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Vice Blog

DEAR VICE - LET'S KICK 2010'S ASS

Dear

Vice

, If there is one thing that can be said about 2009, it is that 2010 will be better. This is just simple arithmetic! So, for the next 12 months, plan to avoid making or drinking or fucking the same mistakes as you did for the last 365 days. Whereas 2009 was a year of restraint—fiscal and otherwise—make the next year one of total irresponsibility. Act like an insane person, constantly. Unless there's a chance that someone is going to

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physically stop you

from doing something, just do it. Dust off the old "easier to make apologies than it is to get permission" logic from 11th grade and run with it. Pursue desirable acquaintances with forthrightness and wildly oscillating levels of intensity—stability is for bridges! Just say shit like that and everyone will be too unsure of themselves to call you on how meaningless it is. Twitter has revolutionized banter: epigrams are unquestionable (See?). Text everyone incessantly, and with the mindset that capitalizing entire words for emphasis shows bravado, virility, and fingertip dexterity. 2009 was a year for inhibited pith—email courtships have over-familiarized us all with the ability to craft the perfect sentence, but such calculated charm has worn its welcome. Ellipses and semicolons are for the impotent: if you

really mean something

, it follows that you would want to make use of the largest letters available to say so. Rid in-person social behaviors of any similar grammatically correct ethos: Show up at parties to which you were not invited and immediately suggest to the most attractive person there going elsewhere. If there's no where to go, hang around outside the party with liquor and drugs that you were resourceful enough to have brought with you. Rely on no one for fun! 2009 was a bad year for staying at the party; in 2010, you will leave at the first instance of being shown a new iPhone app by way of conversation. Anyone who scrolls through their iTunes in order to describe their taste in music should similarly be ignored. Resist purposely de-indexing your own taste in music by naming the three most disparate and random bands on Earth when asked this question. "I like the Telepathy, Herman's Hermits, and Art Tatum, mostly, and some other stuff" impresses no one. Assert thine taste—good or bad—in CAPS. "I like the Strokes and Albert Hammond, Jr. and Julian Casablancas' solo material, mostly, and some other stuff." Content is irrelevant,

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commitment

is the message. It is more despicable to talk earnestly about the awesomeness of self-consciously terrible action movies than it is to talk earnestly about the awesomeness of movies that make some claim to actually being good. When the next

Terminators

or

Twilight

comes out, and it is inevitably a cynical and patronizing piece of shit, it is not elitist to say so. Don't be a pussy: take a stand on the new Wes Anderson, don't change the subject to Michael Bay because you think that makes you a man of the people. It just makes you the asshole talking about robots as if that's a thing that's interesting to anyone. Just generally, talk about things that people want to hear: Stop describing what you cook and what you ate. This is like the new talking about your dreams, except there's no potential at all that the person to whom you're speaking might eventually come up, so it's of even less interest. In 2010, refocus any lingering earnest tendencies inward: Take being interesting seriously, take

fun

seriously. In 2011, you'll be

old

already and then it won't even matter. Sincerely, JULI WEINER

From Vice: Thanks, Juli. We like your moxie.