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?"