The Copenhagen curfuffle

I’ve now written on two separate occasions about the latest climate summit (wiki) and both times couldn’t bring myself to hit the publish button. The first try preceded the event, expressing my initial optimism 6 months ago followed by a grave dose of reality in the weeks leading up to it. The second occasion was mid-discussions and basically amounted to a rant about climategate followed by a desperate plea for something real to come out of this circus. Like many of us, I felt like there was a gross lack of solid proposals and leadership brought to the table by many parties. In the end, leaders talking at each other proved to be entirely fruitless and we’re left with perhaps the most fitting and mocking conclusion possible: “We promise to come up with something next year.” Though hardly a surprise, this nearly reduced me to tears of hysterical laughter. Could there be any response more pointing to our collective stance (or lack thereof) than a formal declaration of further procrastination?

subreddit: fffffffffuuuuuuuuuuuuu

I have a semi-shameful confession. At one point maybe less than a year ago, I was an avid digg user. GASP! I know I know. For the few of you who don’t know what digg.com is, in a nutshell it’s a social news website. What do I mean by that? Users find interesting stories, pictures, videos, or whatever is cookin on the internet at a particular moment, submit the link and other users decide to either digg the link (upvote) or bury it (kill it). Depending on how popular the submission gets, it might appear on the front page or crack the top 10 for all visitors to see. Likewise, attached to each submission is its own discussion thread where user comments are similarly dugg or buried. It’s an excellent meritocratic system in principle but there’s a systemic problem with digg; The user base is incredibly obnoxious and has little to contribute in the way of discussion. If I had to rank them against the rest of the internet, I’d put them maybe a half step above commenters you’d find on youtube. Digg has become the armpit of social news sites, not entirely dissimilar to the realm myspace finds itself in amongst the social networking world.

Enter reddit.com. It looks considerably less refined on the surface, it’s customizable in basically the same ways as digg, and the content is generally pretty similar (often the same), but the meat of this site is in the discussions amongst users which are considerably more thoughtful, witty and poignant. The site is divided into several subcategories (subreddits as they’re coined) which a user can subscribe to see on their reddit homepage. And here’s where the two sites branch considerably. Several subreddits are dedicated solely to discussion amongst reddit users. For example, the Askreddit subreddit is dedicated to asking the reddit community a question. Anything at all really. Do you ever find yourself defending Wikipedia’s validity and reliability to people who think it is just made up information? Come to think of it, yes a bunch of times. Who else is so fucking happy they didn’t rush into marriage and start having kids? Check on that count also. Maybe most relevant to this blog would be the question Canadian Redditors, what is something you want the rest of us to know about Canada/Canadians? Damn good compendium of Canadianisms. I Am A (blank) Ask Me Anything and Does anyone else? also call to the quirky reddit community for questions and commentary with generally entertaining results.

A recent subreddit I’ve latched onto is based on a relatively new meme that sprouted up on reddit, 4chan or the other bowels of the intertubes a couple months back (history lesson). The FFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU subreddit is dedicated to simple yet often hilarious user generated 4-frame rage cartoon. It’s really nothing more than a rudimentary expression of common (sometimes less common) life frustrations through a few very crudely drawn characters and a predictable ending. A good chunk of the jokes are very meta by nature of this community but many others stand on their own without internal reference.

My Minnesotans and Wisconsinite comrades should appreciate this one.

This reminds me of a certain university roommate.

Granddaddy of them all?

Okay this post has taken entirely too long to write. The distraction of reddit is killing me. I’m cutting it off here and saving another subreddit rave for a different post.

edit: I crafted my own for a former university roommate of mine. Happy birthday Bradley

dirty dish theory

Every now and again I get a silly idea about a conceptual social theory and think “Holy sh!t I might be on to something here. Maybe just maybe no human has ever thought about such and such in this context before.” More often than not someone has already written a thesis on it and I fall victim to ignorance but hey it feels a little good to independently arrive at obvious but hidden social systems. This particular one I’ve thought about this one on and off during university and refined the operationalization a bit over time. I’ve yet to find a related theory lurking in the literature but my access to journals is pretty limited.