Oh, Tonight

I'm having a great week. Today I started reading William Gibson's Neuromancer and, well, things are looking up.

In a very coincidental way, I've been priming myself for this book all week. Monday I had lunch with Davers and we talked about art, culture, Internet, and the catharsis of expression. You know, Davers things. And yesterday, me and Higgy traded witticisms and insight over the process of creating writing.

So-- of course-- today I was sucked into the book that defined cyberspace and inspired a generation of nerds to build a world of their own creation. Tomorrow, I'll probably get visited my Morpheus.

I become entranced by something dark and familiar when I read about cyberpunk power brokering and bleak cityscapes that offer nothing but anonymity. It's the same feeling I get when my old mainstay, Turn on the Bright Lights, kicks through my car stereo at night. The feeling escapes words but it's definitively me. It's nighttime. It's gritty but not vulgar. Carefree but not cruel.

Say what you will about memory biases, but I swear: This feeling has welled up in me since I started listening to Interpol.

Oops. Gibson has totally borked my writing voice. I'm spending way too much time trying to thread together sentences that convey emotional whims with machine-like precision. Time to unjack from this terminal.

Note to self: Figure out how to update Blogger from Lynx.

Think Small

It's weird how inspiration can come from the most random places. An inspirational link and a quick conversation with my brother and, quite suddenly, I'm ready to start writing on this thing once again.

It all started quite innocuously this morning: Get to the office, throw on a cup of coffee and check reddit for all the easy-to-digest liberal nerd rage I can bite off with my dulled political chops. Years of caring too much have turned me from a youthfully deaf, rabid Michael Moore wannabe into one of those more sage, jaded liberals who believes in the goodness of sharing and equality but is disheartened by the empty promise of politics in America.

I noticed one particular headline that suddenly cranked my fatigued morning brain into overdrive:

This is interesting: Julian Assange's old blog. (web.archive.org)

A blog written by an academic from 2006-2007 touching on some high-minded topics such as freedom of information, love, life and humor? Interspersed with random snippets of useful Ruby code? All on a very non-flashy, flat-style page? Totally fucking early 2000's nostalgia! Where do I sign up?

To me, Assange has never been the enigmatic, borderline Aspy with a serious case of US butthurt that many media outlets have attempted to mis-characterize. To me, he's a man who values the academic principle of openness more than the academic definition of journalism. And that pragmatic attitude garners a lot of respect from me.

Professors and pundits alike may argue all day about the proportions of journalism, recklessness, integrity, fairness and freedom that constitute the WikiLeaks initiative. At the end of the day, though, WikiLeaks itself (especially with this latest iteration of leaked cables) is not dismantling the institutions it highlights. At least, not on its own. They're dismantling the facade. They're exposing the way the world works in a very candid way, leaving the accountability in the hands of those who dare to lie, mislead or at the very least not educate the public at large.

I think that's cool, because history tends to favor openness and expression.

Anyways, back to that blog.

Breezing through the international pariah's random, somewhat intimate wisdom, I found myself awash in one big, awesome thought: He blogs for the same reason I have to blog. To put my ideas out there. To reflect and check myself in a public space. To share and clarify and sharpen my position instead of keeping it in my head. I feel like those higher goals are evident in Assange's blog as they are in this one.

Blogging for me has always been more than just an indulgent exercise in narcissism, though I'd be lying if I said that wasn't some significant part of it :-) It's a giant "you are here, and this is where you've been" map for life. I do re-read my shit on occasion. I bet you're not surprised.

Honestly, I know myself well enough to know that I have never been able to keep track of myself well in my head. I lose myself. I make myself crazy with the sort of deprecating, self-defeating nonsense that left me depressed and insular for the better part of this year. But when I unleash the stream of consciousness into a finite bitstream for public consumption, well, those self-defeating thoughts get pulverized like errant letters by a springy, loud, 80's style backspace button.

So thanks to Mr. Assange for helping me realize and see the importance of writing on my blog once again.

I also chatted a bit with my brother today and, together, we came to another conclusion: That each blog post doesn't have to be some big odyssey of a tome. It feels like everything I've written in the past year or so is some historical essay on the recent life I've been living up to that point. But that sort of defeats the purpose I was just talking about. What I ended up with this year was three or four giant characterizations of my life based on those pivotal moments when I was so emotional or worked-up that I just exploded with prose. But those aren't honest. They're moving, but they're not necessarily me on-the-whole.

The odyssey isn't each constituent post. The odyssey is the blog.

(oops, I ended up saying way more than I thought I would. oh well. I promise the next post will come soon, and be small. twss?)

How I didn't spend my summer vacation

If you've been in mourning for the past few weeks because you figured I was eaten by rats, fear not: I've not fallen prey to rats or fleas or vampires or anything in the complex ecosystem thriving under my floorboards. Instead I was swallowed up by the summer and a very fire-and-forget lifestyle.

For the past few months now-- summer, essentially-- I've been neglecting my blog and instead Tweeting my life away in 140-character blurbs. Every day I wake up, drive to work, and spend every moment of my downtime following Tweets about Houston restaurants, Billy Mays, fonts, social media, open education, and local drink specials.Then I throw my own two cents in to the mix. And since I'm the social media guy at work, I spend a good amount of my "uptime" perusing Twitter and Facebook. It's a job most guys would kill to have.

...except I can feel the toll it's starting to take on my personality (and my brain). I was built to do and reflect, not to do and forget. Twitter and other tools of the so-call social revolution put so much emphasis on the "now" that it's easy to forget to stop and smell the roses. Whereas I used to pause and carefully consider the implications of the respective past few days in my semi-regular blog posts, Twitter allows me only 140 characters to state the bare minimum before moving on to the next big event in my life. Or your life. So many lives, so much information.

If this blog has served any purpose in the past eight years, it's at least been a good place to sort the wheat from the chaff.

I have honestly reached the limit of how much data I can consume and regurgitate and sort in one day. I go to bed feeling like the 1997 New York Stock Exchange is trading Microsoft in my head. And for all this processing and grief, what do I have to show for it? Nothing. I retain little or nothing more than the ability to gloat about hearing news first, whatever that news may have been.

I've got to push something useless out of my head before classes start back up. Gotta make room for senior year in there, somewhere.

Who has time for morals?

It feels like the media is grasping at straws in its attempts to talk about Twitter these days. First it was a caricature of our high-speed society, then suddenly it was the hip playground for those with an overinflated sense of self-importance. As if blogs weren't bad enough, now you don't even have to write to be popular. Please, God, either foresake me for having an account or call me up to glorious electro-heaven where video bloggers drink Sparkz with Kevin Rose and fist-pump to mashups by the next Girl Talk.

A little technophobic writeup on CNN.com decries fast-paced, 140-character Tweets as the mental equivalent of TMI. According to the article, downing nibbles of information every hour of every day doesn't give us enough time to digest the moral implications of what we're reading.

Seriously? I think that's a stretch.

I think that (for the most part) Tweets are very fire-and-forget, dull happenings in peoples' lives. Sure, there's an occasional "my heart is sad" interspersed among the more familiar "I just ate a burrito at Cafe Adobe" and "@tfaust dicks," but is our generation really becoming so shallow that we use Twitter as anything more than a jumping-off point for a real conversation?

Twitter is a tool used by the Houston Chowhounds to find and felate each other during downtown lunchtime. It's used by readers of Houstonist so that they can throw a technological buzzword into their pub crawl. But is it really causing us to become a demoralized society?

You tell me.

[Scientists warn of Twitter dangers - CNN.com]

Oh, the nerd shame!

This is just flat-out nerdy. I've been trying to come to terms with Linux ever since I took a job where 30% of my day is spent in a PuTTy session. I've always wanted to use Linux if for no other reason than to impress people by doing everything from the command line, LIKE MORPHEUS. Most of the people here at the office check their e-mail and edit code straight from the shell.

Anyways, today I found out about Lynx-- a text-based browser at my disposal-- and decided to give it a spin. It's awesome... I CAN THINK SO CLEARLY WITHOUT ALL THE VISUAL CLUTTER. Above is this site in Lynx. But yeah, okay friends, disown me or whatever.

People You Hate on Facebook

Just like the Matrix, the Internet has gone through several incarnations in its sentient quest toward perfection. Remember 1996? Remember watching a lot of JenniCam? Remember downloading funny Wayne's World gifs to put on your homepage? Remember reading "underground" wrestling news sites between bouts of watching more JenniCam?

Okay, maybe you weren't me 13 years ago. Whatever. A lot has changed since then: Right now I'm Torrenting all the dirty video highlights from JenniCam while video blogging about John Cena and sending my old roommate pictures of SNL skits-turned-movies on Facebook just because.

I love social networking more than anything. Facebook, though. Not MySpace. MySpace is for bands and hooking up with scene chicks when you're back home for Christmas. Facebook, on the other hand, is a respectable tool used to communicate with people you know. People like your mom (Limited Profile), your boss (Limited Profile), your best friend from high school (Limited Profile) and your girlfriend (Limited Profile). And by "communicate with," I mean "hide your profane, secret lifestyle from."

All of this personal exposure-- all of this culture surrounding You-- has given rise to the pariahs of Facebook. Jerks who feed on the nature of the beast. Idiots that throw a monkey wrench into your relaxing semisocial experience. You know the ones.

Or maybe you aren't familiar with the beasts I bemoan. Allow me to introduce you a few types of people you absolutely hate on Facebook. I've attached pictures.

People You Hate on Facebook

The Guy Who's Not on Facebook
The first person who annoys me on Facebook is, ironically, not on Facebook at all. He's the person who is scared of Facebook for privacy reasons. Or maybe he's doing it just to be cool-- totally counterculture. Whatever the reason, he refuses to get with the program and provide three easy-to-access pieces of information in order to join the digital revolución.

To the Guy Who's Not on Facebook: Get real. There is no world outside of the Internet anymore. The real world is the Internet. Google e-mails me breakfast every morning for Christsakes, and it's fucking delicious. Sure, I had to give them my social security number in return for a delicious picture of orange juice and a bagel covered in lox and capers, but it's a price I'm willing to pay for the convenience.

So what if advertisers know that you love the Jonas Brothers and The Boondock Saints? So does the CIA, and you put a waterboard's worth of trust in them. Trust the corporations: They're hiring.

The Critic
I suppose it's sort of ironic that I hate this sort of person, considering I have my own well-formed opinions and you're reading them right now. But I also leave a lot of my opinions to myself and try not to do it all the time. I know what it's like to be hassled all the time about your opinions, thanks to these jokers.

The Critic is the person who looks at everything you post on Facebook and tells you that you're wrong. Is your status related to a song you like? That song is worse than Three Doors Down's National Guard advertisement. Did you post a link to your favorite new restaurant? Papercuts have more flavor than their cheeseburgers. This person thinks every band you enjoy is an audio abortion and every movie you list as a favorite is a visual vulgarity.

Most of these people have sharpened their ability to argue against you, but are pretty bad at defending their own opinions. There's an encyclopedic volume of psychology literature dedicated to the fact that these people are actually soft-spoken cowards in real life. Not the Internet real life I was talking about earlier, but the one where you go to class and learn stuff before getting drunk at 2pm. Find these Critics and stare them down next time you see them. They will cry. It's a doctor-recommended remedy to your distress.

The Appmonger
I wake up every day and after eating my digital Jewish breakfast, I wade through all of my Facebook application invites. My friends really know me. They know my affinity for things like "Compare Friends," "Which Desperate Housewives Mailman Are You," "Enhanced Texas Hold-Em.biz,"and "Contribute to my Birthday Cause." But I've already got all the applications I want, so I have to spend time deleting all these invites. And after I'm done I leave my apartment and swing by the unemployment office to pick up my check before continuing to the hospital to have fluids fed to me intravenously because I've spent twenty days deleting application invites and not eating or working.

I am a victim of the Appmonger. There are only two explanations as to why this sort of person exists. Either there are people-- groups of people!-- out there who enjoy having twenty different Facebook apps installed on their profile and they wish to share this elation with others, or people are knowingly trying to kill me using the Internet. Damn, you know my weakness.

The Kid You Know Well Enough to Friend
One of the most awkward thing about the online world is drawing the definition of a "Friend." Don't worry: The hot girl next to you in class is most definitely your friend, regardless of whether you've ever spoken to her or not. But what about that creepy kid in the back of class that, one day, decided to send you a friend invite out of nowhere? You had a group project with him, once, and he's in like five of your other classes. I mean, why not?

Don't do it! The subtle, real-real life awkwardness is simply a portent of awkward situations to come. When you accept Facebook friend invites from the kid you don't know, you're limiting yourself to a few possible online outcomes. In one familiar situation, you will be inundated with their personal life on your News Feed, forever, and not have the guts to remove them. Maybe you'll enjoy reading about them for a while, sure, but things are going to get ugly when they start dating your ex.

A more likely situation is that they will turn out to be one of the archetypes above, and you will just have more Facebook friends you hate. There's always a slim chance that they're a serial murderer and friending them will spare your life later on. I think not. Obviously, the most probable outcome is that they barge into your hotel room one night and hold you at knifepoint while they take pictures of you screwing your wife.

I expect to lose 20 friends before noon tomorrow

Burger King has unveiled the most awesome incentive to un-Facebook those kids you met at a music festival three years ago that have been stalking you from afar ever since.

It's called the Whopper Sacrifice application, and it's going to make you carefully consider if your online life is worth a couple dozen free burgers. All the application requires is that you pick ten of your Facebook friends and dump them in return for one free Whopper. Though unlike the normal ritual of booting someone from your online life, it notifies the people you remove that they've been traded for consumer goods. I figured I would stay one step ahead of the app.

So here's to you, those about to be sacrificed. Those random friends of my exes. Those hometown friends of friends. Those kids who went to my high school but were in my brother's class and I don't really know you but I guess you like to see my pictures. Those kids from my grade school classes who haven't seen me since I wore my hair spiky. And yes, even those employment recruiters who I friended just to see if I could find a job.

You've all brought me so much. Application invites, mostly. Some of you may have read my blog once or twice, in which case you're actually cooler than 70% of my close friends. But all&all this hasn't been a fulfilling relationship. So, I'm leaving you for processed flash-cooked meat and vegetable blend on a chewy wad of bread ass.

And to the Kyle Barnhart from Ottowa who got really high one night and decided to friend me: Don't worry, dude, we're friends until the end.

[Unfriend 10 People on Facebook, Get a Free Whopper | A Hamburger Today]