Though I’m not a member of many forums, I often find myself reading through discussions to find answers to questions I have, usually for troubleshooting purposes. If you spend much time at all in forums, you’ll quickly learn there are a few rules to obey. One which comes up a lot is to make sure you search the forum to see if the question you have has already been asked. If you ask a question that has already been discussed, you are an insolent fool and you will suffer at the hand of the forum police.
Bless you, forum police, for keeping our internet clean. As we are well aware, the internet is filling up fast. And when it has reached its max capacity, it will then explode and kill us all. Unfortunately, many forum users don’t understand that and continue to pollute the internet by endlessly posting topics that have already been discussed. Kilobytes and kilobytes of useless text litter our cyberspace with no plausible way of cleaning it up, space which could be used to host more productive material, such as porn.
Let’s use real life as an analogy. What respectable citizen of this earth would ask a question without first going to a library to find the answer? It’s simply a waste of words. Nevermind the fact that libraries themselves are already filled with unneeded doubles of information.
He's really mad.
It is for these reasons that the best approach in dealing with an uninformed forum user is to let them know how stupid he/she is for not searching for their topic first, that they are a burden to the digital world for asking something that has already been asked and that they should stop wasting our scrolling endurance. Do not by any means answer their questions or link them to a discussion that would be helpful to them, for this would only encourage them to continue in their ignorance. This will ensure that, instead of there being multiple, wasteful sources of information, that there will be only one source, conveniently tucked away in the dark recesses of the forum.
Thank you again, forum police, for maintaining a pleasant internet environment.
As an interviewer, your job is to come up with questions for the interviewee that will clarify and inform in an intriguing manner. Your job is not to ask surface questions in order to direct the attention onto a point you want to make for your own agenda.
A while back I saw this interview of Mark Driscoll and hated it. But now, I feel like doing a thorough critique on just how stupid this interview is. Go ahead and watch it here:
I think the reason this interview annoys me so much is that I really respect Mark Driscoll. I find him hilarious, and I like that he’s not afraid to talk about issues that are challenging, but still very important; issues that, had my church addressed them more, might have helped me stay out of a lot of sin. If you watch a few Mark Driscoll sermons, I think you’ll find that he has a very realistic, sound and well prioritized stance on the Bible. That’s why it bothers me so much that Neal Karlinsky’s interview with Mark is so shallow.
He asks many questions that, rather than being effective towards a better understanding of Driscoll and his church, direct your attention to the least important aspects, like what the congregation wears, or what pastor Mark wears. Basically, it’s all about the image, and almost nothing about the church itself. Here are the worst parts of the interview:
“Do they call you pastor here, or dude?”
I can’t imagine the difficulty Mark had taming the overload of sarcastic answers whirling through his head when he heard that garbage. Good one Neal. I understand that it was a joke, but it’s such a bad-awful joke that it puts Mark in an extremely awkward situation where he’s forced to play along and answer the meaningless question to avoid looking like a jerk. In any case, not a productive question for an interview.
“The man in charge looks more hipster than preacher…”
Yes, and I demand that pastor Mark apologize immediately for wearing anything other than what conforms to the secular world’s stereotype that all pastors are old, bearded, carry brief cases and wear formal clothing at all times. The video to match this quote shows pastor Mark walking in jeans and a collared shirt. What a hipster!
“…and the church he presides over has the rare distinction of being labeled as ‘cool.’”
I’d like to know just who’s in charge of the church labeling. Is there some organization that I don’t know about whose job is to categorize churches based on whether or not they have coffee shops, a bookstore or lots of fancy lights for worship? Or is it ABC Nightline that decides? I wonder what label they would slap on my small, brethren church. “LAME! People still wear head coverings at your church? What, are we in the medieval age?”
“Pastor Mark is the indie rockstar of the evangelicals.”
I just… have no idea.
“His flock is a colorful bunch in their Sunday’s best torn jeans, tattoos and 20s something avant garde fashion.”
Yeah, who let them in? Obviously Mars Hill Church needs to hire some bouncers. We don’t want people with tattoos and torn jeans in our church. And that avant garde fashion? Repent.
You know the church has a bad reputation when the fact that people that you would see walking on the street every day are also found in churches is suddenly worthy of mention.
“And then there’s Jesus; Jesus according to pastor Mark.”
You can tell how little research Karlinsky did on Mark and his church before putting this interview together. He makes everything seem like a huge marketing scheme by implying that every pastor worships a different Jesus. There’s the Mark Driscoll Jesus, the Francis Chan Jesus, the John MacArthur Jesus, the Billy Graham Jesus, etc… Bogus. These people all teach about Jesus according to the Bible, not according to themselves. Sure, they all have different preaching styles and they may even focus on very different issues, but everyone’s bound to be more passionate about different parts of the Bible, and it doesn’t mean they’re all trying to sell their own Jesus.
“So is your interpretation of Jesus more of a… he’s more of an indie rock dude?”
What the heck does Neal think indie rock is? He throws around words like rockstar, hipster and indie rock like it has any sort meaning, but he has no clue what he’s even talking about. Just vomiting nonsense. I feel sorry for Mark for having to come up with answers to these retarded questions. Interview questions need to be open-ended. What’s so hard about asking, “So what is your interpretation of Jesus?” Because by constantly referring to everything as “hipster” and “indie rock,” he’s basically asking, “So is Jesus a hipster or is He boring like I always thought He was?” He’s limiting the interview with his lack of understanding, instead of asking questions that will allow Driscoll to respond with something insightful.
“At home, pastor Mark would seem to be your typical Seattle hipster dad, from the biker boots, to the shades, to calling his three-year-old ‘dude.’”
Again, using the word ‘hipster’ randomly without knowing what it means. It’s like the time where I was watching a movie with my mom and she referred to a grody-looking bearded man as ’skanky.’ The word doesn’t even apply. Last I checked, hipsters don’t wear biker boots, nor are sunglasses unique to the hipster community. The word ‘hipster’ is already so vague of a word that to use it to describe anyone is like describing someone as ’spiritual.’ A term like that is so full of connotations that it’s impossible to know which connotations to connote. Also, why shouldn’t Mark Driscoll be “your typical Seattle dad?” Does the fact that he’s a pastor somehow mean that all his children should ever be doing is memorizing the Bible and praying?
“…today at the age of 38, this punk rock preacher’s church has taken off.”
Ah, now he’s punk rock. Might I suggest that using music genres to describe someone isn’t the most comprehensive method? Because right now all I’ve gotten out of this interview is that Mark Driscoll is an indie-punk rockstar hipster dude pastoring the only church in the world to be deemed “cool” by some invisible source.
Pastor Mark probably cried himself to sleep the night this interview was aired. The whole thing could probably be summed up by saying, “Turns out the church is full of normal people,” or in Neal Karlinsky’s words, “Turns out the church is full of hipsters. But I don’t know what a hipster is. Heard my son say it, thought it was cool. Started calling stuff hipster.”
It’s really annoying when people who have no knowledge about a subject somehow end up interviewing people about it. I’ve seen many musician interviews that are just so useless because the person doing the interview doesn’t know anything about music. It would be like getting me to interview a politician. I’d be like, “Yo, democracy? Is it good or is it wack?” and no one would learn anything.
And just as a disclaimer, the point of this post isn’t to bash Neal Karlinsky for not being a Christian. I just think he did a horrid job of asking interesting questions, and could have put more effort into preparing questions to provoke answers that would inform the audience. The point I want to make is that interviewers, if you can’t make an interview interesting by asking thought out questions, and instead turn the focus on frivolous, insubstantial details in order to engage an audience, then you suck. Quit.
Stop creating joint accounts, emails, etc on the internet. I won’t acknowledge you.
The reasons are straight forward: I don’t necessarily know both spouses, and therefore don’t want every connection I make with you to be seen by your husband or wife. It’s just weird. I like to relate it to real life. Imagine if every time I wanted to speak with you, show you something, invite you to an event, or ask you a question, you went and fetched your significant other so they could hear also, no matter what.
I understand the Christian marital concept of being one, but seriously, if you’re going to take it that far, you may as well go all out and cuff yourselves together. I doubt any of you are going to do that though. If you really feel like both of you have to know about absolutely every communication that goes on between anyone and yourselves, then feel free to inform each other. I just feel uncomfortable sending an email to JohnMary Smith, when I really only want to talk to John Smith.
Though you are right in believing that some audio formats are better than others, expressing those opinions, or acting on them anywhere beyond your own personal dealings, is pretentious and annoying. In fact, your rebellion against certain “bad” formats is way more of an inconvenience than the formats themselves. Here’s why.
In school today, our teacher was explaining to us how MP3s are compressed. At the mere mention of the term, a few people in my class were already criticizing it. “What does the MP3 compression process do to the original file?” my teacher asked. Immediately, someone who obviously wanted everyone to know how much he knew about the subject responded cynically with, “It takes a good song and ruins it.” I won’t judge whether or not this guy can actually tell the difference between a 300kb/sec MP3 and a 44,000Hz WAV (though I would hazard a guess that he can’t), but I will bet my entire student loan that he has an iPod, and that he doesn’t cringe at how “terrible” the quality of his MP3s are when he listens to them. “I need my music fix so bad but all I have is this MP3 player. FML.” Bogus. I would also gamble on the likelihood that his iTunes is set to automatically encode CDs to MP3s upon import. Otherwise, the average joe would need a terabyte worth of external hard drives just to store their stupidly huge WAV or M4A files on. Suggesting that MP3 compression ruins the song is a insanely radical exaggeration of the simple fact that MP3s aren’t the best format there is.
I was recently looking to torrent the soundtrack for Final Fantasy X, because it’s awesome. Surprisingly, there was only one torrent available that wasn’t dead. Unfortunately for almost everyone on the planet, whoever hosted it had encoded the files in a format called MPC. I don’t know what the heck that format is, and it doesn’t matter. What matters is that anyone with a Mac can’t play it in iTunes, and anyone without Winamp and some stupid plug-in can’t either. You’d also have to find some way to convert it to MP3 if you wanted to be able to copy it to pretty much any portable audio player, unless you have one of these friggin’ weird ones that no one actually buys. So Osaka, thank you so much for hosting a useless torrent. He even had people complaining in the comment section: “gr8 upload, dumb format though… ” which Osaka, due to his ignorance, responded with, “No, it’s not. It’s superior. The only better would be a lossless codec (FLAC for example).” That would be like me stating that Elvish is the best language to learn from birth because it’s so well written. Except no one else speaks Elvish, so in reality that would actually be the most useless first language ever. You would be stuck only being able to converse with extremely socially challenged LOTR fans (though the analogy doesn’t actually go that far). Then there’s this poor fellow, datone1guy, who commented: “Hello everyone. I downloaded this torrent and am seeding it now because the sound quality is amazing. Sadly, I wanted to pass it along to my iPhone so that I can listen to it anywhere I go, but iTunes doesn’t even support a plug-in that plays MPC files…” By golly, you’re right, datone1guy! It doesnt! And neither does anything else. Suffer.
Note: Osaka randomly stated that 911 was an inside job, probably because he watched some speculation documentary on it. From this, we can deduce that he sits in his basement all day, watching movies, ripping them in retarded formats that most people have never heard of, hosting them, and arguing with people about how good they are.
Here’s what I’m trying to say: if you’re one of the few people on earth who can differentiate between a lossless codec and some other format that isn’t completely perfect, and the ladder bothers you, then keep it to yourself. Encode all your CDs with weird, unheard of codecs and download strange plug-ins and media players to play them with. Just don’t expect the rest of us to care, and don’t look down on us either. It makes you come off as a know-it-all, and nobody likes a know-it-all. If you can’t keep your mouth shut about it, leave and start your own civilization where you can talk yourselves to death about how much you hate MP3s, go spend hundreds of dollars on hard drives to house your giant audio files, and send hate-mail to Apple for not supporting OGG, MPC, FLAC, and all those ridiculous file types on iPods/iPhones, away from the rest of humanity, who will continue to enjoy MP3s played out of crappy ear-buds and distorting car speakers.
I know I’m not a parent and therefore have no experience with the difficulties of raising children. But please don’t disregard my counsel because of this. The advice offered here doesn’t require me to be a parent, much like I don’t have to own a dog to know that they should be trained not to poop wherever.
Like most of the entries in this category, this one is inspired by a bad experience. And even though it may seem like I’m just venting my frustration about something that’s really not a big deal, I thought it was worth writing about especially considering a lot of people I know are getting married these days and might be having children in the near future.
Recently, my mom had company over at our house. One of the guests brought along three children, (all under the age of ten, as far as I know. I don’t know how to guess age anymore). I was planning on staying for supper and then going for a leisurely bike ride to escape the madness. Alas, the madness founded itself much earlier than I had expected. Within ten minutes of their arrival, the young ones had spilt Oreo crumbs all over the floor, eaten my trail mix, put their mouths on my recorder, helped themselves to my organ, commandeered my computer to play music from Mario, taken hold of an expensive microphone and tried on my headphones, all without permission. I promise that my attitude at the beginning of this was a patient one, but my tolerance inevitable ran dry. After cleaning up their mess, I diverted them with Lego and quickly fled my house without hesitation, without dinner. Camera in hand, I found peace in nature and some fresh air. My brother, the genius that he is, had been a step ahead of me and was already at the church, away from harm.
Have you ever been walking in a park or on a trail, enjoying the scenery and the smell of the outdoors, when all the sudden, you find yourself having to dodge a big dog dung, or worse, wiping one off your shoe? You probably thought to yourself, “Someone did not do their duty as a dog owner.” How true. Chances are, you weren’t thinking, “I hate dogs. I hate that they poop. Stop pooping, dogs.” Of course dogs are going to poop, but most of the time, it’s not a problem since pet owners who are responsible will clean up after them, supervise them, and discipline them in the ways of pooping.
Now let’s attach the analogy: I don’t blame these kids (much). They’re very young and probably haven’t mastered the art of behaving as a guest. Things like taking without asking, using without asking, eating without asking, and invasion of personal space are things that will take time for them to learn not to do, providing they have someone teaching them.
Enter beef. My beef. With the parents. Returning to the analogy: when I went to the park with my friend to walk her dog, we didn’t arrive at the park, let the dog off the leash and go do our own thing, allowing said dog to annoy other dogs and their owners with his hugeness and playfulness. We had the dog on a leash, and when we let him off the leash, we kept our eyes on him and called him over when he got carried away. Good for us! We rock!
When these guests and their children arrived, the parents sat down in the living room and disregarded their children, ignored their behavior and virtually pretended they didn’t exist. They didn’t know what was going on in the rest of the house: the unknocked doors being opened, the ungranted foods being eaten, the expensive equipment being hijacked, the privacy bubbles being popped. I don’t know if they overestimated their children’s manners or if they assumed that when they are guests, their kids become our kids. They don’t. Transferring custody of children takes a lot of paperwork that no one would want to deal with just for an evening visit, which I’m assuming isn’t the only reason we don’t do that.
This is a lot of words for a small point: when you, as a parent, are a guest at someone’s house, you still need to supervise your children. The host has likely provided dinner, dessert, and cleaned the whole house in order to please you. Don’t punish them by unleashing your kids all over their home. It’s rude.
DENT: Yes, they are. But the night is darkest just before the dawn. And I promise you…the dawn is coming. One day, the Batman will have to answer for the laws he’s broken. But to us…
…not to this madman.
POLICE OFFICER: No more dead cops!
(Appreciative noise)
He should turn himself in!
MAN 2: Give us the Batman! Come on!
MAN 3: Where is he?
(People take up the chant. Dent has lost them. He knows it.)
—UNABLE TO READ DISC—
This is one of the most annoying things in life, and there are tons of ways it could be prevented. It doesn’t matter whose fault it is, but I’ll tell you whose fault it is anyway. It’s my fault, your fault, and it’s the movie store’s fault.
I don’t know what the heck you guys do with your rented DVDs when you get them home. Perhaps you open them up, throw them against the wall, take a needle to them, cut your bagels on them, mistake them for vinyls, whatever. I wish you would stop doing these things.
Correct procedure for DVD use:
1. Remove DVD from case
2. Place unscathed disc in DVD Player
3. Watch and enjoy
4. Remove unscathed disc from DVD Player
5. Place DVD back in case
6. Return to movie store
It seems like something happens between steps one and two, or between four and five, that brings many of us a great deal of sorrow. Because it seems like half the films I rent from the movie store skip at at least one point in the movie, but never at the beginning of the movie. That would allow for a quick trip back to the store to replace it with another disc, likely still damaged. But no, the disc will skip only a good hour and a half into the movie, usually right over a climactic point in the film and after closing hours. So I beg you: treat rented DVDs with respect.
Another reason it’s our fault is because we don’t bother to tell the stores when the DVDs are damaged. We curse at the screen as it happens, we complain, get angry, and then we take the DVD back to the store and drop it in the return box without saying a word so some innocent family can rent it out, hoping for a good family movie, completely unsuspecting of the frustration they’re going to endure when Golem bites off Frodo’s finger and suddenly all the hobbits are tackling him in his bed. But we do blog about it.
Put a note on it. ‘Scratched.’ Easy as π. Then maybe the store will do something about it. Probably not, but maybe. Or if you really want to go all out, crack the DVD in half, put it back in the case, and attach a note saying that it’s ‘Scratched in half.’ They likely won’t ignore such a drastic scratch.
But the ones I feel are the most responsible are the movie stores. You know how when you go to a grocery store, you often don’t see a rotting fruit in the produce section, or expired milk in the fridge, or leaking yogurt containers? That’s because it’s the store’s job to observe these things and then deal with them. I’ll admit it’s probably harder to detect a scratched disc than a rotting strawberry, but the principle is the same: it’s the store’s responsibility to make sure the things they’re selling aren’t broken. Here’s an ingenious idea: a switch on the DVD case.
A) Damaged >= [
B) Good ^_^
Go ahead and steal that. I won’t even patent it! Go for it. I’m not stopping you.
It’s terribly ironic that when you rent or buy a DVD, there’s always some advertisement telling you not to pirate. Nothing like a good guilt trip before you watch a movie you just payed for. Friggin’ hipsters. Not to mention a lot of DVDs don’t even let you skip past the ads to get to the actual film. How about you lay off since I’m obviously watching a movie I payed for, even though it’s going to be scratched and annoying. Do you think that when people upload movies onto Pirate Bay, that they’re going to upload it with the advertisements telling you not to pirate? No, because that’s one of the beauties of piracy. So if you want people to come to the movie store and support the art of film making, I suggest you demonstrate an act of kindness for the world and monitor your freaking DVDs so people won’t be so tempted to break the law. Thanks.
Please shower and wear deodorant. It’s really the least you can do. Last I checked, most guys don’t have to wear make-up, do their hair really fancy, wear earrings, perfume, curl their eyelashes, ect… Those are all things that girls do. Not all the time of course, and I don’t mean to say that if a girl doesn’t do these things, that she’s any less of a lady. But I can’t remember the last time I was a meter away from a female and felt like buying a mini bottle of Fabreeze for the next time someone was radiating an equally bothersome stench. It’s not hard either. Showers feel good.
Don’t see it as something that should be a convenience for yourself either. Self-contentment comes after selflessness. First, you must understand that good hygiene is more than a sanitary benefit, a social bonus or an asset to your comfort. It’s common courtesy; good manners. Ever wonder why we have etiquette? It’s because there are certain annoyances that are virtually universal. Examples of these are chewing loudly with your mouth open, interrupting people, or detonating your biological dynamite in someone else’s bathroom without cleaning it up. The vast majority of people in the vast majority of cultures don’t appreciate these things and it’s the same with people who don’t properly maintain themselves physically.
So how do you know if you’re one of these people? If it was as simple as smelling yourself, then this wouldn’t be such a big problem. Here’s a list of possible descriptions of an unknowing hygienic criminal (for males only):
1. You do a lot of physical activity and don’t shower every day.
2. You do a moderate amount of physical activity and don’t shower every day.
3. You don’t do much physical activity and don’t shower every day.
4. You do absolutely no physical activity at all and don’t shower every day.
5. You don’t shower every day.
Unlike most laws, there are no exceptions to this one (unless you have no sweat glands, in which case you probably are dead). If you’re a member of the male population and you don’t shower every day, you are a hygienic menace to society. Social consequences of this are:
1. People avoid physical contact with you.
2. People who don’t know your name resort to refering to you as, “That guy who smells bad.”
3. People devote an entire hour of their day to write a blog post about you in the hopes that you’ll read it and change your grody ways.
It’s not a complicated system: if you’re planning on leaving your house, shower. If there’s any possibility that you’ll be doing physical activity, wear deodorant.
I recently read in someone else’s blog that the world would be a better place if everyone hugged tighter and longer. Though I agree with that statement in most cases, it’s certainly not true at all if the person you’re hugging tighter and longer is countering your natural instinct to breathe. Please head this advice. Thanks.
