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The Future is Now?

Here are several links that I saved to share on the site in the past several weeks, all rolled into one big post. Big Project is keeping me busy, so for today let’s just catch up on anything and everything a furious reader might want or need. It’s better than not sharing at all, and besides, two of the links actually come from sources outside of the NY Times!

An op-ed article about the dumbification of America.

Why do I feel as if I have been reading different and worsening versions of this same article since I was a senior in high school? Anyway, this latest version contains everything you might hope for from the “liberal” media: 1) Bush and Cheney bashing, 2) New data to support obvious information that we already know, and 3) A subtly snooty tone.

Between the three of these, a reader can be sure to receive exactly what we don’t need…more argument. I completely agree that Americans are getting dumber. It’d be a real surprise though, to run into an article (from either side of this bi-partisan struggle) that focuses more on the issue and less on the blame game. As for my contribution to the solution…oh…time for the next link… Read more

Earlier today, I went to the pharmacy. My future wife and I ran out of bar soap a week ago, and I can only use her skin-replenishing, moisturizing body-wash so many times before I start feeling like a tart.

Anyway, I went to the pharmacy, grabbed some soap, and a Diet Sprite Zero…and some 50%-off Easter Candy, and headed to the registers.

Only one register was open, and behind it was a line that ran past the front of the pharmacy and down one if its middle aisles. I would chalk this lack of adequate customer service up to the fact that things aren’t going too well right now with the economy, but in reality…there is always just one person at the register. Actual customer service really doesn’t matter anymore. At all.

What I am about to say conflicts slightly with some of what I’ll be complaining about later, but I have the honesty sickness…sooo…let’s get it out in the open. I hate lines. If I could somehow discover a way to tell for sure whether or not some line that I was a part of was made up out of intelligent and considerate people, I wouldn’t hate them so much. But I’ll never be able to do that, and, fact is, most people are less-than-intelligent and inconsiderate and oblivious to everything past their own nose. So I try to avoid lines.

Case in point…against my better judgment…I attempted to forgo the line in question by approaching one of the two self-checkout registers that had been installed in this particular pharmacy. Read more

I promise to someday do more with this space than link to various articles from The New York Times, but until that day comes, take your rehashed news and like it. Bitch.

Meant to send this along a week or more ago. It’s an article about one man’s attempt to spend at least one day a week in technological darkness - no computer, no television, no celly. His description of the experience is worth a look. I empathize with his difficulties. Stop reading my blog and go for a walk.

Do not use your walk as an excuse to buy a latte. Bust up that Starbucks!

I wrote the first sentence of this post three times before I gave up. You are now reading a sentence about a sentence. You are now reading a post about a post - no, not even that - you are reading a post about a post that never was and never will be. And the saddest part of the whole thing isn’t that you’re going to keep reading or that I’m going to keep writing. No. The saddest part is that, beyond this, neither of us have much choice in the matter. This never-post now does exist, despite being comprised of essentially nothing.

There are three reasons for this - why it exists in spite of its non-existence. Bang they come:

• It really has all been done before, and then some, so what else is there to do but dispense with the lie and just make something out of nothing? If you don’t understand what I mean by this, or if you disagree, consider yourself lucky. Then go out and slowly educate yourself. Misery loves company. I’ll see you later.
• You’re bored. You need something to do or to read, because at this moment, for some reason, you are either incapable of “watching” or have decided to take a break from “watching.” Like me, you sometimes fly towards a piece of news, writing, or entertainment, not so much for the thing itself but because you’ve just become accustomed to the process. You’ve grown up along with media bombardment. The television and the advertisements and the movies and the music have promised you a full, exciting, glamorous life, shared in the company of beauty, and the newspapers and the television anchors and the tabloids have provided you with enough proof to support the claim that life tends more towards the opposite. So, hey, if you can’t quite live life to it’s fullest, and, further, if everything sucks, you might as well keep yourself comfortable and occupied.
• It is what The Man wants. I don’t know who exactly The Man is anymore, I think maybe we’re all The Man (guilty by association) but, regardless, I think He wants us to pay attention to nothing, to discuss nothing, to dissect nothing, and dress nothing up in new clothes each year, so that he can continue to do what he does best. What does he do best? You may be surprised to hear see me skip over the usual answers of “control you,” or “control your money,” or “control your soul” - but, really, I don’t think he puts much effort into any of these things anymore. The Man, now, wants something simpler…something more essential and basic.

He wants victory over movement. This is the ultimate definition of control. Having gotten things to a point where even the poor can get by in terms of the bare essentials - see this absolutely ridiculous article about why “the poor are doing just fine” for a sound bite from one of The Man’s top henchmen (careful, don’t be fooled, it’s written with authority, puts forward its ugly opinion without using any exact ugly words, and contains charts!) - The Man now wants to take things one step further. He has control over the system, but the system isn’t always as dependable as he’d like it to be, and he knows that.

Read more

Second Skin is a documentary playing at this year’s South By Southwest (SXSW) Film Festival.

To quote a quote (from this page), the film provides “an intimate look at people whose lives have become transformed by the virtual worlds in online games such as World of Warcraft, Everquest and Second Life.”

Needless to say, I will be checking it out ASAP. Why did I just say that?

Add this to the list of posts reprinted from Yesterday’s Salad. It’s from a while ago but the experience it details provides a good example of how backwards our “progressive” society and economy can be when simple tasks get spread out among a throng of people - each of whom is perched in front of their own computer and/or toying with their cell phone.

* * *

Early one morning, a few weeks ago, I dropped my cell phone in the toilet. It was a pre-pee-or-poop drop, so I dove in. Alas, it was too late.

That baby really slid down there. It was almost as if it knew how worthless it was, being 1) old 2) unattractive (gasp!) 3) a cell phone in the first place. The thing almost disappeared down the toilet hole, and when I finally got it out, it started calling my parents all on its own. I don’t believe this was a coincidence. It was my lady’s toilet I had dropped it in, and I think my cell phone, knowing how worthless I felt it to be, was seeking some sort of tattle-tail’s revenge.

“He’s at a lady’s house early in the morning, parents. Do you have any idea what that might mean? What would your own parents think if you had done that? Sure…times are different…but look what happened to Uncle Al! Oh, and, mom-parent, he didn’t lift the seat - but despite all of what I just said, you’ll like the lady - she yells at him for peeing on the seat. He grumbles at her about how he can’t win, that she always nags him for leaving it up, so he just leaves it down now. Then she says that she means to put it back down when he’s done - and then there’s a little more back and forth, then they argue, and then he tells her how sexy she is, and she, after agreeing, says something similar in turn, and then they’re both in the bathroom, and, well, you don’t want to know what happens then, unless you do-”

That is what my cell phone would have said, if I hadn’t ripped out its battery. Such a vindictive cell phone. All the more so, I believe, because of what I would have to go through to get a replacement. I feel like it knew this, and purposely enjoyed a last laugh even as it died.

So, because the majority of our lives seem to now revolve, if not around our cell phones exactly, at least around conditions wherein constant and around-the-clock communication is not only possible but imperative to our day-to-day survival (what if my car breaks down in the middle of nowhere, or worse, the edge of nowhere, otherwise known as the abstract state of being that I am slowly falling into as I sit here talking about someone or something that was doing something to someone who was talking about them doing something that they didn’t do but was only talking about doing…or something) - anyway - because of all this, I decided to wait a week to replace my phone.

I also decided to wait a week because in a week I would be eligible for a free one hundred dollar upgrade from Verizon (who, by the way, totally ruined the nickname that Vertical Horizon was planning on using for themselves while touring…before they fell off the face of the earth…because they’re full of fluff) as a result of my plan being up for renewal.

Please follow that link, because:

1. I need to know what they are all looking at…especially if the horizon has been rotated to run up and down.
2. I need to know if that’s Roger Clemens in the back-right of the picture.

Back to the handed task: I waited the week. But how did I survive? Well, I’ll tell you the truth. I used my work phone and a landline. This left me susceptible to incommunicadoness when I wasn’t at work or at home. It was like a vacation in the past, and I liked it. My lady: “Wait, so if you’re not at work or at home…I can’t talk to you?”

Read more

To read Part I of The Computerization of Your Human Brain, click here. For Part II, click here.

* * *

I was listening (with attentiveness!) to my wife-to-be the other day when she all of a sudden forgot what she was talking about, stopped speaking and sighed.

“I hope you know that if you marry me, I may end up like that woman in The Notebook.”

In case you haven’t seen The Notebook, I’ll tell you two things before I move on. First, Rachel McAdams is in The Notebook, but her eyebrows are not. I don’t know why. Second, after my wife-to-be (or, wyfe2b, as she’s known on MySpace) told me this, she then swore to God that her memory, at twenty-five, is starting to seriously fail her. That’s all you really need to know. Except that…

…she’s probably right.

Read more

Nothing like a good old Captain Planet reference to get things started off in the New Year.I meant to post this earlier but things been busier than a baby bee in a sweatshop. Netflix and LG have announced a partnership for bringing movies straight to the TV over the internet using a set-top box that will also play DVDs. There are a few reasons why this is significant.

1. This bodes extremely well for consumers like me who would like to control when and how they watch films and/or TV shows. What’s been holding TV on the internet back (now that the major studios and networks have finally begun offering their material online legally - because people were watching it there anyway, and because it makes financial sense) has been the lack of an easy and affordable way to get that material back to the TV. Most often, the TV is a better alternative than a computer screen, for reasons I won’t go into because of how obvious and simple they are. As of now, there are few good options in terms of getting films and TV in this way. Throw in with this announcement the fact that Netflix is a pretty smart and solid company overall (example: they’re planning on striking similar partnerships with other electronics manufactures, instead of pulling an Apple) and the chances that TV over the internet on the TV is a closer reality than it is far increase by a substantial margin.
2. Relatedly, this pays the proper amount of attention and respect to both younger and older consumers. Let’s face it (with our butts!), the mamas and the papas of the world aren’t going to be rushing to make the switch from DVD watching to downloading and streaming. Probably, younger generations will take time to make the switch as well. That’s why this is a good idea. The future may not be certain in terms of whether or not hard copy media is going to go all the way out the door, but in terms of the present: it pays to have multiple formats available. Mark my words in pretty pink ink.
3. Relatedly (again), this also means that in the future, if our children want to watch something, all they’ll have to do is pick up the remote (or keyboard) and say “gimme.” There’s nothing dangerous about that.

For anyone who finds the technical and/or commercial side of this topic interesting, I suggest you check out Scott Kirsner’s CinemaTech blog. If you want to talk about how to raise your spoiled babies, you can contact me, because I can talk about something like that all night long. All night.

*    *    *

Note: I should point out that the device discussed above would not be the first option for getting TV and/or films more “completely on demand.” The Vudu set-top box is an example of something that is currently available. I only think that the Netflix partnership sounds like an important step in the eventual popularization of such a process. As noted above, check out Scott Kirsner’s Cinematech blog for links to the most current announcements of this sort.

 

To read Part I of The Computerization of Your Human Brain, click here. For Part III, click here.

* * *

My very first computer was an “IBM compatible” supertower with a 75 mghz processor and a 5.25 inch floppy drive. It was over ten years ago when I got it, and back then I knew quite a bit about how it worked. I knew how it worked because I was smart a nerd…but also because such an early version of the personal computer wasn’t that hard to know. Computers have always been pretty complex pieces of machinery, but the fact is that ten years ago they were a lot simpler than they are now. They were still just machinery. This last bit of information, of course, is news to no one but Amish Joe.

So why do I bring all this up?

Because sometimes I feel like I’m turning into a version of that god damn ten year old computer.

I’ve already said plenty about my general feelings regarding the life of the average American. There’s one recurring point that I’ve touched upon in earlier posts, though, that could be stated in clearer terms. That point is this: everything that I’ve written here so far, and everything that I’m going to write, usually always applies as much to myself as it does to whoever or whatever I’m discussing. That might even be an understatement.

I bring this up for two reasons. The first is accountability. At all times on this site, I’d like to keep things honest. Criticisms and questions and sarcasm and anger will likely creep into, and snap off of, everything that I say. But everything that I say will also apply to me.

One of the main reasons for my writing anything is always to work the essence of that thing all the way out of myself, so that I can grab it and see what it’s made of, and from there maybe guess as to how it might have come to be in the first place. The end result, hopefully, is as close to an honest presentation of whatever that thing is, to a reader. This is why, in a moment, I am going to make the ultimate sacrifice and take my brain all the way out of my head for you to see.

The second reason I bring this up is…

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