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divad
Trad climber
wmass
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Topic Author's Original Post - Aug 4, 2008 - 04:41pm PT
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This from our good friend Andrew Bisharat from Rock and Ice in #171, TNB, p.42: "I've been called worse by the LOL cats living a lie on supertopo.com."
AHAHAHA
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graniteclimber
Trad climber
Nowhere
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A word to the owners of Rock & Ice if they want to regain relevance in the climbing community: More Doug Robinson, less Andrew Bisharat.
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graniteclimber
Trad climber
Nowhere
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"You know who used to "convince" people to go "hiking"? Nazis, that's who. I'd rather get on a treadmill than go hiking. Or, better yet, I'll just drink smoothies and then go pull on mono pockets till I fart. Then, I'll sniff it and tell myself it smells good."
This is representative of Andrew Bisharat's writing. It is crap, pure crap. He spews paragraph after pargraph of this. http://www.rockandice.com/inthemag.php?id=69&type=tnbeblast
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Toker Villain
Big Wall climber
Toquerville, Utah
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Shitarat.
Sounds more gay than Shitagerbil,..
NTTAWWI
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L
climber
Flat-faced Buddha Cat City
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Meeeeeoooooowwwwwwaaaasssssshhhhooooooollle
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Phil_B
Social climber
Hercules, CA
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I am the Lolrus!
Goo goo goo choob
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Standing Strong
Trad climber
sunlight on the surf
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i LOL all the time. at cats, supertopo, bisharat, climbing, myself, everything
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graniteclimber
Trad climber
Nowhere
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Andrew Bishirat, writing about himself, as usual, in An Idiotic Climbing Life Exposed:
"I’ve never climbed the Nose. For a lack of anything better, it’s the pivotal tick to becoming a Real Climber. But give a kid a break. I just haven’t gotten around to doing it for the same reason I avoid rolling in dehydrated piss.
Besides, El Cap trade routes these days are a strangely bad rip-off—like Bikram’s yoga, where people seriously pay $16 to sit in a hot room and have their neighbors sweat and fart on them for 90 minutes."
http://www.rockandice.com/inthemag.php?id=23&type=tnb
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Jaybro
Social climber
wuz real!
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Well, he's on to something with the first sentence, that's the whole thing, really. Why don't they have editors at that former climbers magazine?
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Mighty Hiker
Social climber
Vancouver, B.C.
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May the fleas of a thousand camels infest his armpits.
The photo upthread may not be walruses - don't they usually have tusks?
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Karl Baba
Trad climber
Yosemite, Ca
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""You know who used to "convince" people to go "hiking"? Nazis, that's who. I'd rather get on a treadmill than go hiking. Or, better yet, I'll just drink smoothies and then go pull on mono pockets till I fart. Then, I'll sniff it and tell myself it smells good."
When do they rename the rag "Gym and Sport crag?" Gagmewithaspoon.
The rags keep wanting to get younger and hipper but in search of their demographic they lose the rest of their credibility.
honestly, call it "Gym and Sport crag" and be done with it
peace
Karl
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GDavis
Trad climber
SoCal
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If you haven't read Alpinist 24, you are missing some really great articles. Barbera Washburn, Soloing in Stolby, Ricardo Cassin and more... my favorite issue to date!
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Mighty Hiker
Social climber
Vancouver, B.C.
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Perhaps Mr. Bitchy Rat has sore feelings regarding what we said about him on the "Growing Up" epic thread. (Not hard to find.) Or maybe he and his magazine just like attention. I've heard that there are climbers, and businesses, like that. Although it started with his post to his blog, in which he opined on the thread. And some of us did express some rather strong views on him, his blog, his magazine, and their relevancy.
AB's blog is at http://www.rockandice.com/inthemag.php?id=57&type=tnbeblast
I must say that I particularly like the use of the word "blast" - it simply oozes authenticity. AB might benefit from a trip in the Total Perspective Vortex. His opinion is quoted in full below, in all its deadly prose.
The TNB eBlast Round 56
04.15.08
I've paid some attention to the ongoing thread about the South Face of Half Dome on the Supertopo forum, but not much. Reading 1,400 posts' worth of inflammatory and ungrammatical climbing writing is a lot to ask of any person, even me, who technically has to do just that for a living.
If you don't know what I'm talking about--and most people never do--here's the basic gist: A long, great-looking route, first featured in an exclusive Rock and Ice article, was established partly on lead with some rap bolting last year. Due to the history of the face, this caused some people to become upset. Their opinions were expressed through all of the dialects of the modern, impersonal and misspelled language of today's Internet.
Normally, I don't think it's worth taking what people write on the Web seriously--but the sheer number of people who have weighed in on this issue makes it a relevant one to discuss in this week's eBlast. Sorry, but this one is not going to be funny.
Of course, I have an opinion--that it frustrates me when old-school climbers lose their minds any time anyone climbs in a different style than they did a hundred years ago--but I don't think that my opinion is important enough to post anonymously in a forum.
What's interesting to me isn't this route or its ethical and stylistic issues. This type of debate has been around since the day man decided to go up something with anything other than his loincloth to cover up the him-hang. What is interesting, however, is how the new medium has become influential to the dialogue.
The Internet has turned climbing into an abstract concept. Any time you remove yourself from the reality of a situation, and then try to explain it using cookie-cutter dogma and principles that were picked up from reading enough forum posts, I believe that the soul becomes denigrated.
How many people on the Internet spray about the importance of one climbing style while putting the other one down, which they refuse to even try because it goes against their "ethics"?
The Internet is a place that climbers use to create a cult of personalities, or something like that. For example, if you like the idea of identifying yourself as "old school" and "traditional," you don't have to actually do any old school, traditional climbing--you just have to post enough good catch phrases: bash sport climbers, glorify the 5.9s of 20 years ago, and so on. You know the drill. The reason the Half Dome South Face forum is over 1,400 posts long has NOTHING to do with South Face and everything to do with self-creating opportunities it presents all the gumbies who get to turn themselves into the climbers they've always wanted to be--fearless, hardcore, moralist, old school, new school, whatever.
The point is, and this is what really bothers me, is how sanitized our lives have become. We are perpetually distancing ourselves from reality through technology. I don't care about the Supertopo thread, but it does make me sad. It's proof of how packaged up, or reduced, our sport becomes when you have 1,400 posts' worth of probably decent climbers who are preoccupied with sitting at home and debating abstract concepts, and pretending that they actually abide by the ethics they espouse, instead discovering and enjoying the experience of climbing with open minds.
This sanitization of reality is all around us, too. "Operation Freedom" somehow makes it sound like something other than mass murder, and throwing around terms like "rap bolting" (or whatever) on Supertopo makes it sound like something akin to mass murder! The Internet allows us to take a step back from what is really going on. Would we still be in Iraq if each one of us had to go shoot bullets at people, and would we still be complaining about this one route on Half Dome if we were putting up our own routes using our own preferred style of climbing? Or, better yet, climbing the route in question and enjoying a over a thousand feet of perfect granite?
Of course, it's easier to put Growing Up down than actually go up the route ... or grow up, in general.
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Captain...or Skully
Big Wall climber
Yonder (out in the sagebrush)
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Stupid R & I.... Magazine Whores just suck.....I LOL all the time. I CAN climb, too. with Gusto. and vim....& vigor.
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GDavis
Trad climber
SoCal
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Anonymous? Geez, I hardly consider ST to be a site of anonymous gumbies. The people speaking on either side of the Growing Up argument weren't gumbies... unless you consider Bod D and Coz gumbies.
I do.
;D
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Mighty Hiker
Social climber
Vancouver, B.C.
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I confess that I went climbing today, slab climbing at that. Rather than sit at the keyboard and be a vicarious climber of the type AB refers to, and apparently thinks not worthy.
Can someone please post the full text of the article referred to in the first post, for context?
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