Twitter

Because I don't seem to have enough places to both consume information that's (mostly) pointless in the goal of advancing my life and places to post inanities, I've ended up back on Twitter. Well, it might be more accurate to say I've ended up on Twitter. I've had an account or two in the past but I got bored of it fairly quickly. However, it seems to have evolved into a pretty solid place to keep up with gaming and tech news as well as with authors. The gaming and tech news is largely what drew me there, but I feel like being somewhat of an aspiring writer/english major myself keeping an eye on what authors are saying will be the most valuable. I've already found another free ebook that looks interesting enough to read, and hey, free. This will be the second free ebook I've grabbed. Check them out, search for:

Eyes that Could Kill by Derek Haines
Open Minds by Susan Kaye Quinn

I know I have a limited reader base, but I figure the more people that see these the better it is for the authors. Oh, and if for some reason you want to follow me on twitter: @grumpytck

Word Clouds

In a bout of procrastination I discovered word cloud generators. Guess what the main topics in my current essay are:

Geek Pride

I am what is often commonly referred to as a geek. Does this bother me? Definitely not. Am I proud of the fact I'm a geek? I used to be.

I do understand the whole geek pride thing. Until recently, geeks were generally made fun of as a group of people who did not fit into society due to their lack of social skills (which, by the way, doesn't apply to all geeks) and their interest in things that could be considered geeky. Now geeks are considered cool. What I wonder about though, is how is this any different to finding any other group of people with a certain set of interests cool? How is it different to thinking the sports players in high school are cool? I don't believe there's a difference.

Geek pride is immature. Plain and simple. Why should someone be proud of their interests? If someone went around all proud of the fact they were interested in botany or clothes design, people would think they were crazy. Being proud of being good at something or something you've achieved makes sense. However, a lot of geeks aren't proud of being good at something so much as being proud of liking something. Most people leave this sort of pride in their teenage years, yet a lot of geeks let it continue into their adult life. Why is this considered a good thing in a lot of circles?

This especially becomes an issue when elitism comes into play. Judging people for being into geeky things without being geeky enough. You're a good looking person with social skills who happens to like Batman? Fuck you, you can't hang out with us. This is ridiculous. Grow up. I know the tendency to create cliques can go well into people's adult lives, especially cliques based on interest. But there is no reason to be proud of social construct, it just happens. You won't hear the majority of people being proud of liking something, so why should we be proud of being geeks?

Poor citation, Diablo and a little bit of entitlement

As the title of this post suggests, it's about two wildly different things. I'll cover the poor citation bit first.

If an article discussing scientific "fact", in this case medical, is not properly cited it is invalid. Without proper citation from multiple sources that are also properly cited and peer-reviewed (if original work) the article is an opinion piece. This is an issue for people such as anti-vaccination advocates as there isn't any solid scientific fact behind anti-vaccination. That statement right there however is uncited and must not be taken as fact but my opinion, which is ok because you know, this is a personal blog. I must say though, it baffles me that people are willing to take such a huge risk in not vaccinating their children just because of a few conspiracy theories. There's recently been news of a measles outbreak in the UK which has been linked towards parents declining to vaccinate. As a side note, a lot of the people I know who seem to be anti-vaccination are conservative Christian Americans. This is funny because the anti-vaccination movement was largely popularized by Jenny McCarthy... a Playboy model.

Now for the Diablo and entitlement part. Recently Diablo released a patch. This was a rather large patch that added to and changed a lot about the game. When massive changes happen, bugs are likely to occur. In this case, a rather nasty one did. Trading in Diablo 3 is done via an online auction house. People post items they found in game and others bid on them for in game currency or actual real money. When the patch released some gamers discovered a bug that allowed them to duplicate gold within the auction house. This started a tumble into crazy inflation and all around fucking up of the market. Blizzard (the makers of the game) have taken the auction house offline to fix this best they can. Most the players understand the reasoning behind this, what blows me away are the ones that aren't. Yes, they are entitled to a working game due to the fact they will have probably paid $60+ for it. However, they are not entitled to be nasty to the very people trying to make the game enjoyable and maintain it's inner workings. Gamers suck sometimes.

Finishing Atonement (Spoilers. Serious spoilers.)

Today I finally finished reading Atonement. All in all it's a pretty good novel. That said, the first "twist" was kinda predictable and the second was just irritating. Essentially the way the novel ends up being set up is parts 1 - 3 are a novel that Briony Tallis (one of the main characters) wrote. Part 4 of the novel is an epilogue told from a first person perspective by Briony Tallis. This takes place outside of the novel that parts 1 - 3 are. In the ending of the novel inside the novel, Briony manages to begin to actually atone for her crimes. Cecilia and Robbie succeed in being together, and all is starting to look like it could be rather nice and pleasant. In part 4 however, it turns out that this didn't really happen and was just part of Briony's novel. Robbie actually died of blood poisoning in France and Cecilia was killed during a bombing. Now, I really don't mind sad endings at all. To be perfectly honest they're often somewhat refreshing. What I found annoying was the fact that the good, happy ending was all set up only to have it switch around and slap you in the face. That annoyed me.

Writing Thoughts

One of my assignments at the moment is to pick a journal article relevant to your major (in my case, English) and write a rhetorical analysis of the article. Basically, it's reading an article and writing about what the article is about, how it's written, and how effectively it conveys information to its intended audience. I picked an article written about George Orwell. I particularly love the book 1984, so I thought it'd be interesting. So in essence, I'm writing an essay about an essay about a man who wrote essays. Essayception? (God, that joke is so corny).

Honestly, I thought the idea was a little bit silly. What's the point in just writing about how another piece of writing is written? But thinking about it, it's actually a kinda interesting assignment. I've found I've read the article in quite a different way than I would if I was just reading it for information. Rather than just looking at what the article says, I'm having to think about and dissect how it actually is written. It's kinda like doing an assignment on a poem, just with less metaphor and it's easier to make sense of.

Aside from the actual writing aspect, the article itself is pretty interesting. Of Orwell's work I've only read 1984 (many many times) and Animal Farm (only twice). I also don't know THAT much about the writer himself. The article discusses whether or not Orwell could be considered a genius and talks about his flaws and strengths. It kinda ends up portraying him as a dick. Intelligent, but a dick. He sounds like he was extremely arrogant, paranoid and just generally not very nice. Doesn't make me like his writing any less though.

Might actually post what I've written after it's done and graded.