Caltrops - Peter Molyneux's The Movies





	[quote name="Zsenitan"][quote name="Fullofkittens"]Geeks spend the first 12-15 years of their lives being ostracized and mocked for being in violation of arbitrary (and sometimes mysterious) social guidelines. There, at the bottom of the public school caste system, they find likeminded individuals and eventually get some friends who share an interest in things like underground music and movies. And what do they do then? They develop their own ad hoc caste system, with its own arbitrary social guidelines. They just substitute "better taste" for "better clothes."[/quote] I question this full-on conflation of hipsters with high school losers, I think you're talking about a rather specific subset of hipsters (as I was too at points, with hipsters = trustifarians.) Keep in mind that there are a ton of hipsters still in high school! Also the ad hoc arbitrary social order of the not-losers in high school was based on all kinds of things, and <i>better clothes is assuredly the one that everyone keeps through adulthood.</i> Take it from a permanently outre dresser, FOK. People will always give a shit how you are dressed and will always evaluate you on the merits of your shoes. That's my argument #1: if you think non-hipsters aren't judging the shit out of you no matter how mature they are, that's just because it is like water and you are like a fish. Pro-grade line-toers are painfully aware of how little the rules have changed since kindergarten. [quote] While their social betters back in high school are all now perfectly normal, average adults with no particular thoughts about who is cooler than who, the hipsters are stuck in a perpetual state of arrested development where they obsess over wearing the right clothes, listening to the right music, watching the right movies, reading the right authors. Hipsters can't let it go. They think that adulthood is like high school.[/quote] <b>Things I have been senselessly and unfavorably judged on by normal average adults:</b> 1. Being good at a task 2. The way I punctuate emails 3. My bra straps 4. My inability to enthusiastically enjoy Charles Dickens 5. My religion even though I make a point of never discussing it - with a fierce heat, this one. Someone has tried to convert me - in amazing, gross, presumptuous ways - at every job I've ever worked at. 6. My preferences in classical music 7. Being funnier than a co-worker 8. Weight 9. Make-up - so ferociously and frequently 10. Jokes told out of work to people who loved them at the time, with judgment rendered as though they were told at work to people who were openly crying as I joke-raped them 11. <b>My favorite</b> knowing that there was a plum tree on a spot of wild land 3 blocks away from the office. The woman two desks behind me curled her lip up and made the not-at-all-jokey assertion that I was either lying or a savage. Let me recast the judgment on taste thing: let's say that it's not - it can't be - objective. That is: there's no Big Book Of Correct Taste. All your judges have to go on is their own experiences and the quality of your argumentation for your taste. You can see this dance in action on, say, music ratings communities on Live Journal, or people floating their favorite alt-country or hip hop bands as Truly Great at Pitchfork. So this is a phenomenon with three dimensions: - one, that the outcome can be influenced directly and relatively honestly by the taste-holder - let's call this non-randomness. - two, that the outcome ultimately doesn't really matter all that much, and both the judged and the judge will remain free to pursue their individual preferences - let's call this low-riskiness. - three, that the judgment is being opened and rendered is obvious, known to both parties, frequently explicitly solicited by one or both - let's call this transparency. So now what we're looking at is cliques of the beseiged that are built up based on a type of judgment that looks and acts like a game. A game that the judged can win! A game they can make sense of, and where losing is relatively low-cost. Argument #2: That's what I see when I look at communities that form around tastes in any cultural medium: a complicated game that is nevertheless - by virtue of being non-random, low-risk, and transparent - still much more pleasant and winnable than the horrible degraded vengeful senseless game being played by normal healthy adults. [quote]Not that everyone on this forum isn't guilty of this behavior to some degree, including myself. Two observations: -Musicians are the worst in the world about this thing. One of the reasons I cannot stand to participate in my local "rock scene" is that it's fucking cliquish! These people are in their 30s and they're worried about cliques! Fuck that! -It makes perfect sense that computer dorks (like the typical POE/OMM/Caltrops denizen) would be particularly sensitive to hipsterism, because in that infernal crucible of school, they identified with the hipsters right up until they became hipsters, and then suddenly their own people turned against them.[/quote] Again, I think the geeks = hipsters thing is a dangerous oversimplification on at least one end, but whatever. Still a valid observation as far as it goes. Anyway, I think you will not be able to get people to stop being cliquish until you make everyone supremely confident in their identities. Choosing friends, coalitions, movies, music, etc. - all a process of identity-forming. Also, is there a magical line that we can draw that truly separates cliques from clubs? Also, two things: 1. Does being inclusive buy you something that I'm not aware of? Maybe I haven't been in enough cliques, but I have yet to have my hands tied by one except for of course the hands-tying clique. True, in a clique revolving around a specific interest - say, country music of the 1950's, or local bands that are kind of ripping of The Rapture - you had better really like that shit because your friends are going to listen to a lot of it and you will probably need to know about it too. But the good news is that there are billions of cliques with overlapping edges, both online and off. So you should be able to find some people who will agree with you blindly. But not being in any cliques at all is lonely work. If my experience is anything to go by, it's the person involved in cliques who winds up with a full social calendar and who curates events and outings for his non-clique friends. "Want to come to Drink And Draw?" "Wanna come to Pub Quiz?" "Hey my rowing club is doin this regatta tomorrow, you busy?" "Hey the new Coldplay album is out, we're queuing for it at midnight and listening to banal AOR rock. Come with!" "New Harry Potter movie lol let's go to the theater in the poor people part of town and make fun of it!" 2. Getting back to the game-notion of taste cliquishness, perhaps a taste-based clique is also a way to sharpen and/or expand this specific part of one's identity. Caltrops is a clique premised on pure unpleasantness; the average Caltrops poster is defended against standard internet drama and insults in a way that seems godlike to, say, QT3 posters. So too: getting involved in a country music clique means learning more about country music in a personal and relationship-building way that you just couldn't if you were trying to learn about it on your own.[/quote]