Rancid Monke

Here, why don’t you all do something useful and generous and help out a family as they struggle with the evil that is cancer. You can tell them the Rancidmonke sent you. They will be utterly baffled.

gf.me/u/rwzzd3

-Rancidmonke

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2015 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 3,100 times in 2015. If it were a cable car, it would take about 52 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2014 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 2,100 times in 2014. If it were a cable car, it would take about 35 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

Internet, we need to talk. The click-bait, the videos that could be replaced with two lines of text, the perpetual smug judgement from freelance web writers, the rampant hyperbole that makes everything amazing/shocking/terrifying!!!! Seriously…just stop it.

“This article/video will shock you!” – I have been roaming around the internet for 14 years now, I have seen the 2 girls with the 1 cup and much, much worse. Your video will not raise my pulse in the slightest.

“You will never guess what happens next!” – I have a functioning frontal lobe so I am pretty sure I can guess what happens next, and I bet good money it will either be sappy or stupid.

“Things only 90’s kids will understand!” – Ring pops and Nickelodeon TV aren’t really hard concepts to grasp. Maybe it isn’t that we don’t understand, maybe we just don’t care.

“9 things you shouldn’t do past 30!” – No one needs a website to tell them what to do past 30. If you made it to 30 without dying, becoming a member of a cult, popping out more kids than you could even remotely support or ending up in jail than odds are you have reached a point where you don’t need a website to decide if you are “too old to go clubbing” or “shouldn’t be getting a tattoo at your age because that is super gross”. If you are 30 and you are in a cult, jail, or a trailer full of your offspring then whatever advice they had has come too late.

“Things you are doing WRONG!” – An article tried to tell me I was eating sushi wrong once. I am pretty sure if it ends up in my face hole and gets chewed enough to swallow without cutting off my airflow than I have achieved the act of eating. I have been eating for 34 friggin’ years, I am pretty sure I got the gold star and “meets expectations” on this one a while ago.

“This will restore your faith in humanity!” – Ten minutes delving into YouTube comment sections will take it away again, so wasted effort.

“Here is a list of astonishing things, #6 will astound/amaze/shock/terrify you!” – Then why is it #6? Do you not know how a list works? If it is that astounding/amazing/shocking/terrifying then it should be at #1 and then #1 obviously needs to move down a little. Otherwise, what the hell was the point of bothering with numbers?

“Famous person does something AMAZING! [VIDEO]” – I made the bold assumption that it was a video of the famous person doing the amazing thing, instead it was a variety of clips of the famous person walking around at a red carpet event and having his picture taken while pressing the flesh. Meanwhile, someone narrated 2 paragraphs of this amazing thing he did without citing any reliable sources or providing anything approaching evidence. WHY DID THIS NEED TO BE A VIDEO?!!!!

“This video will change your life!” – All this video will do is eat into my precious data plan on my cell phone.

“15 amazing life hacks!” – 2 actually useful life hacks. 6 solutions to problems that no sane person actually has. 4 things that you could do but will make your home look 100% more tacky than it already does. 3 fixes that we already have perfectly useful consumer products for.

“Where are they now?!” – Probably the same place they were when a different site checked on them for this same article 2 weeks ago.

“Child stars gone bad!” – Lindsey Lohan is #1. Lindsey Lohan is always #1. Unless we are using this new-fangled math that you all invented, in which case she is #6 but she will astound/amaze/shock/terrify you.

“You won’t believe it isn’t photoshopped!” – Unless you are a proven reliable source or are providing some means of authentication then you are right, I won’t believe it. Just telling me I won’t believe it isn’t enough to make me doubt myself.

“Controversial “Skinny Pill” is taking the country by storm!” – Within a year of Viagra hitting the market most of North America knew to subtly inquire about boner pills from their doctor BY NAME. Every comedy act was legally required to have at least one reference to it, Bob Dole was trying to score a free lifetime supply by flogging it. If there really was a skinny pill then every morning news team in the country would be covering it and every home in North America would have a bottle by now. Instead they are trying to sell this through banner ads on sites about child stars going bad and amazing life hacks that someone stole off reddit. Speaking of boners…

“New all-natural pill will enlarge your penis!” – Now, If there was really a penis enlargement pill, I would have bought stock in that company by now. Having bought stock in the company I would be so rich that the size of my penis wouldn’t matter in the slightest. None of that has happened so we can assume your bottle of processed herbs would make a better salad than a penis enlarger.

Also, does it seem likely that I am particularly concerned about how “all-natural” your product is when I want to increase the size of my penis 10-fold? I am pretty sure I wouldn’t care how much mystery science and synthetic chemicals were involved if it actually worked.

Social Media, we need to talk

“95 percent of you won’t like/share this!” – True…that isn’t actually an incentive to like/share it though. 95 percent of people* don’t tie their genitals to the back of a moving vehicle either, doesn’t mean I should try it just to be different.

* Not an actual accurate percentage of non-genital tying population. Used for illustrative purposes only.

“Only my true friends…” – Stop. Stop right there. I don’t want to be friends with someone trying to guilt trip me over posting a status.

“Click like to show respect for our soldiers!” – Great news, we can shut down the veterans hospitals and stop all the widows and orphans payouts, they are all going to live on Facebook likes from now on.

“1 Like = 1 Respect!” – No, no it really doesn’t mean anything like that. No one stops by and hands over all this “Respect” they have harvested on Facebook to all the deserving teachers/soldiers/doctors/police/firemen/sex workers in the photos. If you respect these people you might want to try talking to them about it.

Rancid Monke

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2013 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 7,100 times in 2013. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 6 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

Rancid J. Monke
rancidmonke@gmail.com
Facebook – www.facebook.com/Rancid.j.monke
Twitter – @rancidmonke

I recently ran across a repellant article on my Facebook newsfeed and there is a good chance you saw it kicking around as well. It was called The Case Against Female Self-Esteem. It was pretty much exactly that, a rant about how women with high self-esteem were a bad thing. Mostly bad for the author and men like him, although he also tried to make the case it was bad for the women with high self-esteem, but I doubt they are buying it. Since I haven’t written anything in a while and this particular article is ripe for mockery, I figured I would take a look at it. Do I really need to? I doubt it. I don’t see strong, independent women letting this guy phase them in the slightest and the type of guys that make up the core audience for an article like this have already made up their minds and closed them up tight. That won’t stop me, blogging is all about spewing opinions out into the void to be largely ignored.

Before I hand you a link to his page all willy-nilly I think I need to prepare you a little bit. I did a bare minimum of internet searching on the author and it seems he has a variety of books on Amazon with a range of offensive titles that the blog displays prominently in hopes of getting sales. The guy is clearly from the Ann Coulter/Rush Limbaugh school of media marketing. Be offensive for the sake of being offensive because for all the people who will hate you there will be a small group doing a fist pump at their desk going “Yaaaaa! This guy writes stuff I only think about”. Much like Ann and Rush, you really have to wonder how much he buys into his own bullshit and how much is just for show, to appeal to the lowest form of person so they will snap up his latest offerings. Everyone else is just so much fodder for his continuing crusade against good taste and social sensitivity. So as you head over to read this post of his remember that if it makes you so offended that you want to urinate on his future grave then he got what he wanted and considers it a job well done. Link for the linkless.

http://mattforney.com/case-female-self-esteem/

(I am not going to go line by line trying to refute all of this. First of all, it would take up too much of a lovely three-day weekend and secondly, some of it is so repugnant that it isn’t worth dignifying with a response. Some of this will no doubt stir up a lot of anger and disgust in you but I don’t need to try to turn that anger into words any more than you need me to justify your feelings on it.)

Let’s take a look at some of it and my opinions on it, feel free to leave me any additions, comments or opinions in the comment section below.

“From the moment they’re old enough to speak, girls in America are bombarded with propaganda that artificially boosts their self-esteem. They’re told that they’re shpecialand you-nique because they have an extra X chromosome. They’re told that they’re smart, that they can do anything, that they deserve respect merely for existing. They’re encouraged to derive self-worth not from their inherent feminine nature but from their college degree, their job or the other illusory trappings of achievement in a man’s world.”

He manages to suggest that modern women are encouraged to find self-worth just from being women AND that they are encouraged not to derive self-worth from their feminine nature but rather from education and careers IN THE SAME DAMN PARAGRAPH…AND HE ISN’T HAPPY ABOUT EITHER. Apparently he has put a lot of thought into this.

“In the world of men, respect—and by extension self-esteem—is based on actually achieving something of worth or having some kind of skill or talent.”

First off, respect and self-esteem are REALLY not that interchangeable. The respect he mentions is external, the regard that others have for you and/or your work. Self-esteem is the overall emotional evaluation of your own worth, pretty obviously internal. One can certainly gather self-esteem from the respect people show you but it is only one source from which self-esteem is derived. Others include self-confidence, self-respect, self awareness and acceptance…as well as delusions of grandeur, narcissism, wealth, sexual conquests and the ability to buy shiny, expensive shit. Some of that is probably more healthy than others.

Point is that other people’s opinions of us in not the sole deciding factor in our internal sense of worth. If it was than the original author would no doubt be curled up in the fetal position somewhere, slowly rocking back and forth and whimpering as much of the internet tries to suggest he do something anatomically impossible with his head and his rectum. Instead he is trading insults with people on twitter and having a good laugh about members of the public wishing painful lesions upon his most private of parts. Obviously he is getting his self-esteem elsewhere.

“The same goes for having a job. The vast majority of girls work useless fluff jobs: government bureaucrats, human resources and various other makework positions that exist to give them the illusion of independence. The jobs that keep the country running—tradesmen, miners, farmers, policemen, the military—are still overwhelmingly dominated by men.”

…says the guy who writes a blog. Can you really try to claim fraternity with the tradesmen and farmers of the world if your contribution to society is being an ass on the internet to drive your book sales?

“If every girl was fired from her job tomorrow, elementary schools would have to shut down for a couple days, but otherwise life would go on as usual. If every man lost his job tomorrow, the country would collapse.”

Except if every woman (they are called women, girls are the ones in those school yards he isn’t allowed within 50 feet of) was fired from her job tomorrow it would probably devastate the health care industry, so try not to get sick. Seriously though, it is like this guy lives in the 50’s. I have not had a job in the last 15 years in which women have not made up at least a respectable percent of the workforce, including most of my time in construction/demolition. I wondered if perhaps he was in a very male dominated career but the only thing listed in his About Us section was hitchhiking across the States and writing a book about it. Not exactly a growth industry no matter what gender you are.

Also, let’s not knock the fine people currently spending their days caring for and educating our children so we don’t have to. With the loss of educators and daycare workers we would end up with uneducated, feral youth roaming the streets with nothing to do. Surely they all can’t start blogging on the internet.

“Given their lack of physical strength, a woman on her own should be frightened as hell without men to protect her. If society were to collapse, all the Strong, Independent Women™ who read Jezebeland xoJane would last about five minutes before they either found a man to cling onto or got raped and killed.”

…or found a gun. I mean, this is exactly what guns are for, overcoming an opponent no matter their physical strength.  They are the great equalizer, that is their purpose, it is why cops don’t run around fighting crime with broadswords. Admittedly, training and experience with firearms goes a long way but even an absolute amateur with a loaded pistol is still a force to be reckoned with, just ask any police officer who has had to face one down. I am not even really a gun enthusiast but it would certainly be the first thing on my shopping list if society collapsed.

Actually, I find it a little suspicious that the first thing he thinks that will happen if society collapses is that we men will all be looking for someone to rape/murder. If society did collapse I think the first thing that would happen is people would try to rebuild it. We all like our clean sheets, hot showers and jalapeño poppers too much to want to give them up and join roving gangs of brigands.

“Part of our identity as men based in women needing us, if not necessarily in a material sense, then in an emotional one, though material and emotional vulnerability often go hand in hand. That female insecurity is a crucial ingredient for unlocking our inner masculine instincts.”

So the heart of his little rant is that women should feel vulnerable and needy so men like him can feel like a Real Man™ and take care of them. Question for you, doesn’t that make him the vulnerable and needy one? Answer: Yes, yes it fucking does. He is essentially admitting he needs someone else to bolster his ego and self-esteem on a regular basis by depending on him (which might explain why he confused respect and self-esteem earlier). He then goes on to suggest that this is the natural order of things and this is what all men want and need out of a relationship. On behalf of men everywhere who aren’t interested in this nonsense, can I just say “Ewwwww!”

I imagine coming home to that every night in a relationship and it just makes me tired, bored and irritated. Constantly badgered by another person’s problems and questions that they seem incapable of dealing with on their own, I get enough of that training new employees at work. The feeling that you needed to have all the answers, that you couldn’t rely on the other person to have your back. Even if this was the type of relationship I had, I would be working hard to try and help the person gain the skills and confidence needed to become independent, not basking in the glow of their undeserved awe.

“When I first went on a date with the only girl I would have ever married, her hands were trembling in nervousness. She later admitted that she was openly intimidated by me and the idea that I found her attractive.”

I obviously don’t have any specifics about this relationship other than he speaks of it in the past tense. He had what he wanted and couldn’t keep it, so that should tell you a lot of what you need to know right there.

Confidence doesn’t give men erections; vulnerability does.

Ummm, if we are going to be honest, boobs is probably the realistic answer. After that it is down to individual taste but I am pretty sure telling women that vulnerability gives you an erection will make you seem like a serial killer.

“If I’m not the center of a girl’s world, I’m not going to be in her world period.”

Jesus man, how needy are you?

“I can already see the Jizzabellers angrily pounding away at their Macbooks: “You just can’t handle a Strong, Independent Woman™!” We men can handle you just fine; the problem is that we don’t want to.”

If he could stop speaking for our gender as a whole, that would be great.

“Girls don’t want the six-figure cubicle job, the shiny Brooklyn 2BR, the master’s degree, the sexual liberation, none of it. They want to becollectively led back to the kitchen, told to make a nice big tuna sandwich with extra mayo and lettuce, then swatted on the ass as we walk out the door.”

WHAT THE FUCK IS WITH THE SANDWICH THING? You can’t read an internet comment section or twitter feed without some ass demanding that an imaginary women come to his house to make him a sandwich. He is always screaming it to the internet because clearly no sane woman is within earshot. Seriously though, when I reached an age where I was capable of holding a butter knife properly it was pretty much a given that I would be making my own damn sandwiches. When I see a grown man demanding life present him with someone to make him a sandwich I start to think he might need help with wiping himself or getting dressed. If the author is the one who needs someone dependent on him, shouldn’t he be the one making the sandwiches. If he is supposed to be the manly, capable provider, then why can’t he even seem to feed himself?

Now that I am done with this nonsense of an article I am going to make a nice big tuna sandwich with extra mayo and pickles WITH MY OWN TWO DAMN HANDS LIKE A GROWN-UP.

Rancid Monke

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The new Boeing 787 Dreamliner can carry about 250 passengers. This blog was viewed about 1,100 times in 2012. If it were a Dreamliner, it would take about 4 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

Have you seen anyone ripping down the street in a horse and buggy lately? Unless you live in Amish country, probably not. We evolved beyond the need for them, we left them behind in favour of cars and most of the population has never looked back. Obviously humanity is making huge strides in technology on a daily basis but what are we going to be leaving behind in the next 5, 10, 20 or 50 years?

Here are some of the most likely next victims of our great technological revolution. Some day you will be trying to explain this crap to your uninterested grandkids while they humour you in hopes of getting in your will.

1) Phone Booths – These are already dead, I shouldn’t have to explain this one. Who wants to sit around in a urine soaked booth full of graffiti to talk to someone for 35 cents a pop? The fact that there are already far fewer of them around then even 5 years ago makes it an unreliable way to communicate anyway. This death spiral will continue until they are obsolete.

2) Keyboard and Mouse – Half the planet can’t even spell properly WITH a damn spellcheck but we still include long rows of jumbled letters and punctuation with every computer sold. It is just begging for people to violate the English language like a pervert in a truck stop bathroom.

With the advances in touch screens and voice recognition I don’t think it will be a stretch to see people of the future leaving greasy finger prints all over every monitor and babbling to their computer in order to send e-mails, tweets, facebook status updates or draft thing up in a word processor. This means the only way you will be able to tell a sane person from a complete nut job when they are sitting at a computer is whether it is actually turned on.

3) Computer Monitors – You know the fancy hologram projector thing that gets used in the Iron Man and Avengers movies? You see it a lot in sci-fi stuff now. It’s a combination of keyboard and monitor but it just sort of floats in the air. I saw it in the Mass Effect games too. Right now the movies are just using post production magic to make it happen but some day this will become a reality (it it isn’t being worked on already) and computer monitors will be done. Who needs a screen when any reasonably uncluttered surface would make a decent backdrop. It will also get rid of the need for keyboard and mouse interfaces if the voice recognition software and touchscreen don’t first.

4)Physical Media – Movie studios, record companies and game producers sure do like boxes, manuals and discs. It makes it much easier to sell the price tag on the front if it comes in a nice, hefty package to hold on to. Despite the fact that iTunes, NetFlix, Hulu and Steam are taking off in a big way, content creators are still holding on to the idea of buying and owning discs. Some day that will come to an end though, at this point it isn’t even a question of “will this happen?” or “when will this happen?” but “why the hell hasn’t this happened yet?”

Sooner or later they are going to realize the costs of having factories overseas where you exploit the hell out of the labour force with insignificant wages then have your product bulk shipped back to North America for distribution is still more expensive than putting some decent servers together and putting the digital file up for direct sale. Or to put it more plainly, they will finally figure out what internet pirates realized YEARS AGO and try to get on board to make a profit. Maybe instead of trying to shut down the big torrent sites they should be looking to partner up with them?

5) Books – I love books, not just the stuff on them but the smell and feel of the ink and paper of a book. I understand why people are so dead set against things like Kindles or Kobos or  iBooks. The problem is, I think us physical book lovers (that is not what I meant you pervert) are eventually going to lose. Truth is I have sat down and read entire books on my teeny tiny iPhone screen before. Want to know why? Same reason I stay up all night to finish “just one more chapter” of a real book, it was a damn good story and I couldn’t put it down.

Most North Americans that actually do bother reading are pretty trained to read things off screens now anyway. News sites, Facebook, Twitter if your desperate, WordPress Blogs if you are desperate and slightly masochistic. We are there for the content and although we might appreciate the pretty wrappings of a well designed site at the end of the day text is text, whether it is on paper or a screen isn’t as fundamentally important to your enjoyment of it as the fact that it is well written. In the end, the book will die for the same reasons that all physical media will die, it just might take a little longer for us to wrap our head around the fact that paper and bindings does not a book make.

6)Movie Theatres – I hear stories about how the poor movie chains are struggling to make it through with the movie studios screwing them out of box office take on one hand and internet piracy screwing them out of paying customers on the other. The question I always ask myself is WHY ARE YOU BOTHERING?!! The fact that most people would prefer to enjoy movies in the privacy of their own homes coupled with the fact that most people’s movie watching etiquette has become APPALLING means that internet pirates aren’t the only reason ticket sales aren’t what they used to be. Maybe instead of crying over the fact that they can’t sell overpriced popcorn and sugar water to people anymore the theatres could be thinking about how to repurpose themselves to become relevant again.

As with sports stadiums and arenas the big money sink is having massive amounts of space sitting empty most of the time while it still sucks up heat, water, power and tax money. They could be selling off their prime consumer real estate for good money and start investing in bringing first run movies to the internet or integrating it into the next generation of game console.

I will miss the thrill of going out to an actual movie as much as the next person but if that means I can get the movies I want in my home without trying to dig someone up to go with me so I don’t look like a huge dork than I am all for it. Nothing says “please silently judge me” like showing up at a semi-social event and sitting by yourself in awkward silence. Plus I don’t have to find a nephew or niece to drag to a Pixar movie anymore, nor will I have to put up with someone else’s kids shitty behaviour while I am there. Win-win for everyone really.

Feel free to add your comments below. Either tell me what you think will disappear from society or disagree and just call me a liar right to my face, whatever makes you happy.  

Rancid Monke