Note to Internet: “Win” is Not an Adjective

That’s all I have to say, for now.

Igniting the Flames of Discontent

These rants speak for themselves.

• Yellow cars that are not taxicabs
• Bloom effects in video games
• Yankees fans
• Texas Hold ‘em poker always playing on sports channels
• Obese people that try to compensate by being loud
• Obese people that attempt to deal by being depressed
• Fatties
• Military propaganda on CBC’s Hockey Night in Canada
• Phil Collins
• Internet forums
• Movies with penguin characters
• K-Y commercials where the actors raise their eyebrows but don’t plainly say, “this is used to plow the dirtbox”.
• Discovery Channel turning into home renovations
• Animated features with talking animals and pop culture references
• Reality television that tries to provide a life lesson in the conclusion
• Red Sox fans
• grocery store shopping carts that require a quarter to unlock
• Coffee drinkers
• Store greeters that put branding stickers on your bags to show you aren’t a shoplifter
• World of Warcraft subscribers
• Facebook applications
• People still saying, “that’s how I roll”
• Needing to poop immediately after getting out of the shower
• The female vocalist on Mew’s “Symmetry” off Frengers
• People that imitate Monty Python sketches
• Sports analysts and commentators
• Blogs that post rants
• Bloggers

Cryptonomicon

This cover is as black as my soul.

After an eight month ordeal, I finally got around to completing Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon. I started it in October, but given its 900+ pages and my short attention span when it comes to matters not involving a screen or beer, its consumption was delayed. Now this isn’t an indication of the book’s dullness, because, in truth, it is an engaging read with a mind-boggling amount of ideas crammed into its long length.

When the author analogizes an organism to the effect of a spaceship warping in Star Wars, you know you’re in male-oriented territory. Stephenson manages to put across a geeky intellectual perspective that I just love, such as describing the coldness of a women as an “emotional non-disclosure agreement”. He also obviously knows the subject matter whether it be mathematics or computing, without having to dumb down the material ala 24 or a Michael Crichton novel. For example, to describe the German’s Engima encryption scheme, he uses a bicycle spoke analogy that even a layman could understand. That is, if they have enough focus to read through a couple pages detailing the comparison. Who is this layman, anyway?

The story takes places in two eras; World War II and current day, traveling across locations around the world. Connections between characters in the past and modern times are shown as the plot progresses, highlighted by American marine Bobby Shaftoe who has a proclivity to injecting morphine and Randy Waterhouse, a modern-day hacker of sorts, who is discovering just exactly how deep his grandfather was involved with cracking cryptographic algorithms for the Allies. In a way, all the characters are very similar, rarely being unsure of their actions and always being badasses. It’s like you’re reading a story of low-key heroes. Except Bobby. He just run and guns.

The book goes through many descriptions of how information flows through the world, of which many asides and funny analogies are used to express points. Of course, one of the most well-known tangents the book contains is half a chapter devoted simply to the proper technique for eating Captain Crunch cereal, of which I’ve quoted below (p. 479):

But Randy has, over time, worked out a really fiendish Cap’n Crunch eating strategy that resolves around playing the nuggets’ most deadly features against each other. The nuggets themselves are pillow-shaped and vaguely striated to echo piratical treasure chests. Now, with a flake-type of cereal, Randy’s strategy would never work. But then, Cap’n Crunch in a flake form would be suicidal madness; it would last about as long, when immersed in milk, as snowflakes sifting down into a deep fryer. No, the cereal engineers at General Mills had to find a shape that would minimize surface area, and, as some sort of compromise between the sphere that is dictated by Euclidean geometry and whatever sunken-treasure-related shapes that the cereal-aestheticians were probably clamoring for, they came up with this hard-to-pin-down striated pillow formation. The important thing, for Randy’s purposes, is that the individual pieces of Cap’n Crunch are, to a very rough approximation, shaped kind of like molars. The strategy, then, is to make the Cap’n Crunch chew itself by grinding the nuggets together in the center of the oral cavity, like stones in a lapidary tumbler. Like advanced ballroom dancing, verbal explanations (or for that matter watching videotapes) only goes so far and then your body just has to learn the moves.

This is one of the many examples of someone hacking a piece of information, finding new ways to get a job done. There are plot points centred on Van Eck phreaking and the paranoia of working with sensitive material on a PC within possible proximity of others. Randy uses LED morse code to retrieve desired information from his PC with a possible phreaker being none-the-wiser. You may have noticed xkcd’s Online Communities comic containing its own Qwghlm reference, a tribute to Cryptonomicon’s imaginary country in the British Isles which has a grudge culture that jabs at Irish history; an Outer Qwghlm and Inner Qwghlm in their silent war with each other. The country’s language is without vowels, funny in its own right since all its written text looks like encrypted data. My favourite chapter is “Courting” (p. 543), wherein Lawrence Waterhouse uses graphs and formulas (involving limits) to explain mental clarity and his work productivity in relation to the number of days since his last climax, as he pursues his Qwghlmian love interest.

Overall, the book is quite funny and informative, however its length makes it a daunting task in our era of attention span 2.0. Most of the humour and subject matter is focused on the male geek, so this isn’t exactly transcendent material. It’s all about logic and purpose, so drop your emotional, empathic expectations at the door.

Working in reverse chronological order, I’m now on to Snow Crash.

Attention Span Two Point Zero

Web 2.0, it’s so fucking bourgeois. Last.FM, MySpace, Facebook, WordPress, Technorati… look, listen, kneel, pray! Living off a feed, a personal metaphoric IV drip. Like heroin, it’s addictive but terrible for you.

Yes, you can prove you’re a beautiful unique snowflake, until a wall post comes out of the blue, In which Disdain is turned Inward, bringing together a superficial clusterfuck of existentialist dread. People gather information to quantify what they want people to think they are. Take a picture of themselves at a certain angle and in the right lighting conditions to reach the optimal quality of porcelain.

It’s odd how quickly information can now flow. I’m logged into MSN Messenger (now Windows Live Messenger, way to fuck up the branding) through Trillian. I have my Facebook account setup with a Hotmail e-mail address, so anytime someone on Facebook posts on my wall, comments on a picture of mine, or sends a friend’s request, I immediately get that notification at the bottom-right of my screen through Trillian. With two clicks I’m ingesting what was sent just seconds ago.

Meanwhile on my PC, Winamp is streaming out the current track playing to my Last.FM profile to update my own personal database of what songs I’ve listened to since signing up. That micro-database is merged into others to create a master database, whose information is sold off to the RIAA.

There are also Facebook conspiracy theorists (with an annoying voice) that believe your data helps manufacture terrorists in contemporary sexualized culture. I’ll have you know, I’m kind of a big deal. My friends and I get drunk, I post pictures, and we comment on them. For everyone to see. Of course these web sites will sell all this information to marketing organizations. Do you notice many ads on these sites? Why do you think they ask for your birth date? Did you read the terms and conditions when you signed up?

You can make claims that the current generation of the web is great for bringing people together. Instead, every jackass with an uninformed opinion formulates elongated banal rants about irrelevent topics. I’m trapped in a black hole of irony here, folks!

All in all, web 2.0 is pretty awesome for stalking.

Self-Promissory Notes

I had today off from work, so I was planning on going for a run, taking care of my student loans, visiting a nearby shopping mall to pick up some DVDs, clothes, & books, call a couple friends to see what was up… but of course plans are made to fail. I got out of bed at 3PM. It was overcast and raining for much of the afternoon. I walked around the house in shorts and a hoodie, without showering. I sat on my computer on MSN Messenger and surfing the wild world of the Internet while listening to Swans’ Children of God and The Cure’s Disintegration. I spent some time working on item placement for Jon_R’s Crudreams entry. I watched a fair amount of the Jays playing the Devil Rays. Who fucking wants to watch Tampa Bay? Then I read an article on procrastination. I have now paused Blade Runner a total of 4 times tonight to get a snack, to check email, to write a journal entry, to check IRC, and what- oh look, something shiny! *walks away*

Batman is a Metrosexual

I accidentally leaked the URL of this page to a Real Lifeâ„¢ friend and I was told the content here is too cryptic with all the baseball and tech mumbo jumbo. So we have worlds colliding here and you’re killing independent George. A George divided against itself cannot stand! But I digress.

The last two weeks have been time lost in the world of happy capitalism. I started feeling symptoms of a cold on Sunday, Apr 9 and my resulting work schedule looked like this. Mon: sick, Tues: sick, Wed: sick, Thur: Off, Fri: Worked, Sat: Off, Sun: Off, Mon: Sick, Today: Sick. The only reason I went into work was the double time-and-a-half offered by working on Good Friday. Losing your voice while on the phone with customers is about 7 out of 10 on the scale of awesome things to happen in the wonderful world of customer service. It’s slightly below slipping a Freudian “fuck” instead of “fix” into a conversation. Today I actually only called in sick because I woke up at 4:35pm and I have to catch a 4:30pm bus to get to work on time. Although I did have a cough. *cough*

I’ve been theorizing why I’ve been so down for a couple months I think it’s mostly due to the buttfugliness of my city. When I wrote my Serial Murder distance ed exam at St. Mary’s University last Wednesday, I noticed a trend during my city bus trip. Traveling to the university, the passengers went from uglier to more attractive as I got closer to Halifax. In the reverse direction, the reverse events took place. I think Sloth from The Goonies was the last one to get on.

Now my workplace is mostly composed of recently graduated high school or university students who are temporarily employed while “looking for something better”. The other people are the uneducated middle-agers that are unlikely to find a better position. These are always the people that enjoy helping the customer. They sicken me to my very core. Now while there is some quality ass on the premises, these people are all failures in some way. They work in a bloody call centre! So what I need is to be surrounded by successful attractive people that will challenge me to not be a whiny little bitch like Scuba (how’s that for cryptic?).

During the initial training class at my job, they had someone come in to do the standard diversity training that you love seeing mocked on The Office (“It was affectionate“) . During that time the speaker attempted to claim there are all these stereotypes that are simply not true, like people from Halifax saying Dartmouth is the “dark side” and people from Dartmouth says the same about Halifax. You see, the difference is that Dartmouth is the “dark side”. Does Halifax have these huge white and red smoke stacks with a nearby poor community that has derelict, boarded up housing? Then there’s humanity at its aesthetic failing point. It’s like I’m living this personal episode of Deliverance and these piggies are a’squealing. You want to be in downtown Halifax with the upper-middle class of university students and young professionals. Some day their scrotum and labia will shrivel up and lead to bitter quarrels about who should drive the kids to hockey, but for now I’ll just sit on the edges. And wait to become that person without the happiness. OH EMO.

To make matters worse, I re-created a MySpace Profile. Dear God, what have I done…?

Setting Short Fuses

I think work is trying to get everyone to quit. First, promote a large amount of people to another department causing dozens of people recently hired to take their place, using a software system made in the late 90s that works like a Cezanne, whereas Windows 3.1 functions as a daVinci. For instance, I get the customer’s phone number and it takes me 30 seconds to bring up their account information. Ok, now the second point, make it mandatory to offer every single customer that calls in to upgrade to a new phone and rate plan. I wish to make a payment today. “Upgrade to a Motorola V3 Razr and we’ll talk”. “I have delayed billing on this last invoice, I’m not paying these charges and I’m going to sue you fuckers”. “Would you like to upgrade to a new flip phone and rate plan with rollover minutes? No? No credit for you”. They must enjoy the employee turnover and using up all that training budget for two classes every week.

So life is listen to music, sit on computer at work, sit on computer at home, watching the talkies, doing a minuscule amount of exercise so I don’t become a fatty (I don’t think one set of push-ups a day counts?), and waste more time on the Internet. I likely should leave the house at some point for a purpose that does not include catching a bus to work. Well I guess I am saving a lot of money for the impending heartache of monthly student loan payments.

I Need a Leitmotiv

The brilliance of my current work place includes the systems in place. Whenever I log into my phone (with slip-seating), I must also use a web-based system to login in that I’m taking inbound calls. Now this web site has constant cookie issues preventing people from logging in, even though its only function is to take a user id and assign a work mode for a duration of time.

Yesterday, my Metro Transit bus came almost 10 minutes late, causing me to miss my transfer point so I had to get a later bus. My shift started at 6:30pm but I didn’t get to work until 6:26pm. By the time I signed up for the shuttle bus to get home and logged into Windows, I was already late for my shift. I attempted to login to the web system to indicate I was at work on time, but I get a generic JavaScript pop-up claiming there is an issue with my browser. So I clear cookies and cache, restart browser… to the same error. I say, “eff it”, and load up all my customer systems and knowledge base search tools to I can start taking calls. I finally get to login to the web system using a friend’s computer… at this point it’s 6:37pm. I now have to pinch a loaf. I don’t login to the phones until 6:44PM. Now what do I see on my schedule? A tardy with a hand icon beside the entry to indicate the face slap occurring because my employer can’t get their shit together. I would usually talk to my team lead about fixing the issue but she was on vacation all week… and the back-up team lead was nowhere in sight.

Another point; the closing time at the call centre is 3AM Atlantic… and the customer systems we use shut down at that time. So if you take a call at 2:59AM and the customer asks how many minutes they have on their rate plan, you can’t help them whatsoever. Brilliance, yeah? Also, there are no city buses running at that point at night, but there’s a shuttle service that you can pay for ($30 per 2 weeks for where I’m living). However, they last run at 3:08AM. Last night I receive a call at 2:57AM, with a customer that wants to upgrade his service. The dude was in Hawaii so it was still evening for him, but I was on the phone until 3:25AM ordering him new phones and contract/rate plan because the upgrade system was the only one up at the time… everything else was down. But I missed my shuttle and luckily got home because two friends stayed in order to drive me home, even though they live in the opposite direction. Taking a taxi home would’ve cost me $20 because Halifax cabs are Jewish.

Reason #19483 to watch Dead Man: Johnny Depp spooning a deceased fawn.

I also got my computer setup at my current home along with a DSL connection so finally I may get to finish some projects up such as all that Doom crap and a web site I started in 2003 for a (paying) employer.

Was the racism really necessary?

Garfield Doesn’t Care For Nermal

The training at my current job won’t be complete for another three weeks, but the first four weeks of it have brought up some particular points. The instructor for the course is a terrible public speaker. He is a failed substitute teacher that went to Korea to teach English for a year and now he works at a call centre. A quarter of his language is filler, using brilliant phrases such as “at this point”, “per se”, “typically”, and “supposedly” every sentence. On the second day of training I noticed he had penchant for buggery using the word particular as a nervous twitch. Many times it did not even make grammatical sense (i.e., he would be speaking about general cases). It got to the point that I even started keeping a score of how many times he used the word in a day. Here are some golden quotes from his mouf and the count for each day so far.

• “Nobody even reaches a thousand, in some cases.”
• “… if you just use your phone as a phone.”
• “Whether they do or they don’t, they do.”
• “Let’s start at the beginning which is a very good place to start.”

The total tally is 2107 particulars over 17 days at seven hours a piece which averages out to 17.7 particulars an hour. This doesn’t factor in the times where we are training on computers without the instructor speaking or even the times I really wasn’t listening to him so I may have missed dozens of particular instances. Yesterday he took a live call (that we listened to over speakers) where he gave a heroic performance, uttering “particular” a total of fourty times in an hour.

The numbers and analysis in this article may signify that the training content is beyond the human scope of triviality. I’m just a hard-working corporate slave, driving myself into a corporate grave.

Tingly Facials

Quoting Storm shuts down Nova Scotia:

The Department of Transportation and RCMP urged motorists to stay off the roads to allow crews to clear snow-clogged streets. In Halifax, Metro Transit pulled its buses off the road after several of them got stuck.

At 7AM I decided to go to work since one of the local radio stations said the buses were still running. The whiteout conditions prevented me from seeing the city bus until it was right at my stop, with me standing in a two feet deep snow bank. The bus didn’t meet my transfer point (where I have to get another bus to get to work) in time so I decided to transfer at another terminal that would get me to work by 8:30AM. At Mic Mac Mall, the bus I would’ve transferred to earlier was wiped out in a snow bank, blocking the street, so we sat there for 10 minutes until the bus driver finally drove past using the oncoming traffic’s lane. I finally got to the terminal at 8AM-ish. Here I got off the bus to find out bus service was temporarily canceled. So I was 6km from home and 3km from work with one to two feet of snow over every sidewalk and the undesirable possibility of having to pay a dirty cabbie at least $20 to get me anywhere. I got on another bus and sat there for an hour waiting for them to make a final decision on whether the buses would start running again or I would be shite outta luck.

Finally the verdict came in that bus service was canceled. Luck would have it, Metro Transit’s bus garage is near where I work so I could get dropped off along the way. Non-luck would have it, I was dropped off at a bus terminal 0.4km away from work so I had to walk in two feet of snow in the direction of the wind. I couldn’t see shit. I had to completely cover my face except for one eye because the piercing wind was raping my pores.

I get to work and out of 27 people in my training class, only 3 other people showed up. So they merged us (in our third week of training) in with another class that is in their first week of training. Mostly we just listening to customer care agents take calls from bitter wireless device customers. I purposely don’t mention the provider, but they’re not plural.

So… Canada, huh?

People speaking about a local sports team, referring to them as “we”. Discuss.

• James Lipton on Conan Reciting PopoZao
• Munich Moral Chaos
• Oscar Best Picture Director Roundtable [Newsweek article link now broken]

  So many of your movies this year moved audiences to tears. Do you cry easily in movies?

  CLOONEY: I cried at the premiere of “Batman and Robin.” I cried for a week.

• Brokeback to the Future

Holiday Evil

Here’s the description of the distance ed course I’m taking this winter semester to finish my degree. I’m only signed up because it’s the only social science offered that’s isn’t a first year.

SOC*2750 Serial Murder

This course examines the theoretical and empirical literature on serial murder. It reviews the popular image of serial murder and compares this image with that derived from scholarly investigation. Specific topics include the definition of serial murder, the methods used to detect serial murder, including profiling, and the creation of serial murder typologies. The course does not discuss individual serialists. The course examines how to understand and study serial murder in modern societies. (Offered through distance education format only.)

• Become the Evil Villian you were meant to be.
• But I thought they were real.
• A trip to Europe may be required.
• True Hollywood Story!

On Tuesday, while watching an episode of the Oprah Winfrey show, Chappelle recalled being completely stunned when Winfrey turned to the camera in the middle of interviewing Tom Cruise and said “Dave Chappelle, you should be ashamed of yourself for airing that Niggars sketch on your show this week, I’m going to make sure you never work in Hollywood again.”

The image, allegedly taped by Winfrey, and transmitted to Chappelle’s house under the direction of Robert L. Johnson who called in some favors with Chappelle’s local affiliate station manager, terrified Chappelle.

Some declare that it must end but some of these are still comedy gold:

It was once believed that Chuck Norris actually lost a fight to a pirate, but that is a lie, created by Chuck Norris himself to lure more pirates to him.

Word Pairings That Should Not Be

• Hacking Fashion
• Urban Nomad
• Comic Sans

Stop the madness!

Today I pulled a Mewse. I have to write an exam tomorrow in Antigonish (2 hour away) so I planned to go to my parents house today (2 hours, 45 minutes away) so they could drive me to my exam tomorrow. I had to catch a shuttle bus to get me home since my parents live at the end of the world. The shuttle bus leaves at 3:20PM and the schedule of the city bus route says that arrives at 3:05PM, so I have 15 minutes to cross the street to catch my shuttle. Of course, the city bus comes 10 minutes late and by the time I get to the shuttle bus pick-up, I don’t see it anywhere. I stand there for 10 minutes without any van or shuttle-bus like vehicles approaching me so I head back to my aunt’s place where I’ve been staying. There’s a message in voice mail saying they waited until 3:45PM. So yeah, missed a bus and tomorrow I have to catch a Greyhound-like bus to get to my exam location just in time. Exam starts at 2PM, bus arrives at 1:10PM. This time I have 50 minutes to cross a street.

Online journals really are useless.

A Dish Best Served Cold

Jon needs a comment system so I can personally note that the White Stripes are homosexual. Really, what do people see in them? The drummer can’t stay in time (it’s endearing, charming, lo-fi, down-to-earth, DIY, indie, STFU), the guitarist is only adequate (didn’t some fuckface major music magazine put him in the top 100 guitarists of all time?), and their claim to fame is one bassline with an annoying kaleidoscope music clip. They’re also from Detroit and ugly. Fade, my pretties, fade.

Since most of my day was wasted getting my PC back up, gaming productivity wasn’t too high. I have three more levels to skim through to correct the item placement and balancing and after that I believe I’m sending an alpha test out to the Crudreams project team. My father’s first cousin is getting married this weekend so there’s people staying at my house taking away my bed and limiting computer/Internet access, so that prolongs my plan to rid of this bloody game. Next week, I’m probably headed to Halifax to look for work since sitting on my ass at my parent’s place hasn’t amounted to much of anything during the past four months.

What’s with all the ads and bloated interface with the latest MSN Messenger? I was waiting for Microsoft to start selling me penis pumps, viagra, and mail-order Russian brides. They’ll smother me with their firebush commie snatches. Reinstalling Trillian… now.

Contrived

A friend told me I sound like a Buddhist monk since I always speak with one tone so quietly. Maybe I should start raising my voice a bit more so I can be an obnoxious jerk? Man, look at the funbags on that broad! The sound of that car exhaust is fucking DOPE. I eat my Big Mac with motherfucking fries, bitch. I prefer to keep my rants at a low volume.

Also, a big fuck you to mandatory training at 9am on a Saturday. I’m surprised I even showed up on time since in the past three weeks I’ve been at my shift on time once. The first mention from a supervisor/manager that I will be disciplined and I quit. This is what happens when you don’t give your employees job references. Also, it’s fun to point out that two errors made by one idiot programming a VBscript for Windows’ encrypted file system caused a certain American corporation to lose likely millions of dollars.

I decided to type up what criteria we’re marking on for quality when our calls are monitored. It’ll be fun if my employers search for any of these terms and find this site. Then they’ll sue me because, “you put our quality metrics into the public domain! Well, FYAD.

• Introduction
  1. Prepared for call
  2. Used appropriate greeting
  3. Confirmed clients name
  4. Used client’s name
  5. Confirmed location
  6. Confirmed client’s phone number
• Problem Identification
  1. Identified the Problem
  2. Took ownership of the call
  3. Asked permission to put client on hold
  4. Hold time kept to less than 3 minutes or client kept updated
  5. Thanked client for holding
  6. Followed master ticket procedure
  7. Followed procedure for callback on existing ticket
  8. Followed escalation procedure
  9. Dealt with all of client’s issues
• Wrap Up
  1. Provided a realistic timeframe for follow-up
  2. Did not provide client with personal phone number
  3. Advised client of ticket process
  4. Support referred to by group name only
  5. Demonstrated good knowledge of company policies, procedures, and related tools
  6. Confirmed client’s email address
  7. Use of proper conference call procedures were followed
  8. Urgency of call confirmed
  9. Client was provided with ticket number
  10. Gave client undivided attention
  11. Had an appropriate closing
• Communication
  1. Had a pleasant manner
  2. Showed empathy for client’s situation
  3. Allowed client to state issue/problem without interruption
  4. Used proper grammar and terminology
  5. Was open-minded, did not assume client was wrong
  6. Showed confidence in their knowledge through verbal communication
  7. Justified dead air
  8. Call length was appropriate
  9. Provided accurate info
  10. Confirmed confidentiality of displayed items on client pc before remoting to their system
  11. Support’s phone number is not provided to the client
• Damage Control
  1. Damaged the relationship with the client
  2. Transferred the client without an introduction
  3. Took a personal call while on line with client
  4. Client seemed unhappy with the service quality of the analyst
  5. Confidentiality of email being received from client was no confirmed
  6. Permission to use remote control tool on the client’s system was not requested
  7. Displayed unprofessional conduct
  8. Security procedure for a password reset was not followed
  9. Coaching alert

Communication is my favourite section, since it’s the very one that makes everyone fake their personalities for 8 hours a day. Also Client seemed unhappy with the service quality of the analyst is a hit. What the fuck does it matter if the client seems unhappy? If we provided them support for everything they’ve been “trained” to support, what the hell does it matter what Corporate Whore #394054′s expectations are? You assholes are calling me for help and you make three or four times what I make. Awesome too are the people that I work with for approx. an hour then tell them I’ll have to send their problem up to our second level because I can’t resolve the issue. Then they get pissed saying, “I want this problem fixed NOW”. “I tried everything I can.” This one woman said Outlook was “too slow” even though it was workable. She got fucking pissed at me when I said I’d transfer her problem then I showed her a workaround by using the company’s webmail system temporarily until her problem was fixed and then she fucking hung up on me while I was in the middle of talking. You have the right to nothing, not even your life. Suck a motherfucking tailpipe.

The new Oceansize album Everything in Position is the dog’s bollocks.

• Slapstickery
• Topical

Mysteries and Twists

How many feminists does it take to change a light bulb?

None, feminists can’t change a thing.

HEYO!

May Contribute to Dementia

I read Masters of Doom and Smile, You’re Traveling. Heaven’s Gate is a horribly bloated film that should have put an end to expensive movies that are guaranteed to fail. Hi, Stealth and The Island, how you doin’? I miss you; more than Michael Bay missed the mark when he made Pearl Harbor.

I’ve been catching up on Firefly the past few days and it’s a surprising decent television show. I was on television boycott when it first aired so I missed out but thanks to the wonder of the Internet, I’m watching each episode back-to-back commercial-free. Cheers to that, aye.

• That’s the smell of servitude
• A collage of Jesus paraphernalia in my parents’ house. For serious.
• Check vit Poland
• You can’t make these headlines up

… a drunken fat guy taking a shit on some little retarded kid is hilarious.

What.

unregmp2.exe – Entry Point Not Found

The procedure entry point GETIUMS could not be located in the dynamic link library MSDART.DLL.

Microsoft enters a special place in my heart when a dialog window displaying this error shows up during a repair installation of XP. Now obviously it’s trying to deregister Windows Media Player and reregister the outdated piece of shite that’s likely on the installation CD, but that multi-billion corporation can’t find the time to fix this error that occurs when trying to repair a post-Service Pack 1 installation. The motherfucking solution is here but I’m not a happy panda!

Yeah, computer hard drive that’s been clicking and seemingly powering down over the past month finally took a shit when I tried to shut down last night. XP’s shut down screen sat at the “Shuting Down…” screen for a couple minutes so I said, “FUCK THIS SHIT!” and powered it down. When I tried starting it today it would showing a bluescreen for a millisecond on startup then reboot. The one time I managed to get into XP (without my account profile, display settings, etc. enabled?), I copied over all the semi-important files to my good drive. I then restarted hoping to get my profile back but again I was getting the reboots. So I ran chkdsk and now I’m trying to repair the XP partition and try to run it temporary off my wonky disk until I have enough money to buy a new damn computer. >:|

We Can Dream?

Quoting Timothy Leary:

Throughout human history, as our species has face the frightening, terrorizing fact that we do not know who we are or where we are going in this ocean of chaos, it has been the authorities – the political, the religious, the educational – authorities who attempted to comfort us, by giving us order, rules, regulations; in forming, forming in our minds their view of reality. To think for yourself you must question authority, and learn how to put yourself in a state of vulnerable open-mindedness – chaotic, confused vulnerability – to inform yourself. Think for yourself. Question authority…

Somebody Save Me

A snippet from Henry Rollins’ Smile, You’re Traveling:

I have been thinking about that woman and what she means or could mean in my life. I think it’s great for two people to be together. That is a good number. I think, that to keep it alive though, you can’t spend every day together. It wears out the magic, Love means nothing to me if it’s not fortified with fierce, painful longing, brief explosive instances of furious passion and intimacy and then a sad parting for a time. In that way, you can give your life to it and still have a life of your own. I think some couples spend too much time together. They flatten out the potential for experience by constant closeness. Passion builds over time like steam. Let it rage until it’s exhausted and then leave it alone to let it build up again. Why can’t love be insane and distorted? How can it be vital if it has the same threshold as normal day-to-day experience?

Why can’t you write burning letters and let your nocturnal self smolder with desire for one who is not there? Why not let the days before you see her be excruciating and ferment in your mind so on the day you go to the airport to pick her up, you’re nearly sick with anticipation? And then when desire shows the first sign of contentment, throw it back it its cage and let it slowly build itself back into a state of starved fury. Then when you are together, it all matters. So that when you look into her eyes, you lose your balance, so that when she touches you, it feels like you have never been touched before. When she says your name, you think it was she who named you. When she has gone, you bury your face in the pillow to smell her hair and you lie awake at night remembering your face in her neck, her breathing and the amazing smell of her skin. Your eyes go wet because you want her so bad and miss her so much. Now that is worth the miles and the time. That matches the inferno of life. Otherwise you poison each other with your presence day after day as you drag each other through the inevitable mundane aspects of your lives. That is the slow death that I see slapped on faces everywhere I go. It’s part of the world’s sadness that’s more empty than cold, poorly lit rooms in cities of the American night.

Break My Tongue

I’m developing a theory that the only female partners I’ll ever find companionship with will have to be bi-sexual. Why? Because I have a chick’s body (minus boobs). I’m 5’7″, ~130lbs (although I saw I was up to 140lbs today; maybe running daily is finally paying off with a gain in muscle mass… or it’s the chocolate my parents sent me in the mail earlier this week). I will likely never be hug, so I may have to play off an androgynous look and hope I can find the most dysfunction women around to allow me to service their bodily needs. That’s the ticket.

I haven’t applied to a job in weeks. I think that’s a hint that I’ve pretty much resolved to move back in with my parents once the start of July rolls around. I’m alright with mooching off them for a bit since I’ve lived in this city for five straight bloodying years. It’s time for a change – moving back to something else familiar! But I’ll continue searching for jobs in Halifax. I’d have to deal with not being on broadband anymore. It’s pretty sad that there’s areas in the western world where a 28.8 modem connection is the fastest possible landline. But that’s for the best since I have habits I need to kick and I think I’ve reached my saturation point right now. Oh Marshall, you’re a motherfucker!

I’ve been listening to Wilco’s Being There on repeat for the past three days.