Monthly Archives: May 2008

Being Mean Equals Being Stupid

Posted on by LtL

The world is a violent and chaotic place. Ok, I can accept that. I can accept that governments are corrupt and capitalists are greedy and that bigotry and hatred are, perhaps, inevitable consequences of being human. Ok. It’s a tough place out there and life isn’t for the faint of heart or the overly sensitive. Got it.

But can we stop being so goddamned mean to each other?

So much of our mediascape, from Top Model and Trading Spouses to Fox News to our political campaigns, seems designed around the principle that there is nothing so entertaining as setting people up to be judged and ridiculed. There is a growing meanness of spirit to our culture that has nothing to do with ideological differences but seems, in my mind, to do with a basic lack of empathy and of manners.

I blame—at least partly—the Trix cereal commercials from when I was a kid. A generation grew up with the idea that it’s perfectly all right, perfectly innocent to be deliberately cruel to another sentient being. Sure, the rabbit was a bit of a cereal junky and probably needed an intervention and I am well aware that the rabbit was a cartoon and, therefore, not real. But the message of the commercials was quite clear: hey kids, it’s ok to be mean and cruel to someone not as fortunate as you, someone who may need some smak cereal real bad.

mean 2 |min| |mi?n|

adjective

1 unwilling to give or share things, esp. money; not generous : she felt mean not giving a tip | they’re not mean with the garlic.

2 unkind, spiteful, or unfair : it was very mean of me | she is always mean to my little brother.

• vicious or aggressive in behavior : the dogs were considered mean.

3 (esp. of a place) poor in quality and appearance; shabby : her home was mean and small.

• (of a person’s mental capacity or understanding) inferior; poor : it was obvious to even the meanest intelligence.

If you think about it, the connection between these different definitions (selfish, spiteful, vicious, and mentally inferior) are not so much different definitions of the word “mean” but are actually four sides of the same coin.(1) To be any one of those is to be the others. Perhaps it’s no surprise then that, as we dumb down our entertainment, it becomes vicious, as we become increasingly aggressive toward the world at large, we learn selfishness and spite. As we become less generous of spirit, we degrade our mental capacity.

Being Mean = Being Stupid

So stop it. Please.

Thanks.

1. Don’t ask, I have no idea.

A Line in the Sand

Posted on by LtL

Ok, I’m all for making up words. Hell, as a Joss Whedon fan, I buy into the validity turning almost any word into an adjective or adverb, and I don’t have too much trouble turning nouns into verbs on a regular basis since most things are process in a philosophical sense, but reading this publisher’s description of Jeffrey Archer’s A Prisoner of Birth, I have to draw the line:

Thus begins Jeffrey Archer’s poignant and unputdownable novel of deception, hatred and revenge, in which only one of them can finally triumph, while the other will spend the rest of his days in jail. But which one? This suspenseful novel takes the listener through so many twists and turns that no one will guess the ending, even the most ardent of Archer’s many, many fans

[From audible.com: | A Prisoner of Birth (Unabridged)]

“Unputdownable?”

That’s not clever or cute, it’s just damn lazy!

New – Old Look and the Aesthetics of Blogging

Posted on by LtL

Recently, I’d done a major change to the look of LtL:

Picture 1.png

And I liked it, I really did. I was proud of the background and how it integrated with the header image, and I liked the header image too – the colors really pop and provide a cold luminescence that is both bright but also gives the sense of something gritty. But after only a few days I’ve returned to a very simple and clean look because, in the end, the experience I want to offer on this site is primarily one of reading. I mean, sure, I’ve got my music and sound design pages, and I post YouTube videos on a regular basis to share neat stuff with friends, family and the few strangers who stop by, but the main purpose is to communicate thoughts, ideas, essays, stories, half-baked arguments, crazy theories, daily minutia, etc. I found the new design to be overly aggressive, distracting from the main point.

I’m glad took the time to play around with the CSS to the level that I did, and I may very well clean the theme up and post it on the WordPress themes site for others to use. I’ll probably use the background over at my Sound Design site LtL Sound. For now, at least for Living the Liminal, I’m sticking with an aesthetic that highlights the text and the entries and offers little to no distraction. I’m even going to leave the header sans image for now, until I find something I feel fits the aesthetic that I’m going for.

I want to give Ash Hague a big thanks for his simple and clean designs. I’m actually using them on both LtL and Letters to Lost Friends. I find that I tend to tweak the fonts and font sizes a bit, but other that that, his themes are simple, clean and elegant (and though rounded corners would be cool, my recent experiments with themes over at Letters showed me how tricky those can be).