monday84

Forgive yourself. Love others.

Kramer

NEW DELHI — Thousands of panicked pilgrims stampeded Sunday at a remote mountaintop temple in northern India during celebrations to honor a Hindu goddess, sending dozens of people plummeting to their deaths and trampling scores more. Police said 145 people were killed.

Women.

But seriously. I know this is sad, tragic, awful, etc. I have to say something, again, and I am sorry to be redundat here: How is it that all of the major news agencies can show dead bodies all over the place, but if a nipple slips on TV or in some other medium, America goes crazy?

How many times can we SEE the 911 images or other death in pics and video? I mean, we don't blink an EYE! If we see a nipple, or God forbid a penis or vagina, we lose our ever lovin' minds. Take another look at that pic. We can see that now and be so numb! How IS that? I personally just can't get used to seeing dead bodies, and when it comes to my 4 year old son, I would MUCH rather him see a nipple or a 'tee tee' than dead grown ups laying in the street.

Its just another example of our priorities being effed up. I instantly revert back to nipple-gate at the Super Bowl when Janet Jackson showed her nipple. I reemember looking at it for the 1st time and thought it was just nothing, but the entire Country couldn't stop talking about it. I don't think people should be walking around with their titties hanging out. Don't get me wrong. When it comes to the news media though, I just feel like its backwards. (To say the least.)

You know, I'm not new to this lil intra-web thingy. I get that there is drama everywhere. Here's what I don't get: I DON'T GET how major sites that have been WAY established for YEARS can get their lil feewwwings hurt by a smaller website so easily. I must have some extremely thick skin; that or I am just stupid. Maybe its a combo. We took a $40 ad out on www.fark.com last week. It finally went up on Saturday. The ad simply said, "Zip up and come see us." The link went to the new forums.

I've been looking for somewhere to advertise the forum over the past week. I reverted, wrongly, back to F@RK. Some of you MAFIA or older viewers may remember that over a year ago, we bought a fark ad and the same, exact thing happened. I should have known better and in the back of my head, I knew it was gonna happen again. It seems, to me, like people are more senstive to shit online than they are real life stuff. Its odd. Some of their "FARKERS" started slamming us. I went over and thanked them for viewing. That's really all that happened, but I woke up this morning, opened mah emails, and found a full refund from owner Drew Curtis. Yes, we have the Bill from Festus calls on the website. So what? Its HUMOR. HUMOR is something that not many people have these days online. People get their weetle feewings huwt so so easy these days. I'm pretty open on my website and forums. I've been open to viewers about almost every facet of my life, so I guess over time that's just made me very thick skinned. (And big boned.) I have to be or I'd just be walking around with a gun in mah mouth all the time.

Drew, you guys are weak. I said that last time and should have just went about my business of looking for somewhere else to advertise the forums. I give everyone about 400 chances. I shouldn't do that, but I forgive and firget over and over and over again, and in almost every case of that whether it be online or in real life, get burned. When will I learn?

If you know of a great place that we should advertise the forums, please lemme know so we can get it done. I'd like to have that wrapped up by the days end at least! Just email it or put it on the forums.

Drew damned Curtis, huh?

Speaking of the forums, I've added a special picture page of
stuff that isn't seen on GODOFRADIO.com. They, so far, are
extremely good pics and animated gifs. They're must sees! Its a
sub forum of my regular GOD OF RADIO section.

Not only that but we have the regular picture section, video section with its own YOUTUBE video section (You can play those videos directly on the forums), PG-15 section, and about any other section you can think of: technology, advice, anything goes, outdoors, wastin' time, jokes, durty jokes, newz discussions, contests and trivia, sports, video games, etc. etc. etc. Its a great forum. Looks good and is VERY fast. I hope everyone'll come and sign up. Its free and easy to do.

One afternoon in the spring of 2006, for reasons unknown to those who knew him, Mitchell Henderson, a seventh grader from Rochester, Minn., took a .22-caliber rifle down from a shelf in his parents’ bedroom closet and shot himself in the head. The next morning, Mitchell’s school assembled in the gym to begin mourning. His classmates created a virtual memorial on MySpace and garlanded it with remembrances. One wrote that Mitchell was “an hero to take that shot, to leave us all behind. God do we wish we could take it back. . . . ” Someone e-mailed a clipping of Mitchell’s newspaper obituary to MyDeathSpace.com, a Web site that links to the MySpace pages of the dead. From MyDeathSpace, Mitchell’s page came to the attention of an Internet message board known as /b/ and the “trolls,” as they have come to be called, who dwell there.

“A normal person who does insane things on the internet.” Jason Fortuny in real life.

/b/ is the designated “random” board of 4chan.org, a group of message boards that draws more than 200 million page views a month. A post consists of an image and a few lines of text. Almost everyone posts as “anonymous.” In effect, this makes /b/ a panopticon in reverse — nobody can see anybody, and everybody can claim to speak from the center. The anonymous denizens of 4chan’s other boards — devoted to travel, fitness and several genres of pornography — refer to the /b/-dwellers as “/b/tards.”

Measured in terms of depravity, insularity and traffic-driven turnover, the culture of /b/ has little precedent. /b/ reads like the inside of a high-school bathroom stall, or an obscene telephone party line, or a blog with no posts and all comments filled with slang that you are too old to understand.

Something about Mitchell Henderson struck the denizens of /b/ as funny. They were especially amused by a reference on his MySpace page to a lost iPod. Mitchell Henderson, /b/ decided, had killed himself over a lost iPod. The “an hero” meme was born. Within hours, the anonymous multitudes were wrapping the tragedy of Mitchell’s death in absurdity.

Someone hacked Henderson’s MySpace page and gave him the face of a zombie. Someone placed an iPod on Henderson’s grave, took a picture and posted it to /b/. Henderson’s face was appended to dancing iPods, spinning iPods, hardcore porn scenes. A dramatic re-enactment of Henderson’s demise appeared on YouTube, complete with shattered iPod. The phone began ringing at Mitchell’s parents’ home. “It sounded like kids,” remembers Mitchell’s father, Mark Henderson, a 44-year-old I.T. executive. “They’d say, ‘Hi, this is Mitchell, I’m at the cemetery.’ ‘Hi, I’ve got Mitchell’s iPod.’ ‘Hi, I’m Mitchell’s ghost, the front door is locked. Can you come down and let me in?’ ” He sighed. “It really got to my wife.” The calls continued for a year and a half.

In the late 1980s, Internet users adopted the word “troll” to denote someone who intentionally disrupts online communities. Early trolling was relatively innocuous, taking place inside of small, single-topic Usenet groups. The trolls employed what the M.I.T. professor Judith Donath calls a “pseudo-naïve” tactic, asking stupid questions and seeing who would rise to the bait. The game was to find out who would see through this stereotypical newbie behavior, and who would fall for it. As one guide to trolldom puts it, “If you don’t fall for the joke, you get to be in on it.”

Today the Internet is much more than esoteric discussion forums. It is a mass medium for defining who we are to ourselves and to others. Teenagers groom their MySpace profiles as intensely as their hair; escapists clock 50-hour weeks in virtual worlds, accumulating gold for their online avatars. Anyone seeking work or love can expect to be Googled. As our emotional investment in the Internet has grown, the stakes for trolling — for provoking strangers online — have risen. Trolling has evolved from ironic solo skit to vicious group hunt.

“Lulz” is how trolls keep score. A corruption of “LOL” or “laugh out loud,” “lulz” means the joy of disrupting another’s emotional equilibrium. “Lulz is watching someone lose their mind at their computer 2,000 miles away while you chat with friends and laugh,” said one ex-troll who, like many people I contacted, refused to disclose his legal identity.

Another troll explained the lulz as a quasi-thermodynamic exchange between the sensitive and the cruel: “You look for someone who is full of it, a real blowhard. Then you exploit their insecurities to get an insane amount of drama, laughs and lulz. Rules would be simple: 1. Do whatever it takes to get lulz. 2. Make sure the lulz is widely distributed. This will allow for more lulz to be made. 3. The game is never over until all the lulz have been had.”

/b/ is not all bad. 4chan has tried (with limited success) to police itself, using moderators to purge child porn and eliminate calls to disrupt other sites. Among /b/’s more interesting spawn is Anonymous, a group of masked pranksters who organized protests at Church of Scientology branches around the world.

But the logic of lulz extends far beyond /b/ to the anonymous message boards that seem to be springing up everywhere. Two female Yale Law School students have filed a suit against pseudonymous users who posted violent fantasies about them on AutoAdmit, a college-admissions message board. In China, anonymous nationalists are posting death threats against pro-Tibet activists, along with their names and home addresses. Technology, apparently, does more than harness the wisdom of the crowd. It can intensify its hatred as well.

I understand we live in a different World today. I also understand that when people are young, they're not as mature nor can they handle things like adults can. HOWEVER, ADULTS are victims of this crap too and go off the deep end over things that are said online. Like I said above, people take what's said about them online worse than they would take what someone said to their face. Lately I've been way into this phenomenon. I even have close friends on OUR forum that get their panties in a wad over the most assinine drivel. 99% of the time if I am on a forum, email, website, etc. I sign up under my real name. I can't stand people that sign up being anonymous so they can say anything about anyone and anything they want with accountability. But isn't that what's fun about the net? Maybe to some, but not me. If I go crazy online, screw it, you're welcome to see it. When people sit behind a computer keyboard, its hit and miss whether you're getting their true self anyway. ("LULZ") The problem is, the net is so vast and insecure, stuff like the above story will never stop. Its also growing and growing like some blobby monster that just can't get enough to eat. It can's, nor will ever be policed. Tech geeks aren't 'geeks' anymore. They are a new breed of "cool", and they can rob you blind from your computer while getting inside your puter to see those naked pics of your secretary. Also, the devotion behind these people is incredible. Some of them will spend hours looking for every account you have involving anything on the internet.

When does school start back again?

Democratic Sen. Barack Obama holds a 2 to 1 edge over Republican Sen. John McCain among the nation's low-wage workers, but many are unconvinced that either presidential candidate would be better than the other at fixing the ailing economy or improving the health-care system, according to a new national poll.

Obama's advantage is attributable largely to overwhelming support from two traditional Democratic constituencies: African Americans and Hispanics. But even among white workers -- a group of voters that has been targeted by both parties as a key to victory in November -- Obama leads McCain by 10 percentage points, 47 percent to 37 percent, and has the advantage as the more empathetic candidate.

Still, one in six of the white workers polled remains uncommitted to either candidate. And a majority of those polled, both white and minority, are ambivalent about the impact of the election, saying that no matter who wins, their personal finances are unlikely to change.

The economy. Everyone in the U.S. is talking about it. EVERYONE. So where are we headed. I took about an hour and a half yesterday and read a lot of supposed experts predictions on the economy. The outcome was that I'm as clueless as I was before I read any of it. Some analysts think a barrel of oil will never again be under $100. Others suggest that we're about to see a sharp increase, while others say the prices will continue to drop. One thing's for sure, the price of food is still on the rise and will continue to rise for some time. Actually, not just food, but just about every product you can buy. Wages are down and unemployment rates are high. Retail sales are down. Car sales are down. I usually ask friends if they can feel the crunch when we hang out. I usually, and oddly, get a 'no'. (Lately) Is it media hype? I still say no, that its real. Just look around. My wife, who owns a business, looked back in the books to last year and she can see a factual, evident, and sharp difference between this month and this time last year. Its pretty amazing.

Can ANYone fix this economy quickly? Not a chance. I don't care who we elect, things are in such dire straits that it will take years to turn it around. The oil escalation has been three or four years coming. What has Obama done in the past that says he can handle the economy of the #1 Country in the World? I need more evidence than 'he's a great speaker'. Mark my word though, a 'great speaker' is gonna wind up hoodwinking his way into the Oval office and we're going to be screwed.

Put your head between your knees and get ready. Its a comin'!