God bless the goddamn Onion

I never watched Lost but I will say that wild speculation was really fun when it was episodes of Survivor ten years ago and there really was this a real creative energy put into sifting through a show that seemed to have been deliberately crafted for the clue-hunters at a number of levels. There was actually fun for the fan community in reverse-engineering the likely winner based on the editing cues. Don't know if they kept that stuff going, I bailed after season ten or eleven but it was pretty great dorky fun.

thats kinda awesome

http://www.theonion.com/articles/video-of-man-weeping-becomes-viral-hit,31710/

yep, watched the whole thing

http://www.theonion.com/articles/find-the-thing-youre-most-passionate-about-then-do,31742/

I had never seen this old one that got tweeted this morning:

http://www.theonion.com/articles/slightly-upset-woman-declared-insane,341/

dying

http://www.theonion.com/articles/find-the-thing-youre-most-passionate-about-then-do,31742/

― s.clover, Wednesday, March 20, 2013 1:04 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark

hahaha *feels intense stabs of pain in lower abdomen*

haha, perfect.

And on the "Onion goes dark" front,

Christopher Walken

http://www.theonion.com/articles/find-the-thing-youre-most-passionate-about-then-do,31742/

― s.clover, Wednesday, March 20, 2013 1:04 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark

hahaha *feels intense stabs of pain in lower abdomen*

― 乒乓, Wednesday, March 20, 2013 1:10 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

;_;

this one confused the hell out of me until i saw the byline
http://www.theonion.com/articles/i-am-old-and-confused-and-paralyzed-with-sexual-fr,31680/

every so often the Onion do pieces like that 'find a thing you're passionate about etc' one that pull off the dual trick of having a (near enough) universal resonance while also reading like whoever wrote is blowing off some personal anguish

It has been incredibly good for the last year or two. Wonder if the pay wall has helped boost quality.

Okay that pope one had me in tears, genuinely biggest laugh in a long, long time.

http://www.theonion.com/articles/gaypride-parade-sets-mainstream-acceptance-of-gays,351/

"They kept chanting things like, 'We're here, we're queer, get used to it!' and 'Hey, hey, we're gay, we're not going to go away!'" Orosco said. "All I can say is, I was used to it, but now, although I'd never felt this way before, I wish they would go away."

Like half my fb friends have shared that "nights and weekends" piece. seems to have really struck a chord.

Yeah same here. And I think it really does with all of us, which if you think about it is fucking depressing!

would be more depressing to not have those nights n weekends

yeah I dunno I had a solid 18 months of having no school and almost no work encumbering my time and I was pretty miserable and wasn't achieving any dreams.

good point.

well, poverty is probly a bit worse than pishing yr life away at pointless unsatisfying drudgery but i don't think that undermines the article any

obv some people will disagree but i don't think they're being more realistic

it is a bit depressing but it's also possible to make a real commitment to a hobby in the evenings and weekends. if you do find yourself wishing you could do it all the time that's not necessarily a negative. still a great wry laugh tho, most of us still need to work.

I think what it means to me is this:

I used to do music, and it was something that I gave a large percentage of my time to.

Now, similarly to the article, the best I could hope for would be 30 mins every other day, maybe a couple hours a weekend.

This is not enough time in bursts to get back to proficiency, or to produce anything worth the effort.

So, I don't.

My brane still writes songs / music unfettered, they are the finest songs ever, as long as I don't actually commit them to physical media.

I think more why I found it depressing was less the "I only spend X a week on my passion" than the "I spend most of my hours on this shitty job that I hate" part. I can think of very few people who genuinely love their job to the point they leap out of bed for it/put in extra hours/do it all the time cos theyre obsessed with it. The rest of us do what we do because it pays the bills, and for whatever fucked up reason, creative pursuits don't do this.

I think it's verisimilitude doing the work more than anything else, the article seemed very mid-period Onion in that they've never actually dropped off from having A+ funny ideas but they don't always have more in the article than "The Headline, Expanded". It seemed like they were acknowledging this when they brought in the front page stuff that was just headlines.

Trayce have you considered being Amanda Palmer, I am genuinely surprised at how many people don't consider this as a career option.

I think if I spent significantly longer on my creative endeavour, I'd want some sort of progress to happen to them...

i don't think the bigger issue is whether you should be able to make a living from your personal creative interests, what the piece nails is the relative time and energy people feel they're able to allot to what they have to do and what they want to do. for some people that's not problematic, it's LYFE, and for others it's terrible but you can disagree with where the fault lies, yrself or the society you belong to or some combo of both

i just think its good to remember that no side has a monopoly on truth there as to what's effed up with the world and if your world doesn't seem too effed up then good for you, carry on

Trayce have you considered being Amanda Palmer

Haha. I'd rather die.

i liked and vibed w/ that article but lets b/h its a slightly more subtle/less earnest version of the stuff we make fun of on the facebook artist thread

that tends to be laughed at for the manner in which it's said more than what it's saying though I think?

ie obvious truisms presented as 'insight'

yeah there's nothing deep in that Onion bit but it's delivery twists the knife in just right, plenty of wisdom is just reminding you of shit you already know

it's not even a particularly well written one imo, by their own v high standards of rhythm, but it is a good topic.

the fb thread is 'follow yr dreams' (rainbow font, misspellings, improper period usage, other goodies aside). this is more 'lool this is is what happens when you follow yr dreams, sucker.'

it's more "your dreams mean nothing, stop dreaming" imo

i wonder if this thing "connecting on facebook" has anything to do with the whole tail-end-of-gen-x-thru-gen-y helicopter parenting developing into entitlement issues for a bunch of kids who were told they were gonna live their dreams but instead now we have a fiscal crisis and an engineer shortage and a bunch of 20/30-somethings who didn't live their dreams but ultimately live cushy enough lives inherited from their middle-to upper-middle-to-upper-class upbringings to be on the internet all day and dominate the discourse with things like forwarding onion articles and upvoting "harlem shake" videos.

in short, this was a funny onion piece and i enjoyed it.

in its entire history there are like 7 onion articles total that are strong reads from headline to byline... i really liked it when they switched to the headline/one paragraph format, less chance to fuck it up

man that is some harsh judgement...

Bylines are traditionally placed between the headline and the text of the article

Find The Thing You're Most Passionate About, Then Do It On Nights And Weekends For The Rest Of Your Life

hahaha!

COMMENTARY • Opinion • ISSUE 49•12 • Mar 20, 2013
By David Ferguson

ok you lost me at ISSUE 49•12

haha you know what i meant, and irealizd that the onion places its authors right below the headline as i wrote that but i didnt give a fuccccckkkk

the 20/30-somethings experience

i wonder if this thing "connecting on facebook" has anything to do with the whole tail-end-of-gen-x-thru-gen-y helicopter parenting developing into entitlement issues for a bunch of kids who were told they were gonna live their dreams but instead now we have a fiscal crisis and an engineer shortage and a bunch of 20/30-somethings who didn't live their dreams but ultimately live cushy enough lives inherited from their middle-to upper-middle-to-upper-class upbringings to be on the internet all day and dominate the discourse with things like forwarding onion articles and upvoting "harlem shake" videos.

― îron swanson (Whiney G. Weingarten), Thursday, March 21, 2013 8:55 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah I think this is very much about being a generation raised by dreamy boomers but without the boomer economy/job market to back up those dreams. I just heard some reasonably established middle-aged journalist on NPR saying "When I started my career, all the papers had some kind of paid entry level position that you could get with no experience and it paid the bills and you could feed yourself and build a portfolio" and I was like YEAH RIGHT BULLSHIT THAT NEVER HAPPENED...really?

They would have 'one' position like that.

(I remember C-Man ranting on about being turned down as a school leaver for such a placing, in favour of some 'pretty girl' apparently, and the daft thing was, I'd applied for one as well and also got turned down and had completely forgotten about..)

IDK though, I feel like you hear a lot more older journalists talk about working their way up through a single paper, and starting in a paid job (if not a paid writing job, maybe copy editing). This "internship" concept didn't exist, let alone doing a series of four or five unpaid internships. And there were more papers, with more money, and probably less competition too because fewer people graduated college. Of course you're still getting the selection bias of people who made it when you listen to those interviews, but I definitely think we face a combination of a larger generation of people who feel that they should have "interesting" work combined with a lower availability of that kind of work (unless you're in computers).

Well, I hope those paths still exist, as Amber is keen on doing Jnlsm...

Oh man. Tell her to go into Telemarketing or some other more lucrative career.