Also, for the record, if you’re thinking of contacting me to argue about this, or just be a shitface in general, you can figure out where the unfollow button is on your own.
Categories
Black Lives Matter.
Category: Society
As happens every week, there’s a new episode of Nearly Coherent:
eD!, Jeff, Dave, and Val talk about some horrendous dates Val’s been on.
“Horrendous” doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface here, folks. You need to hear this crap, it nearly broke my damn brain.
Twitter has announced new enhancements to its service in a blog post today:
In the coming months we’ll make changes to simplify Tweets including what counts toward your 140 characters, so for instance, @names in replies and media attachments (like photos, GIFs, videos, and polls) will no longer “use up” valuable characters.
It’s great that Twitter is working on giving people more space for the meat of their tweets, and obviously a much better use of their time than trying to stem the tide of horrifying abuse that occurs on their platform every damn day. But, hey, now trolls can make each tweet chock-full of more hate, so I guess it’s a super-awesome thing!
(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻
The AP Stylebook announced that “internet” will be spelled with a lowercase “i” starting on June 1st.
While this apparently caused some people to have weird panic attacks, it is met with great relief and celebration here at Nearly Coherent Industries HQ, because capitalizing internet was a stupid-ass thing to begin with.
In the wake of the terrorist attacks in Brussels that left over 30 dead and more than 100 injured, an angry and frustrated global populace collectively announced Tuesday that it would make one last attempt to try to understand this shit.
Visibly exasperated residents from every country around the world told reporters that, after enduring so much similarly horrific shit in recent years, they would give comprehending barbaric acts of violence against innocent civilians and the intensely complex network of factors that motivate them “one more shot” before simply throwing their hands up and giving up entirely.
Yeah, that sounds about right, depressingly.
I am afraid of the cops. Absolutely petrified of the cops. Now understand, I’ve never been arrested or held for questioning. I’ve never been told that I “fit the description.” But that doesn’t change a thing. I am afraid of cops the way that spiders are afraid of boots. You’re walking along, minding your own business, and SQUISH! You are dead.
Simply put, I am afraid of the cops because I am black. To raise the stakes even further, I am male. And to go all in on this pot of fear, I am six foot four, and weigh 250 pounds. Michael Brown, the unarmed Missouri 18-year-old shot dead by police this summer, was also six foot four. Depending on your perspective, I could be described as a “gentle giant,” the way that teachers described Brown. Or I could be described as a “demon,” the way that Officer Darren Wilson described Michael Brown in his grand-jury testimony.
It’s informative and infuriating. That this is a thing that anyone should have to deal with pisses me off to no end.
If hearing that the CEO of Apple is gay can help someone struggling to come to terms with who he or she is, or bring comfort to anyone who feels alone, or inspire people to insist on their equality, then it’s worth the trade-off with my own privacy.
I look forward to the day that someone being gay is about as newsworthy as announcing if you have an innie or outie belly-button. But, until we get to that point, stuff like this well-written bit o’ business are important.
FOX News’ Shepard Smith on Ebola. It’s reasonable, non-sensationalist, clear and coherent.
No, I don’t know when we fell into a portal that landed us on the Bizarro world, either.
Categories
Respect My Authoritah!
Even though it might sound harsh and impolitic, here is the bottom line: if you don’t want to get shot, tased, pepper-sprayed, struck with a baton or thrown to the ground, just do what I tell you. Don’t argue with me, don’t call me names, don’t tell me that I can’t stop you, don’t say I’m a racist pig, don’t threaten that you’ll sue me and take away my badge. Don’t scream at me that you pay my salary, and don’t even think of aggressively walking towards me. Most field stops are complete in minutes. How difficult is it to cooperate for that long?
“I’m a cop. If you don’t want to get hurt, don’t challenge me.” is an op-ed that was penned by Sunil Dutta, a professor of homeland security at Colorado Tech University and a 17-year veteran of the LAPD. The whole article is like that, and basically boils down to “respect my authority and you won’t get hurt”.
I think it’s pretty safe to say that when you’re taking your cues from Cartman on “South Park”, you may want to re-think your position.
Update: Dammit, apparently Daring Fireball made that connection last night. This is what happens when I start posting things before I catch up on my RSS feeds from the night before.
In the past few weeks, I’ve seen a ton of whining on the various social networks I spend far too much time on about “The Friend Zone”. One of the more charming complaints was a “picture” 1 I saw on Instagram that relayed the following message 2:
All of you single girls asking where all the “decent guys” are? They’re in the “friend zone”, where you left them while you ran off to go [court gentlemen of ill-repute].
At the time I saw it, that post had a bunch of likes and a pair of comments: one was simply “#PREACH”, which made me roll my eyes so far back into my head that it’s a wonder I can see even now, and the other was the more troubling “Waiting for the ‘friend zone doesn’t exist’ comment”.
I’m not here to make that comment; The Friend Zone is absolutely a thing that exists. As a matter of fact, it’s actually the title used for two, completely distinct situations, which most people tend to mush into one thing, which is why the term makes me want to punch whoever is whining about it in the freakin’ windpipe.
The first (and far crappier) situation is one where one party reciprocates just enough of the other party’s romantic affection in order to keep that person under their thumb. Maybe they like having that other person around to make themselves feel better, maybe it’s a relationship of convenience, but, either way, it’s lame, and certainly no “friendship” in any sense of the term. That situation gets my sympathy, because the poor schmuck who is being used likely has no idea that it’s happening, which is why they refer to that relationship as “complicated” as compared to being stuck in The Friend Zone. Still, in my book, the term applies.
But that’s not what most guys 3 who wine about being in The Friend Zone are talking about. They’re talking about The Friend Zone where they “secretly” 4 have feelings for a lady/dude/robot/sandwich 5, and they’re hoping that the kindness and caring they show for this “friend” will one day translate into a romantic relationship. This concept is the foundation of hundreds of romantic comedies and sitcom plot lines, and has fueled the belief that the ever-suffering buddy will eventually get their friend to realize just how special and awesome they are. They’ll get married, live happily ever after, and when they eventually tell this story to their future babies, the friend who stuck by their oblivious object of affection will seem to be the ultimate hopeless-romantic protagonist. Everyone wins!
Here’s the problem: This situation basically boils down to being “friends” with someone in the hopes that, one day, they’ll let you see them without pants on. Your displeasure about being stuck in The Friend Zone is based on the fact that you have yet to see the action you clearly deserve despite the numerous theoretical punches on your friendship card, and that makes you bitter and cynical. It also makes you manipulative, a crappy person, and the textbook definition of “not decent guy behavior”.
I get it — friendships can get muddled with non-platonic feelings. In fact, if you’re genuinely friends with someone, and they happen to have naughty-bits that are pleasing to your brain chemistry, the odds are that your shared interests and preexisting ability to connect with this person on a deeper emotional level than other people will result in some confusion. I mean, they likely check off a lot of the “Ideal Things for a Romantic Entanglement Partner to Have” list that you keep running in your head, so it’s bound to happen every now and again. But if you plan on having a varied group of friends, you need to (a) figure out how to address these feelings like an honest-to-Batman adult and (b) handle the potential rejection while deciding if continuing the friendship is possible. And if you really do want to keep the friendship alive, you need to figure out how to get your brain to recognize that, and not sit around thinking that if you stay, some day they’ll realize what they could have had. The “friend who was in front of you the whole time that you didn’t realize was your soulmate” trope hardly ever works out in real life, and realizing that is the first step to getting past it and moving on with your life. 6
So, please, people, I beg of you: stop your bitching about being in The Friend Zone. It’s a train of thought that will only lead to Depressed-and-Lonely-ville, and it’s a crappy place to hang out, and chances are that you’re probably better than that.
I have no real button to end this on, so I’m just going to go make some pizza rolls and drink a Capri Sun. Like an adult.
- I use the term “picture” lightly, considering that it was really just white text on a black background. ↩
- Cleaned up for grammatical correctness and language as my mother reads this blog and while I’ll quote other people who are swearing all the live-long day, there’s gotta be a line somewhere. ↩
- From this point forward, I’m going to refer to the inhabitants of The Friend Zone as dudes, because that’s where my experience comes from. However, I’m sure there are ladies who are in the same boat, I just haven’t encountered them. ↩
- Although it’s really about as secret as my well-documented love of bacon. ↩
- Whatever tickles your fancy. I’m not here to judge. ↩
- If you’re sitting there yelling “But you said hardly ever, so there’s a chance!”, you’re right. It’s the same chance that you’ll be struck dead by a piano falling out of a blimp while you were riding your unicycle to a Jessica Biel-Jennifer Lawrence co-hosted orgy that you’re the guest of honor at, but it still exists, I guess. ↩