7.18.2011

The 4chan Mentality

Hello, eyes and ears. How've you been? That's good. How am I doing? Weeell, I've mostly been chilling watching TobyGames videos (L.A. Noire and Fallout: New Vegas specifically) and learning all sorts of new parapara dances for the new dance troupe I'm in. (We also have a Facebook page.) Oh, and I went to a crappy anime convention and Jonathan's wedding all in one weekend, and the wedding was definitely the better part of the weekend. Luckily, me and Presto are officially going to San Japan! One day only, but still better than nothing.


Everyone hears about cyber bullying. You hear on the news that some girls at a sleepover thought it'd be funny to tell a girl over MSN or Facebook message how ugly, fat, and/or stupid she is, and that that message was just the straw that broke the camel's back and the girl kills herself. "We didn't mean for her to do that," they say. A new trend (or a trend that's been going on all along but society just started caring) that's been appearing is gay teenagers committing suicide from bullying and overall pressure from everyone and everything. I'll tell you I've seriously considering suicide when I had depression, but never been anywhere close to actually doing. (They say the steps to suicide are contemplating, planning, and carrying out--I only ever got to step one.) Of course, I felt like everyone hates me because I dressed in black and was different. I openly told people that I was "emo" and my favorite thing to do at recess was sit there and cry or pretend to cut myself (by pretend I mean I would take a pencil or paper to my wrist, but somehow I still manage to have one scar,) hoping someone would say something to me. I had a lot of "haters" you could say, lots of people that thought I was a weirdo or creepy, but I never had it as bad as all those people that actually have been bullied to death.


The thing is all those stories you hear on the news sound so false. Like, why would someone ever do that to someone so directly? Or maybe that's just me.


Everyone knows about Rebecca Black and "Friday." I'll admit the song is stupid and the autotune makes her voice grating. But did you see this video of her actually singing for reals? She can sing. Whoa! Btw, she didn't write the stupid song. Her parents paid some producers to write this dumb song that caused so much hate. I'm not blaming anyone (okay, I guess the producers are kinda at fault for writing a stupid song and Rebecca's at fault for not realizing how stupid the song was,) but in another life she could've been popular with not nearly as much hate. And for whatever reason, people are still blaming Rebecca for all the awfulness. In her new song (which isn't half bad--but I really wish they'd get rid of the autotune, she sounds fine without it) and even her friendly introduction to her new channel is getting so many dislikes and hate comments it's ridiculous. People are confusing hating someone with hating a song a person sung.


If you go to any YouTube video with any sort of recognition, there's going to be ton of hate comments. No popular video on YouTube has 100% likes--there are always gonna be some dislikes, no matter how good you or someone else thinks the video is. (Now, why do you think Facebook won't add a dislike button? I personally like it better how it is--keep the positivity up!) Why? Who knows.


Thing is, everybody does it. Maybe not to that extent, but to some extent for some reason all kids and teenagers at some point are going to sounds somewhat rude or even full-out hate on something or someone. Like I said, YouTube is a perfect example, but even Facebook and forums are active examples. I'll admit to being rude to some people I don't see in my daily life or I'm not friends with on Facebook and I recently posted a thread on the Cosplay.com forums with a huge rant, and instead of focusing on the topic on hand, they just judged me for my rant even though that obviously wasn't the point.


I said earlier that I've been watching a ton of TobyGames videos. Someone posted a comment that I responded to, and they responded back, quite rudely correcting me. I responded again, politely, and they were very polite back to me. Why? I have no idea. But I've done the same exact thing on YouTube--maybe because it's a lot easier to treat the person like an idiot instead of being polite.


Preston and I refer to this as "The 4chan Mentality." If you don't know what 4chan is, it's just a huge stupid pointless forum dedicated to idoicity. No, really--that's the only feasible way I can describe it. It gave birth to all the biggest memes on the internet (if you don't know what a meme is, it's basically a big inside joke that's either a phrase or image or video) like so i herd u liek mudkips and Rickroll. (Ironically, KnowYourMeme is actually a pretty intelligent website that I use quite often.) 4chan is also basically a big excuse to make fun of everything and everyone. This really sucks for anime fans because we often get thrown into the mix of these 4channers because both are from Japan. There's even a kid in my high school anime club that is a big 4channer who shoves his iPod with thousands of pictures of macros (think LOLcats,) into peoples faces and literally has said, "I don't know about anime, but I know way too much about the internet to not be here." Not the same thing. At all. And then there are the people that talk in memes and the people that still think The Game is funny...let's not even go there.


We've been hearing forever about how the internet's basically the end of society. What with all this talk of zombies, Uncanny Valley and homosexuality ending the world, sounds like it's coming up pretty soon, don't you think?

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