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Star Wars Premier: The Line People
proudtobeageek writes "A friend of mine, an attendee of a midnight opening of Star Wars Episode III, took the opportunity to conduct a short documentary/interview of the costumed movie goers. He has his short movie available here on his blog."
perhaps society has failed you instead, for making you believe someone is a monster because they eccentricly dress up as a character in a movie every few years and have a bit of fun.
All he said is that he is tired of it. "Cool" is a concept that doesn't mean anything once you are about 25.
But their "loser"-status can't be all their fault. At some point, we as a society have turned them into these monsters by shunning them, excluding them, or mocking them for their odd and sometimes strange behavior. Perhaps it's some mild autism that they suffer from, or maybe some other neural disease that makes them "different" from most of us (and I use the word loosely) "normals".
Come on, isn't that a *tad* too much? Their behaviour is strange to you; they are happy, they have fun and they don't hurt anybody. Why bother? You said it yourself, you have better things to do with your spare time than critizing movies. They don't, they like it. Tastes vary.
Oh, and it's not a disease; these people are not sick. They just engage in activities most people find odd.
Hmm... maybe the real losers are those who feel the need to define people who are different as losers instead of just letting people who aren't hurting anybody else just have their fun.
"But seriously, there is a problem. Over 40% of males end up living with their parents into their twenties these days."
No, I don't live with my parents, in fact I live half a country away. Even visiting each other occasionally is a bit inconvenient. But I'm still left scratching my head "and the problem with being a family is...?"
See, virtually all cultures and societies used to be centred around the family until recently. Whether it was a farm or a medieval blacksmith's shop or whatever, it was _normal_ for a house to be the home for a whole extended family, and it was _normal_ at least for the firstborn to stay with the parents until they die.
E.g., when you read about the Vikings who sacked England or ended up elite bodyguards as far as Byzantium or Baghdad, those weren't really the cool ones. Those were the disinherited ones who had to fight or starve to death. The "cool" ones were those who inherited their father's farm and didn't have to fight. The ones who, in fact, lived with their parents not only into the 20's, but all the way until the parents died.
The craze about being on your own, and thinking you're so cool because you have no support, and your starving or not depends on a PHB's whims is an industrial age invention. I.e., a very recent one.
Is it really that much better. Yes, you're so cool, you live on your own, you have a big house and a car of your own. And it'll be so cool until you're old and sick. Then your choice will be to die lonely and abandoned in your home, or half-starved and still abandoned in the cheapest asylum your kids could find. Because now it would be sooo _uncool_ for your kids to have a parent in _their_ house.
We churn generation after generation who _will_ spend the last decade of their life abbandoned among strangers, and die among strangers.
Not saying that I have a better solution or anything, but it makes me sorta idly wonder... is it really that much of an improvement?
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You bring up a lot of good points... people are often cruel and the pressure to conform can be overwhelming. But this isn't about being sheep; my board-game/Magic/role-playing buddies and I all thought the Triumph Star Wars video was hilarious. Hell, many of the Star Wars fans were cracking up while they were being mocked. Triumph has the same effect when he makes fun of Bon Jovi and their fans, Hollywood Squares, American Idol, and Hawaii. He could target jocks and prom queens and it'd be just as funny.
We're all absurd in our own ways, so lighten up and enjoy the ride.
However, as a Brit, we have problems with violence on our city streets at night due to excessive drinking, we have to heavily police soccer matches to stop rival fans from waging war on each other, we have joyriders stealing cars and endangering themselves and every other user on the road, we have kids believing it's humourous to walk up to someone and just slap them purely to capture the event on a mobile phone camera...
So while the people queuing in the documentary may be seen as "wierdos" or "geeks", they're probably people that also don't get involved in the type of antisocial activities that I described above.
It's the "cool" people, in their constant strive for recognition amongst their peers, who usually end up being the antisocial people, not the geeks who queue for Star Wars and play Dungeons & Dragons.
If anything, geeks demonstrate they're intelligent enough to have enough individuality to just go do their own thing and enjoy it.
I say good luck to them...
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"If you play Risk (or god forbid Warhammer 40k or Battletech) instead of Chess, or MTG instead of Bridge or Poker, you're a "loser" and an evil monster." ...no, but if you play it obsessively, or spend more time interacting with people throught he medium of Warhammer 40k than you do, say, out at dinner with friends--or, if you dress up like Stormtrooper Q323-a and interact with other stormtroopers... ...then maybe you should stop interacting with your fellow human beings through a medium and do it directly. Stop meta-living and start actually having a life. It's too short to spend it in some faerie world of make-believe hiding yourself from those evil people who you fear are trying to make you "conform".