20070427

Fink Ployd (aka. From the Middle of Fucking Nowhere)

So, here I am in MOFN (middle of fucking nowhere), also known as Wyoming. I'm on a road trip with my mom, heading for the hills and relaxation. It's been a while since I've taken a vacation and I'll tell you, it's very welcome.

We're almost to our destination, a fantastic little town called Steamboat Springs in the northern part of Colorado. So far on this trip I've used Pai (my Macbook for those not in the know) to write a spreadsheet, listen to music, watch a movie and take a cool picture (which I'll apparently have to load later. DA isn't playing nice... :( ).

We were in the stretch between Evanston and Rock Springs when Queen came on. I didn't think about the song until my mom looked over at me and said “Waynes World!”. We just couldn't help but sing the refrain WW style. God, we're such nerds...

We've listened to everything from Ozzy to Queen to, now, the Stones. I asked her at one point “what the hell did people do on long trips when all there was was the occasional AM radio station?” I've never had to deal without music on a trip. Now I'm a little spoiled. I have a laptop with a DVD drive and a ton of battery life (I'm on hour 5 right now, after the music, movie and everything else). We truly are the most fortunate generation to come so far.

We're old enough to remember what values are. We know what 'the look' is. We know that when someone says “no” they mean it and, if they're older, you damn well better listen. But we also get the most benefit from technology. I've grown up with computers, almost from their mainstream inception. Our level of education (for those of us who aren't extremely freaking lazy) is higher than it has ever been. We're catching up to the eastern countries, something that hasn't happened before.

The new generation, on the other hand... lazy bunch of fuckers. They don't know how to spell and rely on Windows to do it for them. They don't know how to add, they have calculators for that. They get away with murder because their parents are too lazy and/or self-absorbed to punish them. They get pampered because mommy and daddy are indulgent pricks. And I'll be damned if I've seen many that know what work is.

Now see, this is what happens when I get time to write. I bitch and complain. My whole point for this entry is I'm having a good time, I'm relaxing, and I fully intend on not doing a lick of work while I'm here. Have a nice day everyone! Burn some incense, make some tea, sit under a shade tree with your significant other and enjoy being alive. They're rare moments and we should all embrace them when we have the chance.

Dumb fucker of the... how long has it been now?
It's fun to laugh at people. I laugh at myself all the time. But there's just some people who make your muscles hurt with all the laughing at them.

We recently lost one of those. Joseph Barbera, beloved creator of many cartoons I grew up with like The Flintstones and The Jetsons, passed on to the great drawing board in the sky. I honestly thought that everybody in the world knew who he was, even if it took a little prompting by mentioning a cartoon he worked on (we all forget things)...

But this person... so help me ... One of my coworkers looked at me and said “What movies was he in?” Blank stares all around. “Well was he in TV shows?” Again with the looks. “Well if he wasn't anything important like an actor then why do you care?”

This caused two reactions, anger being the first. How could you not know many kids' secondary heroes? The man basically invented the SatAM genre for hell's sake! The second reaction was contemplative. Has our society really bred people to not care who someone is unless they're the ones on the screen? Don't we care anymore about the people doing most of the work? Cause I'll promise you right the fuck now that the actors do only about 25% of the work on anything. The months, sometimes years, that go in to pre- and post-production for something like that are what really makes it happen.

Author's note: The title... yeah. Apparently after six hours in a car Pink Floyd becomes 'Fink Ployd'... blame my mom!

Gryyphyn, out.
Section-9

20070409

Fuck AIM and the jackass who wrote it

First, this won't be in my usual format as I'm still working on another big piece.

AIM is a piece of crap, as is AOL. It's not user friendly if you know how a mouse works rather than just how to use it. You can't upload your own pictures like you can with every other IM client I've ever used. And god forbid you want to keep your running processes down because it requires three.

Here's the message AOL: bite my pasty white ass. Let the big kids make the useful stuff. You can stick to being one of the last, sorry companies offering dial-up for damn near the same price as cable service and cram the second worst application ever conceived right up your pretentious ass.

Gryyphyn, out.