You know you are in trouble when the Evening News airs reruns.

[Cain]

They even had a professional music studio built.

[AFK]

blasphemer!

[Mangrove]

damning evidence:

Current campaign by VH1 to encourage people to reintroduce music progams in schools. 

[LMNO]

Rebuttal:  VH1 has been doing that for over a decade, and what do we get?  Battle of the B-List Celebrities.



QED.

[AFK]

Heh, VH1 should reintroduce music programming to itself. 

[the dreadful hours]

I don,Äôt know the answer.¬† I don,Äôt know that anyone knows the answer.¬† I don,Äôt know that there even IS an answer.¬† All I know is there are days I seriously just want to get as far away from all of this as I can.¬† I imagine there has to be some prime real estate in Greenland.¬†

There is no answer.  Give up, smoke up, and enjoy the show.

[AFK]

Umm, okay.   

[Mangrove]

Rebuttal:  VH1 has been doing that for over a decade, and what do we get?  Battle of the B-List Celebrities.



QED.

i didn't know that. (having only had the most minimal exposure to VH1.

consider evidence retracted.

[Triple Zero]

RWHN:
> Have you seen any of the shit that is going on with the Anna Nicole deal?

no i haven't. and if it weren't for this messageboard it would have known nothing more than some remark by my gf "did you know annanicole died?" - "who?" - "some model" - "oh."

really people. the world is big enough without TV as it is already. just throw the damn thing out of the door if it's giving you so much pain.

then it's limited to the poor sods trying to tell you about inane bullshit news. and what do you do with poor sods telling you about inane bullshit news? that's right, you make fun of them.
last wednesday evening, some poor sod making some half-assed non-funny reference to some piece of corporate brainwashing: ".. or don't you know that advertisement jingle?", me irritated: "I don't watch advertisements" *glare*

RWHN:
> No one really ever teaches you how to use your imagination.

this is an interesting notion.

i do this often, try to get people loosen their mind a littlebit:

me: *something*
them: "but that's bullshit, simply not true"
me: "yes but imagine if it wasn't", *other funky bullshit example*
(if they take the bait, interesting discussion ensues)

important here that you don't go into mystical esoteric land btw. at least, not with people of which you aren't 100% sure have a healthy skeptical outlook on it. (unless you're out to make fun of them of course)

LMNO:
> New conspiracy theory: The reason arts and music in schools are always so
> underfunded is because Big Media doesn't want kids to know that it's possible,
> and easy, to entertain themselves with nothing more that a pencil and paper,
> or a keyboard.

OFUK, i didn't even read your lightbulb before i wrote the above.

well, obviously we gotta do something with this then eh?

how about going to christian fundie kids fora and very kindly troll the little robots into a creative MS Paint Compo?

any ideas on how this ties in with the fact that this messageboard seems to be exploding with creative arts stuff?
is it maybe because a lot of us are--at least a tiny littlebit--getting better, not buying into the shit, and thinking for ourselves ?

[Cain]

me: *something*
them: "but that's bullshit, simply not true"
me: "yes but imagine if it wasn't", *other funky bullshit example*
(if they take the bait, interesting discussion ensues)

I do that all the time.  Alternative history, mostly.  Not only is it a great tool for examining how things work (why would this not happen?  does one man have that much influence? etc), intellectually stimulating and a good way of learning more, its also very, very fun.

[Triple Zero]

you mean the "what if the nazis had won" stuff?

i find that quite difficult actually, usually when i get to such a point in a discussion i say, "never say if", cause it's almost impossible to predict what happened, too much variables, chaos theory etc.

especially things like "what if, before i was dating my current gf i would have done X instead of Y" ... really no telling what could have happened :-D

i usually use the technique to get people jump past an apparently impassable obstacle. like "but you can't XXX while YYY", then "ok but now let's pretend we can".
then once they see the value of being able to XXX while YYY, because of having imagined the possibility and (good? desirable? interesting?) results, they are more likely to go actively search for a way to at least emulate or approach XXX while YYY.

oshit this is the intellectual masterbating happening again right?

[Cain]

Yeah, but we do it smaller scale.  Much smaller scale.  So, for example, what would have happened if Erich Honecker had not been taken ill during the summer of 1989. Little things like that.

[Triple Zero]

this is popular pass-time on history students parties, i presume?

[Cain]

Sadly yes.  History students = not known for their wild parties.

Anyway, its important because it makes people think about what could be, instead of what is.  And thats the key to imagination "could, maybe, possibly".  Of course, if you want to build castles in the sky, it does help to have your feet on the ground too.

[Triple Zero]

or rocket boots.





- 000,
using his just new found imagination