Here Goes Nothing

Stephen Marche, writing for The Atlantic:

…A connection is not the same thing as a bond, and that instant and total connection is no salvation, no ticket to a happier, better world or a more liberated version of humanity.

The article focuses on Facebook, but in my experience, these observations and findings are representative of our transition to living our lives in a digital, representative state. Literally speaking, I grew up on the Internet — among what I consider the first generation to do so — and I’ve always been fascinated by the opportunities of online expression. The flip side, of course, is the impact developing and maintaining an online presence has on your “real” life.

Like the telephone or car, social media are tools. What we expect from them — the gratifications we seek — defines our perceptions.

It seems logical to me that bonds are developed and friends are made in the real world, and that happens by chance or by serendipity, whichever you prefer to call it. And for the most part, I think we all get that.

Really, the only kind of person who could conceivably wind up exclusively meeting people through Facebook is the one who moves across the country to go work at Facebook. But that’s a very specific subset of the population, so let’s not waste any time there.

3 weeks ago 0 notes

On food

I think I want to go exclusively vegan. I wish I could say it’s because I finally had some epiphany about animal rights and the environmental strain of commercial livestock farming, but that’s all stuff I’ve known for ages. The truth is far less noble:

I ate a frozen cheese pizza for lunch yesterday and felt like shit for the rest of the day.

That’s the straw that broke the camel’s back. Never mind the countless books, magazine features and blogs I’ve read exposing and decrying the commercial livestock and dairy farming industries; forget the influential and impassioned arguments in favor of veganism that I’ve heard over and over from some of my closest friends. Nope — all it took was a shitty lunch for me to reconsider.

But now that I’m thinking about it, going vegan sounds like a pretty obvious choice to me. I’ve been completely vegetarian for something like 15 months now, and while I’m completely happy with that decision, I’ve always kind of known that I’m half-kidding myself about the impact of my diet on animals. Dairy and eggs still come from the same farming industries with the same lax regulations and heavy government subsidies. Cows and chickens are kept alive under those same horrendous conditions that livestock raised for meat are raised under; the big difference is that animals raised for meat are slaughtered earlier in their lives, which might actually be a far more merciful outcome.

I don’t know how an animal thinks or feels. I do think we distance ourselves unnecessarily in terms of how we experience life from other animals, probably out of a fear of learning some uncomfortable truths about ourselves. But I do know that I want to be efficient in how I live my life. I want to avoid waste wherever I can, whether it’s my time, my body, or the world around me. And when it’s just as easy to maintain a healthy diet without any animals or animal products whatsoever, that really kind of ends the argument for me. Why eat animals when I don’t have to? Why have an exponentially more damaging impact on the environment by supporting these industries?

Anyway. I’m not writing this to preach or to promote any sort of agenda. I just really wanted to take some time to articulate (mostly to myself) why I’d decided to change the way I eat, and why I think I’m going to follow that same line of logic to its natural conclusion. But it’s a fun (maybe not the best word) mental exercise to question the things you’ve always taken for granted.

2 months ago 1 note

mikeymo:

People are so creative. I love this idea.

3 months ago 453 notes

Thought Catalog: 1998’s Primetime TV Listings As Written By A Man In The Throes Of An Existential Crisis →

A brilliant amalgam of two cultural touchstones by Ted Pillow:

Sister, Sister
8:00 – 8:30
Tia and Tamera come to grips with the realization that their twinship is not a playful flourish from the idiosyncratic hand of God, but merely a production error from the mechanized assembly chain of creation.

3 months ago 0 notes

Return of the Herculoids - a 1-Page Hip-Hop RPG →

My buddy Dan, maybe the only person in the world with the broad cultural cachet necessary to bridge the gap between traditional game design and the decades-long history of a musical genre’s evolution, was hanging out in class one day and thought it’d be way more interesting to develop a ruleset for a hip-hop RPG than to pay attention.

It is the year 3030, and The Herculoids have returned from deep space to find a world where Total Control has surrounded the earth in an Anti-Hip Hop field. Unable to enter, The Herculoids granted a fraction of their power to the Heroes to seek out the Four Pillars. Only when the four pillars are brought together can the Herculoids return and bring peace to the earth.

3 months ago 0 notes