ballp.it
Projects => The F Plus => Topic started by: agentanalogue on February 11, 2013, 07:52:25 pm
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This one is aimed mostly at the readers, but I'd love to hear other people's reactions too.
Do any of you feel guilty about any of the episodes? I'm not saying you SHOULD, but there are a few that have given me a pang or two just for listening to over the years. As we've clearly established, not all subjects are equally unlikeable after all.
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Is there anything I'm supposed to feel guilty over? Because, honestly, I don't feel the slightest iota of it. I'm aware of the concept of guilt, but nothing in this show has provoked it.
The closest thing that would come to provoking guilt would have been reading the juggaromance on Facebook, and that only because they were such painfully witless people without, perhaps, the slightest iota of recognition that this woefully white trash tragi-romance was made the butt of a half hour of the Internet-at-large's amusement. It comes close because they were such clearly gormless people, squabbling in public, that it became clear to me during that reading what all those centuries-old English authors were getting on about with the snobbery and patronization of the lower classes.
And then Isfahan made a wisecrack explaining "tht" and what vestiges of proto-guilt I might have been in danger of feeling were washed away in a bright peal of laughter.
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I feel some slight guilt over the Asexuality episode and the Quicksand episode, in both cases because people I personally know were read on those episodes and (hopefully) have no idea that they were read in silly voices.
OwlSaint (Who was read by STOG - "OCCUPY LIVING ROOM!"), as I mentioned in the Irregular episode about the same subject, is someone who I know because they were a regular player (and later DM) of various D&D campaigns which various AVENites took part in, including myself.
Vandercat (Who was read by Lemon in his AARON TANK voice) happens to be a friend of mine, and we still chat fairly regularly. I don't know if he knows about the episode or not, but he hasn't said anything about it to me yet.
As a matter of fact, I feel a slight pang of guilt about the quicksand episode in general because a couple of good friends of mine are quicksand fetishists, but at least one of them has said they thoroughly enjoyed the episode, so I don't feel quite so bad about it.
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Not really guilt, but I guess the closest I've come to sympathy was seeing horribly unsocialized people trying to be social and not quite making it, though mostly that was just from embarrassment on their behalf.
I was about to say most of the exhibits in the furry dating episode were somewhat sympathetic, but many of them had damning qualities to them. The gargoyle-wannabe was too lazy to work out and get the muscles he wanted, the hyena-girl just blatantly wanted money for being female, the Scottish skunkbear was into diapers, the wolf-guy from Maryland was trying too hard to come off as edgy, and the Most Extreme Furry in the World, Seriously wanted someone he could leech off of while "pursuing his life's work."
That said, I wish Hinaru (the fox temp from Yorktown) and the Certified Faguar the best of luck in finding romance.
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Chaz, the source of your guilt is coming from a different place because you're associated in some way with everything you've listed. agentmonster cockogue is trying to find out if there's guilt even with detachment from the subject matter. You're not detached from asexuals or sinking fetishists, so of course it's going to sting a little for you when their slide comes up on the Powerpoint.
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I know it's a popular episode, but Angry Angry Hippos was difficult for me to listen to. While I can't directly relate to their specific problems, body shame is something I have a hard time laughing at. The person who escaped the dr's office through a window just made me really sad.
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More often it's secondhand embarrassment. I still can't listen to the Hetalia fanfiction portion of the Sissy Kiss episode because I enjoy Hetalia, insofar as the concept of nation avatars, and the fandom just horrifies me in new and astounding ways every day.
An example of somewhat humorous guilt, I feel like a bad person for laughing at Dream of the Rood in lit class. It's an old poem about the crucifixion told from the point of view of the tree that became the cross— and everything about it reminds me of that one story told from the perspective of cling film.
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I know it's a popular episode, but Angry Angry Hippos was difficult for me to listen to. While I can't directly relate to their specific problems, body shame is something I have a hard time laughing at. The person who escaped the dr's office through a window just made me really sad.
fruit power, February 11, 2013, 09:27:27 pm
I know what you mean. I do think the Ridiculists did a good job up at the beginning of distinguishing between having a healthy perspective on being happy at any size and the sheer "Fat Supremacy" attitude that seemed replete in the content they read, but even so, these people are just so sad it's easy to slip into some feeling-sorry places.
Still one where funny overwhelmned guilt by tons (no pun intended) for me.
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I've found that with every episode I feel nervous about going in, I'm comfortable and laughing as soon as it starts. The asexual episode worried me because I have asexual friends (two of which were in the following Irregular, hi Chaz), but the first reading made me go "Oh, THOSE asexuals". Size acceptance is a big (hurr) thing for me because I spent sixteen years being told I was unhealthy and needed to exercise more/go on a diet by doctors, when the truth was that I had an enzymatic disorder keeping me from digesting food properly--especially since I had to be hospitalized with an ovarian cyst the size of a chicken egg for them to take a second look at me and diagnosis me correctly. But as aforementioned, the fat activist episode made a clear distinction between being happy and healthy and being in denial, and the other weight-related episodes did the same thing, as well as pointing out the inherently dangerous, codependent dynamic of the feeder/gainer fetish.
Every time an F+ episode has focused on a community, it's focused on the worst of that community, and I think that's what sets it apart. It's also never truly mean-spirited, which I think a lot of people don't get about snark. The majority of the stuff you make fun of, you don't truly hate, it's just mockable and funny. There are exceptions, like RooshV, where you honestly want the guy locked up and eating live jellyfish for the rest of his life, but those are reasonable exceptions. If you're hurting people or facilitating people being hurt, it's not a roast, it's a point being made.
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I like the crazy Louisville lady episode, but when I stop to think about it I can't help but feel bad for her. Despite how irrational her conspiracies are, her fears are still very real to her and she has to live with that every day. Kinda like how Morgellons disease sounds totally absurd, but the people who think they're afflicted by it are scared of something they don't or can't understand.
It's a little different with the anti-Polio vaccine people from Mothering.com, though. That one annoys me because they're involving children into it.
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I've thought about Connie Marshall for a bit and I have to wonder about how her crazy balances with her ability to function at least somewhat in society. I mean, she lives in a house, has Internet access, and has had things like cable in the past, which means she's got it together enough (and has enough money) to pay bills, right? I'm thinking the crazy must hit her in phases and then go away later, leading to some selective memory and confusion when she drifts in and out. This is all complete layperson guessing, but debilitatingly crazy people would have difficulty maintaining a stream of income.
Well, there's also Mai Trang-Thai Nguyen, and she's living in one of the most expensive cities in America, so I guess all bets are off.
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How do we know she's the one paying the bills, though? Could be that she's living on the dime of a family member or someone else close to her. My mom is a bipolar schizophrenic who hasn't had a job in decades, but she has her own apartment in a suburb on the north shore of Long Island. A decent lifestyle doesn't necessarily imply an ability to get along in society.
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A lot of people who are paranoid or have ocd (or a mix of both) are really good employees because they have excellent proficiency at focusing and performing tasks. That is as long as the job doesn't interfere with their obsessions anyway. If their boundaries aren't crossed, they can turn off the crazy long enough to get through a work day. These are people who spend all waking hours focused on survival. Keeping a steady paycheck is often important to them.
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I've got to say, I did feel sorry for the gangstalking people way the fuck back when there was an episode on them. Some of those people are probably not crazy but suffering from genuine mental illness.
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What does crazy mean to you exactly, certified crazy person?
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A lot of people who are paranoid or have ocd (or a mix of both) are really good employees because they have excellent proficiency at focusing and performing tasks. That is as long as the job doesn't interfere with their obsessions anyway. If their boundaries aren't crossed, they can turn off the crazy long enough to get through a work day. These are people who spend all waking hours focused on survival. Keeping a steady paycheck is often important to them.
fruit power, February 12, 2013, 03:03:56 pm
Mom always said a little bit of OCD can be a very productive thing. The trick is medicating it to the point where it's honing your skills and attention, but not forcing you to spend three hours on a single task.
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I felt guilty about making fun of the Fat Activist people, until I found out what they were really like. The thing is, FAs really only have one agenda, and that is to blame everything on everyone else and not accept any personal responsibility. You've listened the episode, so you know that they'll go to ridiculous lengths in order to not only explain why it is COMPLETELY IMPOSSIBLE to lose weight, but also why everyone else should go out of their way in order to accommodate their issues and problems. Can't fit into a movie theater seat? Remodel all theaters everywhere! Getting fatigued when climbing up the stairs? Stairs are oppressing me, eliminate all stairs! They're all for tolerance and peace and love, until someone dares to say something they don't like. Then they are suddenly all for rules and laws dictating how people should behave and what opinions everyone else is allowed to have. I'm perfectly willing to accept people of all size, shape and color, but don't expect me to jump every time you shout the magic word "Privilege!"
Another issue is that the FA agenda can be downright harmful in some cases, which they vehemently refuse to acknowledge. Attacking a mother who's concerned that her five-year-old refuses to eat anything but pizza and hamburgers is not helping the child. Likewise, denying that people's health could possibly have anything to do with their weight is not only stupid, it's being accessory to suicide. My grandfather died of a diabetes related heart attack in his late 50s. He could have lived longer, but because he refused to keep to his diet his body couldn't take the stress. He was very much of his generation, which had not been thought about proper nutrition or the dangers of obesity. You wanna be fat? Fine, it's your life, but don't go telling stupid people it's completely okay to weigh half a ton and it will absolutely not have any harmful effects on your body.
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I agree with Montrith here. I'm sympathetic to the idea of accepting people regardless of their body shape, but that's different than pandering to unhealthy life decisions. It's funny because I went into the episode thinking 'I might actually feel a bit bad about this' and came out unable to believe that these people were so willingly obtuse. I think that's the case of a lot of these Tumbler-SJ type groups - groups which, superficially, seems to be supporting a reasonable cause, but which have clearly taken a sharp right away from reality and have become subsumed in their own little inbred world.
I don't feel like the ridiculists have really treated anyone unfairly, and the sympathetic subjects actually tend to come across more as endearing in their readings than anything else. Like the clingfilm guy. God I love the clingfilm guy.
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Yeah, accepting people regardless of their body type is one thing, but these people are denialists. They claim that there is no way to change your weight even with diet and exercise, and that there are no medical downsides to obesity. Literally every doctor I have ever visited has said otherwise. They're like Creationists or Climate Change deniers. They simply reject science that they dislike, and that isn't okay on the left wing or the right wing.
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If the impression of the podcast is "we look at stuff and then make fun of it," that's not the whole spirit of it. For my own part, I try to have my humor originate from a source different than "haha this is weird," because really, there are tons and tons of people from tons and tons of sites who do that already and it's fucking Easy Mode. Instead, I try to give a cursory monster cockysis of what we're reading and extrapolating a kind of universally-understood ridiculousness from it, something that potentially even the exhibits would have to agree is funny.
A perfect example is the boob-inflation stuff. If it was just us going "haha people who like boob inflation are weird," that would have stopped being funny about thirty seconds in. However, the writing itself served up most of the humor, and the boob-inflation as a theme took a backseat.
"Wait, her bra is cutting into her tits and denting them? That sounds like it would hurt."
"If you're into boob growth and you're here reading this because you find it hot, do you really give a shit what they're filling with?"
Another is the Superpwrful Piss story. It's a story about people holding in piss and omorashi and whatever, but it's just so badly written—and genuinely badly written, too, which is getting rarer and rarer—that it could have been in a bad-writing episode all on its own, even if the layer of fetishism wasn't there. The readers gave it the same treatment: gleaning humor from the writing rather than the subject.
The central theme which ties stuff together into an episode is more often a backdrop for the real funny stuff, which is why I don't really feel guilty. We make fun of people who have genuinely unlikeable traits about them (PUAs, bad mothers, pretentious bands), and for the people who are just weird or crazy, we get our laughs from the stuff they write, not they themselves (fetishists, new-age folks, Basil Marceaux). To me, it seems self-evident, though I think I have a hard time explaining my perspective on it.
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What does crazy mean to you exactly, certified crazy person?
Zsa Zsa, February 13, 2013, 05:39:15 am
From my perspective a crazy person is someone with strange or off the wall thoughts. A person who has an actual organic mental illness is sick, not crazy. To be crazy you have to have some sort of really weird opinion or fixation that can only be explained by your own bizarre thinking. In my case that is political opinions that haven't been popular in this country for the better part of a century. In other cases it might be thinking that you have PTSD because you were tortured in the astral realm in a past life, or thinking that rubbing your dick with another dick has vast spiritual meaning. Crazy isn't necessarily bad either, I rather like my strange opinions, but it's certainly abnormal.
So a person who is housebound because they have PTSD from the war and staying inside their own home all the time is the only way to control their environment in such a way as to avoid triggering a flashback isn't crazy, they are mentally ill and should never be mocked for that. They need compassion and free medical care. But a person who never leaves their house because they are afraid that wild feminists will spermjack them is just fucking nuts. That's my position on the matter.
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"If you're into boob growth and you're here reading this because you find it hot, do you really give a shit what they're filling with?"Isfahan, February 13, 2013, 04:37:39 pm
I'd have to say yes, on account of the whole sugar thing is one of the squickiest things I've ever heard. I think it's entirely possible to be part of the weirdest kink community in the world and still be able to come up with some twist that makes the other members go "Wait, what the fuck is your malfunction?"
I know that's not the point of the post but holy shit I can't forget the sugar thing no matter how much I try.
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I guess the only ones that really elicit something resembling guilt were the crazy teenagers from "Cut my Life into Pieces" (Mostly because I figure most of them will probably grow out of being shit heads) and some of the fat people from the support group episode (Not so much the healthy sex people, the fat guys were at least making efforts to try and make healthy life choices and better themselves whereas the people in the sex forum were all just about barbecue flavoured man pops).
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The sex forum was full of just the most awkward conversations between strangers. Everyone knew it was awkward, you could tell, but they also thought they must be the only one finding it awkward so they just played along.
I mean the whole banana split thing? Jesus. Someone uses a tortured banana-mean-penis metaphor and then gets a few sex puns in there and then they fucking immediately run it into the ground and keep going until you're just embarrassed for everyone involved. Don't they know they have the option to let the conversation end?
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I do feel a bit off about episodes involving, like Runic said, people that could actually be just sick in the head. Gangstalkers in particular make me more sad than amused at their insanity. Most if not all of the people we read were obtuse and insufferable beyond their craziness, so I don't feel too bad, but still.
That's about it, though. I have no sympathy for the FAs or the social justice idiots or whatever. For whatever issue we talk about, we read the PETA side of that issue. And fuck PETA.
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I mean the whole banana split thing? Jesus. Someone uses a tortured banana-mean-penis metaphor and then gets a few sex puns in there and then they fucking immediately run it into the ground and keep going until you're just embarrassed for everyone involved. Don't they know they have the option to let the conversation end?
Isfahan, February 14, 2013, 09:52:09 pm
That didn't strike me as especially unusual. What you had there was not-terribly socialized people--dare I say kinda maybe nerdy?--who upon having found something funny, made the logical leap that a funny thing repeated is still funny. It was "Bus Walkman" Syndrome.
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For whatever issue we talk about, we read the PETA side of that issue. And fuck PETA.
John Toast, February 15, 2013, 02:28:58 am
Wow, thank you for reducing a long, awkward conversation with dissenters into a convenient sound byte. I'll definitely be using that. You have earned yourself one (1) Sea Kitten.
(http://i13.photobucket.com/albums/a300/Delcat/drestinakostoom_zps047de14e.jpg)
Danged hipster narwhals these days...
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Drestina KostoomDelcat, February 15, 2013, 07:56:13 am
Where'd this come from? Can I put it in the episode notes?
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Oh, don't even get me started on fucking Sea Kittens. If I know anything, I know fish, and they are nasty little buggers who would not hesitate to eat you if you were small enough for them to swallow.
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Drestina KostoomDelcat, February 15, 2013, 07:56:13 am
Where'd this come from? Can I put it in the episode notes?
Lemon, February 15, 2013, 08:38:22 am
You mean you've never heard of Sea Kittens (http://features.peta.org/PETASeaKittens/game.asp)? Some people call them "fish", but that's because they're evil and don't discern between sea kittens and land kittens, when in fact they are totally identical! Why, sea kittens are just as cute as...um, well, they're certainly furry and cudd...uh, maybe not, but they're fun to watch play with...well they actually just kind of sit there, but they eat their own crap, isn't that kind of neat? Anyone?
(I'd be absolutely flattered, if you're not being sarcastic.)
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I remember an episode from an indie music review site - I felt bad about one of the singer/songwriters, I think her name was Charlotte Sometimes? Because she just seemed like a 16 year old kid with some issues. She said she'd had some traumatic experiences on tour at the age of 14, and was now trying to focus just on making music - I guess the main thing I feel bad about is when people have some kind of legit trauma, which I guess ties in to people with honest-to-god serious mental health issues.
I also tend to feel guilty when it seems like the people being featured are kids. I mean, I figure, adults have made their bed, but a 16 year old kid posting about his inflation fetish or how he's mad that his friends are or aren't having sex or whatever is potentially gonna grow up to the point where he's embarrassed by all the weird/obnoxious shit he said and did, and then here there's this living record of it, complete with commentary.
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I also tend to feel guilty when it seems like the people being featured are kids. I mean, I figure, adults have made their bed, but a 16 year old kid posting about his inflation fetish or how he's mad that his friends are or aren't having sex or whatever is potentially gonna grow up to the point where he's embarrassed by all the weird/obnoxious shit he said and did, and then here there's this living record of it, complete with commentary.
ellehumour, February 15, 2013, 10:59:20 am
Sure. On the surface I agree with you. Spectrum X is a fine case in point, and I'm positive they'll grow out of all that ridiculous nonsense about believing in being a fragment of a demon soul with lords of evil gently nibbling on sandwiches.
I don't think there's any harm in remembering that a person was a dipshit as a kid. I certainly was, and I defy anybody anywhere to tell me they didn't have their teenaged dipshit moments. The key point is that (going back to Spectrum X), could anybody track down the Adult X to the teenaged Dipshit X on the basis of, say, their resume? Well, no, unless they've still clung to that demonhumping persona, in which case they've got some serious issues that need sorting out with the help of a psychiatric professional.
Furthermore, with such things like the Wayback Machine and anybody with the mental wherewithal to reblog or save webpages on their personal storage, we're not the only teenager embarrassment service on the Internet, not by a country mile.
So to try and wrap all this up: if they were smart enough and used a ridiculous alias as a cutout, didn't leave any real live spoor to make Internet detectivery easy, and grew up a bit, I don't feel any guilt in making fun of teenaged dipshittery. It will have little impact on their lives as they grow up, and I think you'll find that in every case that we've used teenagers for amusement, they've all used aliases and none of this will impact their real life. Those few who do look back are just as likely to find dozens of repositories of their moments of idiocy, F+ barely even registering.
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The only reason I can still keep on living is the knowledge that the Fplus will never find the stupid shit I wrote as a teen. I look back a my younger self and I just want to tell her it's a GOOD thing Facebook hasn't been invented yet.
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I have volumes of terrible shit I wrote as a teen indexed across a multiple of notebooks. I transcribed and self-snarked a fair chunk of it a few years back. It was surprising cathartic, actually.
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Everyone, you can assuage your guilt by heading over to the ten-dollar secrets thread and filling it out. I'm going there now to talk about how Teensfahan used to think he'd make a living playing Quakeworld Team Fortress. QWTF Demoman was my jam back then.
Okay, well, I guess I don't have to go to the thread now.
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I think reading the work of teenagers is pure, uncomplicated fun. If you had guilt in that, your perspective would be off.
Angry teenagers (along the lines of Just Rage posters, Slipknot fans, terrible poets, et al) are really simple creatures to assess. They're spoiled, undereducated, hormonal, opinionated, and absolutely filled to the brim with bullshit. And the constant need for praise and feedback means they're not interested in writing a poem so much as they want somebody to say "Hey man, nice poem."
I think it's easy to love because it's easy to identify with it. I was a particularly angsty teenager, and now I find most of those traits charming. Let me stress that I find them charming in teenagers. If you're 26 with two infant children I'm far less forgiving of your stupidity, but if you just want to write a screed about "CONFORMIST SHEEPLE R IDIOTS MUDVAYNE RULES!" it's fine, because we're all operating on the assumption that you're still figuring shit out, nobody's holding you to any of this, and presumably you'll be able to come back to this later on and realize you wrote something foolish.
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(PS: Drestina is in the episode 49 show notes)
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(PS: Drestina is in the episode 49 show notes)
Lemon, February 17, 2013, 06:25:25 pm
(At last! The attention I never got as a teenager! The F+ UNDERSTANDS me man. Stay tuned for 180 hand-scrawled pages of a 13-year-old learning magic and shapeshifting and then vampires and nagas happen and I guess someone's eyes got gouged out somewhere? It might actually be a Spanish assignment. This handwriting is seriously difficult to make out, sorry.)