Xavia

FORM OF XAVIER

Self Centered, Self Involved, Self Destructive
Olivia Stren on the self-love of narcissists

[Flare Magazine (Nov.10) - Excerpt]
"Narcissism is the dark side of individualism," says Campbell, who explains that while North American society has long celebrated the individual and the pursuit of happiness, narcissism is individualism run amok; if individualism is the character actor, narcissism is the reality TV star. "It's individualism without responsibilty, without a fundamental sense of equality - it gets easily perverted. The pursuit of happiness can go from liberty to doing whatever the hell you want. It's the idea of license versus liberty." [...]

Narcissists, tending to be charming and self-promotional, also have a talent for initiating shallow relationships - making sites such as Facebook a fantasyland for the everyday narcissist. Facebook may not have caused the epidemic, and may not have the power to turn the average user into a narcissist, but it serves as a playpen for narcissists, giving them the arena to do what they love: peacock and self-promote. "What we've found is that narcissistic people who use Facebook, use it as a way of maintaining their narcissism - to present themselves with highly attractive and provocative images. It allows people who are narcissistic to be narcissistic." In that sense, Facebook is to the narcissist, what the liquor store is to the alcoholic - it won't create one so much as fuel one. [...]

MUSIC
Insatiable

TORONTO
Playing Games

Dayo

"JOY ARRIVES"












Brad Goreski, the Zelig of Fashion Week

Geeks Versus Hipsters
COMMENTS
"I know the point of the picture is to illustrate how alike the two castes are, but the crucial differences are in the motives behind the items on each individual.

The guy on the left is holding an iPhone because that's what other hipsters do. He's wearing odd clothing because that's what other hipsters do. He's wearing glasses because that's what other hipsters do.

The guy on the right is holding an iPhone because he has a love for technology. He's wearing a geeky T-shirt because he loves Star Trek. He's wearing glasses because he can't see.

That's the difference between the two groups. Geeks do what they do because its what they love (or need) to do. The aesthetic is a byproduct of that. The hipster artificially manufactures the aesthetic for the sake of the aesthetic. Its inorganic, and thus reviled."

"I feel like one big reason why Geeks have a problem with hipsters is that hipsters are taking all of the image benefits of being a Geek (being outside the mainstream, intelligence), without having gone through the pain of being a Geek. Being a Geek, particularly in high/middle school, can suck. Seriously fucking suck. It's sort of like when a wealthy politician tries to appropriate some tenuous connection to poverty; they don't really deserve the positives without taking the negatives as well."

"The difference between a real nerd and a Hipster. .. talent. When you're really good at what you do, you don't need to dress the part.
The Real geeks out there are at the race track or the university lab or the brewery, or the dark room, and they look like normal people. They don't have time to play geek.
Sort of the same reason only middle classs people wear luxury brands with giant logos."

"You weren't wrong when you commented 'To Geek is to Love' But it's not only that. A geek will explore and create the sub-culture to which the Hipsters glean from.

The geeks are the miners, digging deeper, looking to create the next cool thing—whether it is Art, tech, music, or fashion.

Then the hipsters, the consumers, They are the ones trying to make it fashionable or marketable. It's not to say that hipsters don't have any original thoughts. They just have the money to exploit other's.

'He's the one the that sings all our pretty songs, but he don't know what it means'. — Kurt Cobain

A hipster can appreciate the geek, but will never understand the process that it took to create that thing that they wear/ listen too/ or use.

Which makes anyone who is a hipster, and not a geek about anything... dare I bring it back... a poser. And that is the saddest of all."

"To me a hipster is someone who's taken on the mantle of "geek" or "nerd" because it is now a cool thing to be. Like how some people started dressing like truckers because Ashton Kutcher did it. They may look like a geek, they may talk something like a geek, but they've never stayed up until sunrise roll playing, kit-bashing, root hacking, guild raiding, kernel compiling, component tuning, spec comparing, code debugging, reference reading, photo time-lapsing, achievement unlocking, photoshop tweaking, costume making, board-game playing, sound remastering, library digitizing or many of the other things most of us do weekly. Scratch the surface and there isn't much actual geekery under there.

But I don't hate them. Quite the contrary, as long as we can sell them hopelessly overpriced geek-nostalgia laced paraphernalia I'm all for them."

"I stopped caring for labels long ago. I met so many labeled people (hipsters, punks, indies, skinheads) who were extremely nice, and some quite loathful gadget loving geeks.

It all boils down to whether the person is a douche or not."

THE BIG BANG THEORY
Tampon Talk
Who's Smarter: Sheldon or Leonard?
Sheldon the Germaphobe
The Friendship Algorithm
Johnny Galecki: interview



Move for Me
Bulletproof
Day 'n' Night
Stereo Love
Like a G6

Galadriel

"MAIDEN CROWNED WITH A RADIANT GARLAND"



Tagger Sheds Light


A Hidden World, Growing Beyond Control
The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.

Blood Sugar and Insulin: The Essentials
You have approximately 5 liters of blood traveling around in your blood vessels and heart at any given moment. In these 5 liters of blood, you need only about one teaspoon of sugar for all of your regular activities. If you regularly have more than a teaspoon of sugar floating through your blood vessels, the excess sugar can slow down your circulation, which, over time, can cause all of the problems you would expect to have if you had thick maple syrup clogging up your blood vessels. This is essentially what happens when a person becomes diabetic.

Lawsuits You Should Know About
StreetSpark
Fans of Underground Restaurants/Supperclubs
Mass Mingling
Reality Stars: Where Are They Now?
Is There Anything Wrong With Temptation Island?
Non-Invasive Ways to Measure Blood Glucose Levels
Move-It Box Trolley
Warm Up the Nation's Welcome
New tips on extending a warm welcome to overseas visitors in the run up to the 2012 Olympics are launched today by VisitBritain, the national tourism agency.

10 Lame Roles
New 'Superbug'



Naturally

Rosamund

"PURE ROSE"



Jud Turner



San Jose: The Deepest Tuck
San Jose isn't the coolest town. It's a good place to earn a living, there are some wonderful people and plenty of parking, but it's just not the coolest. [...]

I live downtown, and Saturday night is such a human disaster zone that it's actually overtly hilarious. The first time I took a stroll around all the clubs, it was sort of like the time I went to an anime convention: the toughest part was trying not to laugh straight at people. You haven't seen San Jose until you've seen a rail-thin geek walking to the clubs with all his bros and stopping in the middle of the sidewalk to perform a deep, deep frontal tuck of his pastel green polo shirt into his cargo jorts. [...]

To be fair, San Jose isn't all deep-tucked nerdbros and Popeye Crockers; there's actually a thriving hipster scene. The major difference between the scene here and the scene in any other city in the world, though, is that San Jose hipsterism isn't based on art or music. It's all about bikes. The local youth culture is dominated by fixies, which are like regular bikes but brakeless and functionally useless (but San Jose is completely flat, so who cares). There's a monthly event called "Bike Party," during which thousands of fixie dorks ride down the street yelling "BIKE PARTEH!"-- and that's pretty much the upper coolness limit of the local scene. [...]



Points of Attraction
What makes a person attractive? For me, it goes beyond looks and intelligence and I've come up with a point system to illustrate this.



Kia Hamsters Not Boring Enough for Future Ads, Company Says


David & Goliath

Delilah

"DELICATE, WEAK, LANGUISHING"


4chan: Feeding Children to Trolls
You've probably taken a whiff of the so-called “asshole of the internet” by now. Maybe you've been Rickrolled. You might have lolled at a lolcat. You may even have been touched by Pedobear. But it's extremely likely that you have — consciously, or not — experienced one of the many memes birthed by the legion of Anon (anonymous contributors) to 4chan.org's infamous “random” subforum /b/. [...]

Some members of /b/ justify trolling as a way of exposing vulnerability. After all, if it weren't for that jerk at the parade, the emperor would still think he was wearing clothes, and that wouldn't be very good at all. But trolling isn't always that positive. It may be good for everyone to learn that the emperor is indeed naked, but do we really need to know that 13-year olds are emotionally unstable and bad at grammar? Does knowing that help the 13-year-old any? Does knowing that help us? [...]

Is the goal of trolling to breed a generation of passionless cynics? To make sincere Internet users become trolls, too? [...]

Malwebolence: The World of Web Trolling
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. [...]

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.” [...]

Among /b/’s more interesting spawn is Anonymous, a group of masked pranksters who organized protests at Church of Scientology branches around the world. [...]

Technology, apparently, does more than harness the wisdom of the crowd. It can intensify its hatred as well. [...]

Fortuny disagreed. In his mind, subjecting epileptic users to flashing lights was justified. “Hacks like this tell you to watch out by hitting you with a baseball bat,” he told me. “Demonstrating these kinds of exploits is usually the only way to get them fixed.” [...]

Does free speech tend to move toward the truth or away from it? When does it evolve into a better collective understanding? When does it collapse into the Babel of trolling, the pointless and eristic game of talking the other guy into crying “uncle”? Is the effort to control what’s said always a form of censorship, or might certain rules be compatible with our notions of free speech? [...]

Why inflict anguish on a helpless stranger? It’s tempting to blame technology, which increases the range of our communications while dehumanizing the recipients. Cases like An Hero and Megan Meier presumably wouldn’t happen if the perpetrators had to deliver their messages in person. But while technology reduces the social barriers that keep us from bedeviling strangers, it does not explain the initial trolling impulse. This seems to spring from something ugly — a destructive human urge that many feel but few act upon, the ambient misanthropy that’s a frequent ingredient of art, politics and, most of all, jokes. There’s a lot of hate out there, and a lot to hate as well. [...]

Many trolling practices, like prank-calling the Hendersons and intimidating Kathy Sierra, violate existing laws against harassment and threats. The difficulty is tracking down the perpetrators. In order to prosecute, investigators must subpoena sites and Internet service providers to learn the original author’s IP address, and from there, his legal identity. Local police departments generally don’t have the means to follow this digital trail, and federal investigators have their hands full with spam, terrorism, fraud and child pornography. But even if we had the resources to aggressively prosecute trolls, would we want to? Are we ready for an Internet where law enforcement keeps watch over every vituperative blog and backbiting comments section, ready to spring at the first hint of violence? Probably not. All vigorous debates shade into trolling at the perimeter; it is next to impossible to excise the trolling without snuffing out the debate. [...]

Of course, none of these methods will be fail-safe as long as individuals like Fortuny construe human welfare the way they do. As we discussed the epilepsy hack, I asked Fortuny whether a person is obliged to give food to a starving stranger. No, Fortuny argued; no one is entitled to our sympathy or empathy. We can choose to give or withhold them as we see fit. “I can’t push you into the fire,” he explained, “but I can look at you while you’re burning in the fire and not be required to help.” [...]

How to Troll 4chan!!1

The Art of Trolling: Inside a 4chan Smear Campaign
COMMENTS
Serious question: Doesn't 4chan's owner have any sense of decency? Why doesn't he do something about this?
Can't anyone do something about this?

Reply: There are hundreds of thousands of posts on 4chan on an hourly basis. For /b/, the board in question, there is a full-time staff of moderators trying to keep highly illegal content off the front page. And that's about all that can be done.

Moot can't control the group, because the group can't control the group. Think how geese migrate - there is a collective direction, and individual groups within the flock, but for the most part, it's a bunch of bird brains heading south.

11-Year-Old Viral Video Star Placed Under Police Protection
COMMENTS
Why isn't there a board dedicated to revealing the personal info of 4chan users?

Reply: there is such a board. it's called the 'party van'. and it's dedicated to bringing down teh lulz wherever it may be found. but many of these people are hiding behind 7 proxies to avoid being caught.


4chan Hackers Attack Gawker Again
COMMENTS
The disturbing thing is that this militant arm of 4Chan, with its publicly accessible /b/ board and livechat, is not the worst thing about them by a long shot. There's a hidden website associated as a branch of 4Chan that looks like a carbon copy version of 4Chan.org that's dedicated entirely to child pornography, and the members are essentially one in the same. The technology that enables them to run this website is the same that allows them to troll as they do without being found out.

Reply: Yes, there are pedophiles on 4chan, the anonymous nature of it almost guarantees that the fucked up crazies come out of the woodwork. Posting child porn on 4chan will get your IP banned, but if you use a proxy there's not much else you can do, hence they persist. But 4chan is in no way related to child pornography websites. I'm sure they share some of the same users but not as many as go to 4chan just to look at funny pictures when they're bored. There's also no technology that enables anyone to run a website devoted to child porn openly, all sites are hosted from a static IP address which is traceable to a server that hosts the content. If you know of a site like that report it to the FBI or Interpol and they can get whatever company that hosts the server or provides internet access to the server to shut it down.

Arielle

FORM OF ARIEL


BARF BAG

DOUCHE

MINI PIZZAS

RETAINER


COCAINE

ROOMBA

WALK OF SHAME

iPHONE

PASTIES

VENUS



LOUIS VUITTON BONG

RECTAL THERMOMETER

MOTOR OIL

FERRARI


TASER




VIRGIN MARY



DARTH VADER

HANNIBAL LECTER





HELLO KITTY HELL: The Beginning
FAQ
You are the biggest pussy whipped guy I have ever seen. Why don’t you grow some balls and just divorce your wife?
And you, dear reader, are an ignorant idiot. You read about a tiny slice of my life and decide that from that you have the right to tell me how to live it and what I should do? Quite frankly, it’s none of your damn business, but when you agree to tell me about one part of your life and from that, I get to determine what you should do in every other aspect your life, then I’ll gladly answer this question for you.