schadenfreude blah-ze so called 'shameful joy', coming from a relief at seeing someone suffer, usually with the inference being on them suffering in your place. 031103 ... REAListic optimIST its also a really painful q3 map to play. all defensive and whatnot... no one ever wants to play it. oh well on blather though he's just a troll without enough spine to contribute stuff on his own, perhaps he is too scared people will make fun of him, so instead, to make himself feel better about not having the balls to say anything of worth, he pokes fun at others, and calls their writing drivel, without much of an argument to stand on, and without actually backing up anything he says. it's sad really. but of course now he has our attention, so i hope it was worth it to you, schad, making yourself into an ass so you would get negative attention. perhaps once you find the enlightenment you are searching for in others' words, you can get over yourself and support and nurture. now go to your room and write 5 worthwhile blathes. 031103 ... schadenfreude does my regular contribution to blather determine the accuracy of my opinion? is my opinion less valid if i have only lurked, but have done so for years? what if i am a regular blatherer using this name? will my opinion mean more if i unmask myself? i'm flattered that there are such flames fanned on my account, but i have no care for attention outside of it accomplishing a goal. again, i have no interest in going into the old shitraking arguments, but it seems we have a few newer to the number here, so i'll sum up and leave it be. this is not about intellectual_decay. this is not about my right to voice whatever the hell i want to, though right now what the hell i want to voice is a disgust at the fact that out of twenty blathes i went to, hoping with each to find some glowing bit of knowledge, something of substance to chew on in the night, fifteen were instead full of chatty bullshit, the pixie dust that everyone has been farting to the point of explosive shits. each and every one of you are capable of writing intelligent things, things that move people, things that inform or delight, but in only one in every four blathes did i find anything that even began to step away from the "i like macaroni!" club. blather_is_blather and blah blah blah, i obviously can't stop you from posting whatever you wish, even if it is nauseating dreck, nor would i if i had the magic god-button. but calm your self-righteous indignation long enough to think about my suggestion that maybe, just maybe, you could cut down on the chatty crap for a while and get back to worshipping words instead of turning them into worthless vehicles for thoughts that will not stand the test of time past a day, much less the eternity of blather. if you'd like an example, take a gander at this... picked randomly out of the pile, seeing_stars, has a great example of what i'm talking about... sorry to use you as an example, pipedream, but you're so good at saying nothing: "i miss stars. i need blacker night skies and a higher roof. or a telescope. [br] i want to see stars properly." is a completely empty statement, carrying no weight, doing nothing but imparting information that, really, i don't give a shit about. there's a second post from pipedream that is also a glowing example of the crap of which i speak. however, once we get to the line from the child in the car wreck, yes, that poked me, that made me think, it did more than slide past my skin, that is information that is worth allowing to take up space in my memory bank. nom follows through with some random imagery, and look! seeing_stars is no longer a waste of space. now, take into account that i've never been particularly moved by nom's writing style, but nom consistently reaches for something beyond the "i like macaroni!" kind of thing, and gets full props for it. that's all i'm asking. is to try to reach beyond the bullshit empty information that each of us gets thrown at us from every side and get down to the heart of the matter, say something worth saying or get off the damn soapbox. think deep thoughts, and it might help. don't assume that anyone cares what color underwear you're wearing, and that might help as well. consider if you really want your writing career, your worship of words, summed up by a bunch of pixie dust that was ground into grey before it ever left the first page and empty declarations. just think about it for a while. if you still insist on declaring your allegiance to macaroni, i'll still insist on saying you're wasting everything that *i* hold dear about blather. individual results may vary, and i can't force you to examine a viewpoint, but if i have to listen to your crap then you have to listen to mine. i won't leave. i will still read, and if i wrote under this name i would still write. but i will defend to the death the things that i love, and words are one of those loves. i'm just coming to scare the kids off of the ancestral ritual grounds. and, speaking of examples, these are some glowing gems from the rather short recent list here at the crack of day. real literary masterpieces. if you can keep your lunch down. caffi_laddie why_do_you_swanki_doo bring_the_meeple_to_the_people deathcab_for_cutie 031103 ... endless desire oh why do you care? get over yourself and fuck off 031103 ... schadenfreude i care because i love this place. i care because someone has been pissing in my sacred wine. if you *don't* care, i suggest it would be you that should be fucking off. 031103 ... stork daddy you're both idiots and i love it 031103 ... Road i won't say that I haven't been part of some of the chatroom stuff here, but (and this is where I defend myself) i did it at the time that this old brain just wanted to play with words, phrases what have you. you have certainly brought out some invectives at yourself, but you seem to truely not care. Alot of these youguns are just talking, to talk and they find this is the place that they feel most comfortable with doing it (although I don't quite dare to presume the variety of reasons behind being here). So, I treat this blather as a peculiar little galaxy, in some spots you will be able to just say wow, damn I really enjoyed that, some might just be there for show, other parts might make you puke, other doors will make you wish you hadn't opened them. So, in conclusion (although I've just scratched this particular surface), if you are what you claim to be, a watcher for many years, or another reincarnation of an existing blatherskite, my only piece of advice to you would be to approach this as you would an amusement park, buy your ticket, ride the rides, peruse the souvenior shop, and if you should feel so inclined fill out the customer comments card. But I ask that don't react with condemnation towards others tastes for playing here. And if you have dabbled here for awhile, you already know that blather can be an evolving creature, just like tidal pools washing and scraping the shorelines, often you'll find slime, scavengers and parasites growing in clumps, but most whither and return to the oceans currents. It takes patience and a willingness to keep exploring, to find those pieces of debris that are unique and special to each one of us. Well, I've said my piece. 031103 ... schadenfreude as long as i'm an entertaining idiot. 031103 ... User24 please stop this. 031103 ... schadenfreude fair enough, Road. you're right, and you're right again. though i never claimed to be anything at all, just questioned how identity influences weight of opinion, i do indeed know that this is an evolving ecosystem. and normally i do go on the rides i love and stay away from the fried cheeze curds. what made me pipe up was that i was beginning to see something of a zebra mussel effect, the empty noises choking out those that carried weight. my goal is not to antagonize (though i must admit, it can be a pleasent side effect), but to highlight, to draw attention to an emerging pattern and suggest that perhaps it is not a good thing. but you have very good points, and you made them without taking any of the bitter bait i laid. you actually heard me, and understood. that's enough to lay this ghost to rest. theoretically. 031103 ... endless desire i retract my previous comment. i do not usually bitch like that. . .i just don't care to have a place that i love so much get made fun of. whether or not you have been here for years, i checked your name to see if you had ever added to the beauty of blather, rather than just tearing it down. but who am i to decide that anyways. have fun with your experiment. it is certainly true so obviously blather has its pros and cons. my six month blather birthday is 2 days. 031103 ... pipedream i'd just like to say, in my defense, that i *have* contributed things to blather that i consider to be intelligent and insightful, and not because i think so, but because people who's opinions i respect and admire say so. tough luck if you've never come across them, i'm sorry you think i'm a fluffy idiot. your purely critical, unconstructive,rude, whiny opinion won't make the least difference to me, but it might do *you* some good to get off your high horse and your pretentious quest for true knowledge and light. if you can't see anything beyond your rather sad, preconceived notions of perfection, then you're probably just going to go on and on bellyaching about everyone else without attempting to be real, ever. most poetry *is* in the mundane- if you really knew what you were talking about you'd know that. and i agree with endless- i haven't read anything by YOU (at least with this SN) that made *me* react in any way, except for your lovely little comment on my page. thank you, it's so interesting to see the way you attempt to be the defender of blather's integrity by insulting everyone else and generating ill will. good going, you're on the right track. in any case, thank you for actually hitting 'pipedream', hopefully someday a post by me *will* move you. i acknowledge i may not be spewing lyrical fireworks these days, but you don't know why i'm not, so you should perhaps think before you speak. you have a right to an opinion, but don't slam people unless you have the right to- and you don't. blather is a place where anyone can come and just talk if they want. this is one place where you *aren't* obliged to be scintillating, or witty, or frighteningly intelligent- just yourself, and that's what gives you freedom. where do you think the hypocrisy of writing begins and ends? wishing for just a telescope makes you fluffy, and zeus' lightning to rent the sky asunder in a burst of deity and light makes you either pretentious or, in our good critic's opinion, worth being on blather. it's not me- you don't have to right to pass judgement on *any*one. 031103 ... blah-ze i was thinking about your opinion, on and off, for a while, when i finally decided to go to bed, and lay awake with nothing else to stew about but esters and other chemistry wotnot. you probably expect something totally different from blather then i do. you look at a screen of meandering nothing and slam it because it's pointless. maybe it is, maybe someone actually makes a use of it, a use you can't see. i don't write here because of my high opinion on things i know, my meaningful analysis of emotion, religion, metaphysics, so sorry, mate, i just can't scale up to your expectation of glorious everything on that little point. i don't write about that, because when i focus on all the negative crap in my life, it makes me feel bad, and for some reason, when i think about it, i see myself as being better off dead, so i just don't think about anything instead. i don't think about the people i know getting hurt or dying oh-so-frequently because of stupid little things. i don't think about how close i am to the brink, how many people i know have stood on the same point of life i stand on and simply broken. some i know. some went away, and i don't care to think about where they went. i try not to dream of how close i came to that and the only tangible thing that stopped me was that i couldn't stop thinking long enough to just let it all wash away, and i am not sure how thankful i am for that. you see, blather to me, the little inanities you criticise, mean a ittle bit of the day i don't have to think about where i am going, why, how, and just what kind of screwed up life i live. it gives me a chance to give something inside of me life, even if it isn't real, and lets me smile, or even laugh. i stare at a screen of crap and live for it, instead of thinking about all the dumb things i've done, the way the world is so screwed up right now, and i don't write the things i feel or think about, even though they might be meaningful, because there is enough meaningful stuff here already and adding some of my own stuff would just make all of that a little less special, and i don't feel like throwing myself on a soapbox just to clear all that crap out of my system. call me an escapist, and i'll agree with you. call me wrong, and i'll also agree with you. anyway, to conclude my little rant, i believe we may have got off on a little bit of the wrong foot. this above is about the only meaningful insight into me anyone will ever see, because i try to keep it locked down so tight noone sees the ugliness i have inside. think of this as a little christmas gift from me to you. i hope it's meaningful enough. 031103 ... pipedream enough? you just blew me away, mister! *hug* 031103 ... schadenfreude i am in no way insulting blather, and if you noticed, i did say that i know that all are you are capable of more than macaroni. what you seem to be missing is that my purpose was not to attack (but there we go with the side effect again), but to call attention to a pattern. i'm not "on some pretentious quest for knowledge and light." i was calling into question the value of posts like "i hate this straightened hair fad." really, if a 'skite can look back on that a month or a year down the road and be happy they said it, great, wonderful, whatever, but in my eyes it's worthless clutter. and i do know that poetry is in the mundane. but i draw the line at agreeing that poetry is in straightened hair fads. fair enough, blah-ze. you give a good argument for empty information transfer; it is a good conduit to escapism. it won't change my opinoin that it's empty and annoying, but i understand why it's written a bit better, and can ignore or look past it a bit more. thank you. pipedream, i'm sorry you became the focus of that, the *constant* "special sparkle" shit was what finally made me snap. cute is empty information with a bow tied around it, cute makes my stomach heave. do your thing, girl, i know you will, but that's why you were focus of my snappage. one thing that i haven't expressed is that i bear no ill will to any other 'skites. i may want to smack you in the back of the head sometimes when you start sounding like a bunch of teenage girls (um.... yeah), and i have had quite a bit of fun baiting and insulting as i say my piece, but i don't want you to go curl up and die or endure any of the horrible things i am usually wishing on people. i just wanted the empty and cute to either stop or be done with knowledge of the act. and, last but not least, i know two other 'skites have guessed, but if you haven't figured it out, this is misstree. cheers. 031104 ... Death of a Rose awwwww....you gave up way too easily, damn..... the original boobie! 031104 ... oE yeah i figured it was you mtree..i just figured i'd sit back and watch how it all played out... 031104 ... User24 one thing I'd like to say to everyone, is, when blathing, type your blathe up in word or something, then come back to it an hour later, if you still want to say it then go ahead, but if not, well, there's your undo button. (if you're anything like me and spend many hours straight on blather, then you can also just leave loads of "do you have words" pages open, then when you've said everything you want to say, take a few moments to re-read everything, then blathe it all in one go.) blah. you get the idea. (I know, I should take my own advice, there's a whole bunch of total shite that I've spewed, but you should see how much didn't even make it here) see also minnesota_chris's advice on welcome_to_blather. 031104 ... User24 oh! also, I was wondering to myself about why people (including myself) get annoyed with the recent list, whether it's crappy poetry, mindless chatter, pompous intellectualism, or whatever... one thing I do know is that blather is ours, it's what -we- make of it, it's just that twisty tangly blather won't let us get at what we come here for; if we indexed every word we liked, under a category, then whenever we (or anyone else) wanted something more than what's on recent, we could go and easily find it, eg, If I'm after a bit of narrative, I'll head over to the eyedreamisms, for poetry, there's poems_for_you, etc, etc.. now, at the moment, this knowledge of where the words are exists only in the collective minds of all blatherskites, so, what I suggest is something similar to blather_directory, but not quite: blather_directory is too simple, if it were maintained, there'd be 15 different 'poetry' headings, etc.. so, perhaps doing something similar to what I was doing with 'marked'; every time a blathe got my interest, but for whatever reason I didn't have words right then, I made a small (and hopefully not too annoying?) mark on the blathe, and then used http://blather.newdream.net/cgi-bin/blather?who;name=marked to see a list of interesting blathes. Perhaps we could use different names to signify different categories (and I know, there are some things you just can't categorise, and some things will be misinterpreted, yada yada, there's nothing stopping a blathe being in more than one category) suggested names/cateories, prefixed by 'c_' to ensure we don't crash in on someones actual blather name. c_poetry c_fiction c_fact c_philosophy c_science c_community any suggestions for categories, comments, opinated rants, etc, appreciated.. I would just go ahead and do it, but I thought I'd ask what people thought and hopefully get some support from you, etc, etc blahblahblah whatchy'all think? 031104 ... stork daddy the whole point of blather is that it's blather. blather....look up the word. if it scrapes genius it scrapes genius, but it doesn't have to. when i sit down to blather i just write..i don't think and rethink each phrasing or each word. sometimes it's something i thought of ahead of time and sometimes it's on the spot, but the point is i'm given either option. it's not my job to label my crap. if you want to sift through it, by all means, but i won't make it easier for you by god! 031104 ... 24 fair enough, it's just that sometimes I'm searching for something someone's said, and can't find it, annoys me.. 031104 ... stork daddy i agree...but...soon we'll be into the philosophy of classifications and sets rather than the pragmatic organic organization that is blather. i prefer my moments of wonder to come unforseen like gifts. it is just a personal preference, but blather the format makes no deference to one person's preference over another when it comes to expression. 031104 ... stork daddy actually, in fairness, your idea is a very good one and one you are completely capable of ennacting. i'm sure a lot of people would use that feature frequently as well. 031104 ... oE tried to keep my mouth shut..but here goes..and i hope this doesn't come off as arrogant..but after a few months here i've kinda just accepted that ever'body ain't gonna like wutcha write..and that's totally cool with me..and the things that i don't particularly care for..i ah just choose to not let it make any impression..but then my emotional reservoirs are basically on "E" i just wanna say that there is room for pd or endless or even myself to not be pithy, or oracular or thought provoking everytime we blathe..and a for cliques..hey there's a place for them as well..i dunno..the whole issue of any kind of coercion or folk being constrained to conform to some universalist aesthetic..or norm or standard...even loosly defined..pretty much goes against the whole grain..whatever blather used to be..this is what it has evolved into..five years from now i may not even recognize it..so we each plant our seeds, flowers, poop our piles of faux pedantic pretensio(especiallyme!) ..and ah..hey i just leave the stuff i don't dig..alone..but yes of course debate is vital for any construct such as this..but when does debate descend into this kind of petulant, petty, advesarial spatterfest? Debate the merits of an argument..sure but personal attacks..to me it just seems we degrade ourselves when we resort to that.. ah but then what do i know? and ah remeber the old anti-sophist who wound up losing his life for his negative dialectic..his usurpations upon the very fabric upon the institutions of democrasy in greek antiquity?..okay maybe my bombast..has brought me to the extreme border of this discussion,,but still we have an incredible oppurtunity to expectorate..spatter and build mind numbing pillars of esoteric..solipsistic chatter and ephemera..and learn a few things to boot...so..yea blather on!! later, and doar how could you EVER think that i could have been schad..i'm way too self involved to take the time to spike the old blather punch as it were...not to mention my oh so immaculate piety, rectitude..heh heh ... 031104 ... schadenfreude misses trees my rantings weren't meant to be a "you'd better do meaningful stuff!" thrust, but more a "are you reading what you write? are you proud?" kind of thrust... people will do as they do and that's great, but i was poking at awareness of the product. heck, i don't even care if you're saying nothing, if you're saying it pretty. if your words are empty and dull and you're okay with that, well, good for you. you'll do well in the land of greyface. me, i demand my bread_and_circus, and i want it delivered on my own personal playground. guess i'm just difficult like that. and for personal attacks, i guess i did brush against that a bit, but i tried to focus my flaming anti-cute fangs on the concepts i was railing against. and the (many) attacks returned to me, heh, i've been flamed by the best, the biggest reaction in me was exasperation. when someone tells you to fuck off, it usually means they've stopped listening to you, and they're transmitting valueless statements to boot. the bee's nest has made a good bread_and_circus, though. i like seeing people get in tizzies once in a while. it's good for my cold, shriveled heart. but one favor: none of this was about cliques, or "back in the day." it's about today_yesterday and my personal amusement. everything else can go to hecknuts. 031104 ... blah-ze i figured it was someone who had been here for a while-even that took me a while, and that was pretty obvious. just shows i should read more of the stuff here. whoops. probably wouldn't have picked a scrap with you if i had of actually realised it was someone with your kind of seniority and history at blather. probably wouldn't have written the scrappy little argument above either. blather probably doesn't deserve some of the crap i stick here. congrats for that'un, you actually made me think long and hard. after all my exams are finished, i might sit down and write something worthwhile. or i'll just give up and go read something worthwhile. 031104 ... . misstree??!! Whoa.Wouldn'ta guessed. Shows what I know. 031104 ... schadentree i remained anonymous precisely because i didn't want my identity influencing reactions. :) 031104 ... REAListic optimIST yeah well i don't care if it is misstree i still think that to say "if you look at it a month from now and are happy with it, then fine, good for you, but i'm not" is total poppycock. i know you acknowledged blather is blather, but yet you did not. we are not writing for your amusement, no one is buying tickets to this circus. some of us (me included) spend so much time in front of the screen that this is the most social they get all day, so a little humdrum banter is just therapy, m'dear. i would not care if 10 new people came here and started posting the driest most banal blathes, cuz i know who i want to read and after a few of theirs, i would know who i don't. but if i started attacking them and telling them that they are contributing nothing, then i feel that i would be doing them, myself and blather a disservice. 'skites who have read eyedreamism, etc. know that there is good writing to be had here, and that that is something to which they can aspire. but i'm not about to go blasting pipedream because i can't stand cute. if cute brings a smile to your face, then it isn't empty at all. it actually has the power to break you out of a ho-hum doldrum spell if you let it. perhaps you score goth points by railing on cute, but i'm not convinced that cute is as empty as you say, nor do i believe that if it was, it would warrant personal attacks. if you want the quality ratio to be higher, then perhaps you should take that task upon yourself, create a contest, provide a source of inspiration. i certainly was not inspired by schad to increase MY quality. i was only inspired to defend against generalities of attacks based on personal preference. 031104 ... notme i think stork daddy made some excellent points here, well i think you all made valid points but that's not the point of my blathe. ---caution--- ---long dribble blathe below--- ---continue at your own risk--- ---don't say i din't warn ya--- first off i'd just like to say that for me blather is...blather! whatever is here is what blather is. i can't control what other skites blathe and i certainly am happy for that fact. on a personal note, some of you may remember how i left blather once, back there in the distance of time. what i never mentioned was the fact that one of the main reasons i left was 'cause i don't enjoy seeing all the dead baby and cum crap. seriously, i find it rather base and disgusting (okay so that's me, call me an old-fashioned pruney prude). i prefer images like unicorns, giants, and rainbows.. and hearing how your day has been. but walking down the street, seeing people wearing things i don't like, i can't just say..oh look at her/him what a trashy outfit they are wearing why don't i just go rip it off their bloody skin? there is beauty in everything, even if it isn't always apparent to the one viewing. look at the way the unlinked and linked words dance patterns on the screen for instance, it is an art form in itself. i don't want people to stop writing anything. sure i don't like seeing blathe titles like dick sucking 101 or however the heck it goes, but i'm not about to shout at you all (whoever) and call you names for it, no doubt a lot/most of my stuff has similar nauseating effects on some/many of you. yes i have left sparkles and 'i'm so lonely i could kill myself' blathes. ever had one of those moments where you read something that just brightened up your day and made you smile and you wanted to let the person who made you smile know you were smiling and maybe help them to smile too? well *sparkle sparkle* yes and *twinkle wink twinkle*. i think it is okay to live and let people live.. that is what we are here for. it is good to breathe is it not? fear of breathing is terror_bowl blather is beautiful. that is all i know. it is also scary. because i don't know what i'll type next and maybe that is why i like it so much. yes it is awfully good to be well composed, think thoughts through, glance back for typos, but what is wrong with 'random' spontaneity? i'd much rather read some so called 'boring empty' dribble with 'mistakes' than a pile full of rehearsed echos. diversity is wonderful. what may look like a pile of garbage to someone is a mountain of beauty to another. do we think we're going for gold here? why can't we just shoot and see what makes it in the basket? this is an experiment afterall. i mean, it is all good to write things ahead of time and bring them to blather, that is all groovy woovy koovies. my basic point is we shouldn't restrict ourselves to thinking that only one way of writing is a good way, that only certain types of blathes are good. as i believe pipedream stated, poetry is in the mundane. it is all good. i for one have never heard/done/seen/felt half the things i read about in here. sometimes it is the things i least expect that affect me the most. i don't like a lot of what i've blathed in all of my blather days. i don't like all of what i've read. but i love it all because it is like the sky that drops a canvas to show us where the moon and stars are, i wouldn't cut out the black parts even if i had magical scissors and a tall ladder. the best way to move a crowd is to lead. if we don't like something here, that is okay. it is alright to not like everything. it is good to try to show others the 'door to the room of light' but nobody should me made to feel bad about writing here. there is no room of light. now, i could have taken the opportunity to email this blathe to all of the previous Rites who blathed here on this blathe page and avoided pressing blather. sure it would have cut out some of the clutter, made blathe a little less message boardy. but do we really need to think this way? i think if we think there is enough room in here for all our best thoughts/words there is also room for the 'mundane', for sparkles, for all the blathes that await in the birthing chambers of our keyboards. if something isn't your cup of tea, make another pot, maybe others will enjoy the smell and be enticed to sip it with you. .smile. shine_like_a_star .peace.love. ---end of dribble---- 031104 ... oldephebe "..pile of rehearsed echoes"..NICE! 031104 ... pipedream misstree? you started that pipedream page, and you left sparkles on the sparkle page. either you're a hypocrite or you're just mean. or PMS-ing. in any case, you just broke my heart...i have no words. 031105 ... girl_jane Avenue Q...has anybody seen or heard that musical? 031105 ... misstree is drunk again i am a hypocrite. and i am mean. and i never meant to break your heart, and my schadenbitchiness being aimed at you was a coincidence. i am truly sorry that i've broken your heart, and i don't apologize lightly. wrong place at the wrong time for the wrong personality to emerge, i'm afraid. when i_bring_out_the_worst_in_me, innocent bystanders get bloody. pd, i'll send you an email once i'm hung over rather than piss drunk. i didja wrong, and i regret it. the rest of y'all, fuck off, i'm done. 031105 ... webster schadenfreude SHAHD-n-froy-duh noun: A malicious satisfaction in the misfortunes of others. Schadenfreude comes from the German, from Schaden, damage + Freude, joy. It is often capitalized, as it is in German. 031106 ... oldephebe yeah..thanx web..i think most of us word nerds already figured that out..just to amend my earlier post..actually..the athens of socratic greek antiquity was a combination of successions of "democratic" and oligarchic rule..the right to vote was only extended to wealthy males, land owners..(the aristocratic class, inherited wealth)a prosperous merchant/craftmen middle class..women and the indigent were prohibited..and i regret the inference i tried to draw between schads mischievous exploits and the venerable Socrates who taunted and mocked his accusers and was viscerally anti-democratic..it was socrates who by his masterful excersise of the negative dialectic..forensically searched out hairline cracks in his interlocutors definition of his argument, epistomolog- ical expeditions where the true heart of the argument was buried under Socrates sophistical..yes sophistical impositions.. he'd have made a brilliant attorney..anyway.. like i said i regret the facile analogy/inferment i tried to make.. the two are a cosmos apart in degree and context..so it's back to our encephalic egos flailing..ponderously in these dense seas of conjecture..whatever..this probably should have been put on the blathe entitled Socrates..but i wanted to be honest and address my facile and not particularly analagous assertions..spurious strikes me as a word that connotes slipshod tactics of argumentation..and i want to argue out of a place of integrity, even if my conclusions are not(or cannot be)borne out empirically..or if the dissonance between the two cannot be breached..i at least want to believe what i am saying..so..now everything is obfuscated one great earnest parenthetical column of opacity..blech ... 031106 ... misstree no, a small stain in conjecture is loosened and lifted by a paragraph of convoluted prose. indeed. 031106 ... smurfus rex I had to laugh when you first mentioned the "I like macaroni!" club...it reminded me of a story one of my psych profs told us in class about one of his daughters suddenly disliking mustard just as he was squeezing it onto her hot dog...you had to be there, I guess. On the one hand, I have to agree with the visitors to this thread, that you can't just rubberstamp "UNACCEPTABLE" on someone's blathe because it's cute, vapid, inane, or asinine, because blather, to me, is like a public diary, in a way...a journal for anything and everything that may come into one's head. And any reading of paste!'s threads will confirm that *anything* is fair game for posting. :) On the other hand, though, I have to agree with you too. So often, journeys into blather are like listening to the radio...you want to hear the good songs while you're driving (or jogging or working or whenever), but if you time it wrong, you get that thirty minute block of commercials in between the 12 or 15-song sets. Or worse, you get the 12-song set of bubble-gum pop Top 40 and boy bands...but if you keep hitting the 'Seek' button (in our case, 'go'), you'll find a song (blathe) that's tolerable/suitable/enjoyable. If you're like User 24, though, you just make a CD of your favorite songs so you have something to switch over to if you've been through all the stations five times (like me). BTW, now that I know about that "marked" thing, U24, I feel like, I don't know, like an art judge has determined a blathe "suitable for further review"...it's a good idea. So, to make a long story short (too late), both sides are right. Blather is what it is, whether you like it or not. You want to see a change in blather? Be the change. 031206 ... u24 thanks, smurfus rex, that was a nice metaphor to use, I'm flattered (which, basically is what I'm here for; ego pumping, feeling of self worth, etc... that sounds like sarcasm, but it's not.. good god I'm ranting aimlessly this morning) ahem. actually that was quite interesting to me anyway, so I'll continue (apologies for total breakdown of normal fairly coherent (I hope) blathering) where was I? yes.. quite often I sound like I'm being sarcastic, which is why I always feel the need to excessively explain myself - words are *so* inadequate - but I'm not being sarcastic at all, in actual fact (take note, those who wish to attack me) it's a defence mechanism; I light heartedly take the piss out of (tranlation: make fun of) myself to avoid other people doing it. yeah. ANYWAY back to the point! yeah, good idea, but the trouble is I hardly ever go back and comment on marked blathes, so while it's a useful reference if I'm ever bored, blather provides such a rich stimulus that I never need to. :) 031231 ... marked I've been looking for this blathe for about a year. . 040802 ... jane i can't believe i missed all of this while it was going on. something internal compells me to write my opinion on the above ... discussion. but you know what, i'm going to refrain. i always get here too late 040924 ... Doar fuck I like this, discussing arguing rational and even the late keeping the late nights . 130525 ... Traveller the swimming is a current to take schadenfreude to the other current or shore but it was emotional. . I love you, in all broken bones. . 130525 ... ego hum schadenfreude is no longer entertaining wisdom must intrude please? 220409 what's it to you? who go blather from