Close-ups, Net-Anonymity and Kaskus' Fight Club

It is said that Putra uses this device to plan world domination.

- I like the Internet. You can hide your extremely poor language skills (i.e. English for this blog entry, "well DUH?!"-ness aside, please read on) under either:
a) A massive wall of text; with meaningless complex sentence structures and thesaurus-derived words. People are not going to call you inarticulate when they see a lot of text, especially one that looks like a page ripped from a Tolkien novel. You just can't argue against that. E.g. This blog.
b) Internet flaming. No matter how bad your English is, you can always hide it under a stream of vulgar words, pictures and emoticons.

An example of case b) is Kaskus' Fight club. It's dirty, unadulterated, racist, violent, sexist and certainly not noob-friendly. But it's not that bad. Because we all know that the guy who just made fun of your hair color/skin tone/mom/car/religious belief (if you have one) is actually just a fat overweight lonely college kid sitting in front of his aging computer and eating doritos/gorengan/fruit salad (if you're health conscious) at his cramped and dusty kos2an. Take pride that at least, you have a life. Actually, I'm not too sure about that last part. If you have something better to do (i.e. a 'life'), why on Earth would you go to Kaskus' fight club?

Anyway, still on the topic of Fight club (no Tyler Durden in this fight club, sorry girls.. and some boys), I used to go there quite a lot, just to see what it's all about. Turns out most of the posts were saturated with vulgarities, death threats and the occasional quotes to add to the arguments. Ideas and thoughts are often missing from these 'arguments'. Hence, a 1400+ posts thread on why (Indonesian ethnic group A) is better than (Indonesian ethnic group B).

I get a feeling that I'm a bit off topic right now. Well, to reiterate, my point is, arguing in the Internet is unlike arguing in a coffee-shop at Melbourne Central over latte and frapuccino while taking self-portraits using your brand new Nokia N95. It's different. The advantages are immediately apparent, i.e. the anonymity of the user and the digital nature of the medium (elaborating your ideas by using emoticons, photobucket images, youtube videos and even *shudder* powerpoint slides). Probably that's why opinions posted in the Internet are often rude, full of multimedia attachments and often devoid of any real content in it. In the real world, i.e. the Coffee shop analogy, your friends will smack you in the head if you curse every 5 seconds and used a TV and a dvd player to illustrate your arguments. Or if you do a =P using your face.

I think you need more than words to express yourself in the internet. And I know I'm being a hypocrite by writing a huge wall of text for you to read. But sometimes, it's possible to convey a message using just words, although it wouldn't be as powerful as having something else to back my ideas.

- I went to Uni this afternoon to catch up on my earth science lectures. I was planning to take some photos of the Red tree again (I have this small project to take a photo of this tree every two days to see the change in colors) , but the battery's almost dead and I didn't have a spare. So I went home, charged the battery and took a couple of macro shots.

- I seriously don't know what these photos are about. Things-I-need-to-survive? Well, I can live without my iPod. Not.

- Anyway, that's all for today. I finished my cup of coffee and am going to make myself another one. I wonder when I can finish my assignments and still have time to do some.. studying. Hmm. Good question. Yet irrelevant to this entry. D'oh.

I probably need to finish my assignment tomorrow. Seeing that it's due at 5pm on Monday. Dammit. Gotta go.

Putra

Playlist: The Mars Volta and John Mayer