is what allowed favrd to become such a fertile ground for friendship and creative exploration — in other words, a real, vibrant community.

Not to mention that when we’re talking about stars and Favrd/Favstar, we’re not talking about “communication” in any regular sense of the word. If you want conversation, @replies/mentions and DMs are Twitter’s communication methods.

I’m not sure how a star isn’t communication. It may be shorthand in a broader community that sometimes seems entirely built on shorthand, but the “seal of approval” that it can provide — or, conversely, the “I was here” stamp that it came to mean for some of the members of the community — is certainly a non-verbal form of communication.

These two competing understandings of the star manifest a tension between two broader, culturally constructed modes of communicating: one that values discourse as a form of competition and another that values discourse as a mode of community-building.

Stars are not “discourse”.

Discourse can be accomplished on Twitter via @replies or DMs.

(Just because you can use a wrench as a hammer doesn’t make it a good hammer.)

And just because a hammer was made for nails doesn’t mean that it cannot and should not take on uses that its inventor never intended.

What troubles me is the apparent emergence of systemic enforcement—by bullying, belittling, or blacklisting—of one system of value over another. To claim that starring in reciprocity is “bad” is to rehearse the superiority of a masculinist discourse that values competition over community-building. Even more problematic is the blind recital of this hierarchy as though it were natural, universal, and implicit.

Dan Wineman answered the original post with this:

Pardon my elitism, but following someone is what you do “for being them.” If you star everything someone says, how does that mean anything?

If your community relies on “reciprocity” where everyone has to validate everything that you say every time you say it, you have a pretty weak excuse for a community.

Blind recital of hierarchy is bad, but unthinking reciprocity of stars is good?

You’re making an illogical leap of understanding. She’s not saying that reciprocity is bad. She’s saying that treating people differently for their adherence to this style of reciprocity is bad. She’s saying that “we” have no right to claim a moral high ground because our way of doing something is different from somebody else’s (not hers).

In the current debate, these two divergent value systems have come into explicit and public conflict, and I think this moment raises important questions about Twitter’s capacity to accommodate the diverse values of its own users. Will it be a space that thoughtlessly replicates the discursive hierarchies that have organized so many other modes of cultural conversation, or will it prove to be flexible and responsive to the disparate voices from which it is constituted?

That’s all very impressive and academic sounding, but you’re conflating Favrd/Favstar with Twitter; equating “conversation” with stars (when there are tools and methods of communication which work much better); and criticizing a website (and those who used it) which was established for the purpose of finding a particular kind of post (funny ones) which was shut down after a new group of people came in and insisted that everything they said be considered worthy of inclusion.

Twitter has plenty of room for all sorts of different types of people to use it however they want.

To use academic terms, Favrd (particularly, the leaderboard) was the “honors class” for those who has earned there way into it by meeting the qualifications (being funny).

What eventually happened was that another group came in and insisted that they be allowed in the class, and worked the system so that each member of their group would be included, and each one would, in turn, keep the other ones there.

Here is where you and I differ most, for several reasons. First, the “reciprocity” crowd is not a new phenomenon. It has existed on favrd virtually from the start. You mentioned yourself in a previous post that pretty far back you dealt with users who would follow/unfollow constantly and then berate you for calling them out on it. Others would star, star, star, or call out people publicly for not following them, or followfriday the entire leaderboard in hopes of working the system and moving up the leaderboard. Basically they would do whatever it took except the one thing that mattered most: create good content. Luckily, the community was still relatively small so the “good” people were able to root out the “bad” people. Some were even converted and were active participants to the end. In my opinion, the problem became worse as time went on mostly because of the scale issues to which Dean alluded: mo’ people equals mo’ problems — but not exclusively so.

Second, numerous arguments in support of Dean’s decision to pull the plug seem to come back to this thought of the “original crowd” vs. these ~~young~~ upstarts who have no respect for the system. It may be true in part, but it also smacks of the rigidity and relative sameness of the system that’s in place. I got (and, arguably, caused) a lot of shit for pointing out back in August that there was a tweetup in Boston that had more than its share of white guys (an observation that, regretfully, some interpreted as my calling the group racist and sexist, which made as much sense to me as Glenn Beck calling Obama a racist) — furthermore, more than its share of people in general who are either computer programmers or otherwise make a living from the Internet/IT/Creative avocations (I’m one of those, by the way). They’re almost all amazing, talented people who deserved and continue to deserve the adulation that they receive from old and new favrd participants and Twitter users alike. However, it is my strong personal opinion that too much of the same in any social setting is exclusionary and creatively monochromatic, whether intended or not. That’s a problem bigger than the Internet because, even almost two decades along, it still skews homogeneous. But it’s less and less a problem on Twitter and, by extension, it was becoming less of a problem on favrd. In fact, I agree with what Adam Isacson said about favrd’s shutdown:

Dean’s message seems to indicate that this thriving site has somehow managed to tie itself in horrible knots. I missed that completely; it seemed just as vital as it did the day I followed the link in that @ reply.

Personal things had encroached on my time and active participation in favrd the past few months, but as I started to get more time, I found a whole new batch of faces on favrd, some who were tricking the system just like others before them and some who were incredibly funny in whole new ways. It was refreshing. Now it’s gone.

The one difference is that the little facewalls under every name were a lot larger. But, if you believe in the basic tenets of crowdsourcing, as I do, you could see that the people at the top still, over time, “earned” their way up there. There was more noise, but you could still get a strong signal without coming close to the unbearable amount of effort that has been implied.

Also, with all of the fantastic strides that were made to keep out webcocks in the beginning, and with the user patterns of the “reciprocity” group so seemingly easy to pick out in hindsight, you would think that it would have been easy to keep this group out of favrd and keep favrd more “pure” to its original intent based solely on their user behavior and thereby avoid any personal judgements.

Ironically, Dean’s parting message on Favrd:

Just an idea: next time you see something you like, write the person who made it a note telling them so. Even better, explain why.

…would go a lot further along towards building a meaningful community than a system of reciprocal stars ever could.

I’m sure Dean doesn’t doubt the sincerity of his Oppenheimer-esque mea culpa. But it’s just a little condescending to to tell a group of people who have already been sending each other notes of encouragement virtually for the entire existence of the application you created that they’re not doing it right because you’ve seen the user data and you know the truth. Conversely, if you mean it only to those who were doing it wrong, don’t make such a blanket statement.

Imagine if we applied this new reciprocity system to movie reviews. Imagine Roger Ebert setup a website where people could post a “thumbs up” vote for a movie they liked. At the end of each day, the movies with the highest number of stars would be shown on a page of results. A movie with 50 favorable votes is excellent. A movie with 20 favorable votes is pretty good. A movie with only 10 votes might be very good but not many people had seen it, but since it received 10 votes by people who really loved movies, maybe you’d go check it out.

People might come together around that website, and bond around not only about the movies which are on each day’s list, but other topics as well. It served its original purpose (finding good movies) but a community happened as well.

Now along comes a group of people who come to the site and they all agree that whenever someone puts out a movie, they’ll vote it up.

Suddenly the reviews are meaningless. Everything gets 50 votes.

These newcomers flood the message boards with rants about how unfair the system is and how elitist it is.

You want this to be interpreted as an act of solidarity and community building.

The end result is that what had been a community no longer exists.

This model is similar to the way that Rotten Tomatoes works, except without the self-destruction. In fact, favrd could have done well to adopt some of the methods for weighting scores that RT has. I’m not anti-class — I’m just against the notion of trying out a one-size-fits-all model and then throwing up your hands when that doesn’t work.

If you want to build a mutual admiration society, go ahead. No one will stop you. But you took over the Improv, turned it into a Starbucks, and now want me to believe that a coffee shop is a better than a comedy club because “competition” is a symptom of a male dominated society and now we can have “community.”

Sounds an awful lot like you want to “civilize” us. Ask your sociologist friends how that usually turns out.

It typically doesn’t turn out well, whether it’s transcendentalism or anarcho-syndicalism or kibbutzes or U.S. urban decay or MySpace. But you seem to be attempting to assert that favrd made a direct leap from uptopian ideal to lost cause without any stops in-between. I’m totally willing to admit that I misinterpreted you, but that’s certainly the argument that Dean made on Zeldman’s site. The two unifying threads of all of these past “honor classes” are that somebody encroaches in a way that forces the originators to confront their existence and, rather than staying and fighting for what they believe in, they let themselves be overrun or they move on to the next exclusive, homogeneous utopia, which is too bad.

So, yeah, I still hate that Vimeo is the tumblr video enabler.

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 20:42:41 -0500

When I upload video from my iPhone it seems to be hosted directly by tumblr. But when I upload from my laptop it still goes through Vimeo and takes forever to process. Super.

Holy F! Are you f' guys watching F***' 'Jersey Shore'?

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 19:56:00 -0500

Holy f*****’ s***! I can feel my f*****’ brain cells dying as I’m watching but I f*****’ can’t f*****’ stop watching.

"Please calm down, the music and everything. It’s nice that I went and bought me an outfit today that..."

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 19:20:00 -0500

““Please calm down, the music and everything. It’s nice that I went and bought me an outfit today that costed a lot of money today, you know what I mean? ‘Cause I figured that Wu-Tang was gonna win. I don’t know how you all see it, but when it comes to the children, Wu-Tang is for the children. We teach the children. You know what I mean? Puffy is good, but Wu-Tang is the best, Okay? I want you all to know that this is ODB, and I love you all. Peace!””

- Ol’ Dirty Bastard, interrupting Shawn Colvin’s performance at the 1998 Grammy Awards after the Wu-Tang Clan lost to Puff Daddy for “Best Rap Album.” On one hand, it’s pretty damn hilarious. On the other hand, it makes slightly more sense when you read that the night before the Grammys, ODB helped save a 4-year-old girl from a car accident outside of his studio and continued to check on her in the hospital under an alias until the media picked up on it. Thanks, Wikipedia.

iPhone Apps for Kids?

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 17:30:55 -0500

This note from inmi got me thinking again about something I’ve been mulling. My old iPhone is being used almost exclusively as a remote control for our AppleTV now and I was thinking of trying out a few apps for the boy. He’s almost 3 years old, which may still be too young, but he’s pretty much a pro at finding the videos he wants on iTunes and AppleTV now, so I thought if there is anything that might work some cognitive thinking into his motor skills, why not go for it?

So, anyone tried any apps for youngish young ‘uns?

milkglassmao: morrowplanet: Never forget. I once forgot that...

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 14:48:11 -0500

milkglassmao:

morrowplanet:

Never forget.

I once forgot that I had my windows down on the first really nice day of spring and didn’t realize it until I had gotten through the chorus of “Fuck and Run” at a traffic light and looked over to see a family staring at me, aghast, from the very open windows of their Prius.

Luckily the light changed before I had time to smile at them.

People who own Priuses don’t have, nor do they understand, sex.

Signed,
A Prius Owner

louobedlam: feltron: freshphotons: qmannola: The Physics of...

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 14:43:50 -0500

louobedlam:

feltron:

freshphotons:

qmannola:

The Physics of Ali

My hero.

q’est que c’est “sweet science”?

Long Fin Killie - “Pele” For lisarahmat. No...

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 22:56:28 -0500

Long Fin Killie - “Pele”

For lisarahmat. No particular reason other than I thought you might like them. If you hear similarities to early PJ Harvey, it may be because they were on Too Pure, PJ’s label before she moved to Island.

monkeyknifefight: heather11483 | yourmumratesme

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 18:39:20 -0500

monkeyknifefight:

heather11483 | yourmumratesme

Oh Ha Ha! I Meant to type "Geordi" and instead I typed "Georgi." I'm such a die-hard Trekkie ha ha!

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 16:55:32 -0500

Geordi doesn't have a catchphrase, does he?

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 16:48:00 -0500

Where did you buy your Lt. Commander Geordi La Forge glasses? by carrmah

My wife and I were on holiday in the Nebulon System when two things happened:

1. I stared at a sunset so brilliant that it fried my retinae to a crisp.

2. We happened upon this lovely little consignment shop while passing through Vega on our way home and they had these on the “New Arrivals” table, so I haggled the own and got them for 15 Quasars. That’s right, 15Q! Can you even believe it?

Ask me anything

Guys, I totally know what you mean. It is freezing here....

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 11:26:55 -0500

Guys, I totally know what you mean. It is freezing here. Brrrrrrrrrh!

A Compendium of Merlinisms

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 22:57:00 -0500

The guys shoveled paraprosdokians; the ladies cooed about how much they loved intercourse; gold stars flowed; web stars were born; “books” were published; feelings were hurt. The usual. But, still. It was mostly fun.

Wait, this feels a little unfinished…

Mostly.

BOOM! I don’t think that was a paraprosdokian but whatever it was you totally nailed it. Right on!

But, then I’d also just get so tired of the “memes” and the elections and the fucking drama. And I’d have to quit Twitter entirely for a while — yes, most of the times I’ve been on breaks from Twitter and its siblings, a) it had a lot to do with Favrd-driven stupidity, and b) all those sites went into a hosts file, so they effectively didn’t exist for weeks at a time.

And, yet? I’d get along. Somehow.

I don’t mean to make you self-conscious but it’s only right that you know how much the rest of us weren’t getting along when you were gone, Merlin. It was hell over here. Fireland totally abused the papapadokolusses.

The reasons I’d inevitably come back were predictable. I missed my funny friends, and was willing to overlook the “conversations” and haha-I-see-what-you-did-there antics. And, frankly? I missed being really good at Twitter. It’s my medium. It’s poetry for cynics. I’m good at it. Deal.

Wow, you’re a veritable Norman Mailer of humble.

By late February of this year, I’d become so tired of the grief I got about appearing “too often” on Favrd, that I emailed Dean and begged him to take me out of the running. Frantically.

I’m exhausted by people I don’t know trying to guess, imagine, infer, or fantasize the reason that I do anything…I do shit because I like doing it; not because, as in this instance, a trick of the light makes me appear to be close friends with @[twitterdouche1] and @[twitterdouche2].

I bet Mylie went through the same thing.

But, I’ll tell you something. I don’t expect anyone to believe this and I don’t particularly care if you do, but here goes: Getting On Favrd was never my primary goal; entertaining about 25 individual icons was and still is.

How are the acoustics in that grain silo?

Truth time? I stopped reading the “Leaderboard” on Favrd six months ago. It was just too awful. Too duh. Too blllleeeeeaaaaahhh…joke!

Truth time? I’m typing this in green briefs with a navy blue elastic band! Actually, that’s a lie.

The original purpose of Favrd had become perverted.

There it is, the clarion call of The Aesthete. If something is good — nay, if something is righteous — it must, by necessity, either become perverted or die.

While it had begun as a cool kids’ bulwark against the webcocks and douchebags who were overrunning Twitter (and its less picky 3rd-party favoritizers), in the aggregate, our contributions to Favrd began to constitute their own kind of sad cargo cult.

Popularity necessarily equals corruption and bastardization. Gotcha.

You could see people A/B testing their formula, settling on a “style,” then posting, posting, posting, and following, following, following, and starring, starring, starring in — what? — a diverse and often successful effort at internet comedy marketing.

Now, I have to get serious for a moment because this is some serious bullshit. You just described a fairly common “formula” for creating comedy — not “internet comedy marketing,” just comedy. It also applies to music, as you recognized yourself in your recent posts about the evolution of “Born to Run.” The majority of comedians test styles, not so that they can become a cheap interpretation of themselves but because they are entertainers who respect their craft. They practice, practice, practice in front of audience after audience after audience until they settle on something that allows them to be their best and to get the best reaction from audiences. Although, you appear to have a problem with the concept of “audiences” so I suppose it should make sense that you have a problem with any sort of testing or attempts at building an audience. Really, you and others on favrd seem to have a problem with the “professional” comedian in general, as if making it your avocation somehow makes you a fraud.

I can also see where, as somebody who owes at least part of his livelihood to helping others achieve inbox-zero, you might feel that more people equals less efficiency. Your time is limited. Deal. You’re just closing yourself off to a whole hell of a lot by sticking so closely to this idea of keeping your circles small out of necessity. Of all the comedy shows I attended in NYC, I was mildly entertained to bored some of the time, well-entertained some of the time, and blown away exactly twice, once by Mike Birbiglia and once by Aziz Ansari. Guess what? Those two sets made all of the other times worthwhile because of the thrill of discovery. Favrd worked the same way, possibly even more-so once it became a “sad cargo cult.”

Sorry. You were saying?

Ephemeral popularity is unnecessary for anything other than knowing who’s ephemerally popular.

Gotcha, professor. And trumpets are unnecessary for anything other than knowing when somebody’s talking out of his ass.

Guys. Things change. Things go away. And besides, there’s tons of places to either check your ego or find new friends; if you always cared a lot a lot about the role of Favrd in your life — and one man’s web site was your only contingency plan for handling either your ego or your new supply of acquaintances? Well. You need better contingency plans.

Fuck, man, you are so right. I mean, I can’t speak for everyone but it’s been really hard to type this or anything from the fetal position I’ve been in since favrd shut down.

But no matter how much you love and adopt something another person has made, you’re so not entitled to be a self-righteous — and weirdly ungrateful — dick when they decide not to make it any more. That’s not how it works. Not after junior high.

For some reason I think even Dean should be offended by that last bit of self-righteousness. Zeldman explained the contrary opinion best:

That a community may no longer please its creator is hardly relevant. Once community exists, it is not about the person who created the conditions for its existence; it’s about the people who inhabit the space. If you don’t believe that, you have no business creating anything.

So that was the end of that post…but wait, there’s more!

I’d never ask people on the bus if they liked what I just said. And, if I did, I’d never be surprised when they respond with half-literate grunts and a demand to know who the hell “Renny Dess-carts” is.

Noise, poop, and wanky little bags of sad don’t deserve a place in your awesome head.

It’s… a thing of beauty. In just 55 words, you’ve managed to shit on your followers and people who take public transport and/or people who spend any time in public — pretty much the whole world, including, in a roundabout way, yourself. And you’ve managed to do it all as a message of optimism and self-affirmation. You’re like the Frank T.J. Mackey of Twitter.

Dude, just once for me, can you say “Respect the Cock. Tame the Toots.” Please?

carmenlsigman: The Delta 72 - Got A Train To Catch Yay, Delta...

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 19:54:15 -0500

carmenlsigman:

The Delta 72 - Got A Train To Catch

Yay, Delta 72!

formspring.me

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 15:13:55 -0500

Top 3 animals and why. by ckwinny

Wild Animals, in no particular order:

Cheetah - Growing up, I thought it was awesome that an animal could run as fast as a car on the freeway, kill with predatory abandon, and still find time to look so cuddly.

Wolf - I’m from the west, and growing up you always heard the stories about wolves almost going extinct and then they were reintroduced into Yellowstone National Park and became a thorn in the side of rural ranchers who thought that government-owned land belonged to them. So, I’ve always bought into the metaphor behind a wolf’s majesty, intelligence, marginalization and perseverance.

Giraffe - We got a blanky/lovey thing for the boy when he was born and named it Raffa and have followed up with giraffes of all shapes and sizes, so it’s a sentimental favorite.

Would you rather make out with your mom or massage your dad’s buttcheeks? (Serious answers only, pls)

Having never met my father, I’m gonna go with that option because it would be pretty awesome to be massaging a man’s buttcheeks and then say “How’s this working out for you, Mr. Smithson — actually, do you mind if I just call you ‘dad’?”

What is your personal favorite tweet? by LindsayLooo

Ohhhhh, I’m really sorry but I’m gonna have to take a pass on this question.

I think of my own tweets as illegitimate children: I love them all equally and know none of them intimately. I’ve never been a draft writer so, for the most part, once they’re out of my head they’re mostly gone.

As for other people’s tweets, if I star something, it means it made me laugh. But I can’t even remember knock-knock jokes so I hope people aren’t offended if I can’t keep their tweets in my head for more than a few hours at a time.

Ask me anything

Richard- 80's music hater

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 23:46:42 -0500

rsmallbone:

yummycupcakes:

Was there anything that you found out about your husband after you got married that made you think, “Well, I wish I woulda known this before I said I do.” Not dealbreakers or anything that cynical, just things like “Wow, he farts a lot more now.” by essdogg

I had to think about this for a bit because Richard is perfect in every way, HA. I knew all about his farting and carrying on way before we got married because I was a bad girl and we lived together for many years before I committed.

The only thing I can think of is his hate of 80’s music. He kept this hidden from me for years. I always knew that it wasn’t his favourite, but apparently from what he’s been telling me lately, he hates it and always has.

I guess he just neglected to tell me so he could get in my pants.

Ask me anything

No one asked, but here’s what I didn’t know about Karen until it was too late: she will not use a map or make reservations. Period. Not “unless absolutely necessary”, not “as a last resort”. Never. Ever.

Why? Because “it’ll be fine.”

If we’re going somewhere new and unfamiliar, I’ll print out a Google map but even — maybe especially — if I’m driving, she’ll refuse to look at it. I have to wait until we’re somewhere I can pull over or we stop at a light so that I can look and find out that we’ve been driving in the wrong direction for three miles.

If we’re going out to eat on a Friday night at 6:00, she’d rather wait 45 minutes for a table than make a reservation.

I know when they drag me out of divorce court, with my hands cuffed behind my back, I’ll be foaming at the mouth, screaming “Just read the map, read the fucking map.”

And she’ll just look at me like I’m a slow child and say, “No, it’ll be fine.”

Well, there it is, more proof. I will drive around a neighborhood for 20 minutes with her in the passenger seat refusing to look it up on Google Maps on my iPhone, saying “I know where it is — OH WAIT, why did you just miss the turn?” I missed it because YOU DIDN’T TELL ME WHERE TO TURN, GODDAMNIT.

The reservation thing is a little different. She’s kind of a stickler about dinner reservations and always blames me for not making them — like we’re still dating HAHAHAHA! But movies she’s always like “Don’t worry, we’ll get there — I don’t wanna be early” and I’m like “Yeah and we’ll sit in the front frickin’ row if we’re not early!”

Thank you for this commiseration, Richard. I feel so much better now.

Richard- 80's music hater

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 23:30:24 -0500

yummycupcakes:

Was there anything that you found out about your husband after you got married that made you think, “Well, I wish I woulda known this before I said I do.” Not dealbreakers or anything that cynical, just things like “Wow, he farts a lot more now.” by essdogg

I had to think about this for a bit because Richard is perfect in every way, HA. I knew all about his farting and carrying on way before we got married because I was a bad girl and we lived together for many years before I committed.

The only thing I can think of is his hate of 80’s music. He kept this hidden from me for years. I always knew that it wasn’t his favourite, but apparently from what he’s been telling me lately, he hates it and always has.

I guess he just neglected to tell me so he could get in my pants.

Ask me anything

I really think that you and Richard are my and Sydney’s Canadian doppelgangers. Or we’re your U.S. doppelgangers. One way or the other, someone’s getting doppelganged.

Ringo Starr or George Carlin?

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 22:35:00 -0500

Fuck, man, this is the toughest question I’ve been asked yet.

See, I have this thing about 1) originals and 2) the propensity to “Americanize” foreign products to make them more palatable to our big dumb tastes. That is to say that, the U.S. version of The Office notwithstanding, I’m usually vehemently opposed to it. However, in this case I have some other emotions that mix it all up.

The pros of Ringo Starr are not only that he has an English accent, but that he has a Liverpudlian accent, which is brilliant for storytelling. When you listen to Ringo, you are there on the island of Sodor with all of those self-centered, self-conscious god-damned steam engines.

George Carlin’s primary pro is that he’s fucking George Carlin, man. It’s like a Pixar cartoon where your child understands it on one level and you understand it on as totally different and altogether more cynical level. Plus, Carlin gets into it more than Ringo. Yeah, he’s a Yankee in Sir Topham Hatt’s Court, but he doesn’t embarrass himself or the rest of us Great Americans.

Then there’s the question of Alec Baldwin, who, I think in his down years before 30 Rock, narrated several of the books for CDs. His take is American all the way through. But he brings elements of pathos and ethos to the stories that neither Ringo nor George can touch. There’s this one story with this bitchy car named Caroline who doesn’t like to work hard and breaks down when she does. He voices her as a flamboyant southern woman — basically, as Kim Basinger. I can listen to it a hundred times and still laugh. And the boy can, too. He knows the sound of an actor drawing on personal experience to really nail a part when he hears it.

Alas, the answer comes down to a sentimental cop-out: I heard George first, so George it is.

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Tue, 08 Dec 2009 21:48:43 -0500

Not you too. Yes. This is a question. I know you can feel it.

I understand your concern but the answer is still yes — I plan to watch Dick Clark’s Rockin’ New Year’s Eve.

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Tue, 08 Dec 2009 21:43:09 -0500

What is your favorite book? And why? by BlueCrab

Three:

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole - something about individuality.

Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates - Something entirely different about individuality.

LA Confidential by James Ellroy - Something about epic storytelling.

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Meme, Myself and I

Competition and Community

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Richard- 80's music hater

Richard- 80's music hater

Ringo Starr or George Carlin?

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Holy F! Are you f' guys watching F***' 'Jersey Shore'?