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10.30.09
How I Learned to Start Hating Anything and Stop Liking Nothing and What I Found On My Way to Before I Got There
Posted by: isquub
I despise iPhones. It's the heritage, really, I hate the whole family, I'm a lineagist. Goes back to iPods, which I hate. I hate the whole cult of mac.
My psychic landscape is littered with these things that I hate. It's a pretty clear case of old-fogie-ism. At least I think it is. Kids today probably have some new-fangled name for it. Gah.
Occasionally these horrible feelings for annoying new trendy things get replaced by numb acceptance; sometimes I even grow to like the things I used to hate and then conveniently forget I ever hated them. I'm pretty sure I used to have a problem with YouTube, or maybe bloggers who posted YouTube videos. I know I used to hate MySpace; now I've at least graduated to a sort of uncomfortable truce with that one.
I really hate FaceBook. I hated Twitter for a while and still hate most things about it, but I started using it for a while just to get a feel for it and that smoothed away some of the sharper edges of the hate. I'm pretty sure I will go to my grave hating "lolcats", and the re-branding of the word "fail" makes me want to beat the crap out of inanimate objects.
Cell phones are an example of something new-fangled that I never hated because I got on the bus before it became a bandwagon. There was a time when I was excited about owning a cell phone, back when most people didn't have them yet. I bought some bulky flip-phone with probably a one-line display from a regional provider. I probably still have the phone. I was moving and had a new job and thought it'd be a good thing to have. I have no memory whatever of ever using the thing, though I'm sure I must have. I think I may have ended up having problems with the service when in DC (where the job was), but I don't really remember that for sure. I've got some vague recollection of canceling the service and being stuck with the huge contract-fee which I may or may not have been able to get out of.
When I miss a bus, though: man. I hate the things that snowball when I'm not paying attention, the things that go from non-existent to ubiquitous while I'm in the bathroom.
I loved mp3 players when I first heard about them, and spent a long time wanting one. I couldn't justify buying one for a long time, though. By the time I was able to get one everyone was already talking about ipods like they were the second coming, and I was just baffled. "It's just an mp3 player!" I would've said if anyone would have asked.
Of course by that time also I wanted one that would play more than just mp3s, and so "digital audio player" made more sense. But everyone was busy appending "pod" to everything, and "podcast" was quickly entrenching itself in the language as a stand-in for anything you download and listen to that wasn't a song.
Why do we need to call it a podcast? Why can't it just be called a "downloadable audio file or collection of audio files that you can listen to on whatever suitable device you might have"? That seems like a much better name.
Some of the trends swept me up before I was old enough to realize how much better than everybody else I am. For example, I've never called anything a "portable tape player." I don't think I've ever owned a Sony portable tape player, but I've always called whatever version of that I've owned a walkman.
It's odd that sometimes those brand names somehow take over and stand-in for existing common words. What if we called cars Fords?
I think in some way the way that works feels like marketing gone mad to me. That's why I say I hate the cult of mac; it all smacks of marketing. Sort of like the debate about whether the tea baggers are a grass-roots movement or an astroturf movement. "Mac" is accurate - when we talk about Mac we are talking about a specific brand of a specific thing. With Microsoft sort of the mirror-image problem happened; the term "PC" has been (semi-successfully) rebranded as a stand-in for any personal computer running a version of Windows, leaving machines running any other operating system out in the cold having to call itself a "linux machine" or "computer running a Sun Operating System." As if when we said a "car" we were only talking about Fords, and everything else would have to be called something different. But from there the cult of mac went nuts, and iPod became what everyone called a portable digital audio player, and with iPhone it's gone even further and people seem to think iPhones are a whole new species of device. In fact of course cell phones that do more than just make and receive phone calls have been around for a while and pre-date iPhones. Someone was calling them "smart phones" for a while, but with the advent of the iPhone now it feels like everyone is having a branding war, with lots of people calling everything a blackberry while other companies try to use their own product name to compete.
My hatred of iPhones goes beyond the name, though, to the point that most of that in this case is almost irrelevant. I had a smart phone a few years ago (and blogged from it sometimes) and thought it was a pretty cool device as far as being able to access the internet via wi-fi without having a laptop with me. It did some other neat stuff, too; but it was a horrible, horrible phone. It was a rectangular block, and it was clearly not ergonomically designed to be used as a phone. The call quality wasn't great, and a lot of that seemed to be related to that inconvenient shape. iPhones continue that trend. I rarely (if ever) hear any discussion of their functionality as phones. I sure hear a lot about how they have "apps", though (speaking of rebranding.)
And it's a tissue, not a "Kleenex," goddammit.
My psychic landscape is littered with these things that I hate. It's a pretty clear case of old-fogie-ism. At least I think it is. Kids today probably have some new-fangled name for it. Gah.
Occasionally these horrible feelings for annoying new trendy things get replaced by numb acceptance; sometimes I even grow to like the things I used to hate and then conveniently forget I ever hated them. I'm pretty sure I used to have a problem with YouTube, or maybe bloggers who posted YouTube videos. I know I used to hate MySpace; now I've at least graduated to a sort of uncomfortable truce with that one.
I really hate FaceBook. I hated Twitter for a while and still hate most things about it, but I started using it for a while just to get a feel for it and that smoothed away some of the sharper edges of the hate. I'm pretty sure I will go to my grave hating "lolcats", and the re-branding of the word "fail" makes me want to beat the crap out of inanimate objects.
Cell phones are an example of something new-fangled that I never hated because I got on the bus before it became a bandwagon. There was a time when I was excited about owning a cell phone, back when most people didn't have them yet. I bought some bulky flip-phone with probably a one-line display from a regional provider. I probably still have the phone. I was moving and had a new job and thought it'd be a good thing to have. I have no memory whatever of ever using the thing, though I'm sure I must have. I think I may have ended up having problems with the service when in DC (where the job was), but I don't really remember that for sure. I've got some vague recollection of canceling the service and being stuck with the huge contract-fee which I may or may not have been able to get out of.
When I miss a bus, though: man. I hate the things that snowball when I'm not paying attention, the things that go from non-existent to ubiquitous while I'm in the bathroom.
I loved mp3 players when I first heard about them, and spent a long time wanting one. I couldn't justify buying one for a long time, though. By the time I was able to get one everyone was already talking about ipods like they were the second coming, and I was just baffled. "It's just an mp3 player!" I would've said if anyone would have asked.
Of course by that time also I wanted one that would play more than just mp3s, and so "digital audio player" made more sense. But everyone was busy appending "pod" to everything, and "podcast" was quickly entrenching itself in the language as a stand-in for anything you download and listen to that wasn't a song.
Why do we need to call it a podcast? Why can't it just be called a "downloadable audio file or collection of audio files that you can listen to on whatever suitable device you might have"? That seems like a much better name.
Some of the trends swept me up before I was old enough to realize how much better than everybody else I am. For example, I've never called anything a "portable tape player." I don't think I've ever owned a Sony portable tape player, but I've always called whatever version of that I've owned a walkman.
It's odd that sometimes those brand names somehow take over and stand-in for existing common words. What if we called cars Fords?
I think in some way the way that works feels like marketing gone mad to me. That's why I say I hate the cult of mac; it all smacks of marketing. Sort of like the debate about whether the tea baggers are a grass-roots movement or an astroturf movement. "Mac" is accurate - when we talk about Mac we are talking about a specific brand of a specific thing. With Microsoft sort of the mirror-image problem happened; the term "PC" has been (semi-successfully) rebranded as a stand-in for any personal computer running a version of Windows, leaving machines running any other operating system out in the cold having to call itself a "linux machine" or "computer running a Sun Operating System." As if when we said a "car" we were only talking about Fords, and everything else would have to be called something different. But from there the cult of mac went nuts, and iPod became what everyone called a portable digital audio player, and with iPhone it's gone even further and people seem to think iPhones are a whole new species of device. In fact of course cell phones that do more than just make and receive phone calls have been around for a while and pre-date iPhones. Someone was calling them "smart phones" for a while, but with the advent of the iPhone now it feels like everyone is having a branding war, with lots of people calling everything a blackberry while other companies try to use their own product name to compete.
My hatred of iPhones goes beyond the name, though, to the point that most of that in this case is almost irrelevant. I had a smart phone a few years ago (and blogged from it sometimes) and thought it was a pretty cool device as far as being able to access the internet via wi-fi without having a laptop with me. It did some other neat stuff, too; but it was a horrible, horrible phone. It was a rectangular block, and it was clearly not ergonomically designed to be used as a phone. The call quality wasn't great, and a lot of that seemed to be related to that inconvenient shape. iPhones continue that trend. I rarely (if ever) hear any discussion of their functionality as phones. I sure hear a lot about how they have "apps", though (speaking of rebranding.)
And it's a tissue, not a "Kleenex," goddammit.
09.29.09
Toy Trains
20090929-IMG_1278-tiltshift.jpg
I don't know how that's going to look. It's a picture I took on my ride earlier, with a tilt-shift filter applied over here.
UPDATE: man that is a horrible way to put a picture in a post. Just acknowledging that. Not fixing it, no time. Will hopefully figure things out here again sometime.
I don't know how that's going to look. It's a picture I took on my ride earlier, with a tilt-shift filter applied over here.
UPDATE: man that is a horrible way to put a picture in a post. Just acknowledging that. Not fixing it, no time. Will hopefully figure things out here again sometime.
09.29.09
Some of the Things
Posted by: isquub
Truly, I am barely here. This place is still here, for some reason, and in the spirit of nothing-much-at-all, I'm posting this very thing in this very place.
On? We need new prepositions.
I'm planning to do NaNoWriMo again this year. (I have a bit of an existentational disenfranchisement going on, focused primarily around my growing disenchantment with my "career". I work 4 days a week from my home, and some days it's all I can do to do any work at all. This ebbs and flows - depends on how much work is being sent my way. I'm bored just writing three sentences about how bored with it all I am.) Writing a draft of another book will probably do nothing for any of this -- could in fact further distract me from what I'm supposed to be doing -- but it could possibly force me to focus myself a little bit more in general, thus sort of letting the rest of the unstructured stuff sort of crystallize around it.
Family life is great, stressful, hectic. My daughter is 3 months shy of being 3, and my son is 9 months old, large, working on crawling, and babbling. They're both incredible.
My addiction to Steelers football, and the NFL in general, has increased again this year. I bought a 46" Sony Bravia sometime during the off-season, having sold my only remaining electric guitar (a PRS of some description) to my boss' son. It's great watching the Steelers on it, except for the fact that they keep losing. This season they're some horrible mirror image of last: in the 2008 season they consistently looked like they were going to lose games but then pulled them out in the last quarter; this year the opener was like that, but then against the Bears and then the Bengals they became the bizarro Steelers, starting off with a bang and then just fizzling into crap.
I've been on a diet for a little while now, maybe a couple of months. I went in for a check up with a new doctor, having not had one since before starting my family, and was told I was in dangerous high blood pressure territory, and that I weighed 245 pounds. I was shocked more by the weight than anything; I've been thinking of myself as weighing about 225 for years now, and even at that I was significantly overweight. So since then I've been trying to eat better; started off counting calories but have slipped a little into just a more ambiguous don't-pig-out-all-the-time thing. And I started running 4 or so times a week. I've lost not quite 20 pounds (by my scale I started at 240 and am down around 221 now), and am trying to keep motivated enough to get down to 200 eventually. 220 is the weight I've always had listed on my driver's license, so that's a first step I'd really like to hit ASAP.
The running has been hard on my shins. At the start it was really tough on everything, but a week or so in I was feeling pretty good and enjoying it. Another couple of weeks later and my shins were starting to sort of chronically hurt. My jogging route is basically a mile up here on our mountain, involving a lot of up-and-down stuff. I do it in about 12 minutes, and I have lately been increasing the distance (which just involves doubling parts of the route). It's not a big run, but the hills add to the workout and the time it takes fits well in a lunch-break sort of scenario. Due to the pain in my shins, this week I decided to get my bike in shape enough to ride around up here on our mountain. My first ride, yesterday, was just about a mile and a half of looping around up here, which is hardly anything on a bike, though it was enough to remind me that the leg muscles involved in biking and running are really not the same. For today's ride I went all the way down the mountain, took some pictures in the industrial park down there, and then came back up. It's a strange situation for riding; pretty much the entire beginning is all downhill, taking a few roads that wind down to the bottom, then there's however much basically flat road I choose to follow, then it's all back up a number of steep roads. Feels backwards, as it's hard to enjoy the downhill knowing the uphill's going to follow.
But even though I hadn't even touched the bike since a few rides a year or more ago, I was able to make the trip back up without any huge destruction of self. So the running has definitely improved my conditioning somewhat. I plan on continuing with biking (though fitting it in is going to be difficult; today's ride was just about exactly 30 minutes.) I assume because of the timing issue I should just keep going down and up the hill, as even though it's not really that pleasurable (currently,) it IS a good way to condition myself in a short time.
If I keep motivated to continue posting here to nobody some photos may follow.
On? We need new prepositions.
I'm planning to do NaNoWriMo again this year. (I have a bit of an existentational disenfranchisement going on, focused primarily around my growing disenchantment with my "career". I work 4 days a week from my home, and some days it's all I can do to do any work at all. This ebbs and flows - depends on how much work is being sent my way. I'm bored just writing three sentences about how bored with it all I am.) Writing a draft of another book will probably do nothing for any of this -- could in fact further distract me from what I'm supposed to be doing -- but it could possibly force me to focus myself a little bit more in general, thus sort of letting the rest of the unstructured stuff sort of crystallize around it.
Family life is great, stressful, hectic. My daughter is 3 months shy of being 3, and my son is 9 months old, large, working on crawling, and babbling. They're both incredible.
My addiction to Steelers football, and the NFL in general, has increased again this year. I bought a 46" Sony Bravia sometime during the off-season, having sold my only remaining electric guitar (a PRS of some description) to my boss' son. It's great watching the Steelers on it, except for the fact that they keep losing. This season they're some horrible mirror image of last: in the 2008 season they consistently looked like they were going to lose games but then pulled them out in the last quarter; this year the opener was like that, but then against the Bears and then the Bengals they became the bizarro Steelers, starting off with a bang and then just fizzling into crap.
I've been on a diet for a little while now, maybe a couple of months. I went in for a check up with a new doctor, having not had one since before starting my family, and was told I was in dangerous high blood pressure territory, and that I weighed 245 pounds. I was shocked more by the weight than anything; I've been thinking of myself as weighing about 225 for years now, and even at that I was significantly overweight. So since then I've been trying to eat better; started off counting calories but have slipped a little into just a more ambiguous don't-pig-out-all-the-time thing. And I started running 4 or so times a week. I've lost not quite 20 pounds (by my scale I started at 240 and am down around 221 now), and am trying to keep motivated enough to get down to 200 eventually. 220 is the weight I've always had listed on my driver's license, so that's a first step I'd really like to hit ASAP.
The running has been hard on my shins. At the start it was really tough on everything, but a week or so in I was feeling pretty good and enjoying it. Another couple of weeks later and my shins were starting to sort of chronically hurt. My jogging route is basically a mile up here on our mountain, involving a lot of up-and-down stuff. I do it in about 12 minutes, and I have lately been increasing the distance (which just involves doubling parts of the route). It's not a big run, but the hills add to the workout and the time it takes fits well in a lunch-break sort of scenario. Due to the pain in my shins, this week I decided to get my bike in shape enough to ride around up here on our mountain. My first ride, yesterday, was just about a mile and a half of looping around up here, which is hardly anything on a bike, though it was enough to remind me that the leg muscles involved in biking and running are really not the same. For today's ride I went all the way down the mountain, took some pictures in the industrial park down there, and then came back up. It's a strange situation for riding; pretty much the entire beginning is all downhill, taking a few roads that wind down to the bottom, then there's however much basically flat road I choose to follow, then it's all back up a number of steep roads. Feels backwards, as it's hard to enjoy the downhill knowing the uphill's going to follow.
But even though I hadn't even touched the bike since a few rides a year or more ago, I was able to make the trip back up without any huge destruction of self. So the running has definitely improved my conditioning somewhat. I plan on continuing with biking (though fitting it in is going to be difficult; today's ride was just about exactly 30 minutes.) I assume because of the timing issue I should just keep going down and up the hill, as even though it's not really that pleasurable (currently,) it IS a good way to condition myself in a short time.
If I keep motivated to continue posting here to nobody some photos may follow.
09.04.09
BEWARE
The Government Rockefeller Communist Foreigner With a Fake Birth Certificate Who Calls Himself Our President is planning on broadcasting his death rays out of the video screens of your children's schools. YOU CANNOT BE VIGILANT ENOUGH THERE IS A CUBE. Watch your helmets, call your children back to the compound. BACK TO THE COMPOUND. This is an effort on the part of the robot that has been implanted in the "White House" run by Rockefeller's redcoat armies to take over our schools. This is the next step. You thought the trying to run of the Medicare takeover by the government was bad, wait until you understand this. THE GOVERNMENT WANTS TO TAKE CONTROL OF THE SCHOOLS NEXT.
Disbelieve me at your peril. They want to run the schools, and they will make a government "EDUCATION PROGRAM". Mark my words.
Cyborg Obomanaut has already hypnotized the liberal communist left and is now planning to train the hypnobeams on the children. WE MUST THINK OF THE CHILDREN. He will be attempting after that to require teachings of CIVICS, or HISTORY.
WHATEVER YOU DO do not let your children go to school on the day that Roboma is scheduled to talk to them. Do not AT ANY COST allow your children to listen to the "president" of our "country." YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.
Disbelieve me at your peril. They want to run the schools, and they will make a government "EDUCATION PROGRAM". Mark my words.
Cyborg Obomanaut has already hypnotized the liberal communist left and is now planning to train the hypnobeams on the children. WE MUST THINK OF THE CHILDREN. He will be attempting after that to require teachings of CIVICS, or HISTORY.
WHATEVER YOU DO do not let your children go to school on the day that Roboma is scheduled to talk to them. Do not AT ANY COST allow your children to listen to the "president" of our "country." YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.
12.15.08
...
Posted by: isquub
...
12.02.08
office
Maybe this ongoing, say-nothing-in-the-future thing can just be ongoing.
See how I did that? Yeah.
At any rate it's even harder when I'm actually in the office.
See how I did that? Yeah.
At any rate it's even harder when I'm actually in the office.
11.24.08
I Get It
Posted by: isquub
For most of my life, I've not been a sports fan. I've been a Steelers fan forever, but for most of my life that meant I got excited if the Steelers were in the Super Bowl and I'd probably watch most of it if I weren't busy playing D&D/recording music/being a dork. A few years back I finally made a commitment to start watching Steelers football regularly. (I posted about it then, and I'll provide a link if I don't revert to lazy-mode before I finish here.) At the beginning of this season I was talking to my mom before a Steelers game and I made a comment about the fact that I can never get into any games that aren't Steelers games. So while I'd done a good job of actually actively being a Steelers fan, I hadn't at all become a football fan. I'd watch the Steelers play and rarely know much about the other team or what the game would mean to the Steelers season or anything like that.
11.21.08
I don't Agree With Yesterday
I posted something just now, which is yesterday and now is two days from now, and I just want to clarify some things:
1. I was astounded by Ashton Kutcher's grasp of things when I originally watched the episode of Bill Maher that that "overtime" clip was from.
2. I was set on fire with angriness when Kutcher kept saying, "Stop sending stuff to Mars," and then I was more on fire that the whole panel seemed to agree with him. Fuck I'm mad about it.
3. Still, there's funny stuff there. I just wish somebody was on there that could represent the other side of that stupid argument.
4. The metafilter thread I linked in the same post: there's some great stuff there. I am stumped by all of it.
1. I was astounded by Ashton Kutcher's grasp of things when I originally watched the episode of Bill Maher that that "overtime" clip was from.
2. I was set on fire with angriness when Kutcher kept saying, "Stop sending stuff to Mars," and then I was more on fire that the whole panel seemed to agree with him. Fuck I'm mad about it.
3. Still, there's funny stuff there. I just wish somebody was on there that could represent the other side of that stupid argument.
4. The metafilter thread I linked in the same post: there's some great stuff there. I am stumped by all of it.
11.20.08
Steve Albini's Favorite Sunset Sending Mars to Stop
Posted by: isquub
11.19.08
Forget about ACORN
Apparently there were more than 900 Wizards registered to vote.
(here)
The Harry Potter Alliance? Wizard Rock the Vote? WHERE'S THE FUCKING OUTRAGE?
We are one day away from the US election and are really proud to let people know that thanks to the whole fandom, the HPA's Wizard Rock the Vote program registered close to 900 voters!
(here)
The Harry Potter Alliance? Wizard Rock the Vote? WHERE'S THE FUCKING OUTRAGE?
