(Blog)

One time (now) I read this article about some guy giving a college graduation speech. It’s this speech. And then I rewrote it as my own speech, which I prefer better, because I’m young and selfish and unkind, just like the guy giving the original speech expects me to be.

What are old people good for, besides ridicule? Tales of regret.

Once, I was poor, and it was awful; once, I worked at a slaughterhouse, and it wasn’t. I’ve imbibed poop-water in a distant land and it gave me the shits for months. I shot a hockey puck at a girl I liked, and missed. Once, a nervous-hair-chewing girl came to town, and moved away, and I was kind of kind to her when she was around, but mostly she wasn’t; I think that’s because I was selfish.

See, everyone thinks they’re the invincible lead in their own story within a greater world; it’s not that we don’t care, we just can’t see outside our stories. I’m using stories as a metaphor because I’m an author, so that’s all I know.

Being the hero of your own story makes being kind tough, because who gives a shit about the nervous-hair-chewing girl, right? You’re the hero. Still, as we get older, our reflexes dull and we can’t play FPS games anymore, so instead we play casual Facebook games and give all our money to Gameloft, and Zynga, and others. We slow down and lose our faculties. We can’t tell jokes anymore. We realize through endless microtransactions that we were, after all, not the lead of the story at all.

And like that, this cruel, inhuman modern life grinds you down into dust. But it something like fairy dust. And if you have kids, you’ll sprinkle them with it with every lesson and every story you pass on. Many of you have decades of the stuff on you, and inside you. You’re even breathing it in right now, your parents’ lives. See, they live on through you, and you’ll live on through your children, in an endless cycle of reincarnation through fairy dust.

I’d say “don’t be a dick”, but some Trekkie nerd already made that speech, so I’ll just say this: In 80 years or so, I’ll be 134, probably with robot legs, and laser eyes, and a cyberbrain, and a lot of cats. Hopefully by that time, some of you will have become kinder, because you’re all a bunch of dicks right now. I can tell. I used to be one of you. When you are as kind as the Element of Kindness, and we’re all living in space, drop me a line, and I’ll say “I told you so”, and we can arm-wrestle with our cybernetic future arms and toss back a space brew or seven. Cheers, now get the fuck out.

Upon reading this article on the predictability of year-end top 10 lists, I decided to make my own. Because someone called-out Pitchfork (and me) for being as predictable as the year-end top 10 lists referred to in that article.

10. Any self-respecting egoist music critic is going to pick his/her personal favorite as #1. Also, Mumford & Suns is a hipster Dave Matthews Band, and fuck them.

9. If the author didn’t understand Four Tet’s latest record, there is little hope for him as a music critic, because it’s not dense. He’s dense.

8. This is America, and it’s OK to hate other countries (ironically (unironically), of course). So, fuck all foreign records. Exception: British bands. Because they speak our language, wierdly.

7. Any self-respecting hipster music critic will not include any breakout successes. Rather, they must deride the band’s rise to the top and declare them to be uncool sell-outs. Especially if they have penned many positive articles about that band in the past. Arcade Fire? Yeah, they used to be cool, back when they were unknown and in that one Apple commercial. Now, they’re in many commercials and movies, so they sound like shit, retroactively.

6. Obama is President of the USA. Whites don’t have to go on pretending to like hip-hop anymore. It’s a post-racial world. Let’s all eat spaghetti and Braunschweiger, folks.

5. The old-timer records belong further down the list because they’re only even on the list for irony’s sake. Everybody knows a good hipster has no sense of history, and everybody knows that music only got really good since you started writing top 10 lists. Oh, and in the 80s.

4. Yes, Kanye West does deserve his own spot, despite hip-hop having no place on a modern hipster music critic’s top 10 list. Because Kanye transcends hip-hop. His beautiful dark twisted fantasy is our beautiful dark twisted fantasy.

3. This is the slot for the obvious sub-mainstream hit, actually, the one that almost made it, but didn’t. Because bands who almost sell-out but have to lick their wounds and come crawling back to college radio are the best. MGMT, it’s nice to have you back, you shitty disco hacks.

2. This is the spot for whichever album everyone else chose as #1, obviously. Let’s call this spot “Your Favorite Record is Only my #2 Pick”.

1. And finally, a good hipster music critic is going to put his/her personal favorite here. This is for the album that he/she either a) lost his/her virginity to, b) imagined losing his/her virginity to, c) listened to the most while high, d) listened to while sitting on the hood of a car looking at the night sky pretending to be in some John Hughes movie or something, hoping that someone would pass by and see it, and think “that dude’s pretty cool. It’s like he’s in a John Hughes movie, or something.” For example: 2008–M83, 2009–Animal Collective, and 2010–Beach House.

Apparently, the Associated Press, in a noble effort to appear as much as an obsolete legacy media dinosaur as possible, has rules barring bloggers from citing more than four words out of an AP article without paying them fees for their “journalism”. Details at this Boing Boing blog post, I mean, journalistic article.

This got me thinking: What would AP headlines look like were everything past the first four words chopped off? I checked out recent AP headlines and here are a few perfectly legal fair use citations from the AP, under their stringent rules:

“Bali bomber warns of”
“Hundreds of same-sex couples”
“Cuban TV shows new”
“Celtics rout Lakers 131-92”
“Clinton asks top donors”
“Mississippi River breaks through”
“Bush to urge Congress”
“Probe: Pentagon lawyers sought”

These spartan headlines are almost more eye-catching than the five-or-more word headlines available at the AP’s site. Perhaps I’m on to something. I could perhaps even put together a little web service that does this automatically, but I can’t be bothered, because in the end, who cares about the AP anyway?

“When I walk down the street and only 3 or 4 shots are fired at me, I find it hard to stay awake.”

That’s the quote that stood out, among numerous outstanding quotes from this excerpt of a book of post-modern stream-of-consciousness madness by an author known only by the initials H.C.

It’s not new, especially by internet standards. In fact, by said standards, it’s ancient history, and I’m almost positive an entire generation has completely forgotten about it by now. It’s a relic of the days when WIRED was wired rather than tired (WIRED readers will get the reference), and anything with .com at the end was automatically invaluable. Much of what the original C3F site spoofs, such as Pathfinder and the original incarnation of MSN, are bygone relics that the Sidekick generation has never seen or heard of.

I guess you could say it’s something like The Catcher in the Rye meets Snow Crash meets any random blog post from Maddox.

Note that you can read the whole book by starting here and replacing the numbers in the URL until page 6, where the author makes things a little less maddening (most of the time) for the reader by providing links. Enjoy.

A “spinner” wheel contains a spoke plate attached to the wheel’s hub, which begins to spin using the kinetic energy generated by the vehicle’s motion. Additionally, it is not uncommon for the outer spoke plate to be fixed so that even when the vehicle is moving, it remains stationary.

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Dear Mr. Limes,

I regret to inform you that the offices of GodJesus Ministries International, Inc. have suffered great financial burdens in light of recent events, and that we here at GodJesus Ministries International, Inc. as such have been forced to cut our costs, as our operating budget for fiscal year 2006 has been reduced substantially.

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Parking lots are amongst the least aesthetic and most strictly functional of buildings, and they are by design not unlike the modern Colosseum of suburbia, where soccer moms in SUVs and part-time eco-fascists in Priuses are forced into a daily gladiatorial bloodbath. With one, sometimes two entrances and exits, narrow driveways, tight turning spaces, and enough room for hundreds of vehicles, parking lots seem to have been designed expressly to pit motorist against motorist, to be the place where near-road raging motorists finally crack and go on murderous rampages. I wonder what the parking garage death toll worldwide is.

My experiences as a victim of these labyrinths lead me to conclude that the engineers and architects behind the design of most large parking lots are sociopaths. The single entrance and exit, and cramped spaces can be explained away by the fact that land is at a premium, but bizarre numbering systems wherein parking space #499 directly precedes #800? Floor levels marked 4/5 and 5/6 instead of 4, 5, and 6? Obviously the work of a murderous sociopath who gains satisfaction from the torture of folks just trying to park.

Such was the picture the other day. My librarian friend Louise and I took the metro rail to Downtown Miami, and I parked at the Dadeland Station parking lot. This was not nearly as difficult as I’d previously expected. I even managed an easy to remember space: #711. As in “7-Eleven”. What I didn’t realize until we returned to the parking lot was that in this parking lot, numbers didn’t necessarily run in order. We were on floor 4/5, which was the floor we remembered parking on, started counting upward from the 400s, and immediately ended up in the 800s.

We took the elevator one level down, hoping that the 700s would be directly below the 800s. This, however, was not the method to this madness, for after some walking we found ourselves again in the 800s, and then the 900s. In addition to this, there was a series of about ten parking spaces on each floor numbered with each year in a particular decade. Cute, really cute. I’m sure there was much back-patting for that idea. At any rate, after climbing up as high as floor 5/6 and still finding ourselves nowhere near parking space #711, we were still at a loss.

From there, the details are hazy, but I do remember entering the elevator a second time, walking down about a half level, and then back up a bit, passing the 1980s series of parking spaces, and finally reaching space #711. I don’t really know how we got back to our space, and if I ever have to park in this parking lot again, I still won’t be able to navigate it any better. I can imagine someone leering at the monitor, watching us trudge through this maze through the security cameras with a sick pleasure. When you’re lost in a parking garage, it is definitely not you. I’m a college student and Louise is a librarian. Navigating numbers is her career.

I can only conclude that this parking garage was specifically designed for people to get lost in.