Music downloading creates listener apathy

Anyway, the really thick thing about this article is that everything their describing is more a product of the mass-produced, commercially available recording than of the MP3. I mean "commodification of music" come on! If anything, the wide availability of *free* music has lessened the degree to which people think of it as a commodity.

I'm almost right there with you. I still run across stuff like that Charlie Rich song on the Closed Doors thread, but I'm not actively seeking it out anymore.

Besides, I can't do .rar at work.

it could be just the way he speaks, but it certainly sounds like he's trying to slide shit by that's mostly premature and doesn't seeem like it could even be research based. its true I'm somewhat burned out on music b/c of the over-availability of it and b/c it seems to be coming in at odd angles i can't even keep track anymore, and really esp. b/c electronic files do often sound lackluster, but i don't know how he gets to all these grand conclusions. how can you measure any of this with all the shifts taking place - people need time to adjust and yes it IS complex. the emotional investment part seems particularly weird - how do you measure that? ...i feel burned out but more emotionally invested than ever before. i don't know how that works, but i feel my relationship to music has somewhat changed and less romanticezed -less about worshipping stardom and packaging and the mystery of waiting for shit--- i feel like the music comes to me now clean and naked and when its good i'm really able get into it. before it was like being thrown a bone and maybe some people need that to be interested. and "in short" and "arguably" hmmmm, maybe this is revilatizing his career somehow.

What the fuck is this even supposed to mean?

BIG drop in ticket sales at minstrel shows when the Victrola caught on in 1906. Enrico Caruso's management wasn't too concerned tho.

I wonder whether in fact we're beginning to see a split in how people approach downloads; namely between lifting the newer stuff and making the effort for music of yore.

There's still a great deal that's not surfacing as mp3 and thank god for that.

This actually seems like a good thread to revive in general.

There's M. Matos's Slow Listening Movement project, which I know's been talked about on here before (rightly).

Meantime -- and yes, I'm seeding ILM with a few links on this today -- there's this interview I did with Ben Chasny for the Quietus that has gone up, and is mostly Ben reflecting about music and technology. A key part:

"I feel that what was once considered fetishism in collecting music may become much more important in terms of creativity and long-term consciousness (and I don't use that term as some hippie speak). Let me explain: what I have noticed over the years is that people are being more and more herded, by themselves, into believing that faster is better when it comes to obtaining music. Faster has always meant "better" to the modern mind, so it makes sense that if one can obtain music faster with new technology, one must be progressing, right? But we humans happen to be living at a peculiar time as we find ourselves at the point on the technological line that is about to go vertical in its exponential slope on the chart of progress. Essentially, we are standing on the verge of what some scientists call the technological singularity, which is the point where technology will begin to overtake humans in intelligence as they recreate themselves and reproduce.

"Yes, this is some William Gibson business, but landing on the moon was once a fairy tale as well (this year Stanford University created a helicopter that could teach itself to fly by watching other helicopters. If that isn't sci-fi, I don't know what is). Some see this as a positive future and a part of our evolution as we fuse our bodies with this technology. Some see this as the end of Humankind (Paul Virilio has stated that there will be aliens on this earth but the aliens will have evolved from us. And we won't even get into what Virilio says about the inevitable 'accident' as we fuse ourselves with technology). So back to what I was saying before - I see people thinking that faster-is-better as conditioning themselves (I don't believe this is some conspiracy) for the inevitable technological singularity.

"...the other day I came across the first Sun City Girls LP on a blog. It's absolutely out of print, no way I will probably ever see it in a store or on eBay for a sum I could afford, so that left me with a clear conscience about downloading it for free. But I realized, how much pleasure would I get from it anyway? Why do that? Just to say I have it, that I have heard it? I decided not to download it because it would be much more enjoyable to at least share the experience with someone else. Maybe someone will play it for me one day. Until then, it's just information.

"And I do believe we are becoming addicted to information. You only need to look at those people who have hard drives filled with songs that they have never even listened to. They are not even collecting music. They are collecting information. And the more people become addicted to information and the faster they can obtain that information, the less they will be able to contemplate that information, and it is the contemplation of the information which makes it art."

I think it's undeniably true that if you can listen to anything you want, anytime, with the absolute minimum of effort, then you won't be listening to the music in the same way, with as much attention. But you can't put the genie back in the bottle. Maybe recorded music is a genre that will become increasingly irrelevant because of its ubiquity, as Bill Drummond suggests.

I think I can deny that, actually. I would agree that it is undeniably true that if you can listen to anything you want, anytime, with the absolute minimum of effort, then you won't be listening to ALL the music in the same way, with as much attention.

However, I see no reason why you won't listen to plenty of your music with as much care and attention as you used to. And I see no problem with having another mode of listening, a mode that does just use instant access to music as a method of gathering information or accompaniment. Because you have to have information or you won't listen to anything, and sometimes, you know, it is NICE to just have music on in the background. So what?

I've found that working through my collection and finally importing it into a hard drive has meant rediscovery of a variety of things that I'd either long forgotten or was able to hear with a new light -- and in a number of cases I realized why I hadn't touched certain things in a long time!

"...the other day I came across the first Sun City Girls LP on a blog. It's absolutely out of print, no way I will probably ever see it in a store or on eBay for a sum I could afford, so that left me with a clear conscience about downloading it for free. But I realized, how much pleasure would I get from it anyway? Why do that? Just to say I have it, that I have heard it? I decided not to download it because it would be much more enjoyable to at least share the experience with someone else. Maybe someone will play it for me one day. Until then, it's just information.

Don't get this bit at all. Why listen to any music at all? Just to say you've listened to it? WTF.

I can understand why you would treasure the times when a friend would put on a record for you, and you'd listen to it together, and it's great. But you could just as easily dismiss that as wanting to be told what to like. That's worse than information, that's direction.

Not that I do hold that opinion, it just seems as ill-thought through as the idea that there's no point listening to something that you're quite clearly interested in listening to already just because the only way you can hear it is is through the internet. There is actually no argument being made here except music as information is bad, music as information is the internet, internet is bad. Why is the internet bad? Because it is information. Why is information bad? Because it is the internet. Etc.

I think what he's trying to say is that if he grabbed it now, it'd just be to hear it because he'd heard OF it, whereas he might hear it down the road in the course of his life in a context that makes the music or his experience with it more meaningful or memorable. But then, maybe I'm reading it that way because that's the philosophy that's kind of guided me the last few years: I'm not gonna go out of my way to hear every album that's in the canon or being talked about at the moment, and get a lot more enjoyment out of just hearing things whenever I end up hearing them. If that makes any sense at all.

xpost

to put it another way: if I just DL'd any record that had a 200-post thread on ILM or a positive review on Pitchfork, I'd just be hearing it to keep up with the conversation or make sure I'm not missing out on anything. if I just wait for when a reccomendation comes from a poster or a critic (or a friend or a guy at a record store) whose taste I know or who makes a compelling case for why it's something I would enjoy, that's another story.

I think another problem I have with what he's saying is that he's already scuppered his chance at making it happen naturally in a meaningful or memorable way. Now he has the worst of all worlds: he is unable to hear it AND he's unable to have it mean anything. So why not just hear it? Why force it? Why not just accept that sometimes things are found on blogs, sometimes they're found by your friend a million miles away, who cycles over the ural plains just to put it in your hands.

I don't know why I said 'ural plains' when the urals are clearly mountains.

Good quote that makes sense to me. I don't think he's saying his impulse with SCG is universal, but that that it what he was thinking at the time. And I have downloaded a shitload of stuff because it seems like something I should listen to, or should have listened to.

My boredom decreases as I add more really old stuff to my hard drive. Of course I am uploading more than I am downloading - don't know if that has anything to do with it. Maybe people find downloading itself tedious? I dunno.

(I guess that's linked on Matos's site, but I thought it was a particularly good summary.)

Do not say that you have "heard" an album until you have listened to the entire thing at least three times.

I so violently disagree with this. If you don't like something the first time you listen to it, you are under no obligation to listen to it again. Perhaps, as time goes on, your tastes will change enough to the point where it might make sense for you to revisit things you used to dislike, but there is so much stuff out there that life is far too fucking short to do this with every single piece of music you might encounter.

(also, ironic lol at using OCD as a pejorative, then typing out a precise list of rules for how people should listen to music)

the meaning of 'the technological singularity'

there is a fantastic amount of utterly ridiculous speculation surrounding this concept, much of which can be found on the interwebs. frankly its all kind of gross and full of self-loathing, a "god" concept for nerds who hate their bodies, basically

x-post

ironic lol at using OCD as a pejorative, then typing out a precise list of rules for how people should listen to music

^^also this haha

None of libcrypts rules as good as applauding the gramaphone for its performance.

I took libcrypt's "listen three times to an album to hear it" as meaning something like, "to REALLY hear it". You can hear something once and dislike it, but I'd say you haven't "really" heard it until you've given it a chance to sink in. No one is under any obligation to give any music a chance to sink in. But I think it's bullshit to suggest that you've gotten familiar with an album after a single listening. It's the like the difference between a one-night stand and, uh, a three-week relationship.

it kinds of sounds like peeps are more worried tho' about the perception that other people not listenting to / not enjoying too much music, rather than how they are listening themselves, or am i misinterpreting that?

i agree it's pretty difficult to comment on something you have heard once, there is so much to take in, but there are also times when it grabs you first time.

music is no place for rules

lolz at my rebellious no rules comment. and laughing at my own joke.

i guess i don't really care what people do in terms of "rules"

but yeah, i mean there's albums now that i seriously LOVE that i actively disliked on first listen...

even jazz in general took sort of like a decade of "you know, i really should like this stuff" to the point where it sort of magically clicked and now i love it and get so much joy out of it.

Even in my CD-only days I'd still buy something and not necessarily listen to it immediately. I lived in a place with no record stores other than a Musicland, so on trips elsewhere I'd stock up on used stuff or other things that I'd heard good things about but never heard. I might not be in the mood for something at that moment but figured at some point I'd get into it, or I'd listen to something and not like it but would still keep it around - enough people said there is something redeeming about it, so I should give it a couple of more chances.

Some of my favorite records are things I hated at first, or listened to once and instantly forgot, only to get really into them later for some reason or another. Having cheap hard drive space makes this so much easier and low-stress that I really never delete anything for any reason.

Some of my favorite records are things I hated at first, or listened to once and instantly forgot, only to get really into them later for some reason or another.

all of my favorite albums are pretty much this

Listen to an album IN PROPER ORDER, not shuffling the tracks

Why?

A lot of these "rules" seem like they'd just have the effect of turning listening to music into work, as if it's not work enough already. (And right, it definitely does not take three listens to know whether I like or dislike an album. That’s absurd. Lots of times, it doesn't even take one listen to the entire album to figure that out.)

That said, I barely listen to anything on my computer (biggest exception is when I have to review something, and I have no choice but to listen to the emailed mp3s I'm always bombarded with and otherwise just delete; once in a while I'll track through an album I don't have a copy of on Rhapsody -- new Lily Allen last night, which annoyed me more than her first one.) And the five-CD shuffle on my CD player is broken now (well, the remote control died, which has the same effect), so I do tend more to listen to albums from start to finish these days. Just not sure why that's any more valid than the alternative. (And what if you only listen to half the album, because you have to go to the store, or you're wandering in and out of the room to do household chores? Is that not allowed either, all of a sudden?)

Also have a habit of buying LPs for $1 in thrift stores and letting them pile up for a couple years. Was pretty caught up on the vinyl pile a month ago (more caught up than I've been in forever actually), but I've bought a new pile since. And it may be a while before I get on another vinyl kick. Don't see why listening to them six months from now is any less valid; it's not like the albums that I finally got to last month but had bought in 2006 got any worse in the interim. So why put a deadline on them?

Oh yeah, once in a while I'll get on a Pandora kick for a couple of days, too; that's on my laptop too, right? But basically, I'm saying I don't download mp3s for pleasure. Never have; maybe never will. So lots of these "problems" that, say, Matos is addressing in his Slow Listening thing just seem foreign to me, except in the sense that physical music can pile up as easily as digital music can. Which is sometimes an annoyance, but not always. And when it's annoyance, right, you either listen to the pile or get rid of it. Which isn't that difficult, if you put your mind to it. Sometimes it's even fun.

I kind of ruined This Is Hardcore for myself by accidentally listening to it on shuffle the first time through.

1. If you obtain music, via any media, listen to it in a timely fashion (one month, say).
2. If you do not enjoy the music -- if you cannot say that you "like" it and will listen to it again -- get rid of it. Erase it, sell it, whatever.
3. Do not say that you have "heard" an album until you have listened to the entire thing at least three times.

ppl have been responding to this already but yeah these rules are silly.

to me there's something contradictory about what chasny is saying. i totally agree that liking music has a lot to do with circumstance--it came along at the right time, you shared the listening with a friend, emotionally you were just "ready" to hear a given album on a given day, whatever.

but isn't that MORE of a reason to horde records and mp3s? when i was a student with a lot more time to kill i downloaded gobs of music and didn't listen to most of it right away. but then a year or two or three later someone would mention an album to me, or i'd read something about a band, and i could say "oh yeah i think i have that somewhere."

there have also been countless albums that didn't hit me right away, but i kept them around and they became huge faves.

so why don't you just download the goddamn SCG record so you have it for whenever you think you're ready? there's nothing meaningful about the act of NOT downloading.

i don't know now i'm thinking about it, does music siting on hard drives or wherever unlistened to devalue itself?

as in , being in oversupply like the albums you constantly see in bargain bins

or, as in its an insult to the artist on some level that you bought their music and didn't bother to listen to it?

I've been snarking about this phenomenon for years, and it's nice to read someone clarify the issue: Music listening is becoming more and more about information gathering and processing and less about enjoyment. There are zillions of OCD music "fans" out there, and MP3 networks have just driven their neuroses into the stratosphere.

not really your, or anyones business, to define for other people what "pleasure" is

always ask yourself: does this album provide more or less pleasure than a somewhat awkward handjob?

I just deleted an Eels record because it didn't satisfy that criterion.

threads about downloading rules creating lots of apathy over here

always ask yourself: does this album provide more or less pleasure than a somewhat awkward handjob?

this is a great rule actually.

yes - equals 2 stars on my ipod

i think some of the reasons that internet-centric listening can be detrimental to emotional connections to music are really simple:
1 - a whole lot of music is heard in the exact same place/situation (i.e. at your computer.) its harder to remember listening to something when it doesn't have a unique place and image tied to it.
2 - when listening to music at your computer the harsh light of your monitor dominates the like emotional tone of your environment... just notice how much more pleasant it is to listen to whatever you're listening to if you turn around and look out a window or something. i'm always surprised at how much of my internet burnout feelings seem to be directly related with the quality of the light of the computer screen.
3 - the internet and its infinite wealth music/information/entertainment prevents you from ever having to obsessively ruminate on a piece of music because that's all you have that you really really love at the moment. you rarely ever get the sense of really being with just your own personal collection of music, which can make your own collection of music feel way less personal.

of course, all of these things are easily avoided, but i think just the fact that the internet is conducive to these behaviors changes the feel of music listening.

2 - is a good point. Not so much the monitor but that you can easily be reading about/discussing what you've just downloaded. Then it does become "part of the conversation". I'm not so ready to accept this difference as a negative though.

personally I usually allow what I've dl'd to make its way back at a time and place fated by shuffle.

yeah, that's a good way to think about it (xxpost): some people have problems adequately attending to the music they listen to. Internet listening may not create these problems. But it also doesn't solve them, and may exacerbate them for some people.

The Chicago Reader article linked to above suggested a parallel between music availability today and eating at the Old Country Buffet. I thought that was a bad analogy, because so much of the music available is good. So better to think of it as if you lived in a buffet with only top-notch food: how would you pick what to eat? Would you focus on any one food? Would it be better for your appreciation to focus? How would you avoid eating too much? These problems have parallels for music listening (plus it's fun to think about buffets).

being able to listen to anything, right now, affects people in very different ways, and i think i side with the argument that personal context and lived experience determines much more about how people listen to music than some big perceived technological horizon.

that being said, i agree with the sentiment expressed upthread that the real tech. change happened at the end of the nineteenth century (or maybe it really happened w/ guttenberg or or) and we've been gradually fulfilling that promise for more than a hundred years now.

there is something different now w/r/t the interfaces that connect our lived experience in the world with music information and access compared to fifteen or twenty years ago. i think the key difference lies in more and more layers of software abstraction that connect "us" to "music." the things an ipod does to mediate access create a kind of free-floating effect somehow... your "library" becomes a performance driven by the information tacked on to the files. i think this creates some tension when you're trying to "ruminate" as described above (i take this to mean reading the rich fabric of context around music in a thoughtful way), but it doesn't make it impossible. and in some ways the software performance creates its own context! like, you can mix and match ways of experiencing this stuff. i don't know if any of that makes sense...

i've found that listening on my computer or itunes tends to make me a little ADD since i can all too easily switch to another tune or just skip ahead away from tracks that don't grab me in the first twenty seconds. sometimes i later hear something on the radio or in a store or at a friend's place and i wonder, "what is this amazing track?" and i find out it's one i downloaded and never even listened to or, if i have, never gave it a fair shot or the proper attention.

OK, some folks on this thread are taking my rules waaaaay too seriously. It's not like I have any means to enforce them! It's food for thought -- admittedly, a bit tongue-in-cheek -- and my dictums have truly no force on how you live yr life. I don't even follow them 100%!

Euler, I don't think that excessive MP3s are a psychological weight, but when you have SO much information in yr music queue to process, the natural human tendency is to attempt to get thru the queue as quickly as possible or else pretend that the queue doesn't exist. This is (IMO -- do I really need to add this qualification? It's all my opinion FYI) entirely the wrong way to go about enjoying music. If you have new music that needs listening, not just hearing, you should give that music the space it requires. Do not overload yr queue.

but why view it as a queue and not as a library? i don't need to read everything in the library but at least i know it's there if i ever want to read it.

A library is a public entity and has multiple users. A collection is one person's hoard.

no dude not as like THE library but as your personal library...why not treat yr cds, lps, mp3s that way instead of as something you have to "get through"?

I know what you meant. I was attempting to point out that most non-collector folks don't maintain "personal libraries".

Of anything.

I should mention that I never listen to music "at my computer" necessarily. I throw everything on my ipod and either listen in my car, on my home stereo, or walking around with headphones, ie. pretty much the same places I always listened to it. Even at work, I plug my ipod in and listen with nice headphones, the same way I used to listen to CDs on my computer at work ten years ago. Main difference is being able to shuffle 19,000 songs while riding the bus instead of having one tape to listen to.

It's just that I have so much more of it now and don't have to limit myself to the 12 CDs that fit in the sleeve that I used to carry to work, nor do I have to spend 20 minutes every night swapping them out and reshelving them. I just have 75% of everything with me, all the time.

In some ways it's great because I can listen to so much stuff with so little effort, even if it does mean that I don't really get to know a record because it's been in my CD changer or car for a week solid. On the other hand, I listen to big stretches of the same band or artist a lot more this way.

On the question of how many times one has to listen to an album before it can be called "listened to"--I do find myself thinking that I haven't really heard albums that I've only played once or twice, and do listen to things I like a lot of times. But people haven't always interacted with music in such a repetitive way. Audiences at a classical concert (pre-LPs) would probably only hear the piece once--though of course this was in an atmosphere of concentration rather than background to another activity. Also, improvised Jazz shows kind of made repeated listening irrelevant, since even if you're listening to a recording of a song you're only hearing one of many versions that the group has played.

As far as the question of hording downloaded music--I went through periods where I felt I had to download every CD I ever had any interest in, mostly because it seemed likely that someone would soon put a stop to this era of infinite availability, and I wanted as much as I could get before that happened. But now it's years later and I'm still sorting through all those records.

Yeah...I've never been into the whole thing of listening to an album several times a day...sometimes even at the height of really loving a new album I'll only listen to it once or twice in the space of the week, and that's as true for me 10 years ago as it is today, that's just how my listening habits are. I feel like that helps me savor each listen more, and sometimes I can have really vivid, detailed memories of a single performance or single listen of a song.

As good a place to ask ask any - how is the sound quality generally with AirTunes?

One thing that I never see questioned is what happens once people process all this information[mp3s] and the effect that it has on peoples listening. I went through a pretty heavy period of downloading the 'canon' and filtering through what I liked and disliked and now have an incredible sense of what I enjoy and the direction my future music downloading/buying should take - whereas I fill that if I didn't have that opportunity I'd still be wasting money and time trying to figure out my own tastes. At times my listening seemed like work and info gathering but now I am now about as excited about what I am listening to and knowing what I should hear next. I have the freedom to know I should spend the next week listening only to Kate Bush and Blue Note records I haven't heard yet - because i've already put the time in and know that's what I really, really want to hear, as opposed to what I *should* be focusing on, or what the radio tells me is popular or whatever. People spending a couple years figuring out what they love instead of spending half their life listening to the radio or bugging record store employees just to find a couple things they may like every once in a while can only be a good thing in my eyes.

i've found that listening on my computer or itunes tends to make me a little ADD since i can all too easily switch to another tune or just skip ahead away from tracks that don't grab me in the first twenty seconds. sometimes i later hear something on the radio or in a store or at a friend's place and i wonder, "what is this amazing track?" and i find out it's one i downloaded and never even listened to or, if i have, never gave it a fair shot or the proper attention.

― The Prices are .......... VERY AFFORDABLE!!! (omar little), Wednesday, March 18, 2009 12:40 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark

^^^ this. i'm waaaaay more likely to skip around and go all spazzy when i listen to stuff on mp3. have started getting into vinyl because of this.

also: airtunes actually works pretty well! has improved quality of life, for sure

however could a distinction between 'having' and 'being' be useful here - being with the music in the sense of simply enjoying the sensations and experience of listening in the moment (and looking at artwork, smelling the venue, feeling the emotions, whatever) as opposed to having the music - in the sense of not necessarily 'information' in your library, but having the opportunity to hold on to it so you can be with it in some future moment. in trying to hold on to too much i am sure i end up letting lots of thinks fall through my grasp

The main thing I've gotten out of this thread revive is connected with this quote as well as what later arpeggiator pointed out - that somehow, the experience of sitting in front of the computer as I listen to music is what really ends up devaluing it. I hadn't really noticed this before, but I'd wondered why it's become so hard to find music that really STICKS with me, i.e. something that I'm going to want to "hold on to it so that you can be with it in some future moment". In my fantasy, I'm searching for something that will make such a deep impression on me that I'll want to pull it out in years to come. But the hunger for more information and the ease with with I can acquire it means that most things I find that I enjoy are like fads, no matter how much I like them in the moment. And sitting in front of a computer corresponding with people about it over that screen doesn't lend the same emotional resonance to it that it needs in order really "stick". Music is now less of a truly social activity than it once was in the days when it was necessary to get musical information from people in person.

i think internet-centric musical experience does not just divorce music from the culture surrounding it, but can prevent a culture from forming at all. like the way unique species evolve in small isolated locations, e.g. galapagos. the internet can have a normalizing effect on people where simply being aware of everyone and all the trends that are going creates cynicism which prevents the creation and adoption of new cultural behaviors.

not to be too extreme about it... but there is a kind of loss of innocence that comes with the immediate availability of information.

get a blog

I'm really skeptical about this entire thread. It seems pretty reactionary to decide that new ways of listening to music are somehow worse, or less fulfilling, than old ways. I wonder if people are conflating their lack of connection to new music (which could be due to age, musical trends, etc) with technology. I still find new music to obsess over. And I'll play it for friends and we'll talk about it, and I'll listen to an album over and over again. (In the last month there have been two albums that I've listened to over 20 times apiece.)

It's like more Benjamin-esque critiques ("not to be too extreme about it... but there is a kind of loss of innocence that comes with the immediate availability of information." sounds like some romanticized auratic bullshit). I just don't believe it. I believe that maybe the ways we listen to music will change, but to say that we're losing something essential - eh.

I was at a party recently and I played some Fela Kuti albums (and earlier that evening, some Girl Talk and some random hip-hop) off my iPod. And we all hung out and chatted and listened to music and - to use auratic language - it was a really potent moment and experience. An experience I talked about later and really cherished (it was connected to real life events too; my sister-in-law's birthday party, my brother's last party before leaving the country, etc). And I remember that music in that context now, and it doesn't seem lessoned by the fact that I downloaded all those mp3s off the internet. The fact that my iPod holds 60gigs of music didn't lesson the experience in any way whatsoever.

So... maybe the problem is your context of experience, and not the technology itself. Technology can suggest new locations of listening (in front of your computer, on an ipod, on a gramophone, whatever), but it can't eliminate old methods of listening.

um, yeah, i could just as easily spelled that all out and been more longwinded than just saying "of course all these things are easily avoided"

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/apr/17/the-pirate-bay-trial-guilty-verdict

Steady now, pirate costume abuse is one of the most tiresome things a young adult can do to him/herself. ARRRRRRRRRRRRRR!!!!!!!!

― Just got offed, Tuesday, June 17, 2008 8:59 PM

Hey hey: ARRRRRRRR!

― The stickman from the hilarious "xkcd" comics, Tuesday, June 17, 2008 8:59 PM