There’s always an inclination to return whatever kind words someone says to you. It’s like a game of friendly hot potato. This is especially awkward when dealing with the service industry. Enjoy your dinner? You too! Thanks for coming? You too. I got your septic tank unclogged? You too!
This week actually is Banned Books Week for those unaware. As celebrated by the American Library Association, the point of this week is to celebrate “Intellectual freedom—the freedom to access information and express ideas, even if the information and ideas might be considered unorthodox or unpopular.”
Our comic’s history certainly makes this personally very important to us. You don’t have to like all media that’s out there, but you should respect its right to exist, even if its ideas run contrary to your own.
Students only hearing half of what a professor says isn’t always a problem. They may simply not understand an assignment and get a lower grade, but nobody dies. Still, there are those times where hearing every detail matters. Those are the times the professor rants on about a single concept for three or four weeks.
The color red as a symbol probably isn’t one of those life or death instances, but you certainly won’t sound as dumb if you hear it all.
Video games are capable of being political in an interesting manner. Games such as Beyond Good and Evil, Bioshock, and the Metal Gear Solid series make quite valiant attempts at discussing, at the least, some minor political theory or ideologies.
The problem is that most games that attempt doing so can’t even be called valiant attempts. It would be interesting to see a game that truly tackled the issue of politics in a deep manner. Maybe the Civilization series…sort of?
The idea of rich people crying about class warfare is like the professional Street Fighter player crying because some scrub in an arcade got in a lucky shot. Actually, that might make a good strip. Anyway, class warfare is probably a term the rich best avoid unless they wish to sound really stupid. I’m middle class and even I find it ridiculous to use the term about myself.
Students ask me on a fairly regular basis what is the point in analysis. It doesn’t directly do anything for you in the way that math and chemistry do, and there’s some truth to that. However, a nimble mind understands that some investments are long term in the way they pay off. It’s the true value of a real liberal arts education–you learn about all fields.
I don’t particularly have anything against Twitter (we obviously have a feed of our own). However, am I the only one who sees Twitter as a step backwards in human communication? We had blogging, but then someone decided blogging was too wordy for the masses? Facebook was too personally involved? Twitter is, for the most part, like reading a poorly written children’s book.
It seems like every couple of months there’s an overhaul to a major Facebook feature and people freak out in response. I’m not entirely sure why people pretend to care about how they receive their status updates, when in truth Facebook is just there to feed into their narcissistic worldview. I suppose anything that inhibits that is frustrating. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to update my Facebook with some clever pictures of cats.
My wife and I often run into songs where we’re unsure if it’s a praise song, or just a love song. We like to use the method, “Would this make me uncomfortable if another human being was singing it about me?” If the song has lyrics about someone being “the only thing I need,” “you saved me,” or “you healed my mortal soul,” then you can probably rest assured the song is about God. Or else 95% of pop music.
I’m always amused by the attempts to either fit in or defy the social norms. If you truly defy social norms, then you’ll probably end up looking crazy. Instead, you change some minor things about your appearance that have been pre-approved as “edgy.” Of course, that is not to criticize these people any more than the mainstream. At least they’re trying to do something different, even if they discover that’s near impossible.
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