In Which the First Theme Week is Introduced

Hello!

Welcome to the blog. I'm Thomas. Hi, how are you doing? I love what you've done with your hair. No, no, not ironically - I really mean it. I accents your face. Before we get going in earnest, I think it's important to mention that Zach has made his way into the eye of the internet itself.

http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=4543

So, how's that for legitimacy?

As mentioned earlier, we're just saying hello. It's something I don't do every day, because I'm basically a recluse. The people that I say hello to are captives, people working in the service industry who I buy my food from. I don't mean to sound like an uptight Roman aristocrat, but I do enjoy trying to lighten the day of the working class. Actually, I totally meant to sound like an uptight Roman aristocrat. Someone needs to fetch me wine, and to tell that one slave to dance - his antics amuse me.

Personal predilections aside, saying hello is an interesting sensation. We are presenting ourselves with our worst foot forward; we are not who we introduce ourselves as. Our real friends know what lazy, indulgent, inept, and deliriously self-important sophists we are. Meeting someone new, we have, what, thirty seconds to convince the new person that we are witty, charming, urbane, athletic, and good looking.

Further, people carry filthy diseases that they then transmit onto you.

Meeting new people brings with it untold existential stress. Since we often seek to define ourselves through how others see us, to hold very complimentary mirrors up to reality, then, what we say and do literally becomes who we are. How many people out there have met a really cute guy/girl/other at a bar, stumbled out an awkward introduction, and then felt like leaping off a cliff, because the sad charade of their existence isn't worth the resources they're consuming? Similarly, how often do you meet some drunken, unshaved lout, and then the two of you continue to talk the rest of the night, discussing the threat of Uggo Vampires?* Meeting new people, then, becomes an inadvertant form of narcisissm. We value strangers for their appearances, because they present themselves in the ways that we wish we were. Their rejection is a confirmation of our own faults. Likewise, talking to crazy people about made-up undead menaces serves only to compliment our own social grace and tact, that we can so impolitely convince someone less than ourselves of the rightness of our ideas.

*I mention this only to let the rest of the world know - in our struggle against these unnattractive princes of the night, you are not alone.

The internet is the worst thing ever, if only because audiences are then held captive. The written word is historically unable to convey proper conversational dynamism that's needed to create proper communicatin'. Which is why, perhaps, that the upsurge in blogs (like this one!) is a good thing for society and for language. More options mean more divergence from tradition. While small-minded hill-people may smear Youtube with their hateful screed, overexposure to this lowest-common-denominator numbs our senses. All that is foul about spelling and grammar set into the ignorable norms, while people who are inventive with language fall to the much-noticed margins of popular viewing.

I can only hope that Eleven Names is able to follow through on it's original mission statement* and provide some kind of entertainment or whatever to you, the viewer. Incidentally, I did just re-read the above, and after reading "inventive with language", I kind of want to jump off a bridge. SEE? SEE?

*Zach: The internet can pay for our beer, Thomas!
Thomas: Where do I sign up?