I had a brief conversation with someone today over IM that went like this:

Phrost: is it trolling if you mostly agree with what you’re posting, but just dial it up 10 notches?
Person: i’d call it quasi-trolling
Phrost: we need to invent a word for it
Phrost: Ogreing?

I’ve take a bit of time today, in between other things I’m working on, to engage in a few “conversations” of this nature over Facebook. I pretty much meant everything I said, but expressed it in a manner that undoubtedly came off as if I’d downed a pot of coffee and had a swarm of bees up my ass. Or in other words, like I just got back from the gym, which was the case.

But for the most part, the tone of the posts was a little test in an ongoing experiment I’m conducting over Facebook, to pressure test my own network. The worst that can happen is that I lose a friend or two, which in itself isn’t so bad because if anyone I know doesn’t have the character to stand up to “lively” discourse, they’re better off not reading my status updates anyway.

You see, as I posted previously, the “Social Drift” of Facebook both concerns and intrigues me. One possible method of combating this, I believe, is such pressure testing, or rather, “ideological sparring”. Going full contact with your views is definitely not the best way to keep “friends”, but as far as I’m concerned it is the best way of separating the wheat from the chaff on your friends list.

Just be careful you don’t say something you genuinely don’t mean; that’d be trolling.

• @Halfrican83 paleo diet; lay off the mac and cheese in reply to Halfrican83 #
• Internet's out at the house. Headed to the only place closeby with decent wifi. Trade-off is being surrounded by senior citizens and kids. #

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I generally consider myself to be a fairly easy-going guy. I’m about as high-strung as an unsprung bungee cord; rated to handle even the heaviest loads without snapping. And in my line of “work” this is undoubtedly an excellent trait to posses. Sometimes though, I do get into situations where the load rating is beyond the manufacturer’s recommended guidelines.

I paid a shitty latte’s worth of rent on a booth with an outlet nearby at a local chain coffee shop. The wifi here sucks more than a roomba programmed by Cyberdine, with the latte itself running a close second. Still, I figure, it’s a fair trade for the illusion of ambiance and a clear head to crank out some words. Too bad that wasn’t to be.

Shortly after setting up shop and getting my fingers primed to tap out English, a couple of evangelical christians in their late teens/early 20’s decide to take up residence a couple of tables away and have an obnoxiously, deliberately loud conversation about Jesus, the supernatural, prayer, and related subjects.

Whatever, I think. I’m easy like Sunday morning and I support free speech even more than I do the other 9 amendments in the Bill of Rights (especially the one about not having to let soldiers crash at my house, which I know would fucking suck having been one myself; nasty bastards).

So music is my anti-christ, and I queue up a playlist of Dethklok songs, to drown the twits out so I can think. Yes, death metal (or even a tongue-in-cheek tribute to it) is less distracting than the babble of people infected with the jesus meme.

Unfortunately, the black noise isn’t enough to overpower the bulk of those turkeys’ gobbling. Fortunately, a glare or two over my shoulder in their direction and they relocated a few tables away. All’s good in the hood, as they say (and by “they” I don’t mean anyone in particular you goddamn racist).

The ironic thing about this is that even Christ didn’t want his followers making a big public show of their religion. Matthew 6:6 reads: But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly. (King James Version)

Whatever. While enduring all of this and trying to make some headway on the book, I had to deal with the additional aggravation of the shop’s wifi signal going in and out on me. To me, this was worse than the knucklehead christicans, as I at least had the option of sacrificing my hearing to drown those bastards out. But every time the connection would drop, not only could I not save what written (since I’m using Google Docs) and research the odd factoid, but the damn music I was streaming would cut out. So I’d go from thundering guitars and cookie-monster vocals* (about coffee, oddly enough), to “…well what Jesus really wanted was for true Justice!“. It was like I was a battlefield detainee and Andy Kauffman’s zombie had been hired by a Gitmo interrogation squad to DJ directly into my head so I’d admit I once picked up a hitch-hiking Khalid Sheikh Mohammed on the way to the gym.

When the coffee ran out I decided to pack it in and head home. (I’ve actually been finishing this up from my living room, since the “ironic thing” paragraph.) Now as an avowed “Dick”, I was obligated to say something, to someone. My first inclination was obviously towards the Hitler Youth Twins, to make some kind of snarky request that would call their attention to the obnoxious volume of their conversation. But when I thought about it, that was unnecessary. I’d already glared at them, they’d moved a few tables over, and it most likely wasn’t their fault they were unable to overcome being groomed from birth as douchebags. I guess I could have insulted their parents, but I don’t think that even Harlan Ellison could have come up with an appropriately brief rebuke in that situation that would have, at the very least, still maintained some sort of dignity on his part.

Besides, I wouldn’t have gotten through to them anyway and more than likely would have just made the employees there uncomfortable. Seeing as I’m often at that coffee shop to burn a cigar and watch the sunset, and that I enjoy my coffee without extra helpings of counter grime and roach parts, the logical and productive choice was to bring up the shitty wifi connection instead. Which I did, only to find out that they’ve got fucking bandwidth filters that choke streaming content because of assholes coming in to play online games.

As I sit here wrapping this up, I genuinely don’t regret not** saying something to the Vienna Sausage Choir. But I do regret paying for that shitty latte.

*Credit: Brian Posehn
**Double negative, I know. Deal with it.

• Sitting at the Power and Light watching the goober parents walk by w/their goober kids on the way to see the Jonas Bros. #

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The beauty of posting something online is that if you’re not sure about it, someone will eventually come around and correct you. This saves you valuable time which could be spent going around correcting other people.

Also, I might have broken one or more toes on the heavybag tonight… getting that weird tingely feeling of endorphins just like the time I broke my hand(s), and my foot. Didn’t see the doctor about the foot, probably won’t go in for the toes either unless it gets too bad.

We don’t need to fix National Healthcare; we need to fix National Character.

Maybe it’s just me, but as time goes by I notice more people on Facebook befriending celebrities; not their fan pages, the actual celebrities.

One of the things I prefer about Facebook over MySpace has always been the low signal-to-noise ratio (also the completely lack of glitter, spam, and profiles so wide they’d require a Jumbotron to display without a scroll bar).

The reason for this is simple: people are more selective about who they befriend. Granted, everyone has those friends that they’ve added simply because 20 of their other friends have and they keep showing up as “People you may know”. If you don’t add them, you’re pretty much an asshole, even if you only have a shaky connection to the person at best.

But I’m not talking about these people; the socially expedience of adding acquaintances from work and school is a given. I’m talking about the “social drift” that would, apparently, eventually culminate in everyone directly networked with everyone else.

Here’s an example:

I recently “befriended” MMA and San Shou fighter Cung Le, and a few other notable personalities in the MMA industry. That’s not so bad, I’m a (D-List, at best) personality in MMA myself by virtue of running a huge MMA site, being a Judge, and occasional columnist/reporter/etc. Le popped up in the column on the right where it notifies you about mutual friends and very subtly mocks you for not being friends with so-and-such. An incidental mouse-click and the “situation” is rectified, pending approval. (If for some reason you’re rejected I’d imagine you wouldn’t get bothered with it again anyway).

So shortly after the request was accepted, I wander over to Mr. Le’s profile and notice he’s got around 4k friends. Deep within my itty-bitty heart, my inner child shed a tear; I guess I wasn’t so special after all. If I took anything on the Internet seriously, I probably would have been genuinely bummed to an appropriately minor extent for one simple fact: I hadn’t actually “networked” with Cung Le, I’d just added another point to his eCred (everyone knows at 5000 friends you level up and get new abilities). The guy obviously hasn’t been introduced to Facebook’s fan pages which allow notable persons to create page that can be more “public facing”. In my estimation, Fan Pages were created as a hedge against the kind of drift that’s effectively neutered MySpace as a viable networking platform: having umpteen-billion “friends”, 99% of which you’ve never actually met or share genuine connections with. But note to Facebook: it’s not working.

Like most reasonable people, I’ve never conflated my friend count with any statement on my individual worth, but it’s apparent that entirely too many denizens of the tubes actually do, and that this mindset is here to stay. It’s already effectively neutered MySpace as a viable medium for anything other than getting the word out about your crappy band or awesome t-shirts. And if Facebook doesn’t watch it, it’ll decimate them as well.

The true take-away from this is that as social drift occurs, people inevitably migrate towards progressively smaller and more “intimate” niche networks with a lower signal-to-noise ratio. An excellent example of this is LinkedIn.com. You could use Facebook to network for jobs, with colleagues, or to reach out to possible mentors and leaders in your industry. But do you really want to have your CEO sharing a data stream with the teenage friends that convinced you to get drunk and vandalize a railroad crossing? Or take my own “social network”, Bullshido, for example. The entire site’s centered around people getting together and beating the piss out of each other, in mutual celebration of everyone’s love for MMA and the Martial Arts. As such, the interactions there would generally not be appropriate in “Cube Land” or with your church’s youth group (especially since most people who participate there lean towards unrepentant skepticism).

Social drift is a boon to niche networks because the upside of networking is also its downside; the ease of information sharing can often unintended consequences (such as getting fired). The “you” you are with your drinking buddies isn’t appropriate or appreciated in the 10 AM Sales Meeting. In real life it’s easy to draw clear lines of separation between private, professional, and public life; on the internet: not so much. And it’s especially hard if you’re only networking on the conventional sites.

So I’d like to personally thank the attention whores who feel compelled to befriend anyone remotely connected to them. You folks are driving more and more people to niche networks like mine where people generally don’t have to worry about the social consequences of turning down a friend request from their boss, since he probably doesn’t train in MMA anyway.

Events conspired to keep me out of training both jits and conditioning yesterday so I doubled up on the latter today.

Afternoon session:

4 Minutes of Tabata on the rowing machine. Bluetooth headset crapped out 3 minutes in, so I had to set my phone on the damn neck of the bench and watch the timer out of the corner of my eye.

To the tune of some shitty top 40 song I twiddled my thumbs waiting for either the squat rack or the power cage since for the first time in a year they were both occupied at the same time. And lo and behold, people were more or less using them for their intended purposes *gasp*.

The overweight broskis bailed on the cage first so I wandered in there and banged out a set of 5 squats at 225, another at 315, and then did 20 reps of lying extensions with a 45lb barbell as perscribed by the Super Squats people.

Then I lugged through the 20 squats at 205. 12 in was ok, as I approached 15 my core started feeling wobbly. Gutted through (literally) the last 5 and felt woozy. BP was up. I wanted to get in some core work but after one set of leg lifts I wasn’t feeling so good so I headed home. A bit dizzy, actually. Wonder if it was from the blood pressure increase due to doing the Tabata at the begining, followed by high reps of a decent weight for squats.

Went home, showered, and then turned around and went to AJJ and beat on the banana bag. Caught the last 6, 3 minute rounds of Bas’s All-Around-Fighting, then did some crunches and bounced the medicine ball off the cage for a while, and swiped the Bas boxing CD and did 10 rounds of 2 minutes.

Then I came home and typed this.

Sometimes I hate my generation…