This is Why We Shun

Recently I used the word "shun" and the guy I said it to used it the next day in an unrelated context. I think "shun" has a very high niche factor, a term I just made up to describe when a word could be used more than it is and when you hear it, you feel like using it more. For example, I'm taking a class on James Joyce, and his ginormous vocabulary expands mine: I could use the word "sordid" more. I think I used it on a test Friday; I'm tempted to use it practically every day. Sordid has a high niche factor.

I remember the first time I heard someone say "shun the nonbeliever" as an aside to me disagreeing with something, and to have his friends hiss back, "shunnn." I hadn't seen Charlie the Unicorn. (The relevant part happens a third of the way through for old geezers who can't stand to watch the whole thing. You'll see what I mean.) I thought the phrase was weird and "shun" was a harsh reaction to my position. But once I caught up with the culture, I realized they were actually being friendlier than I thought by lightening the conflict with an allusion to something I should have seen. And people think allusions are only for ancient Greek mythology.

Here's a huge example of how pop culture divides geezers (and much younger) from geezers-to-be: http://www.snorgtees.com/ This website sells t-shirts for pop culture (I counted thirty three shirts inspired by media). The beauty of the digital age is that really small markets measured proportionally are large enough measured straight-on for business. Only a thousand people in the country might buy a shirt (which is less than a tenth of one percent of America's population), but it's enough for them to make a profit. Take, for instance, the blue shirt almost halfway down:


I like this shirt because, if you're under 25, I'd say, you agree that it's hilarious. The top part comes from a level in the earliest Super Mario Brothers games (early 90s), which you know because the flower is really pixelated (video game graphics weren't good back then). The flower gives your character the ability to shoot fireballs at enemies. Obviously, your video game character having firepower doesn't make his temperature increase--video game characters don't have temperature! But when you think about firepower, you have to have some heat to make that work. It's funny to apply such rigorous scientific logic to a game, like trying to explain why a dog or shoe can buy property in Monopoly.

But that's only half the joke. The caption says "this is why i'm hot." (Geezers-to-be shun capitalization in informal use.) It isn't enough to know about Super Mario Brothers, you also have to know the song "This is why I'm hot". Anyone who listens to a radio the right way has heard this song. And you need to before you keep reading. "Hot" here is a synonym for "cool": accepted, admired, successful. In the song, Mims (that's the rapper's name) cites among other things his rapping skill, his blindly loyal fans, and his shady connections to prostitutes, drugs, and cars as reasons why he's "hot."

And then we have Mario and video games. Can you see the connection? A really catchy song that made it to #1 on the Billboard chart and was played endlessly in clubs is the setup for a bad pun. I can just picture it: some geek coming out of his cave of the latest video game console and being informed about the song "This is why I'm hot." And all the geek can relate himself to is video games. "Well," he says in an atrophied voice, "I'm hot when I have firepower." He grimaces as a stand-in for a real smile at his joke.

This shirt is for the self-aware, slightly self-deprecatory person to argue in fun that you can be cool and play video games, too. But it takes so much cultural understanding to get it that old geezers wouldn't even understand there's a conflict. And it's too bad they don't, because they want to tell kids what coolness looks like (tell me again, why shouldn't people smoke?) but can't follow the arguments about it on a practical level. On a t-shirt level. And are frustrated when kids accuse them of not understanding.

And that is why we shun, that is why we shun, that is why, that is why, that is why we shun.

Your Browsing Experience

Every blog should take into account its audience. For example, I recently learned that when you "import" a blog into Facebook, the only clue that the note you're reading isn't a random note is a small link at the bottom that says, "View original post." So I think I'm just going to have to include the word BLOG in my first several posts, and many links to my blog (s).

But there's a fundamentally different problem I have to deal with, and that's the "old geezer" and "geezer-to-be" schism. I'm realizing that normal blogs, which geezers-to-be feel are an extension of the self (remember Xanga?), are not as intuitive for old geezers.

I have some theories about this. "Old" is when you're old enough that you think you shouldn't have to learn any more, and for anyone who turned old before the Internet came around, there's limited progress that can be made. Not because once you turn 65 or 70 or 90 that your brain stops working, but because you think all this stuff that you didn't need before you shouldn't need now. Old geezers don't want progress.

I'm sure I'll be the same way eventually. I'll have just retired from Supreme Court-hood and will say to all the young whippersnappers around me. "Automatic altitude adjustment on my flying car? But there are so many options to it... Do I want 'Wind Optimization'? And 'Nature Preservation'? Or maybe just 'Fuel Efficiency.' I just want to fly! You know, back in my day, we didn't have to make all these choices. There was manual and automatic, sure, and then hybrid, but nothing complicated like this..."

But I should bring up some examples, because I'm pretty sure we geezers-to-be don't understand the depth of old geezers' inability to use technology.

My mom had a conversation with my sister that brought it to my attention after my first post. "'Can you believe it?' she joked with Melanie. 'Will actually expects people to listen to a song on Youtube and read his version of the lyrics. At the same time.'"

I had hoped that everyone would understand tabbed browsing, so in one tab you're waiting for the New York Times to load and in another tab you're cruising Facebook to talk to friends you're friends with. But I hadn't considered that using two tabs at once could overwhelm someone. If it's just a problem of unfamiliarity, then all I have to say is that if you click on a link while you're holding "Ctrl" then the page will open in a new tab. But if it's a problem with capacity, then I have no solution.

If all you want to manage is one thing at a time, your browsing experience is so much different than mine. I feel lonely if I only have one tab up. My homepage used to start with four websites (accomplished by using the "|" sign between addresses in Firefox's homepage options). I routinely IM several people at a time while writing on people's wall, scrolling through the news, and reading the latest on a few blogs. With a Wikipedia tab up for convenience if I need to look something up.

Or look at my little joke about links at the top of this post. The savvy reader would see the words "many links to my blog," see that there were many links, and would assume (correctly) that they all linked to my blog. That's a joke, see, because all those links are redundant. It's also funny because so many links look like advertising, but it's useless to advertise your own website on your website. And if the savvy readers weren't sure, they would move the mouse over the links, notice that in the bottom of the browser they all pointed to the same website, and would also get the joke. And even if they didn't do that, they would hold Ctrl and open each one in a new tab, and then see that the tabs were all the same page.

But the old geezer, being adventurous enough to trek beyond the safety of one page, would click on the first link, be directed to the same page, and then be confused why it didn't work. After a few attempts, they would frustratingly be defeated until they got to this paragraph and lamented being old.

And all I can think of right now is that when I was in China, I learned the word for "generation gap." But I never learned how to say "exacerbated by technology." Maybe I should pull up another tab and google the translation.

Here's the Kick Off

Let's face it. I'm back from China and my mom and at least two other people have said that I should keep blogging. I did have a fantastically well-received blog (for a day at least), but I think it's more that blogging is just a hard habit to break. I still go through the day storing up anecdotes but don't have any release for them.

Nevertheless, there are some changes from my blog about being in China. The most notable from my side is that I will be able to actually visit my own blog. Something about America and freedom of expression. Other than that, though, is the fact that people in America speak English. And if I write about them, they can read it. So I have to be careful not to make knowing me a liability. (If I had a problem learning people's names before, I predict it's going to get worse, because now I'm going to be making up a lot of names.)

This blog, to be updated roughly every other day, is geared toward everyone. For convenience, I divide that into "old geezers" and "geezers-to-be." As a college student, I am a geezer-to-be, and if you haven't even heard of Numa Numa then you're an old geezer.

For us geezers-to-be, I will include pop culture references. But for the old geezers, I'll try to explain them. Did you catch the Relient K allusion? Not if you're not a real fan. (Alternate lyrics to Kick Off provided here:

Here's the kick off
Hope you're not sick of
Will's blogging way
Or all the posts he made
Cuz then you'll wanna click a different page!
(duhn duhn duhn dun, dun, boww)

I encourage you to sing along while listening to the YouTube'd version.)

Other housekeeping matters: I intend to import these blog entries as Facebook notes. When I do that, I won't know how many people read my blog because Facebook won't tell me how many people are just reading it on their site. But why have a smaller audience just so I can count the smallness? Comment to let me know you're there, because it makes me feel happy. And otherwise it's practically eavesdropping, and that's not polite. I'm willing to comment now, too. I don't know why I thought the narrator should be so haughty in my last blog.

I'll link to other people's blogs, and make it look less ugly. But not tonight. Right now I have some math proofs to do.

This is college life. Go Gators! And get excited, because Will has a blog.