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Part of The Well Cultured Anonymous
So, you've cleaned up everything else. You've got a handle on your manners, your clothes, and your diet. What else needs fixing? Your hobbies.
[edit] Developing Broader Interests
- Some cheap ways to become a more balanced and refined Anonymous
- :* Read moar - not just your usual trashy fantasy and bad sci-fi, but mainstream fiction and nonfiction. You'll probably even like it. Neal Stephenson, Irvine Welsh, Nick Hornby and Kurt Vonnegut are good writers to start with and have a tinge of the /b/ sense of humor about them. Short story collections (like the kind used in creative writing classes) are also a great way to discover stuff you like. Between your local used bookstore and Amazon you can stock up on interesting reading material for very little. Having normal books around improves your image and makes your geekiness less threatening. If you are in to the human transcendence thing (becoming more and more in vogue, and Anonymous could think of worse ideas to gain popularity), go read Prometheus Rising by Robert Anton Wilson. This book will help you understand yourself, and perhaps as importantly, help you understand other people. Reading the classics never hurt anyone as well - there are masterpieces out there, things everyone can relate to, such as Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, or Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Stuff that's surprisingly fun to read, and an amazing cultural reference point. Or you could just watch the movies.
- :* Draw moar - it's a good hobby to pick up if you can't. You'll suck at first, but get the fuck over it and keep going. Drawing pads and pencils, charcoal, pastel, etc. cost very little and last a long time. There are plenty of books to help (Drawing On The Right Side Of The Brain is as good a start as any), but the only way to get any good is to keep practicing.
- :* Learn to Cook - cooking is a sexy skill. Find a cookbook you like (Anonymous recommends The Joy Of Cooking by Rombauer & Becker, as well as On Food and Cooking by Harold McGee, which is like a cookbook/food reference guide for nerds.) and test out some simple recipes to start. As you get better you can experiment, but to begin stick to the recipes as written.
- :* Write. All you need to become a writer is to have something to say and a way to say it (an opinion and a form of media). Whether you write it in a blog post, on a random piece of paper, or contribute to The Well-Cultured Anonymous, writing is a great talent and can lead to you getting familiarized with a broader spectrum of words, phrases, and slang terminologies. This comes in handy during conversation.
- :* Listen to music. - let's face it, everyone loves music, trust me that even if you suck at it, girls loves to see a guy playing the guitar (just taking classes is enough). Just make sure you are actually getting better, it doesn't matter how slow you are at learning, as long as you are, many girls will be interested in hearing you playing the guitar even if you can only play the first part of Smoke on The Water , but remember to keep practicing, just like in Mega Man, the more you practice, the better you'll become. For someone who's never played a guitar in their lives, it's actually a lot easier than you probably think. You can buy a cheap acoustic guitar for $100 when you are starting out (do NOT start out with an electric, as it will not make your fingers any stronger, and will teach you bad habits if you ever want to get into acoustic. Start with something easy, yet something that you've heard enough times that it shall interest you, and teach yourself to play most of it, like Stairway to Heaven.
- :* Enjoy Fine Cinema - Let us all face it: Some movies you just cannot go through life without watching, such as Taxi Driver, Saturday Night Fever, The Godfather, Reservoir Dogs, The Wall and Pulp Fiction. These movies make such good cultural reference points, and you will seem like an uncultured bitch if you haven't seen at least some of those. As an added bonus, watching documentaries, particularly environmental, military and political documentaries, will make you seem like an intellectual and educated anon - regardless of whether that is true.
[edit] Why Bother?
Let's face it, geek stuff doesn't give you much common ground with other people. Hell, the sheer life span of most geeky shit (for example, your average YTMND joke) is too short to bank your personality on. If you add to your range of interests, you'll be able to talk to more people, and statistically fifty percent of those people are women. The more you know that you don't feel ashamed to talk about, the less you'll feel awkward in conversation. And then hopefully you'll be reading The_Well_Cultured_Anonymous/Sex for a reason.
Please note that this doesn't mean you should stop being interested in the things you already like. You don't have to give up your animu and your /b/ surfing, just tack some other interests on so you don't seem so single-minded.
But let's face it- culture is sexy. Culture is the kind of thing that very few people have. When you can listen to a Wagner composition and enjoy it just as much as you do "My Chemical Romance" (you tasteless fuck), you have a kind of control of yourself. People who can play musical instruments (see: Not Guitar/Bass/Drums) naturally seem more collected then those who can not. Hell, even appreciating good art can make you that much more intriguing- you'll be considered interesting and mature to your peers, and intelligent to your superiors. Why not go for it?
[edit] Everything is Culture
And by "everything" I mean it, the problem here is that not everyone likes the same stuff, the best thing to do is to try to find something that popular with the people you are gonna talk with (try some small talk at first, even if you limited yourself to "that sounds interesting" or "I'd like to try that", you'll get info at what you should learn about), but then again, if you just hate yaoi, you won't go to /y/ just to get info about yaoi stuff to talk with a yaoi fangirl, there will surely be many other things that interest her, either try to find common interest or GTFO, in some cases, you can even proudly talk about the video that you uploaded in youtube where you beat Mega Man in record time, try to expand your culture, even a line or two about a theme may be enough (however, don't pretend to know every theme or to know everything about a theme, that just makes you a pretentious faggot).
Let's take a good example and say you are going to get into the college party scene at your local educational dumping ground, and you want to know how to not look like a damn fool. The best way to do this, simply put, is to immerse yourself in their world. Listen to some shitty Nickelback tunes, go to Abercrombie and Fitch, and try to understand their mentality. Culture doesn't have to be all about Christianity-inspired art and music- it can simply be culture of ANY subgroup, just translated into artistic forms of some kind.
However, there is a difference between a culture and a fad. For example, no doubt in 10 years, the Miami Beach inspired MTV-christened Abercrombie and Fitch look will die. From there, if you are caught wearing this clothing, it will look roughly equivalent to you wearing a leisure suit: Fucking stupid. The same goes for a lot of clever Gothic art, and Emo music: One day, it will be stupid. However, Classical music, intellectual literature, and beautiful renaissance art will never be stupid. That's why so much of culture is rooted in such things: Because no matter what, your knowledge of them (and appreciation of them) will never hurt.