Something to chew over…
I’m the sort of person who specialises in over analysing things, particularly stuff that’s inherently ridiculous. Perhaps that’s why I find this comic from the xkcd archives so funny.
Back to uni tomorrow. Probably the best place for me. Well, except maybe here.
This particular rant is being written after a not entirely pleasant experience with The Culture Show on BBC Two. Perhaps I’m not looking at it in a particularly forgiving way given that I’m currently fuming at the BBC both for pushing Doctor Who back a week and airing reality-clone Any Dream Will Do? and the horror of Eurovision in its place, as well whoever’s responsible for my new Arrested Development DVDs not working, but along with a nimber of other things its made me throughly depressed over what people think “culture” is.
For a start, it had Mark Kermode in it. Mark Kermode is one of those people who manages to be able to infuriate me without even trying. The first experience I had of him was on Newsnight Review’s look at the at the time soon to be released Wii, and had him criticizing it – and by extension games in general – for being too enjoyable. Because of course, its a video game, which apparently are more addictive and damaging than heroin if you believe what the “critics” say. Personally I’m of the opinion that anyone who uses the words “brain” and “fry” in the same sentence while talking about games really shouldn’t be anywhere near a debate on gaming.
The fact that Kermode was on this show at all sort of set the tone for the whole thing. Nearly everything shown was about “good” culture coming from supposedly “bad” culture. The segment on the illustrated guide to the 9/11 commission report was littered with thousands of comments about superheros and talking dogs, as well as a question as to whether it was in poor taste. This is almost exactly like the games example – the reviewers already have a preconceptions to what something is (in this case, comics), and instead of accepting that it may be more than what they believe it to be, they declare it unacceptable. The thing is, this is exactly what allows misconceptions like this to continue, despite the fact that there have been plenty of serious graphic novels and games for a while now.
These are some of the more blatant examples. At other times it’s more subtle – “instead of MySpace and video games, they’re playing chess!”. There’s nothing wrong with playing chess, but is there something wrong with games. People will often say that there is some sort of inherent “badness” about them, but the thing is this “badness” doesn’t exist – its created and spread by misunderstanding and fear.
I’m fed up with “culture wars”, and I’m fed up with the things I enjoy being seen as a lesser form of “culture” because someone further up an imaginary hierarchy says it is. Isn’t culture supposed to be defined by the people?
Have I told you about Something Happens? If I have, I’ll apologise, but it’s worth mentioning again, because it’s a very good webcomic. It’s got a slightly surreal vibe to it – sort of “it’s not real but it very easily could be” type of thing, and is very funny.
Favourite comics so far include Etch-A-Sketch, Virtual Reality, Kyle, You, Awesome, Waiting, and The Zednoughts. They should give you a good idea of what the strip is about. Today’s strip involves squirrels as well, which are always good to have in any comic.
On a personal note, I do have pictures from Castleton, but I’ll talk about that later. And in other news, I also finally got hold of a Wii! I’m having trouble getting it on the internet though, but hopefully that will get sorted soon, so life is going OK.
I get riduculously concerned over dumb things. The worst part is I know that they’re dumb and I know that it’s just me, so it gets a little annoying arguing with myself (which I can do for hours. I can get very annoying.)
The only reason I can think of as to why I’m so out of it at the moment is that I’ve somehow been turned into some sort of emo student determined to let everyknow how depressed he is. I’m honestly not quite sure how that happened, but the poor readers out there now have to face the results.
Sorry readers. Though actually, I do think people moan far too much about “emo” blogs to the point it’s almost ironic – “Oh, I’m SURROUNDED by all of these blogs everywhere, I can’t get away…they’re all so horrible and depressing and self obsessed…and they’re always MOANING!”
Hope you can forgive my occasional rants – I will try and at least make them fun to read (emphasis on try). Anyway, in order to get away from all that., I think I’ll plug some comics. You may have noticed the Comic list by the side, so I figured I’d bring in a random link, and these ones were good to start off with. Try them.
You might like them.