Things that shit me at the moment:
FFS, it's clearly a scam if the grammar is shitty, or if you're asked for account details via email. We've been online for a long time kids: the AFP do not send out infringement notices via email, and if your bank insists on only email contacts between you: either change banks, or you have so much money you don't care/it doesn't matter/you're laundering money.
And stories-slash-jokes. For shit's goddamn sake, as with email ten-to-fifteen years ago, the same fucking stories are going round and round and round and round and round and round and round and round and round and round.
Like that kid with cancer who just never fucking dies because everyone shares the post, it's all about heartwarming stories of this wonderful person who was kind to someone, or someone getting back at a shithead (and no one ever seems to notice that the get-backerer is often just as much of a shithead). Yay for them. I'd rather see or do it myself than read about it, especially when the details not only ring a bell, but are either a story I read years ago (ever noticed how those click-bait sites have no dates on their articles? Bit of a giveaway, ay wot?), or just a rehash.
And then, and I'm starting to get a headache from the screeching inside my head from this, AND THEN, "type Amen in the comments"...because otherwise you are clearly shit on a stick. Fuck off. I know far more bible-thumping dorks than I'm comfortable with. The ones who assume they are good people because they go to church once a week (and may even show up through the week, who cares) - and the rest of the time behave like massive arseholes.
You're not a great person if you spend the rest of the time judging everyone else: you're just a judg-y dick. You're not a great person if you delight in sharing the apparently scurrilous details of someone's life to affirm your position as someone who does better: you're just a gossipy shit. And if you bring someone's mental health or lack thereof into it...sympathy is a wonderful thing. Perhaps you should try it. Empathy may be beyond your reach, but wow. Here's a thought: I assume from the outset I am not a good person. I'm not. I don't say that to get a flurry of comments about how I am: that's my personal assessment of myself. I try. I try to do the right thing. Sometimes I get that right, and sometimes I get smug about it, but then I fuck up, or have an arsehole moment, and my head goes back to its normal proportions. While I'm about it, though...
Don't fucking preach at me about colour, race, religion, gender or orientation. I don't give a shit about those things beyond how they're important to you. You, a person I actually know, as opposed to a voice in the fucking ether. If I just met you, I assume we're both at zero. So quit yelling at me about how I'm supposed to DO SOMETHING TO MAKE IT CLEAR WE'RE ALL EQUAL. Like what? FFS, we're equal.
While I'm on about about preaching, STOP YELLING AT ME FOR NOT BEING WHOLEHEARTEDLY ON BOARD WITH YOUR POLITICAL STANCE. Fuck off. I'm engaged, I care, but I don't have to agree with you to be a decent person. I'm a conscience voter, and you don't get to be my conscience.
Ahem. What started this rant off was a post on Facebook: "click like if you think the world needs more Happy Days than Kardashians".
The world does not need more Happy Days, Family Ties, Touched by an Angel, Dr Quinn, Star Trek- actually the world does not need more reruns or reboots of the same old shit. I don't mean I won't watch them...but I am over them. We don't need Kardashians either, as far as I can tell, but I'm sick of seeing the same shit recycled, and then crowed about as some kind of golden age. We're dangerously close to simply repeating our past(s). (Thanks, Television! That "chewing gum for the mind" motif has really hit its lowest level! We've gone past the sudden release of flavour (after a half-hour's chewing) to basically chewing glue! Well done! Industrial carpet never tasted this good!)
Nobody forces you to watch anything, and you could, I don't know, buy some DVDs if television really shits you that much. Or read a book. I'd rather watch something new and interesting (or even boring) than be launched into ever-recursive loops about superheroes/trailblazers and how 'x' played it so much better. Maybe because MASH is a lot less funny than I remember, but really: history, we're doomed to repeat it. Quite a lot of the shows I grew up with are now nigh-on excruciating to watch: the idea of ethnicity or gender being quaint, or a show addressing either being seen as edgy is just so much fucking petrified horseshit, as far as I'm concerned. Old news. And I won't even begin to pick on golden age movies and their treatment of women. But I also don't want an emotionally fraught conversation about how the death of a character is really "necessary" - particularly if it's unexpected or in the context of a reboot. It's a story. I'm saving my emotion for swearing at politicians, and dickheads who can only drive at night with their high beams on.
It isn't that I don't care, because stories - however ephemeral or devalued by constant rebooting - tell us how to live. But it isn't exactly an interesting conversation if your argument is based only on feelings rather than exploration of theme, context, broader impacts, or even, dare I say it, clever framing to tell that story. When the conversation starts with, "it was good, but..." and doesn't get much beyond you didn't like it, well, bye. You don't like it, okay. I might or might not like something: do I really have to be harangued about how you either did or didn't?
I should sidebar here to explain my vitriol on this one. It's because of Shaun of the Dead.
I once said I kinda liked it in company that didn't: when I tried to point out the utterly lovely mirroring sequences of Shaun's trip to the local grocer on the day before the zombie pseudo-apocalypse, where he is totally oblivious, to his trip the day of, when he's hungover and also oblivious...or the beautiful moment the morning of, when he and Ed (his perennial loser-ish friend) stumble home singing with each other and assume a zombie moaning at them is a drunk twat (they hear the archetypal moan from an unfortunate and attempt to make it it trio rather than a duet of their own drunken singing - it's a gorgeous satire moment. (We know, watching, that that's a fricken' zombie; they go with drunk tit.)) I tried to point that out: I was summarily shut down. At the time, I didn't really like the movie, as such: I thought it was just silly...except for those lovely moments.
And those lovely moments made me look for more in it, which I subsequently found...rather than dismissing it out of hand. I kept looking because I didn't entirely like it but liked its moments: I didn't think it should be "better". Better in the sense the person who shut me down thought: that was an exercise in reduction. They thought it should be something serious. Oh please. Silly is just as good as serious in exploring deep thoughts: anyone who thinks humour is a waste of time is basically a boring bastard, though they may have redeeming qualities. Thinking that the seriousness of pop culture tropes is more important than the actual point of them makes you not the intellectual you think you are but rather dull. And possibly a tit.
I should have been asleep hours ago, but I made the stupid mistake of checking Facebook after reading some Grantchester stories. And now I'm wound right up. As with The Hanging Tree, I rather hope this means it will be out of my head now it's on a page, but it didn't work last time, and the internal four-letter-word monologue now running through my head says the same will happen here.
Nevertheless, love and peace, peeps.
