I have a new web addiction these days – 4chan. Specifically, /b/. <- NOT SAFE FOR WORK!!!
So I’m late to the party. Oh well. I’m not a college student with tons of expendible time anymore. I, like most people, discovered 4chan through the surfacing of its weird memes on normal, God-fearing sites like Youtube. It’s basically an image-sharing message board based on… You know what? They have an explanation on their homepage. Go read it there.
Anyway, The Redhead and I have developed a fascination with Lolcats and the like, so I decided to start watching the home base for all these emerging cultural phenomena - Lolcats, Rickrolling, Lazar, etc. I quickly found that the place with all the action was 4chan’s random channel, /b/. Where else can you find a shopped pic of Obama riding a skateboard and wielding nun-chucks as vehicles collide behind him? I dunno, it fills a need in my soul.
Unfortunately, /b/ mostly resembles a hypothetical philosophical musing that escaped from the lab: “What if we took the movie The Arisocrats and made it into a web site?” [Again, if you click on that link at work, heaven help you.] After reading /b/ for just a few minutes you come to understand that there is something dark and sinister at work in the minds of today’s youth, and OMFG is it funny. Most everyone who posts to /b/ does so anonymously, so the site becomes one constant stream of id.
The one thing that really bothers me about the site is the racism. If you take off people’s public filter, you find some ugly sentiments that I was pretty sure had begun to ease up with this generation. Half of the racist jokes are clearly aimed at provoking a reaction. After all, race is the new gay in modern humor. Still, you can’t help but want to reach through the screen, grab the little trust funded, corn-fed punk behind those posts and shake him until, in /b/ terms, he “shits a brick.”
In other news, I’ve discovered the buttons that embed pics and video into my posts, so duck and cover.
