User:David Gerard/Cat piss man

Some bits of this are perfect, others are shit.

Intro: pretty good

Cat piss man is an offensive term used by snide and pretentious people on Internet forums to put down those with a different special interest to themselves.

The term supposedly refers to a "comic shop guy" stereotype: obese, bearded, lives in his mother's basement, has a large collection of Star Trek videos and paraphernalia and is claimed to notionally smell like a cat box. It was invented by a burnt-out hack failed science fiction critic of no account — in what appears to have been nothing more than a snide and grossly distorted personal attack on myself — to try to make him feel better about his own inabilities.

They claim various slanders like "Lack of social skills" (always a favorite ad hominem with no evidence ever being listed; I personally make a point of social interaction, rather than being standoffish), "pervasive sour smell" (I have no experience of this at any convention I have ever been to) and "questionable sexual turn-ons" (which is really just "your kink is not OK") or "jailbait chaser" (if you game in an adults' game with a teenaged girl in the group). I mean, really.

The people using this term I think are the ones who should be termed "cat piss men" as they go about abusing various groups of people — human beings with feelings — with unfunny, juvenile and stupid "humor." I now consider the term intrinsically objectionable given the way it is used by these people.

The haters who use the term

tolerable except good last line

I can't stand those who believe themselves to be superior to others, those who can't reflect on themselves and realize they are a cracked mirror. The person who has few cares, worries or problems is one whose intelligence and awareness is too low to realize these things.

They hate people criticizing anything they love, but are quick to fire on anything they don't.

Their watchword appears to be: "I was bullied in high school and never had anyone to pick on. Now I am a bitter and resentful adult, I find the internet is FULL of people to pick on." They resent missing their big chance to push the Jews into the ovens and grab the prepubescent ones for themselves.

Uncyclopedia

good

The common targets of the term, as I list below, seem to be favorites for Uncyclopedia articles that are just unfunny. The writers need to read "How To Be Funny And Not Just Stupid" more closely — paying close attention to the sections on avoiding clichés and on bias not being a replacement for humor.

I'm trying to enunciate precisely why I have problems with this sort of "humor." And to stand up and say, "You know, guys? This? This isn't right. I don't think this is funny at all."

Star Trek

terrible

One of the most culturally influential television shows in history has to be the Star Trek franchise. Now into its 40th year, scientists and engineers say their professional and life choices were influenced by Star Trek. Phrases like "Beam me up, Scotty", "Borg" and "Resistance is futile" have entered dictionaries and the English vernacular.

Why do these people then condemn those interested in it as "Trekkies", as if that's intrinsically risible?

Role-playing games

needs writing

These people are the sort of bigots who put "NO GAMERS" on roommate notices.

not good enough: I enjoy playing something or somebody I am not, never will be and most certainly could never be. I enjoy literature, history and politics, so I enjoy the fine details of characters, worlds, themes, operating rules and ideas.

[statistics]

[importance of rules] Process is of great importance. In all aspects of life. Without it, life is just unfair.

[obsession that leads to greatness in other fields]

Video games and MMORPGs

not very good

The same people who criticize video gamers and players of massively multiplayer online roleplaying games as having no life will watch television for five hours a night. Video games involve some degree of interaction rather than just slack-jawed observation. Gamers show enhanced attention in tests, cope better with distractions and have been shown to be especially good at spotting details in busy, confusing scenes. The critics are the people who wouldn't be able even to attempt the game due to their poor hand/eye-coordination skills.

Furries

okayish with good bits

A perfect example of the sort of gratuitously hurtful non-humor these people favor. They take deeply sincere and heartfelt images in an unquestionably good cause like this and abuse them as objects of fun.

With Furries in particular, the haters are playing the old game of trying to make themselves look better by making someone else look worse. But to others, what they are actually saying is, "I haven't yet come to terms with my own quirks, and the only way I can reconcile my inner self with my day-to-day life is by comparing myself to others and saying 'Gee, I may be a little twisted, but at least I'm not like them!'" Such negative and judgmental people find few willing ears, and even fewer companions, in the real world.

It's like Furries are fair game for "Your kink is not OK." Being into Furry is no more weird than being into goth, like they claim they are because they think it might get them a girlfriend who wears perverted BDSM fetish clothes around the house. It's like they're attempting to build their own hate group against a soft target. It really is like that.

The whole "Furry = sex with animals" thing is an old meme and disappointingly uncreative. The Uncyclopedia articles about this are pretty weak and definitely need some work to be any kind of funny. It's also homophobic.

Wicca

bleh

I don't need to try to gratuitously piss on someone's quest for meaning in their life. "Lol wicca powers omg asl." Making fun of teenagers building their own syncretic religion and coming to terms with the world in their own way is fundamentally a bitter and twisted activity.

Comic book and anime fans

ehh. tho first para is from a complete cat piss man

As is usual in those taking undue delight in social ostracism, they tend toward abusive buzzwords rather than opinions gleaned from reading or watching the material itself. I could say "Warren Ellis is a perfect Moore-wanker" and that opinion would be far, far more mature, wise, and enlightened than the opinions of those who briefly scanned some articles on the web that say some things they don't like about comic books and then commenced throwing around words like "ranting," "nonsense," "Cat Piss Man" or "really fucking old."

Another example of using people perfectly happily having a good time as objects of abusive humor for no particularly justifiable reason. So you don't like his take on Sephiroth? Too bad, I'd say.

Their obsession with attacking anime fans seems mostly to be just a vehicle for latent racist bigotry. They take perfectly sincere costumes people spent ages working on and put them on Fark. There's a subtext there of just plain racism towards Japan and Japanese culture.

Overweight people with beards

ehh

I have a beard and I am overweight. It happens. I think I'm still human, just like you. What makes this intrinsically funny, please? Nothing? I thought so. But it's invariably a part of the stereotype. I don't understand why, except in terms of fattist bigotry.

Transhumanism

punchline in place! could be a little longer

It's clear that computers will overtake humankind in mere decades. Computer technology, nanotechnology, neural interfaces, are all working at a dizzying rate.

Our speculative fiction, and those on-the-ball enough to use it, will continue to inform the working technologists and industry. This will lend spiritual significance to technology developed for entertainment or warfare.

The future will be for humans like me, humans with vision. Living for the next million years.

Computer geeks

good

Apparently, it seems that anyone who can work a computer is a odoriferous nerd with no social skills. And God help you if they think you use Linux. I personally suspect it's to overcompensate for how intimidated they are by the machines they have to use every day and don't know how to operate; they put down the people who are capable and act like their own incomes and sex lives are the only important things in the "real world." My income is quite satisfactory, thank you.

And don't even try mentioning free software.

Fan fiction

world-changingly brilliant tour de force, if I say so myself

They loudly proclaim that fan fiction writers aren't "real writers" and "have no creativity." Their small-minded nit-picking as to the nature of "what makes a writer" is so myopic I have no doubt that they require a use of a white cane. The list of people who aren't writers would then include such notables as Philip Jose Farmer (his Riverworld series and Barnstormer of Oz, for example), Nick Meyers (who wrote The 7 Percent Solution, which uses Sherlock Holmes), Shakespeare ... That's right, Shakespeare. He borrowed heavily from established Greek myths for many of his stories, essentially changing the names, but lifting the plots wholesale.

All writing is fan fiction, properly speaking. Philosophers a lot better than myself have argued that "originality," such as it is commonly acknowledged, doesn't exist. Even so-called "completely original" works (such as Shakespeare) must use elements that have existed before; if something was completely new to human experience, then human beings would have no point of reference for understanding that thing. So-called "original characterisation" should properly be seen as a subgenre of fan fiction. Earlier, these haters would have denied that all fiction is a subgenre of science fiction, or rather "fan fiction of reality."

These people couldn't write Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (renowned fan fiction of renowned fan fiction). They couldn't follow the fan fiction writers who go onto jobs on the show's writing team, thus contributing to the actual "canonical" work itself. They couldn't do what Kevin J. Anderson does.

They sometimes try to be "polite," using patronizing and dismissive terms such as "training wheels" to describe it. That's an insult to the form and every writer of the form. A.J. Hall writes better and more true-to-character Harry Potter stories, taking popular characters and furthering their characterization much more, than J.K. Rowling, who just took a number of existing tropes and combined them. Professional writers are not competent to work on a given universe unless they've read the fan fiction; they write the show for money, whereas the fan fictioners write from love. You can't tell me Rowling wrote Snape in book six in any way in command of her faculties. Doesn't she realise the fans are responsible for everything she has?

We just do it for ourselves, and if anyone else likes it that's a bonus. It's an exercise in writing and communication. These people are just elitists who want to destroy others' creativity. The days of these writers claiming to write "original" fiction are numbered.

Republicans

quotes from uncyclopedians and LJers

They seem to think anything showing leftist bias is automatically funny. By implying that the average Republican is as they describe, they libel each and every one of them. Their implications that Republicans are universally childish and uncaring is ad hominem argument in favor of a quasi-totalitarian one-party system, and is subversive of the American traditions of a democratic republic, a federal system and checks and balances.

The worst thing that satire can be is overly opinionated. Effective satire should be informed, objective and, above all, balanced. With conservative humor you have to be reasonably informed on the issues to get it, whereas left-wing humor is designed for complete retards to understand. "Bush is stupid!" Ha ha. They're completely lacking in nuance.

LiveJournal

quotes

They make fun of "drama" on blogs and journals as if these aren't real people with real feelings. It's like a rape in cyberspace.

The "dot-something" pseudo-"communities" are particularly vicious for this sort of thing. They're devoted to mocking and abuse of people not as "elite" as they. I advocate collectively referring to them only as "dot-verbal-abusiveness." They make snide references to a chosen victim in "DVA" code in places like comments to posts which have nothing to do with the person. The experience almost soured me on LJ completely. Fortunately, LJ Abuse were helpful and responsive, especially with the ones who spread gratuitous nipples in their icons using breastfeeding as an excuse. I'd call that child abuse.

When writing these things as Uncyclopedia articles, they seem to think they're writing for Encyclopædia Dramatica. Hey, let's make fun of an unnotable person just to be assholes! And most of these articles would probably be deleted on sight at ED.

Things that shouldn't be joked about

uncyc quotes

On Uncyclopedia, diseases are a favorite. Less than 20% of Tourette's Syndrome sufferers swear; you can blame television for the misconception. Making fun of horrible disorders is funny? Do people make jokes about cancer? Normal people.

Some of the things they joke about, there just shouldn't be jokes about. There isn't any way to make humor about these topics. Putting Category:Tasteless on it doesn't excuse this sort of article. It's like they want the things in the jokes to happen by acknowledging them. It's transparently self-serving.

It's a lot like the people who use "sexual education" as an excuse for their BDSM — or "ritualised abusive situations" — web pages, claiming an "adult" disclaimer will keep young people from being exposed to it unnecessarily, or who say it should be allowed wherever talk about sex is allowed — sex has consequences, that people can get pregnant, which doesn't apply to BDSM — or who shave their pubic hair and then claim that doing so is anything other than trying to sexualise childhood. I have had it pointed out to me that this may seem a case of "your kink is not OK," but some things are just wrong. And they call the people in their "cat piss man" stories creepy.

In conclusion

quotes

I don't like these people. I think most of them are morally deficient. They are arrogant, humorless, self-righteous and confrontational, complete with curled-lip sneering and quizzical eyebrow raising body language. I guess it's just an ingrained destructive habit, like chemical dependency or gambling away the rent money.

It is really so simple: if you would not walk up to me and say a thing in person, then why would you do it over the Internet?

There is no place for this sort of thing in "humor." Where's the wit? Where's the charm? Most importantly, where are the deserving targets who are so socially odious as they describe? I don't know anyone who fits that category myself, except these people themselves. They deserve everything they get. Everything.

External links

• Retail: The Wrath of Cat Piss Man (Paul T. Riddell, Savant #16, 31 August 2000) — the failed hack at work.
• What Makes A Fuckhead? — a description of the people who use the term.