We should lock up all living true "rock and roll" specimens and only release them into the world when we need entertainment

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I work out every day, but I can still "pinch an inch." Does this mean I'm fat?

Big Bill Hell's is the best car dealership in the country,



I'm incredibly proud to be from Baltimore right now!*

*this is the first time I've actually been proud to be from Baltimore

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The Last Day of January

These are the last days/times,

I found out that it was advertising juggernaut Adbrite that is doing all the most annoying interstitial ads on the Internet. Those things are worse for you than unfiltered cigarettes. In summation, I'm trying to say that Adbrite causes cancer, stains your fingers and teeth, and may or may not have a part in sparking ethnic cleansings halfway across the world.

Next post is about TV Carnage or I won't post at all.

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Favorite Shoes: A Self Indulgent Blog

Everyone has favorite shoes, right? Well, these are my favorite shoes right now. Clarks brand Wallabees. The camera's flash really illuminates the use they've gotten over the past two years or so.

I mostly wear them on my feet but sometimes if I'm doing that midget trick I'll wear them on my knees for an audience that may only stand directly in front of me. I have not yet worn them on my hands, head, or elbows. A dog has never worn them. They've never been worn by another person.

If you don't like my shoes, post some of your own fucking shoes!

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Sheena Easton - 9 to 5 (Morning Train)

no homo*



*yes homo

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Good Seeds and Bad Seeds: A Post About Torrents!

A bad seed

• Britney Spears' newest album

A good seed

• Space is the Place
• Sweetback

Rare classics. Space is the Place is Sun Ra's totally insane movie. Sweetback can be called the first Blaxpoitation film but it isn't really. It's more like an early independent black movie that happened to reveal to Hollywood that a lot of money could be made by producing movies with primarily black casts, plots, and themes. The exploitation part came afterward, when Hollywood got into the business. That's also when most of the money arrived. Hollywood appears to have kept the sexuality of Sweetback for later movies like Shaft, but they are usually not nearly as revolutionary in theme -- for example, Sweetback fights police. Shaft does not; instead, he's a black detective working with a predominantly white police force.

If you decide you want to seed these too, I say "hello" on behalf of my client.

This post inspired by a brief power outage.

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Hate Your Internet: Interstitial Ads

Very simply, I hate interstitial ads -- those ads that appear between sites, like television commercial breaks. They're becoming increasingly prevalent on sites that I visit. The interstitials wouldn't be so bad if they didn't do things like:

• load CPU cycle-eating flash video
• just not work
• load up entire other web sites -- are the sponsors being paid to hijack traffic to other sites?
• That's my thumb over there
  

By the second point, I mean that a lot of the time they'll show up on multiple pages for a given domain, which is not how I think they were intended to work. I understand that people have bills to pay, and not all interstitial ads are equally offensive.

The third point is pretty serious though. I think Blinkx is the main offender I've noticed with this one. At least I think it's Blinkx. Maybe I'll update this later.

Adbrite is the main offender, and yes, it appears that their interstitial ads are often not ads, but instead, are just other people's web pages.

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Katrina & The Waves: Where were all the Hurricane Katrina/Katrina & The Waves Jokes?

One of those nameless bands who people from my generation know primarily through the licensing of their hit song for commercial endeavors.

Video for Katrina and the Waves' hit song, I'm Walking on Sunshine:



Wikipedia article on Katrina and the Waves

Surprisingly few Google search results for "hurricane katrina and the waves"

I'd mention that "some things are just too tragic to make tasteless jokes about" or something along those lines, but we all know this to be false. The jokes just never really materialized. Maybe one day someone will find this post and add the audio of the song to archival news footage from Katrina. That'd be good.

Further investigation into the links in that Google search will show you that this is, in fact, something that the news media tried to take advantage of, although clearly not in the service of comedy. Guess I'm two years behind the curve!

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Geneva Redline Wallpaper With Some Usability Modifications

Free desktop background for 1050x1680 resolution monitor

If I get bored or switch orientations I might also upload different resolutions for this

This is how mine looks:


Here's the clean version


Also it looks like Blogger took the last few pixels out of the image vertically making it a little too short

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Working with Chris Onstad on this one

sike~

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Young Stupid and Dangerous

Video for Blondie's Die Young, Stay Pretty:


Teenager arrested in suicide hijacking plot

Might give some vicious commentary on this later if I'm feeling up to it, but basically it sounds like this kid was just massively confused.

Press play on the video for the song Die Young Stay Pretty. Listen to it as you read the article which describes this 16 year-old's plot to overpower an entire airplane full of passengers and crew and crash an airplane into a venue where they're showing a Hannah Montana concert. Note that the concert was not actually scheduled for the day he hijacked the plane; I guess he was just planning on hovering in the air for a few days? Wonder how he got the money and freedom from his parents to actually pull this off.

Where do they make people like this? Maybe the kid is far smarter than anyone is giving him credit for and he just did this to strike fear into the hearts of Hannah Montana and her fans. Maybe it's an elaborate scheme by Disney's marketing department, which is staffed by our Reptilian Overlords, to inject Hannah Montana into the serious press to increase publicity. But really, this kid is probably just a young, dumb, piece of human waste, and this probably has something to do with some forum somewhere on the Internet.

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DeathWatch: Gene Wilder

I give him five more years. This may not account for "Alzheimer's years" or any other general mind/body deaths that do not actually wrest the soul from the soul cage.

Here he is looking like Doctor Evil:

Here he is looking Ready To Die:

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Back; Here is something to consider.

from surfergirl:

3) Have you ever seen millions of dollars used to market console DLC? Something called GTAIV will change that

I honestly didn't expect this from that franchise. I don't know what exactly Rockstar has in mind, but this could have some really profound effects on the gaming public's opinion of downloadable content.

For instance:

• If they release content regularly for this game for a fee, (regularly being 4-6 months between installments, fee being $20), they stand to make an incredible amount of money from this. The market for potential customers for this sort of thing would be far greater than the market for the most similar service I can think of, an MMO. We know the market would be greater based on how people, in general, feel about the GTA franchise (they love it). This could cause a paradigm shift in the industry and cause more companies to invest in downloadable content.
  
• I forgot my second point
• Third point: if this is successful enough, might we see some crossover into the GTAIV gaming space of real world products? Could, for example, some edgy entertainment brand pay some serious bux to Rockstar developers to create a campaign based on, or related to, their product/service? I'm thinking something like the way some companies have decided to inhabit Second Life, but far less, uhm, esoteric than Second Life is. If anyone is confused about why the mass brand expansion into Second Life isn't blowing up the way some thought it would, consider that Second Life's core users may not be the kinds of people who consume the brands that are extending themselves into the world. Don't make me show you explicit pictures of weird Second Life avatars to drill the point home.
  

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be back later

ta ta~

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Heath Ledger's Death Was Faked

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Great movies I have seen lately:

Crimes and Misdemeanors


Dark City

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Have some free Lobo tile background

Free tile-able (tilable) background featuring Lobo from DC Comics. Does this constitute fair use?

Screenshot of what my desktop(s) look like with this background, plus the actual png tile itself, available to the right.

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Exuberance

Exuberance often leads men into fire, like moths into flame; wings going up in a flash like the thinnest paper.

Exuberance will take you down a dark alley. At the end of this alley, you'll not find what you came for -- you may, however, turn around to see that the alley has swallowed you up and you cannot return, but must instead travel deeper into a world unknown.

Exuberance will lead you off a cliff with the confidence of the late Evel Knievel. It might whisper sweet nothings into your ear during your descent, but it'll be gone upon impact.

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Dudley Moore died in 2002.

No one noticed.

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Avoid the Noid -- especially if you're fucking crazy

In 1989, Kenneth Lamar Noid, a mentally ill customer who thought the ads were a personal attack on him, held two employees of an Atlanta, Georgia, Domino's restaurant hostage for over five hours. After forcing them to make him a pizza and making demands for $100,000, getaway transportation and a copy of The Widow's Son, Noid surrendered to the police. Noid was charged with kidnapping, aggravated assault, extortion and possession of a firearm during a crime. He was found not guilty by reason of insanity.

from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noid

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On De-branding the Self

It's a simple concept, really: why the fuck would I want to wear anything, anything at all, that displays a brand logo that doesn't represent me as a person? For some, displaying a brand is important; it is the difference between looking "cheap" and looking like you have wealth. For me, displaying a brand that I don't care for seems dangerous. I do not want to represent something that I cannot be sure I respect and care about.

I routinely remove the visible branding from clothing that I own. I want my jeans to be jeans, not Levi's; know what I mean? I've also been known to remove the stuff that's not visible, because I'd rather not look at it when I'm putting the clothes on or washing them or whatever. If you pay for the clothing, you have ultimate freedom over what you do with it. You shouldn't have to be a walking billboard when the jeans already cost you $40 or more – branding is some of the most subversive and best free advertising that companies get.

Lastly, consider the term branding and what it means for livestock like cows – it is used to show ownership. Who owns you?

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Be Wary of Innocuous Names

Wikipedia article on the Council of Conservative Citizens

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Who's eating who? (pt. 4)

You're a captive audience when you're watching television. When you use other mediums for your entertainment, it's a lot easier to stop when you want to. Ever try to pause a book? It's not terribly hard. All we do is pause books. They're meant to be stopped and started. A great thing about text is that you can use it in a richer variety of ways than you can use standard television; you can put a dictionary next to a novel and read them alongside each other when you want to reference somethign in the novel. Also overlooked is the ability to rewind and fast forward your text. You can cut text however you want -- in other words, you can stop reading and do something else at the end of a chapter, at the end of a paragraph, in the middle of a sentence, or at the end of the introduction. You have more freedom when it comes to creatively altering the text, for a lot cheaper than it costs to effectively creatively alter television.

Because it is mostly text, the Internet is a lot like a book in the freedom it grants you. It's a very large index of information that can be used as a library. Search engines like Google help us to find all of this information. With TV you can only watch, on a given day, what they are broadcasting. With the Internet, you can access any "program" -- any chunk of information, at any time of the day, on any day of the week. Essentially, you create your own "program schedule."

If you are conditioned to watch TV for a certain number of hours a day, and nothing you actually like is on, do you keep the TV on or do you do something else? If you're heavily conditioned to watch, then you probably do just that. In doing this, you end up being fed extra commercials and programming that you don't really want. These influence your decisions and affect your mind's state. Despite what people may believe about "tuning out" the television when they're not particularly interested, we still absorb a message from something that we're paying some degree of mind to.

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James Brown: Black Caesar Soundtrack (1973)

The entire soundtrack for the classic blaxpoitation film (which I admit I have not seen) is by James Brown. And it's great.

Standout tracks in no particular order:

• 8. Mama's Dead
• 1. Down And Out In New York City: if you listen to the rapper Prodigy you will remember this, and probably some other samples from the album, on his 2007 mixtape Return of the Mac
• 11. Like It Was: Brown gets really awesome near the end of the track, hard to explain just hear him singing the music using his vocals and tongue
• 5. The Boss: one of the most recognizable James Brown tracks ever

The whole album is great though, really.

Download it here -- may be expired after 7 days.

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Also (sort of) coming soon to a website near you:

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Coming soon to a website near you:

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Protip:

Walk softly unless you're being deliberately emotive or running from something dangerous

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Against Television: Part 3

3) CONTRIBUTES TO OBESITY

Television watching contributes to obesity. Moreover, it contributes to obesity in children.

Basically, kids watch TV for entertainment and education (note: they learn from content regardless of whether or not the programming is deemed "educational" by the content providers -- They'll learn things from Sesame Street just as quickly as they will learn things from 21 Jump Street; you decide what you want your children to learn...).

Watching television is a sedentary activity. Kids today watch more television than they ever did in the past (keep this in mind for a couple of minutes as you read this). Kids today are more sedentary than ever before (partially due to their increased television usage) -- they spend 75% of their time being inactive and only an estimated 12 minutes a day being physically active (Strauss, Rodzilsky, Burack, Colin, 2001). While they're sitting in front of the television, they're being primed to eat more energy-dense junk food by commercials for those kinds of junk-food products. Children are exposed to an average of ten food commercials an hour, and most of these are for junk food. Yes, research shows that this increases their intake and preference for junk food (Ebbeling, Pawlak, Ludwig, 2002, p3 [p475 in The Lancet]. Childhood obesity leads to increased risk of premature illness and death later in life (Ebbeling reference #44). Furthermore, childhood obesity is causing children to develop type II diabetes at a previously unheard-of rate.

Excessive television watching contributes to obesity in adults in much the same way it does it for children. First, consider that kids are getting diabetes during childhood due to obesity that is ostensibly caused in some part by sedentary behavior including television watching. These children have more illnesses later in life. The obesity may start in childhood but it effects a person most heavily in adulthood, which is when most of the illnesses set in. You can't do anything you want to do between the hours of 8 and 11 pm if your "shows" are on. When you plan activities around the TV shows you need to watch, you lose the wonderful ability to be spontaneous.

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The Snow Has Started.

Happy January.

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Thoughts Related to the Common Saying, "Youth is wasted on the young."

Give the young a break.

What many seem to forget is that youth is incredibly difficult for the young as they've had less time to "figure things out" than the rest of us have. When I say youth, I am referring to people in their teen years. At 22 I feel more youthful in a physical and mental sense than I ever have before, but I'm losing my cuteness. Though I am still young, I am not the "youth" I refer to here. I see myself at some sort of mid point between being "young" and no longer being "young." "Age ain't nothing but a number", sure -- unless you're trying to be accepted into a peer group that's like two decades younger than you are. What then? Look at a recent case like Britney Spears -- I think we should consider that her recent crises may stem from the bitter fact that she's irrelevant to the age group that she was trained to entertain. This, combined with her draining youth, is making her into a caricature of Young Bitchy Hollywood.

The literal youth I have left is definitely not being wasted: I refuse to waste my youth -- refuse to allow my elders to compromise my youthful exuberance on the basis that it makes them, they who have lost their youth (or otherwise let it grow weak and slip from their grasp), uncomfortable or fearful. The figurative youth I have, on the other hand, cannot be wasted. It is infinite.

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Second Short Essay From My Unpublished Anti-Television Writings

2) SHAPES ATTENTION SPAN TO BE SHORTER

When you are absorbed in a television program, you are essentially a captive of that television station for that block of time. Television shows have commercial breaks fairly often -- Wikipedia claims that each half-hour program has eight minutes of commercials. Let's say, then, that there are two four-minute commercial breaks per half-hour program. This means that you'll be watching the show in segments that are a little more than seven minutes long. Then you go to a commercial break that has nothing to do with the program you were watching, except maybe that it is geared toward a demographic that the advertisers think is likely to be watching the program.

Your attention span over that half-hour block is broken up into, at best, 3 seven-minute blocks of one thing separated by one four-minute set of commercials unrelated to each other and another totally different four-minute set of commercials unrelated to each other. At worst, you're watching some show, maybe a situation comedy that isn't particularly cohesive and you end up with three totally different jokes that each last a little more than seven minutes, separated by the commercial blocks. What does this do to your attention span?

In essence, I see it as a bad thing that the television robs you of control. Unless you can pause it, there's no way you can pick up where you left off when you want to. You're stuck on "their" time. It gets even weirder when you compare it to other activities where you are kind of stuck doing them -- activities that you do with another person. If you're playing a sport with other people and you just stop playing abruptly to go do something else, it's rude: it breaks up the flow of the activity. With television, where's the other person? Television is a very rude and clingy medium.

It should be noted that radio is essentially the same in many regards. Radio, however, only occupies your ears. You are free to do other things with your eyes and the rest of your body.

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First Short Essay From My Unpublished Anti-Television Writings

The title is currently "8 Reasons Not to Use Television." Initially, I had hoped to expand it to 100 reasons, but the fact is that a lot of these reasons blend into each other. Maybe I'll be prudent and start editing and reflecting on them at 10, which is a lot less than 100.

editor's note: people who love television will probably not take the time to read this. people who hate television will probably read this just to reaffirm their hate for television. thus, this little essay doesn't really do anything at all.

1) NO PERSONAL GROWTH

Broadcast television was not designed to be paused. Recently, the ability to pause has been added through third-party developments like TiVo and other digital video recorders (DVRs). Because the medium is designed so that a program plays straight through without any pauses except for commercials (which I will get to in the next point), the vast majority content developed for the medium is not designed with the intent for it to be viewed again and again. When you read a good and challenging book, you are often forced to stop for a minute or two and pick up a dictionary or some other tool of reference to see what the author is talking about. Television is designed so that the largest number of people can watch it, which is to say that it doesn't properly contribute to the growth of an individual who absorbs it. A great movie has a similar effect; in some way or another, the content will be so rich that a viewer wants to watch it again to recapture a certain scene, or a visual effect, or a monologue, or a dialogue. In being able to analyze a scene repeatedly, the viewer undoubtedly grows in some way and learns some thing. The banality of the average television show makes such analysis a painful and fruitless experience.

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Patents and me

Patents are hilarious. Google has a patent search that I've been using to help my Dad figure out whether or not he can go ahead with a concept of his.

That's all I can say on the specific matter at hand, but know this: even when a patent is entirely reasonable, when I see them, something inside my brain sees humor. It's all the numbers and lines pointing to the various functions of the most seemingly simple things, like a toupee. It's the serious description of these things that capture even the smallest minutia -- this is why I laugh and smile. I live for this shit.

In short, I probably read too much MAD Magazine as a kid.

picture from "device for cooling infant's brain." i challenge you to try to explain why patents aren't the best untapped comedy resource america has right now.

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My Contribution to The (Hopefully) Growing Trend of Reptilian Conspiracy Content

Evidence that hasn't been pointed out before: The Strokes Room on Fire album has a song called "Reptilia" on it.

Thom stared out the window like he always did on days like this. He stared...RIGHT INTO THE FACE OF A REPTILIAN OVERLORD. Things had changed in the Narbacular sub-segment ever since the rebellion was quelled – there were more public executions and rations were less hearty. More importantly to Thom, though, there were fewer cosmic dustings.

He climbed over his woman and out of bed: it was time for work. Time to deliver the mail! He put on his mail delivery epaulets, lit a cigarette, and went out the door.

Today on his mail route, Thom remembered something he had learned in school a long time ago. His third grade teacher would often tell his class that they had not always been servants...

Feel free to write your own stories using this base. Thank you.

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Internet Buffet

Noah returns to his room with a peculiar agility. Though it is 40 degrees outside, his window is fully open. He's shirtless, wearing only wool socks and cotton sleeping bottoms. He snatches an empty yellow spiralbound from his bookshelf and writes:

Dear horribly misguided Internet user: your greedy spark is inside all our hearts, hiding in the darkest corners -interrupted by a mom- you should know that just because you can download any delicious little treat, does not mean that you must, or that you should -- for it can become a pathological activity. Remember that the quality is almost always more important than the quantity -- except when dealing with large quantities of great quality.

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My Favorite Blog Picture of the Year

Needs to be taken in context to be appreciated, so: here's some context. Thanks TechCrunch! Thanks Vimeo and Vimeo founder Jakob Lodwick!

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New Desktop Background

Just felt like the right thing to do. Posting it here for download. Works great as a desktop as you can see, I can use it to sort-of organize my desktop files, which is a great thing because I've been using the desktop as a "home base" a lot more lately.

I encourage you to use Inkscape and take a few minutes to learn the program and then a few minutes more to just make your own!

As my desktop:



The actual desktop image:

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Suggestion for Team Fortress 2: Domination Tokens

I think it would enhance the game if you could earn "tokens" that allow you to respawn instantly instead of the normal respawn time, which is often 20 seconds. This would be beneficial when you need to get back into the action as soon as possible (for instance, if you're an engineer who knows there's a spy in the base casing his buildings). These tokens would be earned -- I think a good way to do this would be to allow them to be earned via domination: when you dominate an enemy, you earn a token.

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"Gary Coleman Is Someone's Dark Savior" Blog

The first picture conveys a sense of evil intermingled with the aesthetic of acid-washed denim.



The second picture is more "evil genius" combined with "crack cocaine" which gets to the subject looking like some evil genius who lost his original body in a crack factory explosion but is now made of pure rock cocaine, and instead of tying his victims up and pointing lasers at them, he just breathes crack in their faces and leaves them paralyzed in an ecstatic drug stupor. Am I the only one who feels this shit?



These pictures make it apparent that Mr. Coleman shops at Good Will; additionally, we find out that he's not very good at it.

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Typosperma: a really cool biology + typography project

Created by Oded Ezer, Typosperma is the second experimental typo project in his 'Biotypography' series.

As a paraphrase on the biotechnology definition, 'Biotypography' is a term that refers to any typographical application that uses biological systems, living organisms, or derivatives thereof, to create or modify typographical phenomena. The main idea of the 'Typosperma' project was to create some sort of new transgenic creatures, half (human) sperm, half letter. These imaginary creatures are cloned sperms, that typographic information has been implanted into their DNA.

Link

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Political Bashing Segments Embedded in YouTube Videos

So, I just watched this video clip from the show "It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia" and it was very funny. I've never actually seen the show before and have only seen one other segment (which wasn't even the show, but was a sort-of commercial for the show. There was one very peculiar thing about this clip, though: at the end, there was something entirely different. Approximately 2/3 of the way into this 1 minute 49 second YouTube video, there was some stuff that wasn't from the television show. I think this situation is really strange and could have some very far reaching and fucked up implications. Basically, the last portion of the clip is a Mitt Romney commercial. I didn't have the sound on, but I did read the text and it reeks of propaganda.






Mitt Romney "Ran the Olympics" ? Are you serious. Really? Could this be any more vague and engineered? Notice the clip's description says nothing about Mitt Romney, but does mention that there are some bonus clips at the end. Notice also the poster's profile. His two favorite videos are some clips of fucking chili peppers growing. The video's tags, when read in succession, form phrases like "liberals sucks" and "vote romney president." Regardless of the intended usage of tags, I don't think they should be used to form propaganda phrases. And I wonder who might be thinking they should.

Questions:

• Who the fuck is doing this and why do they think the American public is this gullible?
• Are they doing this because it has worked in the past, and the American public may actually be this gullible? :(
• Is this being sponsored by Romney? If not, he should make a statement saying as much. Looks pretty official to me -- for a YouTube video, anyway. If someone consumes YouTube videos as their main media diet, is it not possible that they might just assume this is official?
• Does FX, the channel where the television show airs, endorse Mitt Romney for president?
• Does FX support this?
• Not the "Sunny" clip, hasty internetter. I mean the propaganda at the end.
• If FX allows small portions of their content being posted to YouTube, do they realize that people could potentially use these clips as vehicles for political messages?
  
• Is it possible (or maybe now, necessary) for YouTube administrators to pay closer attention to the mixes of content being posted in video clips now? Also, are people hiding other things in video clips on YouTube?

What do you think?

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2008 Blog

• I'm pretty sure I'm crazy
• I'm also just okay with this.
  

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H.N.Y.

Happy New Year.

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