Okay, this week’s edition of my rants is going to be a couple of shorts rather than a unified front. Apologies for bad segues and references to equine children’s shows.   

Liberate Kony Island, or why we aren’t paying attention to Syria

Unless you have been using your interwebs for entirely academic pursuits over the last week, you undoubtedly watched or read about “Kony 2012,” the “informational” minidoc by advocacy group/accused shell company Invisible Children about a warlord’s misadventures in Uganda. For those of you who actually can locate that war-torn African nation on a map, Kony’s action are probably unforgivable, but the inefficacy of simply throwing money at a group whose fiscal transparency is questionable seems obvious, right?

Which leads me to the night last week when a friend asked me to hop on Facebook and help inform a group of new-blue “activists” who mean to protest Kony’s abduction and indoctrination scheme on April 20 (insert stoner activist joke here), yet fail to even research the facts behind Invisible Children. After a few hours and some well-placed pictures of Carl Weathers, we were booted from the events page for the group, and I was lambasted for correcting one of the leaders’ grammar. Sorry I got a degree in English from this fine university and cannot use it for more utilitarian means than making a misinformed 20 year old on a social networking site look silly (insert job market joke here).   

Various memes about Kony have now taken the place of rational discourse, for as the wise Anonymous philosopher once said, “If you can’t beat them, troll them into the ground.” A personal favorite is “My Little Kony,” with the general’s head pasted on a neon purple giraffe horse. Then there are the viral hashtags on Twitter and the endless walls of text on Facebook walls. Which drives home the point: have we, the young adult generation, become so crass and unrightfully cynical as to accept this as a means of protest, or are we really so unintelligent that our only options are to jump on the official band wagon or make funny pictures and say “LOL wut?!”   

Better late than never: Descent into webcomix fandom

I began a second job a few weeks ago at Marlin and Ray’s, a new concept from Ruby Tuesday whose first store opened in Maryville eleven months ago, and our store on Lovell Road is already the eighth in the franchise. This has lead to working seven days a week and odd sleep schedules, but also offered the opportunity to pursue meaningless hours of web trawling until I wind down and descend into id-fantasy mode (read: sleep).   

For a few months various friends have been posting strips from various webcomics on Facebook, but since my brief foray into anime and manga a decade ago I have kept a safe distance from most animation and a taser in my back pocket. I’ve previously discussed my love of Pendleton Ward’s “Adventure Time,” but comics still felt too fringe for me. Enter “Questionable Content,” Jeph Jacques’s long-running strip about indie rock snobs in north Massachusetts, with all of the sexual tension, psychic hangups and inevitable “Band A is a watered-down derivative of Band B” banter indicative of hipster culture. Naturally, I’m hooked.   

In the few days leading to this piece I’ve read almost seven hundred of the comic’s 2100 strip run, which Jacques publishes from Monday through Friday without fail. If you start at 2003 with the comic’s inception, a lot of the future speculations and commentary about former indie bands may seem a bit dated, but the start date of the comic coincides with my own immersion in left-of-the-dial music culture, so it’s nostalgic, if anything.

Seeing as it’s neither porn nor one-sided news media, I feel like the time investment is at least non-toxic. For a few minutes of snark and Zen each day, visit http://questionablecontent.net/. Also check out their merch page and buy a few shirts so you can outhip your nearest and dearest.

Enjoy your spring break and remember: drunk is okay, acts of random vandalism can be cathartic, but a jail cell in Panama City is no place to wake up. Seriously, the reek of Axe and ubiquity of boat shoes is a ring of Hell unto itself. Be careful, and when in doubt, don’t panic. Someone has surely screwed up worse than you. “Chappaquiddick” ring any bells?

— Jake Lane is a graduate in creative writing. He can be reached at [email protected].