Posts tagged: conformist

I was going to make a post about the usual New Year’s resolutions, but I realized that my main goal for this year is improved communication.

Communicating on the internet is daunting because too often scope is difficult to define, words are stolen, honest journalism is undervalued, tone is misunderstood, and readers will be oversensitive to their own feelings and wholly insensitive to the feelings of others. I’m not one to shy away from a formidable task, though, so this year I aim to cut through the internet culture’s impediments to real communication.

If there is anything you have been wanting to know about Blue Blood or Blue Blood philosophy and how Blue Blood fits into the world around us, or even the world around Blue Blood, please feel free to respond to this post with your question. Feel free send your question via Personal Message to me or Forrest Black on the BlueBlood.net forums or any of the other sites Blue Blood or its reps are on. If you ask via a less public method, please mention how/if you would like to be credited for what you’d like to know. Each month, we will answer some of the most intriguing questions. If you ask a question which is chosen, we might even send you cool swag from the Blue Blood Boutique.

Over the coming weeks, I also plan to write about each of the issues which I think cause a lot of great thinkers to be silent online. I plan to report honestly on newsworthy topics, even if, heaven forfend, I step on a few toes. I’m going to look for the good in everything, but I’m going to tell it like it is and so are other Blue Blood writers. Expect more funny anecdotes, …

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I never trust any woman who lists Sixteen Candles as one of her favorite movies.

The most fundamental flaws with society today can all be traced back to 80’s teen movies, specifically the work of John Hughes. I hoped, when I moved to Hollywood, that I would someday get the opportunity to tell him so in person. I’ve been here a while and haven’t run into him yet, so I thought I would post it on a nice busy site and wait for him to find it while ego-searching.

The message of pretty much all John Hughes movies is that you should hate successful people, while coveting what they have and having the exact same sucky values that the people you hate have. If you hate someone, why would you aspire to be like them? I understand that sometimes one can take a wrong turn in life, but who actually wants to become something they themselves hate?

Let’s start with The Breakfast Club. Although Sixteen Candles and Some Kind of Wonderful are so much worse, I’m going to try to go with chronology. The basic conceit of Breakfast Club, for those fortunate enough not to have seen it, is to place a group of dissimilar and unrealistically stereotyped students in a room where they are not allowed to leave and see how it all turns out. The results are an implausible and thoroughly unjoyous exersize in unhelpful group therapy. Anthony Michael Hall’s character blubbers and actually gets sympathy from fellow high school students trapped in detention with him. Molly Ringwald’s character takes the poetic and sexy character played by (much hotter) Ally Sheedy and gives her a makeover that would qualify her to play the ugly friend. You know how lots of …

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So, I’ve told my web pals and reminded those with us since the print days about why I like eclectic content.

But there is a dark side to this approach when the internet is thrown into the mix and it knocks me totally off-kilter on what sorts of information to select to share with you all. The net is overwhelming.

There are so many people. So many of them probably have cool and interesting and good aspects to them. But there are only so many hours in the day. Once you have done your work, your art, and your laundry, how much time can you truly devote to getting to know other people in a meaningful and genuine way?

There are so many sites. The smallest micro-niche of an interest probably has a site devoted to it. Want a site with photos of women who are both goth punk-looking and wearing rubber? Got one.

So, if you have broad interests and a true curiosity about the world around you, the options quickly prove boggling and paralyzing. I used to feel like it was possible for me to be aware of, and have an opinion on, every goth-industrial music act around. But, now that there are bands across the globe with MP3s on MySpace and thousands of other sites, I don’t feel like I could even sift through just that one genre.

Over the course of the past week, I got tons of cool and creatively-satisfying work done and went out on the town and had some fun as well. I also meant to go to a big fashion convention with Forrest Black and Blue Blood hottie junk princess this past weekend, but I just kinda spaced on it. The weekend before, I wanted to go to a big science …

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I had a master plan when I included an eclectic mix of articles and other content in Blue Blood in print.

Some people pick out their persona like flash art off a tattoo shop wall. Blue Blood is for people who construct themselves out of a myriad of sources, always seeking to get closer to the core of their true selves. There are people who decide to “be goth” for example, and they will then attempt to only do and like and wear and say “goth” things. To me, there is nothing less conformist about that, than someone who wants to be an investment banker, and attempts to only do and like and wear and say “country club” things. The only difference is that the investment banker probably at least gets paid for his or her conformity.

I created Blue Blood to reach out to all the other people, like myself, who passed through multiple subcultures, who took that little bit from each which spoke to them, that little bit which fit their insides. I often took flack for my offbeat constellation of interests. At the time, I had thought I was more alone than perhaps I was. From the outpouring of letters to Blue Blood, I found that I had kindred spirits all over the world. There were so many people who had thought they were the only ones into both bondage and RPGs, rap and industrial music, tattoos and science fiction, or whatever their personal mix was. The key to Blue Blood was that they picked that mix based on genuine personal taste and not just trying to be cool or fit in.

Now, of course, Blue Blood featured both erotic pictorials and erotic fiction by big name genre authors. This is where the master plan part comes in, in …

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