Alaska Miller

disregard females, acquire currency

(via hotmessinawalmartdress)

turns out i live like kid cudi

When Tumblrs meet offline.

A cold day in September. Four Seasons hotel room, Kansas City.

Her friend sat at the coffee table, stuffing a blunt. She’s splayed on the bed, head tilted on the edge. The TV is on, an episode of the OC is concluding. She looks up and at me, “Is California just like the show?”

I cocked my head to the side and pretended to be deep in thought then reassured her in a silly tone that it’s exactly like it. She laughed, despite the joke being neither witty nor funny. I confused her laughter with thinking she loved me.

“You know what I hate—”

“I hate every single boy you know that’s more interesting than me.”

“Well, your problem is there’s a lot of them around.”

“Not forever.”

I paid more attention to the TV than her but I can tell she smiled at my boast. I, again, confused that with love. Then off I went to try to do as many interesting things I can, take as many interesting pictures as I can, and read as many interesting things as I can, thinking—befuddled with love—she’ll come out west, to see how it’s as pretty as I had described it, with me. She never did. You can’t bluff a smart girl on what reality is.

Blah blah Oscars dresses, Oscars rumors, Oscars complaints blah blah blah. This is what’s actually important:

Back in December of 2008, a buddy of mine sent me a torrent link along with this message: “Watch this. This is the movie. This is it. Except for that boring sniper part.” He’s referring to the slow-paced scene where Bomb Douche 1 and Black Bomb Dude spend a whole afternoon lollygagging on a berm readying to drop hajjis with a pouty-looking 50-cal chambered Barrett M82 special application scoped rifle.

I told my buddy that he’s absolutely right. This is the movie that explains it. And that boring sniper part—if you interpret it metaphorically—is the reason why this movie will have an Oscar in 2010, instead of a James Cameron re-imagining of Fern Gully.

People enlist for the dumbest reasons. I’ve heard girls, pride, tradition, and every now and then the Judge Judy said so routine. Obviously, some can thrive in the military environment and survive their whole hitch in based on the motivation they had when going in. My personal vendetta of slaying the lava monster, after being fulfilled, wasn’t enough to get me over the hump of being in the Suck to re-up on my commitment to Uncle Sam that’s four times as long as your iPhone contract. As my platoon guide once said: “Be happy, if not for this shit we would just be jerking it at home.” Being in the military is essentially an international jerk-off tour. The Hurt Locker is the movie that explains it.

Full Metal Jacket explained it before pre-9/11. It’s a VHS tape cassette that’s played on repeat in every single recruiting station in this country. Not the crazy ‘Nam on acid second half, just the boot camp stuff up until Pyle shoots himself. That’s to remind poolees their place: sacks of suicidal shit that don’t deserve to be Marines.

When Saving Private Ryan came out the laziest of the lazy press—film critics—huddled around the common theme of praising Spielberg for finally bringing the Great Sexy War back. There were articles about WW2 vets crying in the theaters and everyone getting all introspective after watching a bloody mess occur in the first fifteen minutes. That one movie has now spawned two 10-part HBO series about a war that took our grandfathers to end faster than the current Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom has lasted.

Ask me a year ago what I thought about the cowards in mainstream media that don’t dare point out that twee fact America has been consistently at war since 2001 and I would have been ragey. But 2010 me, the post-Ron Paul me, has officially given up. The truth about war is that if you have no immediate family member or close friends being bent over by the Green Machine and royally fucked on a consistent basis, you have no interest in it. Sometimes I think it goes both ways, soldiers—the ones that saw some real shit while in the sandbox—have no vested interest in sharing what they did when they were in. You, a civilian, just wouldn’t understand it and instead of answering your thank yous properly with the entirety of what an experience a facet of war is like, polite decorum takes over and you get a nod and a you’re welcome.

So we have war movies. Every generation, every conflict, there’s a war movie meant to be the artsy clown car stuffed with clowns painted with face masks meant to represent foibles and romanticism, paraded along with other Rose Bowl floats where Jersey kids are stripping in full stereoscopic 3D, meant to entertain you long enough to forget the burden of you have to live your hard-fought middle-class lifestyle.

Military life is boring. It’s never like how the movies portray it. It’s not exciting, it’s not explosives happy, it’s not full of killing or stabbing or death. Military life is repeating a series of pre-conceived actions and routine motions over and over again. It’s only paired in context with an ongoing war does any of what soldiers and sailors do makes any god-damn fucking sense. It’s a perfect environment for suicidal manic depressives that can’t even out their mood levels, if only they could get a publicity awareness campaign to admit people like them into the military without fearing having to disclose health information tracing to childhood.

That constant burdening of anxiety, of being told to hurry up to get somewhere just so you can wait, wait for the most opportune moment—or, at least waiting for the commanding officer to finally get off his ass and do something—that constant shouldering of straining tension. In peace time, it means nothing, but in a designated combat zone—whereby if you die your paycheck is tax-free!—it’ll break men and women in the most obtuse ways far after their initial four years in.

The sniping scene encapsulates the entirety of what it feels like being in war because it’s essentially the war porn fantasy every little boy having weened on GI Joe and suckered into the service because of war movies they watched as a kid has been waiting for: to be the guy that triumphs when everyone around him has been shot and killed, to be the guy wielding a gigantic penis replacement that can dispel a high-speed, low-drag, bullet cartridge that’s 3.91 inches long and 0.51 inch in diameter with an effective range of 1,800 meters, to be the guy that dutifully fulfills his given mission of vanquishing all enemies at the gates, waits patiently all day and night, honorably carries out he has been trained via muscle memory to do mindlessly for over a thousand times, to be the lone hero doing the deeds worthy of medals that the high brass sneakily brainwashes you to do but on paper will ardently deny because, after all, you’re not an army of one with a brain, you’re just a government-owned, government-trained potential killing machine, a true douchey tool.

The waiting. The constant maintenance of bearing even while diffusing clusters of improvised explosive device in a sandy, pisstown where foreign angry-looking person have confused emotions of wanting to kill you, warn you, protect you, or use you. This is the movie that finally explains it. And that kind of fantasy jerkoff sessions is going to be a better moneyshot than even the sexiest Na’vi hair-braiding after finishing a quest in World of WarCraft.

But too bad it’s just fantasy and none of it is reality. No one runs around towns as a small fireteam like that. No one abandons each other like that. No one disconnects communication gear. No one tells junior boots to just forget about it. No one. That’s what everyone learns after they lived the military lifestyle and try to compare and contrast it to the glorification and romanticism war movies bring to the table meant for its audience of the most strung out, most dedicated, most detail obsessed, and most deadly professional soldiers the modern world has ever seen. But we will gloss over all that and this movie, like the masterpiece of a movie it will inevitably replace for use as ulterior propaganda purposes, will now work effectively in time to sneak into little boys’ heads and impregnate in their minds a germ of an idea of what it means to be a classic hero and we rinse and repeat every generation the fascination with serving in the military.

But at least be happy. If not for this shit we would just be jerking it at home.

:(

thephenthouse:

sade:

What?

I can’t even….first of all:

“author of marketing iphone apps. donnie darko is my favorite movie and i wear heels every single day.”

Ok…that’s a personality, just not a very fucking interesting/unique one. Jesus.

Also, David? Really? Do you really need more self-promotion on YOUR OWN WEBSITE?

Cool.

What she said.

(via richtong)

funemployment was cool in 2009

Men of a certain age: Jack Dempsey gag-punching Harry Houdini

1. i just learned my mom was a 23 yo hottie.

2. she still thinks LOL means lots of love and ends every sentence in her madlib-esque emails with it.

LOL

When your phone beeps in the middle of the night?

When your phone tells you things that in one swoop changes your perspective on every single thing in your tiny little world?

When you reply back much too quickly because you want so desperate to?

When your phone, again, tells you what you wanted to hear, so much so that you believed in it, for that short moment, even if it’s not true?

When, right after tapping that send button, you immediately realize what just happened?

When you throw your phone against the wall because of how humiliated you have been?

When you get the sagging feeling that this is it, that this is the last straw in how much shit you can take?

When you get the nagging feeling that you’re just hated, again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and everything is a cruel joke on you?

When you feel such rage in knowing that being lied to, betrayed, and toyed with by someone you would never thought of doing something like that to you because you’ve always painted them as being the kindest and most caring in the world?

When you realize that the metaphorical scale of even just friendship has been tipped, and so much that it’s entirely flipped over?

When you have to decide whether to be passive-aggressive and wash yourself of this or call it out but are now trapped in a mutually understood pact between two people that one can’t call anymore and the other can’t ask anymore?

When the trajectory of two people will never match up?

When you learned a lesson about never giving away parts of your heart, trust someone else, or believe in love?

What do you call that?

I don’t know.

Just call a therapist and ask for some Xanax.

What It Feels Like… to Drown

It’s funny. First you hate ‘em, then you get used to ‘em. That’s drowning.

The first time was in Vegas. I was five and it was in the swimming pool of Circus Circus. I don’t remember how I get into the predicament—though I am aware I used to enjoy daring games of tippy-toeing around the deep ends of swimming pools (Turns out if you at age five can’t make it past at least three-fourth of the pool, I, at age five, am better than you.)—but I do remember sinking and struggling to break the surface, to get at the precious air but rewarded with just more chlorinated piss water in my gullet. My mom ran along the edge of pool hysterical, maybe even crying, trying her best to find help, and even while being occupied I can still feel for that precise moment how helpless she felt. I felt shame, for being a failure, for letting her down and wanting to give in to dying that day. That fading memory, where faces are turning blank and figures turning ethereal, haunts me whenever I am close to dying, often it’s the only motivation I have to not.

Drowning is a quick exercise. It’s possible to drown anywhere at anytime, in the ocean, in a river, in a pond, in the tub, in a sink, maybe even in a bucket—that’s why there’s warning labels of a manbaby on those big five gallon ones. In the United States drowning is the second leading cause of death for kids under 12, vehicular terrorism is the first. In a big pool, when you realize you’ve gone just that one bit too far in the deep end, you have just 30 to 45 seconds of air in your lungs as you start gulping water and start panicking. Some people can push past that wall and hold out for another 30 seconds if they really focused on it, but rarely do people ever experience that after their adolescence spent splashing in the backyard with waders on.

Experienced swimmers learned to mediate their breath and can last at least a minute, or two, if need be underwater. David Blaine lasted 7 minutes and 20 seconds, while trying to break free of his handcuffs after being in a giant fishbowl for like a year. Sadly, non-magicians start thrashing about, which exerts more energy and more air, and eventually enter the phase of near-drowning, where they all start to get tunnel vision and eventually pass out from lack of air to the brain. At that point your brain ceases to function even on pure instinct and you’ll “forget” to breathe. If not spotted in time you have less than 15 seconds before your brain is damaged, or you die.

That’s what happened to me. I think. I do remember the brief moment of warm clarity I achieved—while gasping for air so hard that I broke my jaw and it’s been clicking due to what orthodontists labeled as temporomandibular joint disorder ever since, I’m now like a snake, I can dislocate my mandible slightly from my skull—and it was almost exactly like how people describe their near-death experiences: you see your life flash past before your eyes.

A neuroscience graduate school friend of mine once said human memories operates via a lazy store and restore method, kind of like a broken jukebox. Things get written—like records—and then jammed into a box for storage, but there’s no menu to figure out how to get the songs to play back. To hear music you have to remember how the individual songs on the various records relate to each other. Which sounds impossible but the brain is a quirky and witty thing, it can come up with the most obscure connections between your billions of memory fragments—and sometimes when the bond is a good one that’s when you scream eureka and run around naked, kind of like how you are when it’s late on a Friday night and you’re browsing Wikipedia randomly while being lazily stoned.

I saw that. Actually, not so much a slideshow at a boring roast inside some Earth-to-Heaven wormhole but more like Sliders, jumping from point to points of my life. I assumed I was suppose to get a moral lesson from each bit I saw but what wisdom can you gleam at five? All I remember was eating—milk candies, pooping—all the time, watching Ninja Turtles—Donatello is my power animal, and finding that dead body out in the woods—it was some old guy.

I did learn what it feels like to be a failure.

Some years later I asked my mom if she remembered the time I almost died but she only look puzzled, grunted no, and went back to her cooking. She did recall, much later on, that I slipped out her hand once while I was a baby in the sink and almost choked to death from the water. I still love her.

—-

The second time was in San Diego. I was 19. An exciting time when freshly-minted as a bad-ass Marine I thought I was ready to die but never will. I was told repeatedly, even in song, of my badassness by everyone around me, and I, too, to fit in would mention how bad-ass everyone else was around me. Together we were the most bad-ass professional killers in the world. The few, the proud.

But I didn’t believe in any of it. It’s a troubling state of mind that’s been with me since I was a kid. While everyone grunted and projected their badassness I knew deep down we weren’t. We’re all just scared little boys playing GI Joe. But I also knew every militarized force on Earth has to get told how they’re the most elite and unique. How else can you get scared little boys playing GI Joe to jump into the fight and function in the most dire of circumstances if they don’t believe they were the most bad-ass mother-fuckers in the world? My recruiter only promised me foreign pussy.

There was a week in May where we just finished yet another week of the annual swim qualifications tests to ensure kids billed as Marines are capable of jumping into swimming pools in full gear with cammies, combat boots, pack, and a plastic rifle—as if I was jumping out of a helicopter in the middle of ‘Nam—and still be able to get to the other end of an oversized pool that might or might not be sanctionable for Michael Phelps’ usage.

I made it. And with a timestamp that put me in the seal pack instead of being lumped with the rest of the clams. The perks of being so fast in the water is that I get to go back in. Somehow I got put into indoctrination class for warrior water survival certification. Yes, warrior water survival. The training instructors, all hard-asses because waterdogs are the most bad-ass of all, that said very little and demonstrated even less.

They explained guppying, what it looks like when people in the state of drowning keep trying to reach the surface and gulp in water, and they explained that in order to survive being in the water the one and single thing to do is to not panic firstly and expect no one to save you secondly, as they grabbed us by the neck tossed us into the deep end of the pool one at a time like bags of trash. Mission: survive five rounds.

John Lennon pointed out that when you’re drowning you don’t have the sense to say “I would be incredibly pleased if someone would have the foresight to notice me drowning and come help me,” instead you just scream. Winston Ono is wrong. To scream requires air in your lungs and your brain viscerally has every ounce of air in your lungs pre-spoken for, so rarely do people get a chance to even ask for help. People also rarely raise their hands, as keeping your hands high up naturally pushes your head down below the water line, all of which by instinct and in panic things your body fights against. Imagine that.

The first three rounds were easy as it was designed to be. First is learning how to inflate our uniforms to stay afloat. We blew bubbles into our shirts to create tiny bags that seemed to disappear when you slap it just right. We floated around like green and brown lilly pads for half an hour.

The second round is to tread water with just our feet. For an entire hour. We are told to never breathe in water, swallowing some is okay but you have to know the precise moment as to when to do that—when you’re exhaled all stored air in your lungs. Some guys cheated when they could get away with it and stuck a toe to the ground. They got caught and was immediately dragged in to be slapped around by one of the instructors cruising about like a shark.

Third round is retrieving gear under the water. We are told to never panic underwater. Panic only needs to doubt and doubt will destroy you quicker than your convulsing body can.

Round four is water confidence. It is used to pick out the weak. The task of figuring out who’s who laid in the hands of three sadistic training instructors. We weren’t told how the test will go or what to prepare for. We stripped off our cammies and boots and stood in a line, nut to butt, in tiny green swim trunks and waited nervously. Two of the instructors jumped into the pool and disappeared for what seemed like forever. The one on deck started grabbing the guys in line and tossing them in. Mission: don’t die.

I got tossed into the water and was immediately grabbed at the ankle—this meant I was singled out as being weak—by one of the instructors. He dragged me as he skipped along the pool floor to the deep end and in one motion smooth motion threw me beneath him. I held my breath in anticipation of being able to get to the surface to last a few more minutes but he never let go. Instead he jumped on my back and started alligator-rolling me like a rag doll.

In confusion, calm is not a fungible commodity, as in I can’t trade it for something else. I can’t trade gold for it, I can’t exchange air for it. The only thing you can do is produce calm, through will and practice. I wasn’t ready for that and succumbed to the water and to drowning. I thought about my mom before I went through the same cloudy and dream-like state I’ve associated death with.

One thing about passing out in the water is the fact that your lose your short term memory. You lose track of who you are, where you, and what happened. Next thing I remember being on the wet concrete and getting kicked repeatedly in the stomach and spitting out water. The instructor chuckled then snarled: no one has ever died in training, before jumping back into the pool to find his next prey.

I got up and in a daze started to wander away from the pool, to the doors but someone yelled “Hey, fucker” and froze me in my tracks. I remember now, everyone gets two attempts before being washed out of the training. I remained unconvinced, I’m not a badass. I stood at the pool edge and broke down, thankfully water dripping everywhere masked my moment of weakness. The first chink in the armor has bore itself.

One by one every one went through their thrashing. Some guys get tossed into the water and went through the problems I have of not being able to stay calm. They all got dragged out. Some took to the water like fishes and stayed in the deep end of the pool and was able to dodge the grabbing hands underneath. I thought about how my friends from back on the block would just be watching Shark Week on TV, I live it.

I got tossed back in for the second time and tried hiding at the bottom. That strategy didn’t work either, someone held me head down as I tried to get at air. I got dragged out again and again got no sympathy except for the life-giving kicks to my stomach. The notion wasn’t explicit but it’s clear as writings on the tiled walls in the pool house: I’m weak, I felt like a failure for wanting to live. My indoctrination is complete.

Only a dozen people got to round five and out of that only four got certified that day. They carried themselves dramatically differently thereafter, letting nothing betray their actual emotions. I envied them.

The lesson here is to either get over your fears or forever be beholden to it.

—-

I’ve been staring at the computer screen in front of me for the past two hours. A blank Keynote open and Mail in the background kept beeping every five minutes as I got new email. I’ve taken to this being a habit, times where I just sit in my comfortable Herman Miller Aeron chair and spend the morning alternating between staring at my computer and at the fuzzy cubicle walls.

Everyone around me is twice or maybe even three times older than me. Despite their exuberance I know deep down there’s a sense of resentment. Some 23 year old kid—I could easily have passed for their son—that keeps showing up early and leaving late is telling them what to do, when to do it, and how to do it. Mostly over emails, like most corporate employees I rarely interacted face to face with the people I work with unless it’s explicitly for a meeting pre-arranged weeks ahead and in a reserved meeting room.

The lights in the new building we just moved into—one of the many bought in a land grab from the other once-formerly innovative corporation of Silicon Valley lore in a small city that can no longer accomodate either as the freeways, parking, and housing have been stretched not just to the max but to astronomical prices that would preclude anyone of right mind to want to live here—have been out ever since we got here. Minor maintenance, the memo said. That was six weeks ago. Like others, I’ve worked in the darkness for twelve hours a day every single work day since but unlike others I didn’t bring in extra lamps to accomodate. I liked the glow of the monitor, it’s my tunnel, the lights are at the end I promised myself, I have to see this through. I learned to catch myself drifting better and went back to the emails, the iChats, the tasks, the meetings, the deadlines.

Every day that Spring was spent prepping for the new phone, in the metaphorical and literal darkness. Because I wasn’t a VIP I wasn’t privy to certain information about the new phone. This drove me nuts as my boss and I had to frustratingly figure out ways of letting me work on things without her revealing information that could be leaked by me and I had to work with people to make sure they don’t leak information from me. The lack of sunlight made me grumpy and irritable. The honeymoon period of work has ended, I’m no longer excited to be here day in and day out. The money didn’t make it better, the toys I bought didn’t make it any better.

To save my soul I had to create and so I did, with a buddy of mine during the weekends and after work hours we went about trying to live out the Silicon Valley fantasy—identifiable worldwide as the dream of hustling dollar for dollar. But those meager hours weren’t enough and we both resentfully knew it yet said nothing about it. I, again, felt like a loser for wanting to live but the day the lights turned back on I went to my boss and told her I quit. The next week we applied for and got accepted and later went on to the last round of interviews to fight for seed money for our startup. We didn’t get it, the rejection came as an one-line email.

There was no shock attached to that, maybe because deep down despite the bravado inspired by all the startup success stories we’ve internalized we knew we weren’t up to par. That rejection manifested itself as anger later on, we were disappointed in ourselves but also believed firmly it’s just that others lack the ability to recognize our genius, we’re going to make our project fly no matter what. That, turns out, is rarely ever the case. Anger turned to resentment and finally composted to acceptance. I went East—to Washington, to Pittsburgh, to New York—to find others who might believe in my dreams as much as I did. No one else did. I was yet again a failure.

Fed up with that idea, my buddy and I spent time on and off over the course of two years stuck in the suburbs trying find the magical shortcut to the riches our peers around us have managed to get at. Silicon Valley became my ocean, where I acted as a pirate, my dream was the sail wind, but time became my anchor and doubt became my suffocating agent. Near the end of 2009, both time and doubt worked in tandem to sunk me worse than a battle-hardened jarhead ever could.

The lesson is to learn when to let go.

—-

I woke up in a luxurious queen bed, yet another night without someone next to me. I can’t find the remote for the curtains so I just pulled the whole thing over my head. The sun is just about to set on the housing sprawl as far as the eyes can see. From the very top of the Venetian’s tallest tower I surveyed the land. Past Treasure Island the sun dropping into the mountain ranges instead of rising from it.

The thing about living inside moon bases on Vegas is how quickly your internal clock adjusts. Constantly exposed to bright lights, oxygenated air, fake boobs, carpet patterns, and adrenaline from all the cheap thrills does that to you. Six in the morning becomes legitimate bed times and sunsets becomes your only brief recognition of a day. I’ve been in Vegas for almost three weeks now, I’ve gotten used to it. Not the food, though, never the food. The buffets and restaurants were full of greasy and horribly generic-tasting food that will wreck your insides like a ginger-headed problem child wanting so desperate to come out from the rear end.

The third TV in the room has been on the entire day, looped on a DVD-rip of Moon. Sam Rockwell is busy making sense the whys and hows of him having a clone. Tough break. I turned it off and went downstairs. Once a day, every day, I’ve taken the elevator down to the casino floor, walked to roulette table next to the upscaled-branded Cheesecake Factory, and placed a $20 on black. If I win, I get to eat for the day, if I didn’t I sat around until I got my free can of Red Bull and three fingers of bottom-shelf whiskey. I won, but didn’t feel hungry—yet another distraction—so I just sat there and chit chatted with the croupier. His name was Steve, he’s from Malaysia, he’s been working in Vegas for fifteen years, he has a house, and it’s put his two kids through college. He never gambles, though, especially not like me to feed myself. That’s the worst way to win, he tells me. I nodded as I sipped my Red Bull.

That night I drove on a road out to the desert until I couldn’t see lights anymore and pulled over. I sat out there looking for something but couldn’t find it. I’m starting to get bored of looking at nothing in silence but remind myself that Buddha says the ill of men comes from the fact that one can not sit in complete isolation for more than half an hour. That sounds wistfully simple back when you lived before Jesus Christ. Buddha might have been an Internet-addict if he was alive today, imagine the enlightenment you can ascertain once you mastered all the knowledge to everything in life.

I sat there a bit longer, not recognizing how much time have been spent. I sat in the darkness until it invaded my head and flooded all five of my senses. While immersed I tried to stay calm. Concepts such as hopelessness and desperation and rejection all came out like a ghastly parade, one by one to taunt me.

It’s called faithlessness; I remember from my scattered record of attending Sunday schools when convenient, or when I know for a fact the cute girl I’ve been crushing on will be there. Those who sit in darkness are the lost and faithless. It’s only through perseverance, acceptance, and maybe a bit of help, that you can finally see the light of God again.

The mountains provided nothing and the desert answered only in howls of wind. I began to expect, then demand, something miraculous, something unexpected, to happen the longer I was left alone. I wanted a sign. But, like each night I spent wallowing in front of a dark wasteland, the result is always the same: there is no miracle. Always I forget. I forget who I am, forget what gave me hope yesterday, forget what my dreams are for tomorrow. I can’t even smile at being delighted from grandeur of valleys or mountains or forests or the oceanfronts. I forget everything, in turn wisdom and perspective get bored pitying me and conspire with the darkness to hide, amongst the shadows then amongst the flickering playback of my memories and re-examination of my life, they both delight in eluding me no matter how sure I am of where they might be.

With the dynamic duo gone, I am left to deal with my problems by myself, like the fact that in my entire adult life I have never one day felt worthy or accomplished in what I have sought and gained; I’ve lived it entirely with the nagging feeling of being a fraud, of being a Homer defined, to wake up one day and come to the horrible consensus that you are now twenty five and have absolutely hated how you turned out gives way to panic then gives way to rationalization. It’s at that precise moment, when you’re at the point of being sick of being betrayed by men and lied to by women that you deem as friends over and over again, sick of being pegged a failure, sick of not being where you had imagined you would be as a kid, that you want to commit something heinous, that’s when you realize you want to wrestle with the dilemma of premeditated murder, and rationalize the entire plan of social suicide, purely motivated by the hatred of just one man: myself.

Eureka!

To nab wisdom and perspective I have to do it when they least expect it, like shooting myself in the mouth. And so it is that I let myself drown completely, to see the tunnel, and grasping for the light at the end instead of fighting it in a panic. Panic won’t work. And expect no one to come save you, but hope for the best. It’s just a type of faith, unlike the ones peddled by church, because in real life miracles don’t happen and because faith, like cops, doesn’t protect you from the bad things that happen, it only gives you the determination to accept what has happened. You just have to stop and learn to let go, for this—like all things—too shall pass.

I got up and drove back to the glistening moon base in the horizon, a sense of well-being in my head. I turned on my iPhone, realized the time and sent happy new years text to people that I cared about and quickly turned it off again. In my head I feel relieved but cautiously optimistic. I’m excited, as you should be too. We both now know exactly how it feels to drown, again, and again, and again. What more is there to fear?

All the single planets…

The small space between the headrest and the seat belt pivot anchor is the perfect nook for my bigger than average head. I twist my head slightly to keep the sky in view, always looking for a shooting star. I keep puffing on my cigarette just to blow and watch the smoke curl and billow against the roof then waft like a ghost out the slight window crack.

The Japanese-made car is old. At least twelve years old, a hold-over from high school when it was given to my buddy as a new used car. Everything creaks. The plastic molding is cracking and the leather is melting and none of the four door handles are identical in size. But the engine’s been going strong ever since we were in high school and joyriding through the night, exploring every amber-hued and empty road. I miss it, I said out loud.

“Miss what?”

Miss when we first got our learning permits, our cars, gas was a buck ten and we wanted to drive everywhere except our own driveway.

“Yeah, I miss that too. When is the truck coming?”

We were just so fearless back then. The terrors that flaps in the night.

“What is that? Are you quoting Disney cartoons? When is the truck coming?”

I don’t know. They said it was going to be half an hour. Whatever, just chill.

Joel kept his head buried in the manual flip book. We both don’t know how to attach the jumper cables and he’s going through the numbered instructions. Red first then black then backwards. I feel a bit awkward not knowing that, thinking in some parts of the country I would be a laughing stock. Not here though. Here, people make money on the Internets and design microprocessors. Who cares about car maintenance? Besides, no one buys American so reliability is never a problem. That is, unless, you’re too stoned to realize you left the key in the ignition for the past two hours just to listen to the radio.

Stan is in the back practicing blowing smoke rings. What do you miss, Stan?

Without hesitation and with one furrowed brow and in the most deadpan voice: “I miss sixteen year old girls.”

What, pedobear?

“I miss them. I miss how in awe I was of them back then. Remember Lisa?”

I do remember Lisa. She was, even with the best of our SAT vocab studies, complex. When the boys were trying to run, she was hiding behind the bleachers smoking. When the boys were playing StarCraft, she was figuring out why her heart wants to be ripped out. When the boys were talking about Swiss Army knives and camping, she was cutting herself. When the boys see her, she felt like back-flipping off a cliff into the Pacific ocean like South American divers while being stabbed repeatedly in the back a thousand times. Oh, wait, that’s how I feel during my panic attacks.

“Can you imagine what it was like to have talked to her? To have known her?”

One time during class she got upset with something the teacher said and ran out of the class. The teacher, like us, didn’t know what exactly to do. He told us to stay put but one of the boys got up and said he has to go get her because she grabbed her lead mechanical pencil and more than likely she’s using it to cut herself in the bathroom. Mr. Johnson told us to stay put and went with the boy to go find the most complex girl in the world. I didn’t think twice about it because I didn’t get it. I still don’t get it. I am, however, in love with the idea of a girl like that.

“I really wanted to be friends with her but there was so many problems back then. Like you can’t just ask her out because you don’t want to ask her out, you know? And it’s not like I can say let’s go get some coffee because we didn’t drive. We could only walk to the park next to school and watch the smokers hang out. It wouldn’t have worked.”

I made a mental note to look her up on Facebook. Oscar Wilde said he preferred women with a past and men with a future.

“Oscar Wilde was a fruit. It’s a sad thing that nowadays there’s so little useless information;” Joel got bored with the manual. He lights up an American Spirit menthol light, his fifth in the past half an hour. My friends. Let me show you them. We quote Oscar Wilde while waiting for a tow truck. Sometimes I wonder if I am, or we are, ever too old to be hanging out inside a car past midnight.

“You’re never too old to do any goddamn thing you want. Especially now. Everyone’s broke. Everyone jobless. We’re reverting back to the same drifting high school kids we always were, you know?;” Stan finally mastered his smoke rings. The smoke breaks apart like glass into a thousand shards as it hits the fuzzy ceiling. There’s a streaking spray of brown spots if I glance to the left. Joel confessed it was just Coke, whatever was left in a bottle one hot summer day some years ago. What will happen this summer?

I stared into the starless sky and watched the moon, wondering how many people around the western hemisphere is staring at the exact same thing as I am right now. Move forward, not backward, upward not forward, and always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom.

“I’m going to miss you guys when I have a girlfriend and eventually kids.”

I’m going to miss you guys when I move to LA.

“I’m never going to miss you guys. You guys are all dicks for smoking in my car. When is the tow truck coming?”

Greg Dulli of The Twilight Singers bellows his dark and tense voice accompanied by the moody alternative rock instrumental into the smokey air, aided with an additional bass-oomph since the iPhone is inside the plastic cup holder. Every now and then it beeps like an anxiety time bomb. What if she stops texting me back?

I flick my lighter nervously and think about how all I want to do is go home and write down everything we just said. I have a feeling this is going to be priceless once we stop being losers in our little car world.

We got a Twitter dispathed Korean-Mexican hipster taco truck too in the ‘burbs. I feel very metropolitan now.

TV Lessons: sometimes when things are really tough, in my internal dialogue, I ask every body part to recognize its combined full potential and that there is no challenge that I can’t face. Then I eat a fish taco.

movingsideways:ohspontaneity:skelterhelter

I’m not sure I really care when this word went from describing a sub-group of people who lived in the Williamsburgh section of Brooklyn who did stupid shit because there’s a sub-group of people living anywhere and everywhere who does stupid shit. For me, the word is now synonymous with the word…

A lifestyle is like a virus. It incubates within constraints—and, boy, did this economic downturn provide the best agar for the petri dishes—and the really good ones survive and multiply until it uses up everything and explodes, carried outward by means of travel and nowadays the Internet. Smart businesses latch on to that and sell dreams of it to flyover state citizens with aspirations and coastals needing an identity. That’s just the breaks of capitalism.

What we’re all arguing now is how best to eclipse the contemporary use of the word hipster and what it really means to us all. I’m just sad Gawker’s audacious dreams of being Newsweek doesn’t allow for it to have on staff the incestuous and insular NYC writers to properly explain it to me in sharp and witty sentences.

Oh, hey, I guess we all grew up and left Neverneverland. When you’re pushing 30 and can’t build a viable career with your own two hands the dilemma is do you have enough conviction and belief in contemporary hipsterism to fulfill all your physical and emotional needs or will you just give up and live the yuppie lifestyle from an actual full time job you keep insisting on rebelling against?

The immediacy and effectiveness of the Internet is both the savior and the death of culture. And that’s the ABC and XYZ of hipster.

dbreunig:

Facebook would have no reason to buy Loopt for its userbase or iPhone app. Facebook already has a gigantic userbase — 400 million users worldwide. And the Facebook iPhone app has 28 million monthly active users, according to its app page. Loopt is much smaller.

Business Insider hits a point that’s been bugging me every time I hear about VCs funding location-based networks.

They’re so small and so easy to make there’s no reason for any digital property that could buy them to buy them.

Sure, FourSquare’s got buzz, engaged users, and some mainstream crossover. But how many people use it…400,000?

Facebook has 70 times that amount using its iPhone app alone. They could push out an update tomorrow that turns on location features. Even Windows Mobile is bigger than FourSquare by a factor!

What is the value in these networks?

FourSquare has been closing ad sales recently. Run rates are In the neighborhoods of just three digits for restaurants and food spots in San Francisco. The ads, according to some second hand gossip, do nothing to convert sales. People enjoy the check-in part but rarely pay heed to recommendations. That’s what Yelp Mobile is for.

nedhepburn:

goodbye, rest-of-day.

Back in my day, we called them girls “artsy,” they tended to drift away at the slightest breeze and carried inside them a hungry desire to express their uniqueness; a much more poetic and beautiful counter point to the emo game every other boy was running. Artsy girls that you fall in love with but could never tame.

They went straight to art school for a BFA despite all the warnings, they had no trust fund so Goodwill finds went beyond legit to necessity, they didn’t have cars but they didn’t ride bikes, they drank excessively on Colt 45s cause the Indian clerk gave them freely for a tit flash, they ate Whoppers inside McDonald ballpits, took lots of pictures with disposable cameras, and quipped with each other over bowls instead of spending all night on social media sites.

Hipster, as a term, never entered the vernacular until the latter-half of college for the millennials, and by then it was just referring to a standardized uniform of plaids, American Apparel, plastic glasses—not the spirit—yet we all accepted the change without negotiation.

2003, never forget.

How bad of a coke binge do you have to be on to blast bass heavy euro dance music every single night—only interjected by nights when Jack Bauer’s voice explains, along a booming dramatic theme, the 24 DVD menu on 45 second loop for hours—until the sun comes up every morning this week?

How bad?

Bad enough to offer me some when I knock on the door telling them to stop.

That’s when you should realize how acceptable it is you don’t know any of your neighbors’ names in your condo complex unless they tape a water shut off notice, for repairs cause our plumbing’s more plugged up than Dick Cheney’s black heart, on my door with their names on it like Mr. Across, Mr. To The Left, and Mr. Down The Hall.

I love you, suburbia. You provide a nonmeaningful yet comfortable lifestyle.

Currently dabbling with iPads.

I pop in and out some social media sites, see something, and realize just how out of the loop I am. Then I wonder if I was ever in the loop; because if I were I probably would know what these little things I see mean and the context in which these things live in.

But it’s a bit past that now. So I’ll just see the little windows into your new life, nod, smile, and move on. Maybe tomorrow the concept of missing something will sting just a bit less. And for the sake of arguments, I want to be as smug as I can in saying at least I knew you before. Back when you were a different person than now, back when we shared secrets that only we understood, to a dramatic shift from A to B; a braver, stronger, and happier person. I’m now your constant.

And while I always dreamed I would be part of that change, and you to me, maybe it’s just not meant to be and as strong as my resolve can be it can’t stop something as gentle and willful as time and life. I miss you.

Today I’m going to hunt down yet another ghost that I had thought I busted. This one is a real slimer.

In polite company, it’s uncouth but I feel I’m amongst people that know their way around the word fuck so here goes: I still don’t know how to game Tumblr and keep an audience at the same time. What started out as a random test of a web service—it was seven months between my first and second posts—is now this: a faster-paced LiveJournal with iPhone pics and weird motivation techniques such as Tumblarity scores and the Directory.

People unfollow constantly, I’ve seen ups and downs of 50 followers and 75 drops in a day. And while I never coupled my ego to follower counts I was unbearably impatient with milestones. It took forever to get my 100th stable follower. It took even longer to get to 500 and 1000. Reblogs are key. It’s a form of tacit recommendation, the kind of thrill that Lorne Michaels indulges in all the time, I’m sure. Timing posts to hit the EST lunch break schedule works great too. Sometimes when I get drunk and push out a few dozen posts it’s entirely to bait and catch followers so I can neurotically have control over numbers ending in zeroes. I fucking hate odd cents sales.

Then I went through this numbers really mean nothing phase after my 1000th because the game changed to not how many but who, that’s the real game. Congratulations for accumulating followers is as meaningless as scoring in a sex addiction support group. Sometimes I click on notes on other people’s popular posts just to see who’s liking what. Then it became a pattern of seeking approval. A like from David? Um… is he confusing me for a cutesy camgirl or have what I heard about him turned out to be true? A like from Coketalk? Are you shitting me? A like from Molls? Oh, I miss those days. But approval seeking is beta behavior. Of course I’m liked, I write good shit.

My new thing now is just writing for the sake of writing. I feel crazy but I know I’m not. I know no one gets what I’m doing partly because I’m bad at writing—no, really, the mechanics of it has eluded me throughout my public education career and the only voice that permeates is that of a stunted high school homework procrastinator—and partly because I’ve put walls of intrigue and mystery to my Tumblr so much that it’s growing lamer than watching the Da Vinci Code while high. It’s just not high concept like Boner Party or Hipster Puppies; it’s a meandering, unorganized, overwhelmed, nerdy kid with a laptop living out a Fight Club cliche fantasy in California. But I don’t care. I used to and I would put up 15 picture posts of half naked hot girls to push earnest long form content to page 2 to steer away the Tumblr account names that regretfully confuses numbers with letters but I’m just too lazy for that now. And at the end of the day aren’t we all just shades of Tyler Durdens on Tumblr?

I have 757 followers right now. It took an entire year to get to 500 which, as long as you provided good content, is what I believe to be the minimum needed to be taken seriously around these here parts and be assuredly Tumblr famous. I peaked at 1,100 during my JetBlue flights and after the three of four late night liveblogs of my drunken visits to the Martin Luther King Jr.-named streets side of my psyche, tons of people left.

And I feel good about that, my diary of a 25 year old college dropout (-$12,000), former Marine combat engineer ($16,280.44), former corporate drone ($62,000), former startup founder (-$15,000), former campaign staff worker ($5,000), former professional blogger ($10,000), and former juvenile (4 girls).

PS. All the capitalized posts are written on my iPhone.

The thing about having an existential breakdown and quarter-life crisis when you don’t have a job is the abundance of time to replay it all in your head and ascribe meaning to it.

So what do you call a guy that walks into a Subway to cop a delicious tuna and meatball sandwich ($5! $5 FOOT LONGS! This is so patriotically American it makes me want to stab a flag into my heart and flay myself onto a the tomb of the unknown soldier. Why? Because this amazing jingle only works in the United States and Liberia.) and ends up breaking down crying because a John Mayer song is on the radio speakers? Do you walk out the store a better man for it? Can you figure out the lesson in that? How do I, and my girthy 12 inches of meat, fit in to the grand sandwich of life?

I still don’t know. I just know that a tuna and meatball sub is fucking delicious but I also know I don’t want that, nor Heartbreak Warfare, to be a valid life event. Yet, here we are. Unexpectedly crying in a Subway.

Sunset club meeting. The sergeant-at-arms took roll and we are now going through the minutes to discuss old business, how to put film in my camera, then it’s on to new business, how to scrape together $3k in five days for a project. The pirate’s life be for me.

I’m using this as an excuse to play on my iPhone so that the cute starbucks girl I’m flirting with on her smoke break thinks I have social proof.

I don’t think it’s working.

She’s actually really boring. And she spits :(

She says epic and legit a lot.

Game over, no final boss. She thinks her boyfriend would really like me. I said I think my girlfriend would really like to fuck her. I don’t have a girlfriend but I think my dignity is intact this round. Just not with you folks online.

The best tumblrs are always the ones where the author writes honestly about how they experience and come to terms with the surreality of being an adult and living lifestyles explained to them via pop culture. Those are always the best. Most everyone else just treat this site as their personal wish board that’ll never come true.

I, on the hand, just use voodoo dolls. Olivia Wilde is totally just waiting for the right time to divorce her photographer husband and crawl into my bed.

I don’t remember you from high school but I wrote “hey, happy birthday! ” anyway because no one else wrote anything on your wall despite the stern reminder on the right hand side bar. I’m hoping the somber realization of that doesn’t ruin your day but if it does I have half a bottle of Jameson left.

Was what I should have left.

What?

Are you watching the Olympics?

I sold my TV three months ago.

Well, find a livestream somewhere.

Of what?

Of the Olympics, idiot. Hockey’s on right now.

I’m kind of busy with something. But are Canadians playing? Are they winning? Did they replace the pucks with curling balls?

US beat Canada like dead babies at a game of babies beatings in the Olympics.

La Haine (1995)

What does your daddy do?

When you move around a lot as a kid, like me, this question gets raised a lot. It matters within the first ten minutes of hearing this question to have a worthwhile, poignant, and funny reply to win over thirty new faces, thirty new potential playmates, thirty new variables that could wreck incalculable amount of changes to your lifeline.

I never had one. My only show trick was an awkward silence until the dismissal. Eventually, the teachers’ disappointment—framed in their old granny glasses—of the fact that I’m not revealing that simple fact weighed less on me through repetition. They figured I was just extremely shy and left it at that. I actually just didn’t know, I haven’t seen him around since I was seven. But instead of saying that out loud I just gave a nod, gaze towards my shoes, and waited to shuffle back to my chair.

Ironically, while always dangled in front of the class, I unfortunately never got the same chance to sit through that one rare time in primary school where we went around discovering simple facts about each others’ lives. I never filled out sheets that explained to you I had a betta fish named Guppie in a mason jar on my desk, or that my favorite meal was spaghetti and meatballs, or that my favorite color is blue. And, likewise, I never got to know your mother was a Silicon Valley tech firm executive or that your daddy was a intellectual property rights defense lawyer. Sorry, wasn’t there, I’m just the new kid.

It never occurred to me to ask that of people and after years the uncertain became certain, I’m just certain that your parents work and provide you with which the house we inevitably sat while bored throughout the summer. Somehow I stumbled and managed to make friends that lasted throughout junior high and high school and college. We weren’t the jocks, the preps, or the goths. Those type of things don’t really exist in a high school with 80% of its students coming from Asian descents. We were just the nerd outcast kids that blended in with every other nerd outcast on the schoolyard. And that was enough for us to stick together all these years.

Tonight as all my old friends squeezed ourselves into the overstuffed pleather lounge chair at BJ’s Restaurant and Brewery—with pizookies to die for—for one of my oldest friend’s early birthday and slash going-away party the Wonder Years theme kicked in for my internal dialogue to hit on yet another Breakfast Club revelation that keeps bubbling up in my recent quarter-life existential crisis: we’re adults.

Adults that for a brief time period after high school all we ever wanted was an excuse to play grown-up and go out and eat at fancy restaurants. Adults that for a brief time period lived every day happy about the fact that there’s yet another 21st birthday popping up. Adults that for a brief time period before college graduation stressed about finding jobs to a brief period after college graduation stressed about having worked in a desk job for too long. Adults that for a brief time period in the post-Obama America were unable to even afford going out to a family-style restaurant chain to drink good beer and the eat the fuck out of some pizookies that I heard are to die for. Adults that are now one by one being regrouped, we’re no longer allowed to check off 18-25 on the census.

I look around a bit and seethed at the changes. One’s now a teacher, his dream job and I’m completely as envious of his lovely girlfriend as the absolute joy of being able to work at something you truly love. Two are going to be doctors soon and as much as I detest how little we’re already seeing them I know I’ll be seeing them much less. One is using weekend classes to accredit himself as an accountant no matter how much I goad him into a better job that won’t drag down his personality, he never agreed and is more comfortable with an assured meal ticket in hand than chase after dreams. One has clocked in over 100 hours this week at his software job already, theoretically the only one to make it out of the ‘burbs and the only rich enough—and willingly enough to do so—to pay for the tab. And then there’s my best friend, invariably lost as I am. My little odd screwball family is getting split up in the worst way possible. By force so gentle I can’t stop it with my will.

The night went okay. It wasn’t uneventful and it wasn’t a complete gabfest of stories from the past, just a lot of imposing questions about the future and how we see ourselves individually fit into it. By the end, the beers flowed heavily and the family-sized giganto oreo and chocolate chip pizookie that almost killed through belated heart diseases was consumed. We left to lounge at a fancy bar by the fire pit to further just enjoy the mutual camaraderie and good scotch.

At the end of the night when we went our separate ways knowing that this might be one of the last time we see each other as a group again, I realized suddenly what it is I never knew about any of my friends:

I don’t know what any of their daddies does.

Hosting a book club meeting. Planning and executing a kickass going-away dinner party. Sitting around with three fingers of scotch in my hand and think about life a bit while drunk-texting some classy ladies. I can’t see the future but I believe those things will happen today.

This is now my favorite show. Mark Wahlberg got smart and is now franchising off more Entourage location clones than Law and Order, but at least his formula is getting better meanwhile Law and Order: Andale High Security isn’t doing so hot.

How To Make It In America. Same docushow concept about hustlers hustling but upgraded from the struggle being pre-peak instead of peaked, fashion instead of movies, and twenty-something aging-hipsters-pre-yuppies instead of douchefucks. What awesome improvements! I’m no longer have to need to mask my bro-shame by fake laughing my way through another bullshit episode where Turtle learns the moral of the story is to stop being such a chump.

Twenty-something aging-hipsters pre-yuppies is the new hot demo now that we’re all done getting silly with the fuck-the-men attitude ‘cause we’re itching to get that new leather jacket lined with iPads and the fancy downtown lofts we always dreamed of.

Today is a good day. Today I found something else to top my bucket list.

—————

Blood Falls | Taylor Glacier, Antarctica | Atlas Obscura

Roughly 2 million years ago, the Taylor Glacier sealed beneath it a small body of water which contained an ancient community of microbes. Trapped below a thick layer of ice, they have remained there ever since, isolated inside a natural time capsule. Evolving independently of the rest of the living world, these microbes exist without heat, light, or oxygen, and are essentially the definition of “primordial ooze.” The trapped lake has very high salinity and is rich in iron, which gives the waterfall its red color. A fissure in the glacier allows the subglacial lake to flow out, forming the falls without contaminating the ecosystem within.

The existence of the Blood Falls ecosystem shows that life is indeed possible in the most extreme of conditions. Life could perhaps exist on other planets with similar environments and similar bodies of frozen water - notably Mars and Jupiter’s moon Europa. But regardless of extraterrestrial life, the earth’s Blood Falls are a wonder to behold both visually, and scientifically.

My friend Dan was such a prick. Don’t let the fact that he still sips Elmer’s glue in grade school deter you from calling him a retard; he doesn’t do that for attention, he just likes the way it swooshes in his mouth. What a Palin.

But Dan’s dad was super duper rich so playground rules dictated we had to be nice to Dan, because after we’re all done swinging on swings and monkey around on monkey bars Dan got to choose who he takes home to play Super Mario World on a Trinitron. Tragically it was never any of the girls.

I didn’t even know what this game was about but I just knew I had to beat it. I’ve been playing the same ten JAWS games on my NES my whole life and according to the PRO TIPPERS at Nintendo Power, no fucking armies of koopas and centipedes or wayward shells should stop me from saving the princess. None. Except some brat named Dan. I wasn’t going to take his verbal and physical abuse like the others to play Mario so I went to my other friend Chris—he liked Star Trek so I liked Star Trek and not Star Wars—and we spent one recess creating a dastardly elaborate plan to maximize our only fungible negotiation piece: Christmas. We got our parents to agree to split and buy us a SNES.

Chris had it first because unbeknown to me my mom wasn’t able to chip in. Chris’ parents simply gave me the SNES for free after Chris was bored with it after a few months. And also ‘cause he had some weird fetish for locking his sister outside the house. I was too young to care about pity, or maybe I did, but having a SNES is pretty fucking big deal enough to stuff awkward childhood emotions into dark closets and focus on the mission at hand: the princess.

I played this game so hard I broke the controller. Now no one can play Luigi with me but I didn’t care. I’m going to win this myself and I’m going to head to that scary pirate ship swirl thing in the center and I’m going to upfuck Bowser’s little world. I had swagger then, from playing Mario. Don’t tell me about the fucking stripes and stars on the flag, old white lady, I have a manifest destiny to save the princess.

I breezed through the worlds. The frustration is of course each of the boss fortresses didn’t contain the princess. And it just aggravated me to no end, though at the same time made me want to finish everything as soon as I can. Forest of Illusion gave me the most trouble but the princess. Oh, how she cried out to me in the middle of the night from from the family room, through the cheap and shitty US-made TV.

Three months after it’s all been said and done, on a Wednesday, I finally finished the FINAL BOSS. I was proud, I ran through every level and stomped on every turtle and I got a kiss from the princess for my troubles. I walked up to Dan after school when he was ready to seduce more young boys to play Home Alone with him and told him said fact—that it was lame he’s picking boys to play home alone—and to brag about how I beat Mario in three months. I also wanted to tell him that his Talkboy is lame despite how much I wanted one too but didn’t get around to it. Dan looked at me for a bit, mumbled into his Talkboy and played it back to me: “You’re so stupid, I finished it in two days by using Star World.”

Fuck you, Dan. What the fuck is Star World?

“Haha! Stupid! It’s the top-secret shortcut in Vanilla Dome that takes you directly to the castle. No wonder you didn’t know about it, cause you’re just too dumb.” In slow-mo.

I’m left stunned as Dan and his little goons went away. This was a turning point, those goons later grew up to be the worst bullies in school by the time I moved away. On the shortbus ride home I kept thinking I should replay this game, to hit the secret world and really get the satisfaction of finishing a video game that took me much more energy and planning in real life to get in the first place because otherwise I just feel… incomplete.

The bothered me for so long but I couldn’t pick up the controller. Why would the princess not tell me about the Star World? It would have been so much easier. After a week I rode on my Huffy down the valley to give the SNES back to Chris. He seemed happy for it to be back in his life but being an Aspies case I couldn’t tell. He offered to play Mario with me but I told him no, thanks, the princess is dead to me. That and the other controller doesn’t work.

Something in me broke. I didn’t care when the 64 came out. I didn’t covet the PlayStation. The Dreamcast didn’t entice me. And since I didn’t live in a dorm or a frat, I never cared about Halo. I just don’t want to feel empty and frustrated ever again.

So don’t tell me let’s just be friends. It’s already ruined. I know you have a Star World map. I know it. It’s the secret place that contains all your secrets, stories, and heartbreaks. I want to engage that level and I want to complete this game. Telling me let’s just keep it Yoshi’s Island isn’t so simple when I want to be in your Chocolate Island, explore your Donut Plains, cross your Butter Bridge, and complete the special Star Roads. Otherwise, what’s the point? You constantly hide, every now and then scaring the shit out of me, and continuing to haunt me.

You’re my Big Boo.

PS. I still hate you, Dan. I don’t care if you’re going to HBS now and will likely end up making millions corrupting humanity, you’re still just a glue eater to me. And your Talkboy was lame, it’s just an overpriced fucking tape recorder.

You know what’s funny is how good board games are at telling you what life is going to be like. Monopoly explains greed. Operation teaches you not to touch the sides. And Sorry shows that your buddies are vengeful dickwads.

Then you get to thinking that The Game of Life might really be what life would be like if you never got the joy of playing the Sims for the whole weekend straight. Then you start to fantasize maybe this is how it’ll be: find a pink peg, settle down, have more pegs in the car, and end up happy because you stacked the life event cards to your favor before everyone sat down.

But it’s not. And so it got me thinking to how to better the experience and I think I got it. Staple a LIFE game board to the bottom of a Girl Talk board and to beat the whole thing you just have to be really good at football. That’s how you win life.

Today it’s timing. It always comes down to timing. Sometimes it’s external sources of time that fucks you over, like how she met him first. Sometimes it’s internal, like the fact that I’m unready to do something new and something better. Be patient, but not forever, for the good things and the good people. Once you take into the fact that everyone is essentially just waiting, waiting, and waiting some more to get what they want or start what they want it’s amazing that things get done at all. I guess it’s a good thing then that there are 300 million people in this country and 6 billion around the world all milling about on their own fucking program.

raptoravatar:

Pitchfork= not the bully in this situation

Tumbledore= arguably squatting, but rightfully pissed

Tumblr= bobbling this common courtesy thing all to Hell like Pitchfork asked them to prom or some shit and they only had fifteen minutes to get ready

To be fair: Pitchfork’s legal team could just have easily filed a DMCA complaint about the copyright name infringement. This would then shutdown any web business from operating past a single week without addressing this problem. The DMCA complaints would mostly almost always be on the side of the major corporate entities that invested time, money, and law into their branding. If you have the time and money to outfight such a claim, then by all means, pick this battle.

This is really just a time-saver, like when you bust out the Jump To Conclusions mat during a house party for midgets.

dontplayitcool:

bthny:

tumbledore:

I’ve run pitchfork.tumblr.com for almost a year now. I had several posts up and I followed 28 people with the account. All my posts are now gone and my address has been changed to pitchfork1.tumblr.com. Where my blog once stood now stands the official Tumblr for Pitchfork Media Inc. Watch out, Soup, I hear Campbell’s is gunning for you next.

Recently, one of my friends who is subscribed to my pitchfork tumblr was surprised to see a sudden change in the content I was posting. That’s because Tumblr stole my subdomain and gave (sold?) it to Pitchfork Media Inc. Keep in mind that the word “pitchfork” is not a proprietary name, it is a noun dating back to the year 1364, so they had no legal right to the word or the subdomain. It clearly wasn’t a case of impersonation as none of my posts had anything to do with music. If there was some kind of content quality threshold that failed to be met which led to my blog’s demise, then 98% of Tumblr should now be blank. Is it possible there’s a certain amount of time that can pass between posts before Tumblr deletes your blog? If so, they should probably make that information public just in case someone accidentally makes the mistake of going on vacation.

The worst part of all this is that if you subscribe to the RSS feed for the “new” Pitchfork Tumblr (http://pitchfork.tumblr.com/rss), you’ll see the first five posts I made are still there! There’s even a post with a screenshot from my March Madness pool standings with my name and face on it. Sadly, I apparently no longer control this image or this information, nor can I exercise my right to remove it from the Internet. But hey, it’s not like these amateurs haven’t pulled this crap before, they’ll probably just write some new content policy after the fact in order to justify it like last time.

So make sure you back up all your content!

If you think your content shouldn’t be deleted and moved arbitrarily at the whims of corporate latecomers, then you should consider contacting the Tumblr team to ask them to stop disrespecting their loyal users:

Email support@tumblr.com and or call them out on Twitter

#NoBloodForIndieMusic #MemesNotBombs #TumblrPitchforkedMeLikeABaleOfHay

I haven’t been reading Tumblr lately but this popped up and I find it delectable. Because it’s happened to me!

Last August I registered mediaite.tumblr.com and piped in a RSS feed from Gawker. This was prior to “Lucky” Dan “The Man” Abraham’s media site going live. I just thought it to be a funny, albeit benign, joke at fucking with corporatism— admittedly my threshold for what qualifies as a faceless organizations is getting lower in my old age as I’m losing my vigor for system rebellion, how is a fancy lawyer’s vanity project really worth fucking with?

7 days I get an email from a Tumblr customer service rep extolling the problems of “copyright infringement.” Apparently Gawker’s RSS feed with partial posts and advertising is considered copyrighted material and the use of it… was used as a justification for the Tumblr rep to review my list of other Tumblr names, remarked how I have an unusual collection of trade names. 8 days later I logged in to find I’m the new owner of mediaite1.tumblr.com without further contact from Tumblr.

Lesson learned? Name spaces, especially SUBDOMAINS on TUMBLR DOT COM are not your property. You paid no considerations on your end to hold on to a particular name, whether a corporate entity is involved or not. It’s like being shocked that hot girls named Lexus and Mercedes aren’t your property, you’re just leasing their time with green funhouse tickets.

One fun part of Tumblr at the beginning were the fake and novelty accounts. I still giggle every time something as ridiculously named as riaa.tumblr.com adds me. But I like this too: when people are taking bickering over an account name seriously it just means people are taking Tumblr way too seriously, which then means Tumblr, baking in bicoastal ovens of hipsterdom that is Williamsburg and Silver Lake, is now ready for public consumption. Twitter had this exact same problem 6 months before every bimbo on cable news channels started chanting it nonstop every day. And all of them, except for Rick “I’ll Say Whatever I Want” Sanchez, have been boring introspections.

I can’t wait until we’re going back to AOL days and adding XXX and numbers to account names. It’ll easily filter out stuff I should be caring about.

Edit: Before I could pop up Photoshop to tint my avatar icon to a soft black hue, Pitchfork already issued a statement post! With screenshots! Tres nerdy.

axiis.org - The Browser Wars - Visualized as Tree Rings

rodrigofigueiredo:

Awesome AR idea for IKEA !!!

cameronr:

I really like WeTransfer too. Making file transfer sexy again. The hi-res background changes as your file uploads. The images are actually ad buys. They’re usually visually interesting and “unbranded” except for the little link in bottom right hand corner. This image is for Bugaboo Strollers.

breefield:

Down for maintenance, neato.

jakelodwick:

Shaun Inman’s awesome home page.

dbreunig:

I would pull 80% of NBC Universal’s content from competing services and give it away for free to my own subscribers. It would be my $30 billion loss leader, producing content for my internet and cable subscribers.

Just saying.

peterwknox:markyb:rosiesiman: an interactive map of housing + prices in NYC

soxiam:

Sqaud

taitran:

Facebook’s Own Statistics Show Content-Sharing Increase, New Status-Update Trends, and More

December 2nd, 2009

• Average user has 130 friends on the site
• Average user sends 8 friend requests per month
• Average user spends more than 55 minutes per day on Facebook
• Average user clicks the Like button on 9 pieces of content each month
• Average user writes 25 comments on Facebook content each month
• Average user becomes a fan of 2 Pages each month
• Average user is invited to 3 events per month
• Average user is a member of 12 groups

bunch:

1. BUSINESS AS UNUSUAL
Forget the recession: the societal changes that will dominate 2010 were set in motion way before we temporarily stared into the abyss.

2. URBANY
Urban culture is the culture. Extreme urbanization, in 2010, 2011, 2012 and far beyond will lead to more sophisticated and demanding consumers around the world.

3. REAL-TIME REVIEWS
Whatever it is you’re selling or launching in 2010, it will be reviewed ‘en masse’, live, 24/7.

4. (F)LUXURY
Closely tied to what constitutes status, which itself is becoming more fragmented, luxury will be whatever consumers want it to be over the next 12 months.

5. MASS MINGLING
Online lifestyles are fueling ‘real world’ meet-ups like there’s no tomorrow, shattering all predictions about a desk-bound, virtual, isolated future.

6. ECO-EASY
To really reach some meaningful sustainability goals in 2010, corporates and governments will have to forcefully make it ‘easy’ for consumers to be more green, by restricting the alternatives.

7. TRACKING & ALERTING
Tracking and alerting are the new search, and 2010 will see countless new INFOLUST services that will help consumers expand their web of control.

8. EMBEDDED GENEROSITY
Next year, generosity as a trend will adapt to the zeitgeist, leading to more pragmatic and collaborative donation services for consumers.

9. PROFILE MYNING
With hundreds of millions of consumers now nurturing some sort of online profile, 2010 will be a good year to help them make the most of it (financially), from intention-based models to digital afterlife services.

10. MATURIALISM
2010 will be even more opinionated, risque, outspoken, if not ‘raw’ than 2009; you can thank the anything-goes online world for that. Will your brand be as daring?

tedr:

Chrome has 12% Browser Share of Digg Users » Dogster Inc. Company Blog

Do music artists fare better in a world with illegal file-sharing?

soupsoup:

We love helping publishers make their content available to large groups of readers, and working on ways to make the world’s information useful and accessible through our search results. At the same time, we’re also aware of the fact that creating high-quality content is not easy and, in many cases, expensive. This is one of the reasons why we initially launched First Click Free for Google News and Google Web Search — to allow publishers to sell access to their content in general while still allowing users to find it through our search results.

soxiam:

ColoRotate

emergentfutures:

IBM Debuts Food Traceability iPhone App

Today at the IBM Information on Demand event, IBM will demo a new app that will bring the Internet of Things to the iPhone. The as yet unreleased iPhone app is called Breadcrumbs and it will give consumers access to information about grocery food items. The app will be able to scan barcodes and deliver a summary of the ingredients in a food item, along with when it was manufactured. That data is usually on the food label, but Breadcrumbs goes a step further - it can provide extra information such as product recall data. If a product has been recalled in the past, this app will tell the consumer all of the relevant details.

richtong:

As someone who happens to appreciate a number of the products DWR has brought to market, it’s disheartening to read about how low the design & executive teams were willing to go just to make a little more money just to satisfy the board.  It is quite possibly one of the most dangerous ways to move forward with a business.

DWR has done a lot of good, and I’m happy to read that there’s at least some conscience to cut the shit and get back to what made it what it is.

solid piece jeff.

datainsightsideas:

My friend, Doug Petkanics, is a true startup hero. In less than two weeks, he released Snapm - a marketplace for amateur photographers to post interesting work and for consumers to discover/hire their services. Take a look around, explore and offer feedback.

v1.0 underway! Kudos Doug.

tedroden:

I enjoy reading ReadWriteWeb.com, it’s a solid site. However, one little detail has always bothered me: its use of the majestic plural or royal we. So, rather than ignore it, I did what any other rational person would do…

I created a greasemonkey script to change “we” to “I” on readwriteweb.com. It’s terribly done, but you can install it for yourself.

I’m becoming quite the greasemonkey nerd. See also: my “I fixed tumblr” script.

ak47:tscp:Apple Accessories

marinich:

Anybody wondering if advertising is a legitimate form of creative art: Don’t.

• Integrity is our most important commodity: Avoid writing or posting anything that would embarrass The Times or compromise your ability to do your job.

• Assume that your professional life and your personal life will merge online regardless of your care in separating them.

• Even if you use privacy tools (determining who can view your page or profile, for instance), assume that everything you write, exchange or receive on a social media site is public.

• Just as political bumper stickers and lawn signs are to be avoided in the offline world, so too are partisan expressions online.

cameronr:

Everyone needs to experience the insanity going on over at Jim Carrey’s website. Easily the best celebrity website of all time. Of all time.

inky:

Re: AOL’s new logo

It’s literally the first thing you’d come up with, and the first you’d throw out.

dbreunig:

Roku beat Apple to the punch, launching their channel store today. This could make my WD TV obsolete, very quickly.

I just requested my dev kit. Tumblr on HDTVs, anyone? What app would you want on your Roku?

poobah:

Rude Aps

r:

Use pinboard.in

lickystickypickyme:

Click on the ingredients you have in fridge and cupboard and they will help you with recipes. With what you have.

Anyone can be a great cook with the fancy stuff. It is cooking from scratch what really sets you apart.

(ah well…..Monday babbling)

check it out here

caro:

Hey, branding nerds: AOL is revamping its logo along with its NYSE debut on December 10. Read more here.

trendd:

(via dorka)

brit:

If you didn’t see it yesterday, we launched a collection of Search Stories about how people use Google. This one, Parisian Love, is my absolute favorite and is guaranteed to make you smile. If you have 53 seconds to spare, you should check it out.

john:

patrickmoberg:

Internet Vices

fred-wilson:

officiallyrad:

Fred Wilson testifying before NYC council in support of #netneutrality

Flickr co-founder tries his hand at another Web startup - The Globe and Mail

There’s a lot of hyperbole regarding anything tech, but I challenge you to refute the the Interenet is not in the top-tier of anything that has ever happened…

(via tedr)

betashop:

Don’t forget nor minimize #10.  Exercise your body and your mind will keep up!

inothernews:

dailyhuff:

I see what you did there.

[Original]

I’m serious: the NBC “local” sites?  NEED TO GET RID OF THEIR FUCKING WRITERS.

taitran:

mary1in:

Tweeting at the Speed of Scale /Logic+Emotion

taitran:

xoai:

The brand’s social penetration (via activeside)

suzannexie:

this may be true. creative types aren’t driven by the numbers as much as the analytical types are. numbers being pure hard cash.

hiten:

n8:

Dan Pink, previously Al Gore’s speechwriter, displays evidence found that when doing innovative tasks, using monetary incentives actually has a detrimental effect in getting the task accomplished….

jstn:

The gesture is only half the battle though, you need appropriate feedback. Once the reload is activated, the scrollable area of the list actually changes to leave the feedback UI in-place (rather than bouncing offscreen). Without this part, the UI is unintuitive. And once the loading is complete, the UI makes itself disappear.

I don’t use Twitter very much so this app was brought to my attention by someone else, but it blew me away instantly. It’s rare for an application to generate so much discussion with a single point of UI, but it’s a real masterstroke for something that has such a high quality experience even without it. If you see one piece of interaction design this year, make it this one. (thx petervidani)

stewf:

Did this with Feltron for my company’s 20th anniversary. Launched today. Working with Nicholas was a breeze. I highly recommend him for all your stat porn needs.

aaroneous:

I always knew there was something different about this taqueria…

davidkaneda:

30 Android icons, with source files, released under a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license.

trendd:

Page Take-Over: Resident Evil on gametrailers.com

These types of page take-overs are waring on me, but this one has a cool feature where you can actually shoot zombies at certain parts of the trailer (when it says “Shoot the zombies!!” at  the bottom). Pretty cool addition.

soupsoup:

hiten:

Tumblr Shares Stats: 20 Million Uniques, 420 Million Impressions Per Month

taitran:

The Visual Miscellaneum

(via youmightfindyourself)

bijan:

I’m a regular reader of my friend Brad Feld’s blog.

As usual, his post today, I Want More Information, Not Less, got me thinking. I just read it a few moments ago on this flight that I’m on from SFO to Boston.

Brad’s post is about information and data. Brad addresses the typical sentiment about data overflow and how can we manage all of this data. It’s a great post.

Some of my favorite services start by collecting a crazy amount of data. But the reason they are valuable to me is because of the creative products they offer with that data.

Few examples:

Last.fm

When I listen to music on my laptop, sonos or iphone, the history of my music streams are recorded or scrobbled to my last.fm profile. Since I joined the service, last.fm has scrobbled over 19,000 tracks which is about 18 tracks per day. Thats a ton of data.

But that data set isn’t the interesting part. The interesting part is that if you are a last.fm user and you come to my profile you can see if we have similar listening habbits or not.  Here’s what happens when I goto Mo’s profile on last.fm

Also, last.fm uses all of that data and offers me a personalized radio station based on my friends and my personal preference.

Twitter

There is a ton of data on Twitter. I make best use of all of that data by

a) following people that are interesting to me (some I know personally and some I’ve never met). But I care about what they have to say.

b) Twitter search. At this point, I probably use Twitter search 3-5x a day. Sometimes way more than that. It helps me filter the data for just what I need at that moment.

c) Another way to deal with the data is by the new Lists feature. Robert Scoble has post about Lists today and how it changed his consumption model for Twitter.

Foursquare

Foursquare is a lot of things to a lot of people. The service captures a ton of data about me and my friends. Every single day we ‘check-in’ & tell foursquare where we are at any moment.

There is a fun game play that uses that data by earning badges, earning Mayorships, and scoring on the leaderboard. There is also a real utlitity that comes from that dataset as well. I receive tips from the service and I have a history of where I’ve been that is super helpful to me.

Plus, I get implicit restaurant recommendations because I can see where my friends are dining, etc.

Fitness

My iPhone collects a ton of my fitness information thanks to apps like RunKeeper and Nike+. I’m planning on getting Fitbit to collect even more of my phsyical data. I love the applications that come from all of this information.

Brad is spot on when he says in his post:

I don’t believe the issue is too much information.  This is an independent variable that we can’t control.  For the foreseeable future, there will be a continuous and rapid increase of information as more of the world gets digitized, more individuals become content creators, more systems open up and provide access to their data, and more infrastructure for creating, storing, and transmitting information (and data) gets built.

Now comes the fun part. What other creative products will be born from this mountain of realtime and non-realtime data.

There are plenty of things to do in the world of filtering, analytics, search, aggregation, curation, entertainment, recommendations, and discovery. And the best part is the stuff we haven’t even considered yet.

Long live data.

kayfabe:

golden-and-delicious:

And you guys wonder why I block those apps now. :I

As the article says, if you need to scam people to keep your company going, you have a flawed business plan.