The Return of the Well Cultured Anonymous/General *ure

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.

Developing broader interests
Some cheap ways to become a more balanced and refined Anonymous


 * Be Curious - curiosity is your one way ticket to knowledge, and to culture, just fight your fear of the unknown, and try. You'll learn a freaking lot about many things just by being curious and asking a few questions, people love to talk about what they know.


 * 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 appreciate art - Art is everywhere and shit. Understanding and appreciating it will set you apart from losers and make you feel better about your understanding of the world as a whole. get an art history book and flip through it to get a feel for various styles impressionism, surrealism, neoclassicism etc. while looking at a work, ask yourself a couple questions, like
 * "What's going on here?"
 * "What visual evidence do I have?"
 * "What feeling is the artist trying to evoke from me?"
 * "What is the artist trying to say to me?"
 * Learn the following terms as they relate to art: Form, line value, shape, texture, color, value, harmony, variety, unity, balance, proportion, dominance, movement, economy.


 * 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. This is especially something to look into if the purpose of this exercise in self improvement is to do better with women. Women love their food, most would be content to eat themselves unattractive and once they're married a hell of a lot do. If you've got cooking skills you're set for life, as not only will an attractive women be more willing to come round to your place if you offer to cook her a meal, but should you ever wish to settle down and get married, if you've got control over what she eats then you can prevent her from fulfilling what seems to be all married women's ambition of becoming a fucking moblin.


 * 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. Writing will also help you with women. Every woman loves it when a guy can write a poem to her, no matter how shit it is. If you can tell her that her eyes are like stardust in iambic pentameter, she will stab her best friend in the face for a chance to sleep with you. Shakespeare can help you here, read the romance scenes in Twelfth Night or something. Just ignore Romeo and Juliet, that shit is contrived and you know it.


 * Play 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. It's something that everybody is capable of so long as they put in the practice, and eventually it'll become like a habit to practice everyday. 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. Guitars are considered the coolest instrument by your average musically apathetic women, they're attracted to the fantasy of their own rock star. Whilst you may find other instruments cool, from personal experience I've found that most women only ever completely enjoy your mad violin skills once you've shown you can use a guitar too. So if you're getting into music for image, anonymous suggests going for a guitar as a first instrument. They're also the most commonly used instrument, so once you get good you'll have a chance to show your worth should some prick whip out his guitar and try to attract all the female attention. Don't boast about your musical skills either, that way you won't look like a prat when it turns out you're not as good as you've made yourself out to be and it'll look even more impressive if it turns out you can play like a devil. Don't rely on being able to play a mean guitar to win over the ladies though. Unless you're in a band who often does public gigs it definitely isn't a ticket to funky town, but it helps impress them and helps you one up non-musicians, and avoids you from being one up'd by other musicians. Women who play musical instruments (particularly guitar or other string instruments - nobody gives a crap about your clarinet) are however onto a major winner as most women seem to do fuck all other than look good, talk for hours, shop, etc etc so if you have that special niche of playing music guys will definitely be interested.


 * 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.


 * Tinker - Tinkering is your basic skill to surviving, if you put two people on a desert island, one who knows his way around things, and the other who's been spending his life calling customer service, you can be assured that one will live much longer than the other. Tinkering will make your whole life easier and faster. Fixing things by yourself will also make you think about how stuff works and you will learn and get smarter. It also is a sexy skill, for many women will think you just fixed their "life and death" issue in the blink of an eye, and you'll be a hero. That's also why SMB still exist, because all women get horny just hearing them ya-hoo!-ing. Frankly, even if you can't make much conversation with it, it'll always be a good thing, helping friends and yourself, you will look/be much better than you objectively are.
 * Some may say that tinkering isn't culture, that it is too practical and not enough knowledge, but tinkering will give you a good knowledge of materials, processes of working them, prcoesses of working on them, etc. If you're not too much of an idiot and are a little curious, you will learn many things by just asking "how is this done?"

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 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?

Being "cultured" also feels damn good. It's one thing to beat all your mates at Mario Kart even though they always seem to get blue shells on the last lap. That may feel good temporarily, but you'll know that most people IRL don't give a shit so you won't feel proud of it. Not like you're proud of yourself when you hang a painted canvas on your wall, or write the daddy of all chord progressions. You'll be less inclined to self loathing now that you've justified to yourself that you have talents and skills most other can't do, and you'll feel more confident because of it. Having "culture" will back up the confident swagger this guide has advised with something of actual worth.

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 instance, there is no doubt that 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.

Also, never back out on new things, as unpleasant as they might look, as long as you haven't tried them, you have no right of having an opinion about it, being curious about things and trying to know about them will give you a boost in knowabitofeverything-ness, little knowledge of everything is sometimes better than deep knowledge of a few things, especially in that matter. Being knowledgeable on something is good, but once the topic leaves that something aside, you're fucked, you can of course focus on a few specific things of your interest, but knowing a bit about everything will help you out greatly in conversations, which are, by experience, pretty random (though very organized, chaos theory?).