I’m a professional snoop. It pays the bills, especially Bill my bookie and Bill my parole officer (and Bill Watterson, from whom I stole this joke). Preliminary investigations indicate that there is confusion about what the word “neckbeard” means.

A classic neckbeard has three things: nerdy interests, obesity and/or poor hygiene, and arrant narcissism.

Possession of only two traits does not qualify one for neckbeard status. Harry Potter’s Dudley Dursley has a large physique and excellent self esteem, but he is not a nerd, and hence cannot be a neckbeard. Comparatively, Samwell Tarly from A Song of Ice and Fire is fat and introverted and sensitive in his tastes…but he lacks the neckbeard arrogance.

Neckbeards seem like a recent fixture of our culture (ignoring occasional historical artifacts like Ignacius J Reilly). Where do they come from? The internet’s an obvious guess. Some claim that the internet is great because it connects you with lots of people – dogs, FBI agents pretending to be 14 year old girls, etc – but don’t forget the other side of the coin, it also lets you filter out people.

Take the furry fandom, which is not so much a “fandom” as a neckbeard spawning ground. There’s a feeble public facade that it’s a wacky art movement by people who enjoy anthropomorphic animals – and ten billion square hectares of sexual perversion beyond it (occasionally someone breaks ranks, reveals the sordid side of the fandom to the tabloids, and recieves an Amish-level shunning, see Chew Fox).

The neckbeardiest element of the furry fandom are the “dragons” – hardcore therianthropes who believe that they are literally dragons imprisoned in human bodies. It’s often said that dragons are the “furries of furries”, noted for their arrogance, self-delusion, and incredible social awkwardness. Here’s dragon Kaijima Frostfang telling his life story. Note certified neckbeard quotes like After my “death” (the human concept of death is so simple, and limited ;)), I was highjacked by some of the local Powers (thanks Thok’sa :p) and steered into being dropped into human society (of which I was mostly underwhelmed… except for some of the food, the music, and Anime, which is very nice :))”, which gave my computer autism. Is there any doubt that Senor Frostfang possesses a majestic beard that spills over his keyboard like R’lyehan tentacles?

The furry fandom could never exist at its current size without the internet, and just as epicycles can exist within epicycles, the “dragons” could never exist without the furry fandom. There’s no way this sort of thing develops outside of a cult-like commune that has the ability to shun outsiders. The more time you spend in an environment where people tolerate your strangeness, the less strange it seems, and the more likely you are to bring that strangeness to Sharon Tate’s doorstep.

Is it possible for a woman to be a neckbeard (or an equivalent term, like “legbeard” or “tumblrina”?) I honestly don’t think so. Nerdy, obnoxious women exist, but there seems to be a different dynamic at work there. Neckbeards have an unerring belief in their own charm. Their female counterparts are usually cauldrons of self-loathing and over-compensation. And part of the neckbeard aesthetic is that you are completely repulsive to the opposite sex. “Legbeards” still seem to get lots of male interest.

And I’ll mention that the furry fandom has avoided that issue entirely, because most of them are gay. In the words of Eric Blumrich: “furries, by and large, are bi and large.”

Again, this is an interesting historical mystery without a clear answer. It’s said that influential early furs like Mark Merlino promoted the subculture heavily in the gay and S&M communities, but I suspect only a small part of the fandom’s current base would have joined through such evangelism (most furs now have never heard of Merlino). It’s possible that gay people are more open to exploring sexualities a bit off the beaten track (phrasing!). It’s also possible that whatever causes male homosexuality is also a risk factor for other types of sexual deviancy.

“We’ll choke their rivers with our dead” – Bart Simpson

“There is nothing more mysterious than a TV set left on in an empty room. It is even stranger than a man talking to himself or a woman standing dreaming at her stove. It is as if another planet is communicating with you.” – Jean Baudrillard

“Power may be at the end of a gun, but sometimes it’s also at the end of the shadow or the image of a gun.” – Jean Genet

“Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.”

“A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.” – Frederik Pohl

“When you`re reading or skimming argumentative essays, especially by philosophers, here is a quick trick that may save you much time and effort, especially in this age of simple searching by computer: look for “surely” in the document, and check each occurrence. Not always, not even most of the time, but often the word “surely” is as good as a blinking light locating a weak point in the argument.” – Daniel Dennett

“Imagine a city where graffiti wasn’t illegal, a city where everybody could draw whatever they liked. Where every street was awash with a million colours and little phrases. Where standing at a bus stop was never boring. A city that felt like a party where everyone was invited, not just the estate agents and barons of big business. Imagine a city like that and stop leaning against the wall – it’s wet.” – Banksy

“The point of philosophy is to start with something so obvious as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it” – Bertrand Russell

“It is almost impossible to carry the torch of truth through a crowd without singeing somebody’s beard.” -Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

“Epping Forest was still untouched across the other side of the street, rabbits, squirrels and deer were always around. In the morning my mother would walk me to school. It took me about ten minutes through the forest along a trail worn by footsteps and deer. There were pools, frog ponds, deep shadows. It was a magickal place, and a favourite haunt, I learned later, for rapes, flashing, and the dumping of corpses.” – Genesis P-Orridge

“Drr…drr…dr…” – Junji Ito

Eating good food comes with a price: you can’t enjoy McDonalds ever again. Likewise, reading good writers means you will no longer enjoy their imitators and ripoffs (and I hold that it’s possible for a writer to be a second rate clone of someone without even knowing they exist).

I used to read a blogger called Fred Clark/Slacktivist. He is a shitlib (look it up), but I originally assessed him as an entertaining one. He’s most famous for his Left Behind cycle, where he reviews the popular Left Behind novels page by page. (It became a bit of a mess after he changed from Typepad to something else that blows. Maybe WordPress didn’t have enough writers of color or something).

…Then I discovered John Dolan, and was struck by a sense of “wow, this is what Fred Clark was trying to be, all along.” Clark’s a Shirley Temple, Dolan’s 60-proof moonshine pulled straight out of the radiator. Here’s his article about being homeless in Canada. Here’s his article about working for the American University of Iraq. He writes extremely well, and he writes about interesting topics. The shitlibbery is pretty strong at points, but he always lays out a case that’s hard to argue against.

For more Dolan, read the War Nerd (his column under the pen name Gary Brecher), or his all-time most entertaining piece of writing, a review of that James Frey thing: A Million Pieces of Shit.

But then Frey is no expert observer, as he proves in one of the funniest scenes from his nature walks, when he meets a “fat otter”: “There is an island among the rot, a large, round Pile with monstrous protrusions like the arms of a Witch. There is chatter beneath the pile and a fat brown otter with a flat, armored tail climbs atop and he stares at me.”

Now, can anyone tell me what a “fat otter with a flat, armored tail” actually is? That’s right: a beaver! Now, can anyone guess what the “large, round Pile with monstrous protrusions like the arms of a Witch” would be? Yes indeed: a beaver dam!

Any kindergartner would know that, and anyone with a flicker of life would be delighted to see a beaver and its home. But for Frey, a very stupid and very vain man, the “fat otter” is nothing but another mirror in which to adore his Terrible Fate. He engages the beaver in the most dismal of adolescent rhetorical interrogations:

“Hey, Fat Otter. He stares at me. You want what I got? He stares at me. I’ll give you everything. Stares at me….”

And so on, for another half-page. You want to slap the sulking spoiled brat. The Fat Otter should’ve slapped him with its “flat, armored tail” and then chewed his leg off and used it to fortify its “Pile with monstrous protrusions.”

After injecting copious amounts of hi-test Dolan into my brain, I re-read Clark and he comes across as a shrill button-pushy retard. Here’s his latest, trying to score some rhetorical points re: shooting sprees. “Hahaha, I’m taking the logic people use on Muslims and applying it to men!”  But that’s actually un-ironically interesting. I am curious to know why males are much more likely to be spree killers. So are lots of people. Go ahead, let’s investigate it. You’re not making a joke here.

Great how he tries to jam every fucking thing from the news into the story (Go Set a Watchman, Sandra Bland). It was a sad day when he slithered from the abortion bucket.