Oh, screw it. Let's go for the long, slow decline.

This year in cultwear:


EDIT 1/7/2009: I don't seem to see an obvious way to stop the auto-play of the video, sorry. I'll just have to post a bit more to get it to shuffle off the main page.

But, one of the cow-orkers and I had a conversation about this abomination of infomercials and her response was along the lines of "Hey, that could increase my slack", but tempered somewhat wisely with "So why wouldn't I just wear a bathrobe backwards?"

So I'll go on record admitting that some of the cow-orkers have their heads on straight. Good job.

And with that, I think I'm done.

I keep reading all this self-importance of "the blogosphere" and I keep reading how new idea after new idea just gets swamped in some new "Hey, now we can spam these people."

But I think I'm done here. I never had that much to say, but it was a nice to have an outlet to say it in.

At least I know that I never saw this as a business proposition, never sold ads. Yeah, it was probably a call for attention more often than not, but whatever. Didn't cost anyone anything tangible.

I'm really not intending to be melodramatic about it, I just think anything that gets a beginning deserves an end.

See you around, folks.

Dear DVD Producers

Filling your product with trailers for Blu-Ray and inserts for Blu-Ray are helping to cement my view that you've discovered the new LaserDisc.

The economic downturn will certainly not help your cause nearly so much as finding better examples than "and look, in this wide shot you can see the detail so much better (once you buy a new television, and make sure it's one that is compatible with our copy protection scheme, and be sure that you use the right cable, because even though your player might support playing what we sold you, and your new fancy television might have various connections, only the right combination might work. You did pay some guy to come out and calibrate your color settings, right? Because the gadget blogs keep posting nearly indistinguishable comparisons between calibrated and uncalibrated televisions, and with all the other money you've spent, you certainly wouldn't want to miss what the dvd producer thought the film director intended.)

Hey, at least the gadget blogs still love you, Blu-ray. (hopefully it'll be a while before they realize their own internal inconsistency that complaining that nobody watches the bonus features might not be compatible with jerking off over whatever the spec (provided you didn't buy a Blu-ray player early, before they got all the features working) decides is the must-have feature.)

Granted, the gadget blogs get excited whenever a cell-phone manual comes out with a new release fixing a typo, but hey, take your cheerleaders where you can get them, yeah?

I apologize in advance.

But this article may have sneaked in at the last second for 2008's "No shit, Sherlock" award.

Just for a second, consider any teenage lad in a community where "pledging virginity" might be popular. If said lad wanted to impress his desired counterparts, how fast do you think he'd be to pledge, especially if other qualities (say, not so good at sports or part of the popular crowd, etc.) didn't feel persuasive in gaining the attention he craved?

How about someone that doesn't know what they want, or doesn't have an inkling yet about what the big deal is?

It ain't an easy subject, certainly, but I'd be hard-pressed to believe that any solution borne of a worldview likely gestated in some bygone television era of nuclear families ain't going to begin to cover reality.

What troubles me the most is the suggestion of this study of something I've believed. Abstinence-only education doesn't damper individual desire, it just makes them ill-prepared for it. Even more troubling that such an idea sounds newsworthy.

A boot to the...

This article was shared to me by a friend, and while I can appreciate the sentiment, one does not change culture overnight (ok, there are ways, but they are supremely unpleasant ways that I'd rather not see)

So I'd ask of you, when faced with an entrenched establishment, where disruptive technologies (i.e., teh intarwebs) have only gone so far, can we change our culture? (or is the really unpleasant path the only way out of this rut?)

-transiit

(thanks to geechee girl for sharing this)

Feed Cleaning 2008

I can't say that reading all this nonsense is improving my life, so I'm cleaning out my feed reader a bit.

I had this idea that if I listed the feeds I dropped, maybe somebody will find something that suits them. I grappled a bit with the idea of explaining why I chose which to purge, but ultimately, it probably doesn't matter.

So here's what's getting dropped from my feed reader. Perhaps one or more will interest you more than it did me:
OverCompensating
Carey Lives Here Now
Freezer Burns
101 Cookbooks
Diner's Journal
Purple Liquid
The Food Section
The Kitchen: Apartment Therapy
What We're Eating
Engadget
Gizmodo
Joystiq
Salon.com

I know, this isn't exactly a ringing endorsement of any of them. But they did capture my interest at one point or another, so I figure maybe they'll do something for one of you.

Merry Christmas

Whoops.

I seem to have irked a segment of the comic community with that last post.

People that have chosen names with creative spellings (like substituting "z" instead of "s") questioning my capability of "wit and wisdom" because this, what was once a silly food blog (before I realized that I wasn't important enough to have separate blogs based on topic and gave up, consolidating them here.), well, not a lot of capability for being stung by such a rebuke. I probably don't have a lot of room questioning the guy's psuedonym. "Transiit" isn't that good. (and bloody hell, it was a smart-ass response to this same line of taunting before. Surely co-opting a failed attempt at being called a transient is better than "Rantz") But to read the guy's twitter feed where he can't resist exclamations and uses the general knuckle-dragging lines like "FTW!", well, I can't say that I feel too put upon that he doesn't approve of me, either. Sorry, Captain Mouth-Breather, I must've wasted your precious time.

I seem to have pissed off one of the Marvel writers, but hey, it's a Marvel writer, not much loss there. What's the worst that can happen, a thinly veiled approximation of me gets its ass kicked in some future episode by some leotard-wearing halfwit? I'll admit that I reacted to his saying "That guy makes my list for fucking retarded mall metal facial hair of 2008" somewhat immaturely by replacing the image of me that he'd linked to with this altered image of him:

I probably should've been better than that. Hell, his current ambition is to resurrect a character that's already suffered three mediocre (at best) film adaptations. It'd be unfair to pick on a guy with such an uphill battle. Seriously, you know that no matter how hard/tough/bad-ass you try to write the character, the artists are still going to make it look like yet another steroid-laced spandex fetishist.

It's just funny to me. I posted the thing without any spite at all, being a fan of these people's work, just kind of poking fun at their twitter feeds, and all of a sudden there's this group of others that are so deeply concerned that I'd besmirched their honor.

Part of me wonders what they would've said had I not stayed based on the reality that I'd observed.

Part of me wants to up the ante and do it again, but worse.

Thanks to Ze Frank, John Cleese, Warren Ellis, Jhonen Vasquez and Stephen Fry for either ignoring me, not noticing, or not taking it too seriously.

Thanks to Ben Templesmith for acknowledging it, whether he liked it or not.

Thanks to Chris Ryall for running with it in the lighthearted spirit it was supposed to be.

EDIT:
I'm a little ambivalent about the Boingboing folk as this has nothing to do with steampunk, creative commons, Cory Doctorow's latest book, BBTV, or this week's newest site spinoff so I think I'm still safely under their radar.

My apologies to anyone that was a big deal on the internet in 2008 that I didn't offend yet. I'm sure I'll do better next year.

The worst of Twitter, 2008

10. Ze Frank, except he's probably forgotten what twitter is by now in favor of a ball of aluminum foil that he's batting about his apartment.
9. Ben Templesmith. Not only did he inundate us with link after link of common news stories through the US election cycle, he made sure that we all knew of whatever current sketch he had on his blog at any given moment.
8. Warren Ellis. For "Conan! What is Best in Life?" and then announcing "I never said it was safe for work." Beats Templesmith for pandering to his work (yeah, yeah. friday's are freakangels days.), but gets a notch above for actually encouraging Templesmith.
7. Jhonen Vasquez. For trying to be Warren Ellis, and yet still failing at it.
6. John Cleese. For not posting interesting things when he could've.
5. Stephen Fry. For posting every stinking photo of his safari.
4. Anyone directly related to BoingBoing. You think you don't get enough attention as it is?
3. Anyone that followed me because they were all about the search engine optimization and how they had a new business plan that would make them millionaires through the excitement that is Web 2.0 or Social Media.
2. Anyone that still thinks rickrolling is hilarious.
1. Me, for paying attention long enough to even be able to compile such a list.


EDIT: For anyone thinking this is serious, this was in response to Warren Ellis making a 10 best list

But I'm glad you care.

If nothing else, it does appear this pushed me over the edge into Rick Remender's "fucking retarded mall metal facial hair of 2008" list. I'd call that a win.


(and yeah, of the people mentioned, I'm a fan of their respective works, for the most part. (Maybe not Rick Remender. Being introduced to him in this way hardly makes me give a shit about his work to go check it out now.) I promise I'll feel bad if you can convince me that for any of them their desired legacy is to be remembered for what they posted on Twitter.)

Hangin' Tough.

Now I'll admit that I'm far from being the best musician on earth, but seriously, if I were to try to convey something like a bunch of tough guys knocking each other silly, no matter how scripted, I don't think I'd emulate the New Kids on the Block model of tough guy cred.



As a bonus, I'll think of this any time I run into anyone that professes to be a fan of professional wrestling.

(via Everything is Terrible)