Rant

To be fair, we should have a holiday in November to balance out Valentines Day by making people feel bad about having people who love them.

Oh wait, I forgot about Thanksgiving dinner. Nevermind.

Journal

At 14, all my mom could talk about was how getting a girl pregnant would ruin my life.  At 34, all my mom can talk about is how never getting a girl pregnant has ruined her life.

Journal

Sure, by my age my grandfather had fought a war, bought a farm, married, and had two kids, but I've got a phone that plays music AND video games.  Who's got time for kids with all that on my plate?

Journal

I want a girl I can take to Ikea, not in some bullshit "500 Days of Summer" way but because she's seriously passionate about Swedish design practices.

Journal

Whenever I pass a person preaching the apocalypse on a street corner, I just wanna stop, hand him a book of Lovecraft and ask "Have you read the Good News?"

Seriously.  Every Revelations preacher is just a goth kid who never blossomed, and it's all I can do not to help them along their way.

Journal

Have you ever just had one of those moments where you stop and think to yourself, "This is it. This is how I become a super villain."  Mine are starting to come one on top of the next.

I knew I was evil from a very young age.  I was always been very well organized, and really, that's the thing about evil.  It's always got a plan.  It's just that, lately, I feel like things are coming to a head.  I feel like, at any moment, someone's going to push me a hair's breadth too hair and BOOM, there's my super villain gimmick.

Rant

Honestly, at this point, I don't even watch television with any expectation of enjoying it.  I only watch series so that I understand what everybody is talking about online.

"Bullshit is everywhere.  (Are the kids still in here?  We'll deal with that later.)

Bullshit is everywhere.  There is very little that you will encounter in life that has not been, in some ways, infused with bullshit.  Not all of it bad!  Your general, day-to-day, organic free-range bullshit is often necessary, or, at the very least, innocuous.  "Oh, what a beautiful baby.  I'm sure it'll grow into that." That kind of bullshit in many ways provides important social-contract fertilizer.  It keeps people from making each other cry all day.  But then there's the more pernicious bullshit.  Your premeditated, institutional bullshit, designed to obscure and distract.  Designed by whom?  The bullshitocracy.

Rant

Mama always said, if you can't be a good influence, you just have to be a horrible warning.

The best of my many original (de)Motivation Posters and possibly my all-time favorite platitude.  As far as I'm concerned, you either wake up every morning of your life and work like a dog to meet the world's expectations, or else you get on with the business of unabashedly enjoying your life without shame.  Nothing in between has ever made any sense to me.

81.) The things you put into the world will be used in ways you never expected. And by idiots.

Don't ever think that you know what people will do with what you release.

Rant

Girls, if a guy wants you to learn how to play a video game, it means you are the most important person in his life... or, he needs a healer.

Journal

Girls: So... do you have any hobbies?
Me: Mostly, I just make sure that the internet doesn't get lonely.  It's not so much a hobby as a calling.

Rant

Remember the good old days when ms paint was enough to keep you happy for hours?

Rant

If I ever climb up a building and begin shooting people, it will have far more to do with Ray Bradbury's "And the Moon Be Still as Bright" than any video game.

Rant

Nineties Kids make the saddest adults.

Having witnessed the transition from the Industrial Age to the Information Age first-hand, we've become a generation mired in nostalgia for technologies that have been rendered obsolete.
We grew up playing with action figures and board games, only to graduate to Speak-n-Spells, Simon Memory Games, and Nintendos.  We've marveled as huge corded telephones have shrunk down to wafer thin computers carried in our pockets.  We've watched as our television offerings expanded from three fuzzy channels on a day with clear weather to five hundred channels of cinema-quality definition.  And we've reveled in the growing freedom afforded to us by global data networks that have evolved from BBS chat boards into realtime streaming video that carries the world into our home.

As a result of that rapid technological development, we've been left yearning for a childhood that seems to us to have been both simpler and far further in the past than reality.  For most of us "ten years ago" still means 1995, not 2005.  Cursive feels like an old friend, and each book sitting on our shelves is a treasured trophy of a journey through foreign lands to our eyes.

We understand the technologies our parents are still uncomfortable with, but we still remain capable of seeing the technologies our children take for granted as the miracles they are.

Torn between the two generation, we stand apart, the saddest adults.

Rant

Ladies, want to look five years younger?  Nothing makes you look like a broke ass college kid faster than an iPhone with a cracked screen.

80.) The smarter your technology is, the less control you have over it.

While hardware defines what a technology can do, it's software defines what it will do.  Slowly but surely, that software is being designed to resist our wishes in favor of the best interests of corporations (such is the case with DRM), and it won't be long before it is designed to resist competing technologies, too.  As we enter the age of the Internet of Things, we run the risk of transforming our households into either technological battlefields or fiefdoms.

Rant

Sorry, but your password must contain an uppercase letter, a number, a haiku, a hieroglyph, and the blood of a virgin.

79.) All systems have embedded purposes. The less we recognize them, more we mistake them for given circumstances. We start to treat the map as the territory.

At the very least we must come to recognize the biases - the tendencies- of the technologies we are using, and encourage our young people to do the same. If we don't participate in building our digital future together, it will be done by someone - or something - else.

Source: "Why Johnny Can't Program" by Douglas Rushkoff

Rant

I once read a short story about a cineplex of the future that claimed to have a thousand different movies playing on any given day.  The story followed a teenage girl who discovers that, at any given time, a large portion of the movies are fakes, only zany trailers and posters marked "sold out."

I suspect that one day, the real world Hollywood marketing apparatus is going to catch on that a series of two minute trailers released strategically over the course of two years sells just as much merchandise as an actual movie, and it'll won't be until years later that we realize no one we know has ever seen any of the movies that our toys were supposed to be inspired by.

Journal

My family went to an outdoor wedding last Sunday.  About halfway through, my brother starts complaining about a rash.  My mother had to explain to him that it was a sunburn.

There are many words to describe us, but "outdoorsy" is not one of them.

Rant

A person with fewer than five pictures on Facebook scares me more than a clown holding a bloody axe.  What the hell are they hiding?!!

Rant

I've often thought of computer coders as a new type of priesthood.  They speak a language unknown to common man and control our experiences of contemplation.

Rant

No one showers, shampoos, dries, deodorizes and then pulls on sweat pants.  No one.  Once you've  committed hygiene upon yourself, you're gonna take that last step and actually get dressed.  Sweat pants are what you pull on over stank when you're forced out into the world and you don't want to go.  So be polite.  If you see some in sweats, that's a clear social signal to keep your damn distance and advert your eyes.  Cuz no one ever pulled on a pair of sweats to get noticed.  Not ever.

"Don't worry kids, being an adult is mostly just Googling how to do stuff."
- Bill Murray, October 27, 2014

 

Rant

If you ever find yourself sitting somewhere bored, just remember that somewhere, somebody is typing up a set of software terms and conditions.

Rant

Remember kids, choose a job you love and you'll never work a day in your life... mostly because that field isn't hiring.

Rant

Being a nerd is so expensive.

Seriously, why is being a nerd is so God damned expensive? I'm pretty sure my grandfather didn't spend himself bankrupt on cowboy merchandise at my age.

Journal

My brother, walking into the kitchen while I'm cooking: "What's this an infomercial for?"

78.) There's a difference between a rut and a groove, and it's all in your attitude.

A nugget of wisdom from my father, in honor of Father's Day.  This in response to being accused of being in a rut after ordering the same pizza from the same restaurant on the same night of the week for three years in a row.  Evidently, a rut leaves you feeling tired and old, but a groove is what it's called when you're having a good time.

77.) If you're adult and you aren't absolutely convinced that you're fucked, something is terribly, terribly wrong with you. It's the Catch-22 of adulthood that the only people who aren't worrying about something are the ones who should be worrying the most - addicts, idiots, and the blissfully ignorant whom life makes into examples for the rest of us.

Journal

Why yes, Microsoft Surface, M. Night Shyamalan does perfectly sum up my disappointment with your product.  Thank-you for making that link for me.

Stupid Wayward Pines commercials.

Journal

Every since we got Mom hooked on Game of Thrones the new rule is "It's not porn if watches too." Try not to think on it too hard.

Rant

I read the comments again. Began to seethe. Successfully closed browser. When you gaze too long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.

Journal

Ten weeks into the New Year and the diet's still going strong.  Unfortunately, that diet would best be described as "unchaperoned child at a birthday party."  Better luck 2016!

Journal

I thought that a relationship should be nurturing, so I suggested we get a pet together.  She thought a relationship should be rooted in trust and wanted us to be more honest with each other.  So we compromised with a trip to the local taxidermist.

Rant

It’s fucked up that Doritos-flavored Mountain Dew is a thing now, but what keeps me awake at night is that, somewhere out there, a 12 year old still has two wishes left.