Scribe, ut possis cum voles dicere: dices cum velle debebis (Pl. Ep. 6.29)

Wednesday, January 04, 2006

With Attitude

People often ask me: "Don't you have anything better to do? Anything better to do than studying Linguistics? Can you find a job with it? Any better language to learn than Amharic, Latin or Lithuanian? Is Lithuanian even a language? Don't you have anything better to do than to study the Mishnah or read Agnon, Tolstoy, Bashevis-Singer? Anything better to do than to write a blog, to read Slashdot, to read and write Wikipedia articles? Anything better to do than to spend hours cooking pasta sauces instead of microwaving a TV dinner?"

Well, no. I like those things, these are good things to do. I sometimes have a problem of properly prioritizing between them, but all of them are good. And i don't like to be asked this question; not that i'm offended, i just sometimes get sick of giving the same answers all the time.

And i don't like to ask this question either. Come GNAA - the Gay Nigger Association of America. (Be careful - the home page is harmless, but some parts of the site, such as "members", opens a bunch of popups with shocking and disgusting images. You can read a more civilized description on Wikipedia.) Of course, they are not really gay niggers. They are a group of proud self-proclaimed Internet trolls. They don't hack sites - they disrupt public forums, such as the aforementioned Wikipedia and Slashdot and others. And i just don't get it: They have a very well-designed website, they are apparently knowledgeable with computers, they are quite sophisticated and elaborate - don't they have anything better to do then to tell scathing jokes about websites and write stupid things in newsgroups and think that pictures of feces and ugly naked people are funny? I would understand it if they were fourteen years old, but they seem to be grown-ups. I found out about them yesterday, and for some reason it didn't make me curious and it didn't make me laugh. It actually depressed me - which is quite rare.

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