PRETENTIOUSNESS

Now we're crossing the great divide. Boredom, creepiness and douchiness, like their counterparts lust, gluttony and I've heard argued greed (though I certainly wouldn't argue this) are possibly inborn flaws and so therefore the punishment, at least according to Dante, is less than what follows.
However, pretentiousness is a choice you make, and so therefore the retribution will be terrible indeed.
You may remember Dice_Dork (fuck) from the rather tellingly named "I Ain't Even Mad" and, for a rare move on my part, a second part entitled Capitalism, Ho! the following update.
You may recall the solemn vow I took:

My goal in life is to punch you right in the fucking mouth, Chris.

And I never forget a grudge.

I'm going to start something new here.

This icon will indicate boring stuff ahead.

The implication being when the "funny stick figure man typing crazily" isn't present what you're typing is somehow fucking awesome. I guess I'll go ahead and give it to him: he at least considered his audience. Good thing there, Chris. Good things seldom happen when blogging is involved so I'll be sure to note them when they do come up.

I'm not a big fan of filters for things people don't want to see. (The exception to that would be a filter for over share--not everyone on my FL wants to know about my sex life.)

This entire idea is so alien to me. You have, perhaps, the greatest technological achievement ever in the internet (landing on the moon is arguably more impressive but no one seems to be doing anything with it, as nearsighted as that is) and you want to censor yourself from naughty ideas? This is like Warhammer logic. You can genetically enhance and indeed clone people, destroy entire planets, terraform worlds and yet there's an inquisition and witch hunts?
I guess it's as I've always said: common birth, common man.

I've had some unreasonably stupid reactions in the past to folks demanding I remove their ability to see certain things. Mostly I just firmly believe in everyone's ability to scroll down.

Yeah this is a dead end argument. "IF YOU DON'T LIKE IT DON'T FUCKING READ IT!" despite all the wisdom it contains, inevitably falls on the deaf and unwilling.

I took a few days "off" after school ended. I actually do better with daily goals I set myself to if I first take some time off. Life just seems to have a better balance if I feel like I've blown off some steam first.

I just noticed his icon appears to be the Justice Tarot from Persona 3.
Fuck I just remembered the quote Nyx Avatar says when he switches to Justice mode: "to find the one true path, one must seek guidance amidst uncertainty" and then half my team dies to instant kill spell bullshit.
Fuck you, Nyx Avatar.
Oh well, at least that fight had some ballin' music.
It goddamn better for being like a 2 hour fight. That I failed twice due to being underleveled.

Now I'm back, though. I've had a few things on my mind. Some I can blog openly about and others I can't.

Oh right, this. I guess it's as Nyx Avatar says: "it matters not who you are, death awaits all."

This story starts with me wanting to give back.

No seriously, this story begins with me feeling that overly-sentimental pull to give back to a community that I've gotten so much from.

What community is that? Blogging? Furries?

I've LARPed for a couple of years, and I figured I could help someone engineer that experience I so love for others. Fair's fair, right?

Oh, LARPing. Also known as the death of dignity.
LARPing, for those of you blessedly unfamiliar, stands for Live Action Role Playing and it's basically Dungeons and Dragons sans self-respect and rules.

What happened next was more than a little silly, but let's just say that the first person to come along and take me up on my offer to help run a LARP had an...ambitious plan. And I'm using "ambitious" as a euphemism for insane...like nucking futs insane. (But the good kind of nucking futs insane--the kind you look back on and say "Man that was stupid, but MAN that was awesome!!!) This has the potential to be Ninjas and Pirates team up to fight Zombies caliber cool--

Pirates and ninjas teaming up, wow. We sure are scraping the "internet fad 2006" barrel for that one.

Anyway, now I'm starting to realize that running three games with a linking arc has this side effect that I didn't consider. Three games is like "all but two" of the time slots for the whole weekend. We will literally end up conflicting with over half of the other LARPs for the entire convention. A lot of really awesome peeps are running some really awesome sounding games at the same time as us.

I can't believe there are more than 15 people in the entire world interest in this.
Oh what am I saying "can't believe". I can perfectly well believe it.

So I've studied both post-colonial theory and Orientalism, which aren't exactly the same but have huge areas of overlap and a lot of recurring tropes. I've even spent a non-insignificant period of my adulthood self-identifying as Muslim.

>non-insignificant
>significant is a word
Getting a little angry now.
AWWWW YEAH FFXIV PATCH YO.
I hit fatigue for leatherworking today which is really kind of sad but I'm pretty sure it resets tomorrow (?) so no worries.

And yet I'm still unsure where I would put Islamaphobia on the racism scale.

Same place I'd put fear of Christians or Buddhists I reckon. That is, Muslim isn't a race.
Holy shit this patch was like 5 MB. They're literally only adding the new search function, aren't they?
Not that it's a small thing or anything, but I dunno.

It seems to me to be something TIED to race in a correlative way. People seem to lump Islam in with Arabs and pretty much presume vice versa. And I've even heard anti-Muslim sentiment referred to as "racism against brown people."

Yeah but I've also been accused of Orientalism for finding brown girls attractive and contributing to the "remnants of crusader culture" (dead fucking serious [whatever that means]) so I don't think you get it both ways, pussy.
I was initially incredibly honored at the idea of contributing to crusader culture because fuck yeah the Crusades but then I realized this wasn't leveled as a good thing at me.
Whatever. Prepare to be purged, heathen. I'm still not entirely sure what they meant by that but Asian girls of all directions are attractive.

Certainly secular Arabs exist, and sometimes even engage in the most vociferous Islamaphobia, moderate Muslims try to distance themselves from more extremist groups and there are millions upon millions of ethnically Caucasian Muslims--Eastern Europeans being the largest groups but also large populations throughout Europe, and let's not forget converts. Technically, if you want to talk statistics, the largest populations of Muslims are EASTERN Asian--they live in China, Burma, Indonesia, and Malaysia.

Uh-huh. Let's talk about brown girls instead. A topic I find far more interesting than whatever these words that suddenly appeared on my screen and block quote form are.

Maybe my perceptions of Islam are colored too much by my own experience with it. I can't become another race, so when I became Muslim, it may have very much biased me towards the view of Islam as a religion, not an ethnicity.

My perception of Islam is that they keep their delicious brown girls covered in ridiculous Pac-Man ghost fashion. Deal with it.
That's why they're so angry I think. Christ all mighty, living in the 11th century and what consolation you have has to wear a drape like it's furniture and then it's so hot out there, good grief. Get these people some air conditioning.

Obviously I'm not talking about antagonism towards anyone wearing a turban--a particularly ignorant move on a bigot's part since the turbans almost always denote a Sikh rather than a Muslim anyway.

Or Abu from Aladdin.

Obviously I'm not talking about suspicious gazes as anyone with dark skin. That is clearly racism.

I don't trust anyone, dark skin or no.
For it is written: a suspicious mind is a healthy mind.

With Judaism, there's a sort of acknowledgment that the word "Jew" might be ethnic OR religious and often is some kind of hybrid between the two. And yet a lot of these same confusions seem to surround "antisemitism."

Arabs are Semites I get it. Fuck.
Why didn't this get your "I'm really boring" tag, exactly?

I understand that I tempt the irony demons. I do. I use "epic" to describe a cheeseburger and then roll my eyes when someone says "literally" before hyperbole.

I am literally going to find you and punch you in the face.
THIS IS A WRITTEN THREAT.

I am sure that somewhere my actions give an irony demon strength, and some day they may tear me to pieces,

Oh God please let this be so.

The article below is from the Washington Post detailing how Obama has quietly used executive power to expand federal rights and benefits for gays and lesbians.

Obama is a politician not a paladin.

If he were a paladin I'd have felt better about voting for him I'm sure.

He weights costs and benefits with a keen mind for how to work around obstructionism....and then he does what he can.

Hey wait I call bullshit. Paladins must be lawful good and using the law to extend your own goals is neutral at best. I'd personally contend using the law for your own ends is the epitome of chaos but I'm weird like that.

Ever notice that no matter how evolved Star Trek: TNG supposed to be, it's still a pair of able-bodied heterosexual white men telling people from various non-privileged groups how they ought to live?

No. Remember that episode with the psychic Romans? And there was a midget for some reason.
Oh that was the old one not "TNG", my mistake.

Or that for our incredibly enlightened future of incredible enlightenment, the crew is still mostly white.

What about Geordi? Worf was a Klingon and they're not even human.
Two of the primary cast are black and non-human, respectively.

Yes, that's a Ke$sha reference in my title. What y'all DON'T know about me could just about fill a cargo carrier.

Like you're gay, apparently.

I love boots on women. I have loved boots on women for a long time. I'm sure they are perfectly nice on men too, but I am tragically a flaming heterosexual.

Coulda fooled my ass.

About half the women on either campus I attend seem to be in boots anymore.

It's almost like it's cold outside and women wear boots in cold weather.
... Nah that's just crazy.

Whether it's something of dubious aesthetic value like Uggs, or the gloriously welcome fashion that has (forgive the pun) cropped up of riding boots.

... Is that a pun? Crop, riding crop, riding boots--
Fuck it I'm just going to give it to him to save myself this headache.

Healed, not, vinyl, leather, plether, whatever.

Heeled. Pleather. It stands for "plastic leather".
What do you call tanning not involving curing?
TAWING, though tawing isn't by definition tanning.
What do you call someone who makes shoes? A COBBLER.
What's that little hammer tanners use? AN AWL.
FUCK I KNOW SO MUCH ABOUT TANNING NOW.

They are one yummy accessory.

There is no way you say "yummy accessory" without having sucked at least one dick. Also I'm admittedly no expert on fashion but I'm pretty sure shoes aren't accessories.
Unless you live in the third world, of course HOOOOOOOOOOO--

But the very commonality of boots is lowering their awesome curve considerably.

Oh fuck you, hipster.

Used to be maybe one in twenty women wore boots, and they jumped out at you. BAM! Hi there! We're boots!

Used to sit by the statute of Athena at my campus and watch the girls walking by.
Those were good hours wiled away with Athena.
Of course I didn't think anything homo like this but whatever.

But like anything else, part of their charm wasn't objectively aesthetic, but had more to do with their relief against common fashion.

I'm amazed we're almost three paragraphs in and for a supposedly "flaming heterosexual" he hasn't mentioned the most obvious feature of any heeled shoe: they make the ass look firmer.

It's kind of like cleavage in a corset is very interesting, but if you're walking around Ren Faire, pretty soon you're kind of like "Ho hum, cleavage"

No way you are straight. It's okay, dude. Just be gay.
Now some sort of bondage queen (going by the avatar) comments, I never get comments-- OH GOD ARE YOU A HAMBEAST. IN BOOTS.
Now some kind of hipster bitch posts a picture of herself. Is that why this guy acts like this? Getting all the mad hipster pussy?
I can respect that--

I don't really have time to get INTO the thoughts right now, but between now and the last time I read The Tempest I took a criticism class, and my brain is going CRAZY with how post structuralists must have gone crazy on this play--

Maybe I'm just stupid but I thought The Tempest was cool because of that badass wizard guy.
In fact that's why I like almost all of what I read, not because "HURRR ORIENTALISM AND POST-STRUCTURALISM" God you're a pretentious douche.
Anyway this meandering post has dragged on long enough I feel and like the other two times I've viewed his blog I kind of forget what I'm talking about and just awash in pretentiousness.
So I guess it's safe to say "ye guilty".