I Always Read the Comments Section

I always read the comments section.
Read, and look in, even as my eyes wire words that my brain immediately rejects.
Witness the love, the hate, the ignorance and fear and just plain stupidity
All protected behind the one-way mirror of an internet avatar.
You see out, we can't see in: the perfect mask.

I always read the comments section.
On good days, words of hope and love abound, rationality rules, logic takes the stage.
On bad days, I see a regression of humanity, determinedly grinding backwards towards a closed, closeted world where free speech doesn't feel free.
Freedom of stupidity exists for a reason, as does freedom of ignorance but
Who are we to indulge in spreading those freedoms?

I always read the comments section,
and despite my better judgement (or perhaps because of my better judgement), I never comment back.
I exist as a silent observer, quietly categorizing and balancing, actively judging from behind my own personal wall of tightly clasped ideology.
Is that bad? Probably. I hide and have the luxury of praising myself over others. I never join the battle.
But.
Just by reading, I learn, and that,
I hope,
Makes a small difference.

Off

Switching between tumblr and facebook
facebook and tumblr
wondering
where did my capital letters go?
When did I become reduced
to a string of meaningless (or oh so meaningful)
letters
numbers
emoticons that sometimes jump up and down
in a semblance of reality?
When did I forget how to react?
Reaction here, behind a screen, is almost nothing.
Does the real world even exist anymore?
Can I find a place to go
when the internet signal blips
when tumblr's down
when I slowly and unconsciously scroll and click
facebook to tumblr
tumblr to facebook
even when I'm not online?
When did I give in?
When did I become better
at text to text communication
rather than face to face?
When did I lose my emotions
to mere dots and ellipses
colons and semicolons and parenthesis
and less than threes
and the oh so meaningful (meaningless)
emphasis
of a sentence
without
punctuation

On Procrastination

It's a plague. It's a scourge. It's here in my room with me, and I can't get rid of it. It's procrastination! *insert dark theme music*

Funny thing is, I've been meaning to write about this topic for a while, but I didn't because, you guessed it, I was procrastinating. There are so many things that distract me!

Distractions:
1) The internet and all it's wonderful colorful graphics.
2) Skype and Facebook (not under the category of internet because they are different).
3) Knitting
4) Reading
5) Schoolwork. Yeah. That stuff.

It's terribly difficult to blog when I've got so much on my plate, and so many tasty delicacies to choose from, be it sleep or Tumblr-stalking or a new Terry Pratchett book. But I shall persevere, namely because it's good for me, but also because blogging is a way of not feeling so bricked up. The whole wide world of the internet can see this, and even though I've taken precautions to keep this blog from most of my friends, I have no issue with total strangers reading it. Strange, but possibly a bit of basic psychology. Who knows?

Perils of the Internet

I love the Internet. It's one of the greatest inventions in the near past, in my opinion. However, there are some times when I just don't understand why people say the things they say or act the way they do.

My friend has been getting college emails, and this past week she got one from the University of Advancing Technology. Being the nerds that we are, we immediately started trolling their website, and we found a "what kind of geek are you?" quiz. We took it, and had a good time. Thinking our friends would like it, we emailed it to some people and she posted it on Google Buzz. This of course set off a flurry of activity, and the inevitable rain of comments.

When asked to describe herself, one of my friends usually says "hipster before hipster was cool", "indie", or "so hipster even hipsters think I'm hipster", or something along those lines. So of course she has a complete disdain for Nerdfighteria and all it entails, it being too mainstream and "fake", in her opinion. So she posted something on the quiz being like "alpha geek, I really know what I'm about, unlike you sissy Nerdfighters" (not an exact quote). So I posted back saying "Nerdfighter is different from geek." And she went off on a paragraph long rant about how Nerdfighters are (and here I quote), "asinine", "moronic", etc.

So much for friends respecting friends.