Stop Being Violent On The Internet

Hi internet readers. I know, it's been a long time since I've posted. It's just that I've been terribly busy (no I haven't.) So, today, I'm supposed to be writing my resume, but instead I'm doing 1000 other unimportant things.

Also, it's Remembrance Day. If you don't know, this is the day that Canadians pay respect to everyone who gave their lives for our freedoms and specifically to this post, our right to free speech. Which, of course, includes my right to blog about whatever I feel like AND to insist that everyone reads it.

Okay, so, there has been some controversy about a "white poppy movement." Here, read this COMPLETELY TERRIBLE ARTICLE by the Toronto Sun which is the worst newspaper ever and displays biases and generalizations like it's its job. Actually, don't read that article. Read this one, because it actually gives you real background information. Please keep your eyes out for the word "alongside." It's important.

So, I'm getting to the point, just hold your horsies. I don't personally have a really strong opinion about the white poppy one way or the other. I personally choose to wear a red one, even though it doesn't really seem like it because I usually lose my poppy within 4 minutes of putting it in my coat. I think I've gone through 6 of them so far. Buuut, my opinion on that isn't really relevant.

So, if you didn't read the articles that I told you to read because you don't do everything that the internet tells you to do, here is a quick rundown of some info that you'll need to understand the rest of this babble. Feel free to skip if you're familiar with the situation.

1. A group in Ottawa has been trying to bring back the white poppy which is supposed to represent peace and anti-war.
2. Many people have taken offence to this movement, saying that it is disrespectful to the veterans who fought to ensure our rights to free speech and free lives.
3. Apparently somewhere along the way someone claimed that the red poppy glorifies war.
4. The red poppy people have been rage tweeting/commenting/facebooking for like a full week about it.

Okay! So here FINALLY is what annoys me about this situation. I will write it in bold. Just because you don't agree with someone doesn't mean you can threaten to kick them in the face and wish shame upon their entire existence and the existence of their children and their children's children. Seriously, it's kind of funny, because you're trying to argue against the glorification of violence by threatening violence. Wait, what? That doesn't make sense! 

So, now let's apply this to the bigger picture, because that's how we make changes in the world, or something. (There's a piece of life advice there somewhere, I know it.) I'm going to use some more bold font. Why do we think we can say whatever terrible, rude, violent, mean thing we want on the internet? It's actually so dumb. Yes, it's much easier to say whatever you please when you don't have to look someone in the face or hear their reactions. Why do you think I love pizza places that let you order online so much? (Because I'm terrified of the phone.) But is it RIGHT to say whatever mean thing you want to say to a person? No, it is not right. So stop doing it. Unless it's directed at a celebrity, then it's fine.

There are so many other fun things you could be doing on the internet. If being a total a-hole in the comment section of a website is the most fun thing you can come up with, you should probably go talk to a therapist about your childhood. Maybe keep a journal beside your laptop and you can express yourself there. Surely if your opinion is important enough, whatever you write there will be published as part of your memoirs sometime in the future or it'll be discovered post-apocalypse and be interpreted as some sort of religious text.

So, come on everyone. The internet is a place to come together and share happiness, not to call people names and wish them the worst. Life is tough enough without trolls releasing their troll-sorcery and vexing our first born children.

Professional Athletes

So the NHL lockout is over. I guess I'm happy? I don't really care. I mean I enjoy watching hockey but I don't think I actually missed it. When you think about it, professional sports are possibly the biggest joke in western society.

Here's a reminder to pro athletes: Your job is to PLAY A GAME. Settle down. Some people sit in their basements and dominate at World of Warcraft every day. These people are called "losers" even though who says that WoW is any less legit than hockey or baseball? Someone could pay them to do it and broadcast their quests on live TV. That would be the EXACT same thing. There's still a certain amount of skill involved and you're still getting paid to contribute absolutely nothing to society.

Here's my other big issue with professional athletics. If you're truly an amazing player, you should be able to take the most simple, least technologically advanced equipment, and play with it. Having these Ultra-flex FX-7000 Super-Mega Hockey Sticks is, in my opinion, pretty much cheating. It's like when Harry got the Nimbus 2000 and everyone else was riding around on Cleansweeps. Not fair. Because not everyone can afford the best of everything. I'm talking about the kids who are trying to get into the NHL or MLB or NBA (although I kind of feel like there's only so much you can do with a pair of b-ball shoes to make them better than another pair of b-ball shoes.) If this fancy equipment really makes SUCH a difference, it shouldn't be allowed.
Maybe we should wonder then if it really makes a difference at all or if it's all in your head because those shoes are SUPPOSED to make you jump 17 ft. in the air so CLEARLY that's how high you must be jumping right now. If one hockey stick is worth three times as much as another hockey stick, I'm expecting something kind of more like a rocket launcher that shoots pucks at 200mph.

These days, less fortunate kids, no matter how naturally talented they are, have almost NO chance of getting anywhere in sports because they can't pay to play. That's the kind of crushing heartbreak that ruins a person's life and makes them miserable in whatever job they do find. There's no such thing as kids being discovered in back alleyways by tough-but-kind coaches. That only happens in movies like The Mighty Ducks, not real life. (I know. The Blind Side was a movie about the true story of a kid who got taken off the streets and made it to the NFL. First rule of life: There are exceptions to every rule.)

In closing, my fellow people, it's all just a giant money grab, right? They get paid millions to play a game while the less-significant members of the population pay for tickets, t-shirts, jerseys, beer and chicken wings and watch the games. Sure, there are people making a living off of it, and we're all just trying to make it any way we can, right? But the people who are making the money off of pro sports are rarely making any reasonable amount. They're like Scrooge McDuck rich and they're not sharing it with ANYONE.
I don't really have a conclusion or a suggestion or a plan or anything. And I've been begging my father all morning to buy me Habs vs. Sens tickets. So this feels like a perfect place to stop so that you can have a chance to think about what I said and write a comment about how the NHL is fuelling something rather in the economy and bread tastes way better when Sydney Crosby is on the packaging and blah blah blah.

Note: This whole thing can be applied to movie stars and musicians in a way.

Internet Bandwagons, Scams and Bullying

I wrote a blog post a while ago regarding Invisible Children and Kony 2012 on one of my old Tumblr blogs (you can read it here if you'd like.) The point of the whole thing was my frustration with internet bandwagons. People support a cause because it's popular to support a cause, or people post whatever because that's what is popular right now. They don't think about it, they don't do any research, and often it's something they cared absolutely nothing about before.

Recently, a young girl committed suicide because she was being bullied over the internet. The video she posted on Youtube about a month ago was truly heartbreaking and gave everyone a lot to think about. Since then #RIPAmandaTodd has been trending on Twitter, and Facebook groups have been popping up everywhere to honour her memory.

Note: The rest of this post is in NO WAY meant to be disrespectful at all to anyone. It's only something I was thinking about.
Internet bullying has been around for a long time. We've all heard about it, some of us have taken part in it and some of us have been the victims. It's easy to bully people online. You don't have to look them in the eyes. You can think about everything you want to say or do beforehand. None of this is in real time. In fact, sometimes what goes on online doesn't even feel real. There's just enough disconnection from the bully and the victim that it's easy to avoid feeling guilty.
So I was thinking, why is it that only when stuff like this happens, when a girl posts a message on the internet before she kills herself, that we step up and say we need to end bullying?
There are countless stories like this. Kids being so bullied that they don't even want to be on earth anymore. And every time one of these stories ends up in the news, people say, "we need to do something about bullying." And this lasts for about a few weeks. Facebook groups pop up, people join them and then that's that. That's all you need to do to support something, right? Share it on Facebook and then go about your daily life.

And it's not just bullying. Let's look again at this whole Kony business. One of the crucial steps in the whole Kony 2012 plan was Cover The Night - basically running around and vandalizing stuff with Kony's name and picture. I don't believe I saw one Kony poster the day after Cover the Night, although I saw so many people on Facebook claim they would be "attending" the event. People just simply forgot about it. It was too far down the road from their initial viewing of the Kony 2012 video.

But that's the thing about the internet, isn't it? Everything is changing, all the time. There's too much information going in and coming out, you can't just concentrate on one thing, and you can't show support for everything. So we join groups, like statuses and retweet messages, hoping that that'll be enough. Someone else can do the hard stuff. Someone else can teach the anti-bullying classes and send money to the children of Uganda.

And I do this too. I'm not standing on any pedestal, wagging my finger at the world for not being better citizens. It's hard to be passionate about things these days.
Not only that, but it's hard to know what groups, or organizations or sad stories are for real. There are so many internet scams created everyday. People make up sad stories and attach an unsettling photo from Google so that they can have their photo shared thousands of times.

So when things like youth suicide happen, and when the entire world knows about it, it's hard to not join the "bandwagon" isn't it? You want to seem sensitive and so you like RIP Amanda Todd on Facebook and you retweet some stuff about her.
But then you actually read some of the things on the group's wall and there are people being disrespectful there. Saying that the people who bullied her should "go die."
And all I can think is, "did you all completely miss the point?" Why did you join a group remembering a girl who wants to stop bullying, if you're just going to be rude and disrespectful (a bully) while you're there? Just because the person you're bullying is a bully, doesn't mean that what you're doing is okay.

I'm not against supporting causes, or joining groups. I'm against the complete lack of thinking that you see on the internet every day. And it's not anyone's fault necessarily. Like I said, the information being thrown at us every day is astounding. Processing it all is more work than most people even realize and so I guess it's understandable that maybe you post things without thinking, or like groups without understanding what they're all about.

In closing, all of my blabbering about bandwagons and scams aside, I hope we never have to see another news story like this. I know, bullying is something that will probably never truly go away. But we can change things and hopefully this is truly the push we need to do it. Bullying awareness is something that I always remember being a part of education (did anyone else learn the warm fuzzies cold pricklies story?) but maybe it takes a story like this one to really make it sink in.

This Is Serious: Re-freaking-cycle.

Tonight we were on a mission. In Northern Ontario wildlife is everywhere, especially if you know where to look. Driving on the backroads near the dump, we came across a family of bears (we were in the car, of course.) This was adorable, especially because one cub was running around carrying a plastic container. Total YouTube cutie stuff, you know what I mean?

As it turns out though, the cub was not running merrily with a new toy. No, the plastic container was stuck right on it's head. We rolled the windows down, only to hear the desperate wails of the terrified little guy. To make it all even more heartbreaking, the bear ran blindly right into the side of our car. That sickening thump made everything worse. And there was nothing we could do.

So here's the thing, that little bear wouldn't have been in this predicament if some idiot had recycled his plastic container instead of throwing it in the dump or (even worse) on the road somewhere. Keeping a little blue bin outside your door is not a big deal. It's not going to kill you but as I've seen tonight, it may (more than likely will) kill innocent animals.

I keep telling myself "Winnie the Pooh got his head stuck in the hunny pot all the time." But this time Tigger won't be there to help the little guy and the Mommy bear won't let Christopher Robin anywhere near him. (Children's books often give the best life lessons, but in this case they didn't teach the unfortunate truth about real life bear's lack of knowledge about man-made items)

So "Shaaaame" (Mitch Pritchett, Modern Family.) Maybe think about it a little bit before you toss "just this one container, no big deal," into the garbage, because you may have just killed an animal.

This is a classic human fault. Who cares what happens to this piece of crap as long as it's out of your house ASAP? Recycling isn't all about cutting down on garbage or stopping global warming, etc. It can effect the world much sooner than you think it will.

And that's all I have to say about that. For now.

Taking "you look good enough to eat" to the Next Level

I don't know if you've been paying attention to the news (and if you haven't, stop reading right now and go live in a cave, because ignorance is most definitely bliss in this case) but honestly what is up with the increase of totally vulgar and disgusting crimes?! There are specifically four that come to mind here.

1. Guy chews off another guys face
2. Guy sends body parts to Canadian political parties
3. Guy disembowels himself and throws his insides at some cops
4. Guy kills his roommate and then eats his brain and heart

So obviously the best explanation for most of this is the zombie apocalypse. Duh.

Or maybe we should be blaming drugs. Or the psychological stresses of everyday life in America. Who knows if all of these things have anything in common. Are we breathing in a toxin that's turning us all into blood-thirsty lunatics?! Well, probably. Who knows how all the chemicals we've pumped into the air are mixing and effecting our bodies. Is our competitive nature really getting the best of us like this? (It's a human eat human world out there.) Are reality shows driving people completely mad!? Or is it all a big coincidence? (Secretly, this is my theory, although I like to pretend that I think people are just taking the saying, "you look good enough to eat" waaaay too seriously.)

I'm not going to address how disgusting and blah blah blah whatever this whole thing is. You can figure that out for yourself, I hope. If you don't see what's wrong here, then you're probably going to be featured on the news pretty soon as well. Hey, maybe it's the fame game that's making people crazy. ([eat] skin to win.)

Well, I've used enough bad jokes here, and I think you get the point. So goodnight, sleep tight, and don't let the zombies bite.

Alene