Youtube Comments

Here's a craaazy idea: get a fake account and go around posting the most absurd, exaggeratedly ignorant, racist, homophobic, sexist comments everywhere possible. Make them SO over the top that people read them and think "this is funny, because no one could possibly be that ignorant".

I'm being facetious. I hate the comments section of this website. I strain to not see anything anyone writes there. It is the ultimate end result of any unmoderated speech on the internet. It confirms my suspicions that humanity can't play nice without supervision. There might be a good thing going somewhere for awhile, but someone will find it take it upon themselves to ruin it. Maybe they figure that a uniform population of ruined forums is nice and neat and tidy.

Life

I moved in with N this month, making official a situation that has existed unofficially for months. I'm completely happy with this. Sad to move out of the old place, but it was time for a change. That said, the old place is a great apartment filled with wonderful folks and a great guy is moving in there in my place (and he makes his own beer too). I'm proud to be an alum of that house.

Ash, You Need To Get On...

Here's the thing: I have this paranoid compulsion against using my real name on the internet for any reason... private or not (nothing's truly private in cyberspace). I just can't bring myself to register for a networking service where real names are used.

I am, however, considering adopting a fake but real-sounding name for this purpose. I'll have some kind of clue in the name so that people in the know can guess it's me. The reason I'm seriously considering this now is that I'm encountering more and more people who use fb as their sole means of electronic communication. Other than that, I wonder how much I'd really use this service... apart from seeing if old friends have aged poorly or not.

One thing I don't want to deal with is disabling a whole bunch of defaults that track my online purchases and shit. That's horrible!! (I heard that's been phased out, but still). I detest having to endlessly "opt out" of services I don't want. I've also heard it's difficult to put music on fb... a friend who uses it told me they want your sin number or a scan of a real ID!! FUCK. THAT. I'm still on ms, but music is now the only thing I use it for.

I admit I'm guilty of not giving people much to read here nowadays, but I wonder how many people even care about blogs now, given the above situation. Some probably do.

My New Band

...is so much fun!! Our jam last night was great. We had some technical troubles at rckn4$$ the other night, but played decently. I've got to learn to mellow out before going onstage, I turn into a fucking mad dog when I can't start playing right away. It was cool though, no embarrassing scenes this time.

We'll have a song on the internet in a few days and a 7" out hopefully before the end of the summer. It shall be a split with very good artist I won't name just yet. Our debut show is next month. Check it out if you can!

Growing Up

I have a fascination with unrealistic cautionary tales about drugs aimed at young people. The type where somebody attmepts to fly or rip their skin off or some such nonsense.

I grew up in the 1980s. I was 7 when the decade began and 17 when it ended. Back then this type of thing was always getting shown on TV. I was totally naive about pretty much everything, drugs being very high (no pun intended) on that list. I remember my mom telling me about a guy she grew up with who "took drugs" and apparently now does nothing but sit on his mother's couch and stare vacantly forward. Hilarious!

Being a naive kid was an endless source of embarrassment for me. It was constantly used by other kids to put me down and keep me in my place. I always envied the older kids who seemed to have "done it all". They'd vandalize stuff, fight, steal, shit in the middle of the road, you name it. No one fucked with those guys. I wanted the respect the other kids gave them without having to...well, shit in the road.

By the time I was a teenager I had placed very high value on being street-smart and worldly. It was hard for me to achieve these things though, because my parents were pretty strict and I was scared of what they might do to me (probably not much, looking back). Most of the time I just had to fake it. Absorb as much info as possible from "bad kids" so I could at least know what evils were out there, even if I didn't partake in them myself. This was a defense mechanism I continued to use even after I really needed to. Probably as late as grade ten.

Most of the anti-drug propaganda I was exposed to in the 80s seems in retrospect to be aimed at (if not WRITTEN by) very naive people. That's why the following clips have special meaning for me. Does drug education today still assume kids live in some Leave It To Beaver world? I certainly hope not. The clips bring out really strong emotional reactions for me. They're mostly funny, but I think on a deeper level they remind me of my struggle to get out from behind mom and dad's blinders so that maybe I could finally be treated as an equal by my peers. Or maybe even looked up to.

Fucking enjoy!

Here's a very well-known actress, early in her career, doing an after school special. My brother and I have this running joke about youth-oriented TV shows where someone "takes drugs" and goes bonkers. We figure there is one particular drug causing all of the trouble: after-school-special acid. Or, after school acid for short. After school acid is any drug that makes you jump out a window, try to claw your own eyes out, etc.



Here's another gem, in three parts: