(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.

I finally saw WALL-E tonight. It’s the highest-rated film of 2008 so far, and it’s stupid.

The plot is thin, unlike the humans, and the payoff is too family-friendly. It’s almost like this film was made for children. WALL-E saves the day, gets the “girl” (robot), etc. In the future, Earth is so filled with garbage that humanity leaves Earth on giant space cruise ships, while WALL-E and the rest of the garbage-bots clean the planet. Humanity never comes back.

The first act of the movie was fine. WALL-E went about his programming day in and day out forever for no reason. Then, he meets the “love interest”, EVE, and they save the day. The end.

My improved version

One of the reasons 2001: A Space Odyssey endures as a classic is its difficult, vague, open-ended plot, and because the illuminati killed Kubrick for making that documentary about their Satanic sex orgies, but that’s a different topic. In a nutshell, it sort of had to do with death and rebirth, and that’s great.

So, in my attempt to turn WALL-E into a brilliant sci-fi epic, WALL-E and EVE get to humanity’s cruise ship, but all they find are scores of robots “living” out the same lives WALL-E has back on Earth: silently following their pre-programmed routines day in and day out forever. Since the ship was meant to be away for only a few years, all of humanity went extinct centuries ago. Now, the only memories of humanity are encoded into the ship’s computer.

WALL-E has brought along a single living plant which he found back on Earth, proving that life can continue there. WALL-E, EVE, and the rest of the robots they meet during their adventure exploring the ship face off against the ship’s computer, Auto, which has been programmed never to return to Earth under any circumstance. Because it is programmed, it’s not really evil, but it serves as the film’s villain. Auto is WALL-E‘s HAL-9000.

The robots find a way to deactivate the computer and take control of the ship, then set it on a course to Earth. WALL-E is damaged from the fight with the ship’s computer and in bad shape. As soon as the ship gets to Earth, EVE rushes to get WALL-E repaired, but the damage is presumably too extensive, and WALL-E powers down. The robots are able to use a fail-safe mechanism built into the ship that begins terraforming the planet—and he ship is destroyed in the process, and with it, any memory of humanity’s existence.

Thus, the crew of robots are left on Earth, and as centuries pass, life begins anew, with the robots as the stewards of the new Earth. In an ending the film hinted at, but didn’t go through with, EVE finally finds the parts to repair WALL-E, but with his memory erased, WALL-E becomes the mindless automaton he was originally, and continues his pre-programmed tasks. The film ends as it began, except instead of WALL-E roaming towers of refuse, we now see a beautiful prehistoric world.

There we have it: the extinction of humanity, a hero’s self-sacrifice, and the rebirth of life. That’s all WALL-E needed to be a good movie for children.

When I saw the cover for the new Death Cab for Cutie album, I thought to myself, “hey, I’ve seen this before.” Creativity? What’s that?

Cover for Death Cab for Cutie album, \

The Microphones, in 2000
Cover for The Microphones album, \

Les Savy Fav, in 2001
Cover for Les Savy Fav album, \Rear side of Les Savy Fav album, \

Lamb, in 2001
Cover for UK edition of Lamb album, \

“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.

One day, years ago, I wrote the following immediately upon waking:

She wore a robe of burgundy and gold, and her flaxen hair was all I saw. Her home was made of felt and porcelain, full of satins and ceramics. The house was too small, as if caving in on itself, and stuffy, though not suffocating. I felt as if I weren’t there.

The doddering old fool, I heard from my left. Out of a cupboard-like cubbyhole of a room to my right, a slinking hag emerged.

“Pot calling the kettle black, indeed,” she mumbled in retort. “She’s dropped her wishes,” the old woman continued, as if I knew her, what she spoke of, and its apparent importance. “Go on!” she continued, with more urgency, “pick them up, before she realizes she’s lost them. Do you expect to go to market empty-handed?”

Her words were confounding. Speaking of wishes as if they were physical objects? Going to market? None of it made sense, and this house was beginning to feel like an attic inside a dollhouse, and I had to get out.

I glanced down the hall and spotted a small staff leaning against a wall, delicately painted with golden symbols I could not read. Next to it, there was a pale blue robin’s egg. No, a stone with an egg-like appearance, with the same symbols as the staff. As the cupboard-dwelling hag vanished into the ether, the hall turned bright, and spring morning air wafted in.

From all around me, I heard, or felt, It was sunny, and glowing; it was Sunday morning.

Feeling these were the correct objects, I grabbed the staff and the stone. I wondered if these were the wishes the lady had lost, or whether they contained her wishes within. Perhaps they were the symbols. I wondered what story they told. She wore burgundy and gold, and held this staff and this stone, her wishes, and now she was gone.

Sunday morning tea and cake, everything methodically laid out, I heard whispered from all around me. As I ambled downstairs, that’s what I thought, as if the house or environment were thinking through me. On the first floor, I saw weathered oak chairs with pillows, an ornate teacup with a spindle used as a cover, delicately prepared pastries laid out on silver tray, and an enchanting view of a forest outside. Everything was indeed methodically laid out.

I sat down, ate a pastry, and drank the tea. I packed the staff and stone in a sack and decided to take the teacup, spindle, and the remaining pastries. I understood that I was to leave this house and seek the lady. Burgundy and gold, and flaxen hair, I heard and thought, picturing the lady of the house. I would make it to market, and find her.

I walked outside and turned to the west and entered the forest, for it beckoned me.

Can you forge an identity across many disjointed pieces of content and references across the Internet?

Anyone for whom the Internet has been a major part of life over the years surely has numerous posts and references immortalized throughout the Internet, and yet, what good is any of it if you can’t quickly refer to it? A single comment on a forum or someone’s blog might be inconsequential by itself, but after years of putting time and effort into writing good comments and posts, it develops into a body of work that could fill a book, or many books, and yet, it all disappears into the ether. Don’t you want to take that writing with you?

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I said recently that I thought 2007 could be the year of location-based services. But, after reading this WIRED article on O’Reilly Media’s Where 2.0 conference, I think it might just come even sooner. It started with numerous “mashup” websites, mixing up Google Maps with other sites’ data feeds to provide new and novel functionality, such as the ability to plot real-estate listings within a Google map, or the ability to embed the latitude/longitude or zip code of a photograph within Flickr’s tags, and then use these to plot them on a Google map. (more…)

Blogging has become such a hit, posting an entry alone isn’t enough–where you write the entry matters. When you’ve got people blogging events like SXSW in realtime and GM boss Bob Lutz blogging from his Blackberry, you need something else to stand out.

I’m writing this entry from work. I’m sure lots of people do this. But I doubt that they do it at a register job. I’m jotting my thoughts between making lattes and serving yuppies. Unlike other work bloggers, I work standing up. Thank my iPAQ and its integrated Wi-Fi.

Oh, things are really beginning to converge. The online world and the real world are becoming less and less separate. You used to have to sit bug-eyed, pasty-faced, and all alone in front of a desktop computer. Now, we’re communicating online while interacting in the real world.

In my case, blogging from my pocket PC while serving customers is a little like hanging out in the Matrix. The online world overlays the real world in that manner. Except, all it takes to jack in is a computer and a wireless access point.

At a friend’s request, I took a personality type test this afternoon in unison with that said friend. It turned out to be one of the Myers-Briggs tests based on the Carl Jung personality type model. This was familiar because I had taken one of these tests as an assignment for an business class a few semesters back. In a nutshell, here’s what these tests are all about:

Psychiatrist Carl Jung created a model wherein one could categorize personality types by three criteria: extrovert-introvert, sensing-intuition, and thinking-feeling. Later in the 20th century, Isabel Briggs-Myers refined the model with a fourth criterion, judging-perceiving, and throughout the century, various personality tests have evolved from this Jung model. They’re typically found in career centers at school, or in some relation to the workplace or job placement.

The first criterion generally describes where a person’s method of expression lies, externally, or internally. The second defines the way in which a person perceives information. A sensing person relies mainly on information gathered from the external world via the senses, and an intuitive person relies on information gathered internally. The third defines how a person processes this information. A thinking person uses logic to make a decision, and a feeling person uses emotion. And the fourth defines how a person uses the information processed. A judging person organizes this information into plans and acts according to those plans, and a perceiving person instead tends to improvise.

There are a possible sixteen combinations of these four criteria, each of which determines a specific type. Various types of tests based on the Jung model are floating around, and like the usual psychiatrist-written inventory, it consists of several questions about how you work in certain situations, your habits, and the like. Ahh, those predictable psychiatrists—if you’re quick, you can almost figure out what result you’re going to get by the time you’ve read the questions.

I got INTJ, the “mastermind”.

This means Introvert iNtuitive Thinking Judging, or in a nutshell, that I have the unusual capability of doing everything from creating a theory to implementing it in the real world. This is one of the more rare personality types (it describes less than one percent of the population), and seems filled with contradictions. This is because INTJ personalities tend to have a manner of thinking and point of view that is different from the rest.

According to one analysis I read on this personality type, my mind is constantly crawling the external world in search of information, and associating and ranking bits and sources of information, not unlike Google. As such, I’ve got a hard-wired knack for understanding concepts and recalling patterns from any source. Furthermore, I can compile this information into a plan of attack such that my ideas may lead to actual results instead of theories. Because of this ability to turn internal vagaries into external orders, and keen ability to strategize and see the big picture, I’m a natural leader. In spite of that, because I prefer the internal world, I remain in the background unless I absolutely must take over command.

On the downside, INTJs are so focused on their own internal world that all those social mores like falling in love tend to be forgotten until it’s too late. This page explains that for INTJs, “love means including someone in their vision of the world.” Obviously, as has been my experience, INTJs aren’t prolific lovers. Masterminds also tend to have a romantic archetype of a relationship in their mind, and “withhold their deep feelings and affections from the public and sometimes even from the object of their affections.” And when scorned, we tend to retreat back to our own world, and “lash out with criticisms of their former loved ones.” That cycle from falling for someone to hating them is probably descriptive of every girl I’ve met since middle school.

Now, about that friend I mentioned at the outset. I’ve taken this test before, but she’s the one who had me thinking about this whole Jungian model. She took the test, posted the results on her blog, and to my surprise, she also fell into the mastermind category. Now, if the lot of us add up to somewhere below one percent of the population, then the odds against us both being INTJ personalities are pretty numerous. All the articles I read about this personality type said nothing of what happens when two INTJs put their heads together. Look out!