Mere Musings

posted on 5.2.13

“I think I started having more success when I stopped feeling like there was a narrative to my life. I think once you let go of that idea, then first off you stop seeing yourself as the most important thing in your narrative, you see yourself as more of a component. There’s no art to my story. There’s no like, climax or anticlimax… so trying to find where things connected or what’s ‘in my arc’ didn’t make a lot of sense. And once I let go of that — cause that was a big thing for me in high school and college — I think I started having more success or became happier.”

From:

Justin McElroy in the little documentary The Verge made about Paul Miller’s year without the internet (via christinefriar)

Hey, that’s my managing editor! I can confirm that Justin is an awesome dude — if his guest appearance in ‘Finding Paul Miller’ didn’t confirm that — and that I’m on the same page as Paul: Justin’s my hero, too.

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posted on 4.27.13 Max Scoville's Wet Burlap Sack of Unbridled Hatred: Q&A: Afterschool Special

maxscoville:

Anonymous asked you: I finished high school last year thinking that everything would start to get better once it was over. However, being outside of a comfortable school environment has highlighted how fucked I am at talking to people and making friends, and as a result I’m pretty consistently…

Salient point here: “…if you sit around feeling like a depressed lonely piece of shit, you’re probably going to continue feeling like a depressed lonely piece of shit.”

Years before I got my current gig at Polygon, I spent way too long complaining about my mediocre situation instead of actually attempting to do something about it. (Not that I’m above reproach now — I’m doing the same thing with my slowly growing gut. I’m unhappy about it, but while I’m trying to eat better, I haven’t actually started to exercise yet.)

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posted on 4.17.13

“The senators who voted against background checks for online and gun-show sales, and those who voted against checks to screen out would-be gun buyers with mental illness, failed to do their job. They looked at these most benign and practical of solutions, offered by moderates from each party, and then they looked over their shoulder at the powerful, shadowy gun lobby — and brought shame on themselves and our government itself by choosing to do nothing. […] Our democracy’s history is littered with names we neither remember nor celebrate — people who stood in the way of progress while protecting the powerful. On Wednesday, a number of senators voted to join that list.”

From: Gabrielle Giffords in a scathing New York Times op-ed piece today, after the Senate failed to meet the 60-vote threshold to pass legislation for universal background checks

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posted on 3.29.13

oatmeal:

The gay marriage debate in 50 years

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posted on 3.2.13

“
It turns out procrastination is not typically a function of laziness, apathy or work ethic as it is often regarded to be. It’s a neurotic self-defense behavior that develops to protect a person’s sense of self-worth.

You see, procrastinators tend to be people who have, for whatever reason, developed to perceive an unusually strong association between their performance and their value as a person. This makes failure or criticism disproportionately painful, which leads naturally to hesitancy when it comes to the prospect of doing anything that reflects their ability — which is pretty much everything.

But in real life, you can’t avoid doing things. We have to earn a living, do our taxes, have difficult conversations sometimes. Human life requires confronting uncertainty and risk, so pressure mounts. Procrastination gives a person a temporary hit of relief from this pressure of “having to do” things, which is a self-rewarding behavior. So it continues and becomes the normal way to respond to these pressures.

Particularly prone to serious procrastination problems are children who grew up with unusually high expectations placed on them. Their older siblings may have been high achievers, leaving big shoes to fill, or their parents may have had neurotic and inhuman expectations of their own, or else they exhibited exceptional talents early on, and thereafter “average” performances were met with concern and suspicion from parents and teachers.
”

From:

David Cain, “Procrastination Is Not Laziness” (via pawneeparksdepartment)

This totally justifies every excuse I’ve been giving myself from not doing that thing I’m supposed to do.

(via aaronmoles)

Well, shit.

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posted on 1.3.13 The Problem With The Big Bang Theory…

butmyopinionisright:

I’ve been meaning to post something about The Big Bang Theory for a while now but it’s taken me ‘till now to really understand what it is about the show that makes me uncomfortable. I’m not exactly a believer in the whole “only write about the things you like, don’t trash the things you don’t” trend which seems to be plaguing comments sections in negative articles lately, but I wanted to be able to really examine why I don’t like TBBT rather than just slagging it off. My main questions being - Why don’t I like this anymore? Why do I feel uncomfortable watching it? And why do I get so annoyed when I see people sing its praises online? The thing which really sparked this post was seeing a raft of comments on Facebook, below the last round of voting in Television Without Pity’s Tubey Awards, claiming The Big Bang Theory to be “the best comedy on TV”. This made me angry so instead of posting an impulsive comment calling out their bad taste which I’d probably regret later, I decided to really analyse why seeing comments like that made me so mad when previously, although I didn’t really love the show, I’d never considered myself as disliking The Big Bang Theory.

Hell, I even have season one on dvd, it’s sitting right between Battlestar Galactica and Bored To Death in my alphabetised collection.

And here, I think, is where my problem with The Big Bang Theory lies…

Read More

I stopped watching The Big Bang Theory a couple of seasons ago for the very same reasons — this person just outlines them in great detail. The salient points:

Why don’t I like The Big Bang Theory anymore? I think at first I was so happy to see people like me represented on mainstream television that I ignored the cruelty behind the humour. As I continue to watch the programme […] it’s become much clearer that actually I’m not being represented. I’m being ridiculed.

Why do I feel uncomfortable watching it? Because whenever I laugh at a joke, and I do sometimes find it funny, I feel like I’m laughing at my friends, like I’m putting myself and the people I identify with down. And that’s not a nice feeling, that’s not how I want to feel when I watch a comedy.

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posted on 11.12.12

somuchsass:

sade:

themattsmith:

Why Doesn’t MTV Play Music Videos Anymore?

This is so fucking spot on that it hurts to laugh at.

unfuckingreal

Watch this.

yuuuuuuuuup

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posted on 11.2.12 WHEN A WRITER TAKES AN EDIT PERSONALLY

editorrealtalk:

How to know when to break up with your editor, over at CJR today.

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posted on 10.31.12 open areas: let's talk about equivalency.

openareas:

Listen, I don’t want this to become a “I have no power” blog. But really, that’s all that is going on in my life right now. Dealing with the aftermath of Sandy. Which is something I want to talk about. The aftermath of a hurricane is different things for different people. For some, it’s dealing…

Amen.

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posted on 10.5.12

world-shaker:

Why Save PBS?

via Chris Bishop

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I’m Samit Sarkar, a 26-year-old reporter for Polygon. You may also know me from my four-plus years as an associate editor at Destructoid.

I’m a stickler for proper English — grammar, punctuation, spelling, etc. — so if you see any mistakes in my writing, let me know. And if you see mistakes elsewhere, let me know, because I’ll want to point them out here and laugh (à la English Fail Blog). I might even put some on The Grammar Nazi, a Tumblr that I contribute to.

You can contact me at samit [dot] sarkar [at] gmail [dot] com, or on Twitter (see below). I’m also on Facebook.

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