Somewhere inside of me lies an extremely strong masochistic streak.
This masochistic streak does not lead me to nipple clamps and candle wax, or the pursuit of any sort of physical discomfort, nor does it have any sort of erotic component, but rather, it leads me to engage in self-inflicted acts of psychological torture.
As I said, there is no erotic component to these acts, and I really can’t be said to enjoy them, and yet, time after time, despite my best efforts to avoid doing so, I find myself doing the same things over and over again.
Masochism (or perhaps sheer stupidity) would seem to be the only explanation for this behavior.
One of the more common acts of self-inflicted torture I’ve engaged in is reading the IMDb Message Boards.
If you don’t think this is torture, you’ve obviously never been to the Message Boards.
In the IMDb Message Boards the English language is routinely butchered to an extent that goes far beyond the darkest nightmares of the most rigid of grammarians. Beyond that, though, the Boards are more than just a collection of bad spelling, wrong word choices, poorly formed, and argued, ideas, and logical fallacies, they are home to pointless insults and name-calling, rampant stupidity, and all of the very worst aspects of their nature that human beings have to offer.
A typical thread often looks something like this:
OMG
Posted by Gushingfanboy1:
OMG!!!1 shes SO hOt! i luvved her in that movie.
RE: OMG
Posted by Flamingtroll1:
ur so fucken stoopid. shes a skankho bitch who needs to DIE now! faggot!
RE: OMG
Posted by Gushingfanboy2:
she rally is hot. do you know her number? ru her? u r! i luv u and want to merry u! heres my email. plz right to me
RE: OMG
Posted by Takingthebait1:
taht is SO rood! who ru to say that shes ugly? i bet you have a small d*ck!
Of course, more often than not something like the second post would actually read “Post removed by administrator,” so the response from “Takingthebait1” wouldn’t make any sense, though you’d be able to infer what was said by the troll.
“Trolls,” for the benefit of those of you who don’t know, are people who go into message boards and deliberately post inflammatory comments for the sake of getting people angry. Trolls especially love to target forums designed for nerds to express their appreciation for a particular movie/TV show/book, and will usually consist of saying “The movie/TV show/book you are expressing your appreciation for sucks!”
This will then result in a flurry of angry responses, mixed in with comments from others who recognize a troll when they see one and encourage other users to simply ignore the comments, as a “do not feed the trolls” approach is the best way to avoid the start of a “flame war.” No one ever pays any attention, and a flame war invariably results. This is true in any and every message board of any kind anywhere, though it is especially true at IMDb.
Here is another typical thread:
When is it coming out?
Posted by newbie3:
When is her new movie coming out?
RE: When is it coming out?
Posted by pointlesslyangry4:
We’ve already talked about this in a different thread. God! People like you should be tied to the back of a horse and dragged over broken bottles! Why should I have to hold your stupid newbie hand? Just go to the main page and search the boards. Idiot! How dare you not already know everything and have the nerve to ask a question! I will now proceed to belittle you because I have no power in the real world and must rely on attacking newbies in message boards to feel good about myself, even though it would take much less effort to simply say “The movie opens on June 10th.”
With some variation, considerably more venom, and much more mangled use of the language, this is pretty much what every thread looks like in the IMDb Message Board, though they are usually much, much longer, sometimes having hundreds of posts made by people who all seem to be totally brain dead, with each post more retarded and painful to read than the last.
And yet, read them I would, all the while demanding that I explain myself. “Why? Why am I doing this?”
I could never answer that question.
What made things worse, though, was that I would often find myself reading these threads for hours, often in boards for movies or actors I didn’t even care about.
It was bad enough to be reading these irritating posts in the “Sin City” boards, but it was a thousand times worse to be reading them in a Hillary Duff board. I mean, wtf? How the hell did I end up there?
I would usually try to avoid going to the boards, but invariably I would see a thread that would draw me in. I was powerless to resist the temptation, even though I knew that nothing good could come of it.
My salvation came in the form of IMDb requiring you to register in order to even read the boards.
As I didn’t have an existing login, I was finally free!
Sure, conceivably I could create a free login and be back where I was, but however strong my masochism may be, this problem now falls under the jurisdiction of my laziness, which is more powerful than pretty much anything. As tempted as I may be to create a login when I see some especially aggravating-looking thread, my laziness determines that creating a login would just be too much bother.
These days, though, I find myself getting suckered into the comments posted on Slashdot, which, because they’re written by pretentious, self-important nerds, can be even more irritating than the posts in the IMDb Message Boards, so it looks as though I’ll never truly be free (unless Slashdot starts requiring you to register to read the comments, which I pray will be the case).
My other masochistic indulgence involves comic books.
In fact, it involves two specific kinds of comic books, neither of which is in existence any longer.
I read these comics in electronic form in the comic book newsgroups on Usenet.
(BTW, for anyone who makes use of Usenet, I highly recommend using Easy News. For $10 a month you get 20 GB of downloads, with the option to earn lots of free extra gigs, access to all the major groups, an easy-to-use and extremely functional Web-based interface, up to 40 days of post retention, and so much more. I’ve been using the service for years, and while they keep adding new features all the time the price has never gone up. It’s an unbeatable value.)
The specific comic books I read, though only when I’m really, really bored and want to punish myself, are romance comics and Lois Lane comics.
For the most part, these were all published prior to the 1970s, which can make for painful reading in any comic book genre, and due to the pre-ERA mindset can be extremely offensive to modern sensibilities.
The Lois Lane comics (Lois had her own series for quite some time, as did Jimmy Olsen, though eventually both books were folded into a series called “Superman Family,” an anthology series that focused on the supporting characters in Superman’s life) are especially painful to read, as they present someone very different from the strong-willed, driven, yet compassionate woman I think of when I think of Lois. The stories usually present her as being vain, shallow, and interested only in landing herself a “super” husband. Many of the stories focus on her rivalry with Lana Lang.
For the most part it’s just sad.
The romance comics, though, also induce their share of groans.
In neither case do I find myself as “compelled” to read as I was with the IMDb Message Boards, but it is often hard to look away.
Often with the romance comics I find myself performing a sort of “Mystery Science Theater 3000” commentary in my head as I read them, so that much, at least, is entertaining, though it doesn’t make things any less painful.
And those are the major ways in which my masochistic tendencies manifest themselves. Sometimes, as I’m wincing at a story about how Lois has been exposed to an enlarging ray that has made her so fat that even Superman has to strain to lift her, that I’m just a glutton for punishment.
The same could be said, though, for people who read Threshold.
That, of course, leads us into the more conventional recounting of the events of my day.
Beyond going for a walk I didn’t do much. I haven’t been feeling especially creative this week, so I haven’t been doing much in the way of drawing or non-Threshold writing. Honestly, I haven’t been doing much of anything this week, other than performing some “hard drive hygiene,” freeing up space by deleting unnecessary files and then defragmenting.
In the interest of doing some future drawing, though, I decided that today would be a good time to grab some screen captures of Carla Gugino in “Sin City.”
So I popped the DVD in, launched my player software, and waited. And waited. And waited.
Eventually, my DVD software reported that it had crashed, at which point my computer stopped being able to even see that I had a DVD in my DVD drive.
After messing around with a few things and locking up my system entirely, I rebooted.
As sometimes happens, my computer went a little way into the booting up process and just stopped dead. I’ve never been sure of the cause of this, but usually it’s nothing that a quick shot of “CTRL+ALT+DEL” can’t fix.
Not so this time.
After some frantic cursing and some messing around with setup, I got my computer to boot up, though my DVD drive was still on the fritz.
Eventually I determined that problems with the drive were actually what was keeping the computer from booting.
It seems that whenever the drive door is closed the drive thinks that there’s a DVD in it, even when there isn’t, so it keeps trying, and failing, to read the DVD, locking it into a perpetual loop of trying to read the DVD and failing.
It also gets stuck in this trying/failing loop when there actually is something in the drive.
So, as the DVD drive is set as the first place the computer looks when booting up, the computer is not able to get past this loop to move to the next boot device and boot up normally.
The only way I can get around this is to have the DVD drive door open when rebooting.
Once inside of Windows, the loop prevents me from being able to open the “My Computer” folder unless the door is open.
So as a temporary fix I went into the Hardware Manager and disabled the drive.
Of course, this leaves me without a DVD drive on my main computer, which is an unacceptable circumstance.
Rather than trying to fix what’s wrong with the existing drive, which is more than two years old anyway, I figured I’d just go ahead and buy a new one, upgrading to a Dual-Layer burner.
Further, I decided that I’d get one and install it today. The particular drive I wanted is about $100 at Wal-Mart, so I jumped in the car and headed there. I decided that I should make a quick run over to Best Buy to see if they had any bargains. They didn’t, so I went to Wal-Mart, only to find that they no longer have the drive I wanted. For $40 more they have an external version. I considered the notion. After all, when it comes to installing new hardware, I usually prefer the external versions, as it’s usually just a matter of plugging in a USB cable.
In this instance, though, I wanted an internal version. Plus the extra $40 was a bit of a disincentive.
There was a cheaper internal, DL drive there, but I decided that I would just deal with delayed gratification and order the particular drive I want online.
I haven’t actually done so yet. I may decide to hold off, as I do have a burner on my secondary computer, so, if necessary, I can get by without one on my main system.
We’ll see, I guess.
In any case, I think that will do it for this entry, and for this week. Have a good weekend.
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