A friend of mine has gotten into roller derby. Well, his fiancé has and his method of supporting her on her important life choice is by being incredibly over-the-top and enveloping himself in the roller derby world, which is why I've had it thrown down my throat for a year or so.
I just wanted to find a place where I could bitch about roller derby and masquerade it as a simple disagreement with this article. If a game allows - nay, actively requires - you to customise your equipment with teenager's-backpack-style stickers and choose an alter-ego, then I don't believe it's a sport. If these people spent as much time practicing a sport as they did posing for photos in their equipment for their team's Facebook page, they might actually get good at a legitimate sport.
My friend tries to justify it by saying I should see a men's game (I won't call it a bout) before I shrug it off, but having met some of the blokes that are into the sport, I can vouch for them being weird people that are trying to be some male counterpart to the alt-girl. I don't think I'd enjoy watching people skate slowly in circles regardless of gender.
Can we talk about roller derby? Preferably in agreement that it's shit, but I'm open to being called a cunt for having this opinion.
The people in that article seem oddly pleased that it's no longer an underground subculture, and is in fact a "proper" sport now. Some people are so eager to be accepted by the mass of scum that is mainstream culture, it's truly vile.
You're right, it's almost as though by describing your average human blob as part of a "mass of scum" I was being facetious in the extreme. Almost. You scum.
>If a game allows - nay, actively requires - you to customise your equipment with teenager's-backpack-style stickers and choose an alter-ego
It's not a requirement under any of the officiating bodies that I know of.
>I don't think I'd enjoy watching people skate slowly in circles regardless of gender.
You rarely see that.
It's clear that what you're really objecting to here is your friends pushing their hobby far too forcefully on you. Why is it that you've not asked them to cease with their enthusiasm and tell them it's eroding some of the warmth of your friendship? Surely if they are your friends they'll respect that you don't have an interest in it and that it's annoying you, and drop it. You'd do the same to a friend who nattered on endlessly about Harry Potter or Linux or bicycle polo (another "underground" sport that isn't known to many, seems to have the same sort of feverish enthusiasm in its participants, and from what I can tell is also striving for recognition by various sporting bodies and the wider world). Why didn't you post a thread in /emo/ asking how to better navigate your social web?
>I just wanted to find a place where I could bitch
I'm struggling to understand why you didn't just shove this in /101/ - it makes little sense for you to post something on a sport board when you seem to be arguing that it doesn't deserve recognition as one. Aren't you sort of giving it a shred of validation by doing so?
>>5542 I wasn't responding to that, I was responding to the overall sentiment that something becoming more mainstream sullies it, and wanting something to become more mainstream is somehow a bad or unjustified thing.
>>5545 Hm, yeah, good point. It really is a shame that internet services became widely available and culturally relevant rather than remaining the sole preserve of autistic university students.
I know a lass who started doing it, and it all looks a bit contrived to me. In the league she's in, each person has to have an alter-ego, which is usually a pun based name. I think it's like the Screen Actors' Guild where you can't have multiple people with the same name, so most of the good puns on her name were already taken. There also seems to be a particular type of person who does it. I know there's the stereotype of it being butch lesbians, but from what I've seen it's primarily 'quirky' bi-for-attention alternative girls with brightly dyed hair and facial piercings and whatnot. Then there's all the customisation and stuff to stand out.
It's basically an anime in real life. Promiscuous, provocatively dressed quirky girls with unnatural hair colours, each girl having an alter-ego corresponding to their particular niche, all doing a sport which seems less an actual sport and more something from a Mario Party game.
Actually when I describe it like that, it sounds fucking great.
It seems to me like the type of thing that lasses like predominantly because other lasses are doing it/seen to like it. See: Candy Crush Saga, Fifty Shades of Grey, the enduring and completely mystifying appeal of Davina McCall.
I know a couple of lasses who regularly go on about this - one is a physio and relatively normal, the other is QUIRKY and everything she owns is either rainbow striped or tie-dyed.
>>5553 That's not chunky that's fucking hefty. Having been to quite a few burlesque events. Many of the performers aren't stick figures and I like a bird with an hour glass figure, but never one that bovine.
>>5555 I really liked her on Streetdate. It gave me the impression that she probably has a rather sharp sense of humour behind the public-friendly face. And that show is a great 90s blast from the past, I remember spotting Wimpys and Kwik Saves in the footage. Ah, them were the days.