Onward through the fog

Do everyone a favor, will you? Go on the World of Warcraft forums for a week. Under a girl's name.

Be a girl for a week. That's it. Seven days. You can afford to take that much vacation from being Mark Zuckerberg.

And then you may try to tell me we don't need pseudonyms on the internet.

You will never – ever – reach a full understanding of the life of someone who has to put up with this kind of shit every day. But you will get an inkling of the vast gap in your current awareness of human society on this earth.

Try it. Try being a girl for a week. Or if that's too threatening to your privileged psyche, try a Chinese name on for size. Try being anyone other than the white boy from Harvard that you are, and see how much of an issue your "identity" suddenly becomes to other people. See how badly it interferes with what you're trying to do, and who you actually are. See how inconvenient and yes, inefficient, using your real name can be if that real name is feminine or nonwhite.

Go on, try it. It's the internet – no one will know. At least, not until you have your way.

I read the Time feature, and frankly your vision of the future is revolting. An internet without strangers. Go on Amazon, and see only your Friends' reviews. Read webforums, and see only your Friends' posts. Stay within the same group of people, no matter where you go. Holy christ. If I had grown up reading only the books the people around me read, watching the movies the people around me watched, spammed entirely with the advertising Liked by my peer-pressure-mandated Friends?

I might have taken years to come out of the closet. I might have taken years to leave my hometown. I would never have gone to Sweden, I certainly wouldn't have gone to Tasmania. I might not even have made it to Japan. How long would it have taken, in your vision of the future, for me to find a gay adult who made it out okay? There wasn't one there in my existing social network. I had to get on the internet, and talk to strangers.

You're not pitching something new. You're giving us something we've already outgrown. You think everyone wants to have the same old people, the same old closed networks, everywhere, with us, forever.

Because it's all a very good deal for you and those like you, born into privilege, grown into power, surrounded forever by other Exeter boys who like what you like and do what you do. But for those of us who would like to move up a little, maybe change the class structure that you're so far into you don't even see, or maybe just those of us who want to go somewhere different and meet someone new, the internet is our best tool. You would take that away, and not even realize you were doing it.

Because of course you could go anywhere and meet anyone, with your passport and your skin and your name, and not feel the slightest danger or threat. So why can't we? I hear you cry. Why can't we use our real names for everything, online and off?

So I'm daring you. Be a girl for a week. Find out.


With all my heartfelt and pseudonymous contempt,

Lina D.

So hey, who knew the Internet was coming in 1969?

The Ninja Turtles are becoming a theme for this blag.

ps, Bacon chocolate was a religious experience.

Okay you guys

So I just had the best day, ever, period. So freaking awesome. I met up with eponymous_x &co at the Guggenheim and saw the Cai Guo-Qiang exhibit in all its glory- no webpage can explain or truly exhibit this and I exhort you all, if you are anywhere near NYC, to GO SEE THIS SHOW before it is gone. This man lit'rally makes explosions and explosives his medium for artwork. There are other beautiful and stunningly thought-provoking things he does, taxidermy and construction and clay sculpture. Go see, go see.

And then we went to Union Square for THE PILLOW FIGHT. A clutch of strangers with pillows thwapping each other, feathers EVERYWHERE, feathers drifting up into the air and blowing along with the wind and making a SIGNAL for where the fight was. It was beautiful.

And what should we see there on the edge of it? What should be parading along the side, chanting slogans and waving signs? Why, a campaign rally, of course – for what better way to reach The Youth than to campaign at an internets-organized pillow fight? And for whom, pray tell, are these fresh-faced activists-in-training cheering?

Why, Harvey Dent for District Attorney, of course!!

We got stickers and bumper stickers. Gotham City News was covering it, and the pillow fight behind it, as a strange escalation in the tense race for DA. Vicki Vale, on the scene, seriously for real you guys. I thought my face was gonna crack I was grinning so hard.

We took a time-out for food and Forbidden Planet, 'cuz why go to Union Square and not buy comics, amirite. They have a life-size Dalek in there now. I got some Teen Titans because I hadn't had enough Bart Allen in my life lately. And, you know, can never have enough Drake. Picked up some free Harvey for DA campaign buttons at the counter.

And then it was back to the pillow fight. We waded in and got to sit in the big pile in the middle. Feathers EVERYWHERE, cannot emphasize this enough - a guy on the subway afterward asked if we'd been attacked by birds. Whumpf bumpf shoompf! There goes another pillow, a cloud released into the blizzard. Every time one gets thrown out of the ring, some helpful soul throws it right back in and beans a combatant on the way. One pillow said OBAMA BOMB. One said 'デクスタ' on one side and '暗' on the other and had small bloodstains, very mysterious. One crowd favorite was bright red silk with Chinese characters all over it. THE FEATHERS. Trails of foam mixed in.

Ahhhhhh. A glorious, glorious day all around. And tomorrow is Easter. =DDD

Everything's worked out just as it should.

Al Gore won the Nobel.

The Vatican's publishing the Knights Templar records.

And LA Weekly did a piece on this Internet-based manifestation of this as-yet unnamed mental disorder which we in the Journalfen crowd mostly know by the name 'pseuicide'. It's not just faking your own death on the internet, though- it's faking the whole life, the full character, and then killing it off. Good piece of writing. I am reminded of half a dozen cases I've seen through the interweb grapevine.

Incoming, fresh off my internet:

The Bacon Vodka thread.

:')


*Archived here.

The pairing list. She lives.

( And spring break coming up too, don'cha know. )

My, my my.

This comm IS going to need some actual fic, if it's going to live.

And, I mean. Sauron/Inverse. The Gravitation-Phoenix Wright crossover is a bit... much, perhaps, but there's always Bruce Wayne/Peter Venkman to make it better.



(also I think I aced my midterm. Which, coming at the ass-end of a hella full day like this one, is really something speshul. I think I'm going to celebrate with an early bedtime.)


ps. GodTube. Hunh. Go fig.

You can tell they're Followers-of-Christ because, verily, Jesus would have used YouTube to mock people. - f_l

I can't post on 2ch.

=(

Nothing for a whanging headache like going to bed at 8.30.

And now, dinner. Or maybe just tea. I think I'm coming down with something, bleargh.

In other news, Facebook caved. Partly. We'll see how well this works.