In which I may be talkin’ shit about the iPad, but I still totally want one.
There are these awesome people I’m friends with on Twitter. Right now they’re all pissed off at me because I don’t agree with them that the iPad is the Bestest Thing Evar And Proof That Apple is Ascendant In All Ways, and I have to quit discussing it with them or they’ll all quit following me. One of them’s pissed because I called him an Apple fanboi, and another told me that the iPad is a “cultural phenomenon.”
Well, the iPad is not a cultural phenomenon. It’s a boutique social networking device for university-educated white people who can’t be arsed to carry their 17″ laptops all the way to the couch so they can check their Facebook during True Blood.
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In which it’s all peace and sunshine!
People are rioting in the UK, and apparently no one can figure out why. (Hint: happy people don’t riot.) Egypt thinks they’re doing it wrong, and Egypt’s right. Authorities are freaking out that rioters are coordinating via technology so watch this space for more legislation seeking control and monitoring of electronic communication.
There are kids in jail for sending packets to corporate servers. Seriously. Fuck you very much, Paypal. It was really cool when you blocked donations to Wikileaks but allowed donations to the KKK.
Parents seem to believe that protecting children from perverts is government’s job, not their own. They’re wrong. Don’t want your 13-year-old in a chat room with a pedo? Then fucking monitor your kid yourself, breeder.
The Anonymous and Wikileaks drops are proof that government keeps horrible secrets. They tap, they lie, and they kill. Transparency is essential; allowing more and more government monitoring of citizens’ data does nothing but tighten the noose. There is no privacy on the Internet for individual users, there should be none for governments and corporations, either.
Oh, and if you don’t believe corrupt government is corrupt, human beings are starving to death in Somalia as we speak.
Have a nice day.
In which I suggest that the American Dream is propaganda.
I spend a lot of time on Twitter, and I’m following more and more political feeds (as a result of my fascination with Anonymous). I now even see tweets I disagree with, because my timeline’s not as curated as it once was.
And so this[*] bullshit happened the other day:
And it got me thinking.
“The poor” are all lazy, entitled creeps who want to take our wealth from us, right? We seem to think so, even if there really isn’t much evidence to support it. The idea’s so embedded in our cultural consciousness that even I used to believe it, to the point of being frightened of the poor: the most helpless, disenfranchised, and powerless sector of America.
Jeez. I’m not like that. I pride myself on my compassion. Where did this heartless idea really come from?
And then I realized: it came from our pride and joy, our rallying point, our deepest belief. It came from the American Dream.
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In which there are fish. (Click to feed them.)
In which there’s an incoherent brain dump on love, desire, and the mind.
I am surrounded by human beings who appear to be quite infatuated with romantic love and/or the frequency and quality of sexual intercourse they are (or aren’t) experiencing.
As I’m currently seeking neither romantic love nor sex, I end up watching behaviours and parsing sentences and thinking thoughts I often can’t voice because they’d be tangential or inappropriate, but here are some of the observations I’ve been mulling over:
Romantic love hurts you because it’s false, not because you’re unworthy of it.
I’ve wasted a lot of time recovering from gut-wrenching break-ups, and I’ve seen a lot of friends waste a lot of time grappling with intense emotional and psychological pain due to failed romantic entanglements.
Romantic love isn’t a universal human experience; it was invented in or near the 12th century. Before that, we didn’t have a way to think about it or express it, so it effectively didn’t exist. People knew about love and sex and partnership and family and raising offspring together, of course, but they didn’t have some kind of nebulous, Disney-fueled desire to meet a prince or princess and live happily ever after, nor did they experience the crushing pain of disappointment and self-doubt associated with failing to achieve or maintain it.
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In which I have a metric fuckton of time, but still feel like I’m too busy to blog.
I survived the Morgan family reunion last weekend, which was, in essence, five days of drinking like a fish bookended with two six-hour trips on Greyhound buses with my brother.
Apropos of nothing: THIS IS AN AMAZING GODDAMNED BOOK. You can get it for free here.
I’m doing part-time QA work again, which is good because it looks like I only have two weeks of unemployment benefits left. I went to a mandatory three-hour meeting at WorkSource this afternoon. They showed us how to fill out forms and made us watch PowerPoints on Washington state’s unemployment rate. Totally uplifting. Not.
I’m probably going to have to get a food handler’s card because I’ve started applying at grocery stores and coffee shops. That year I spent taking CCNA prep classes has resulted in a grand total of zero cool jobs to apply for, so maybe I’ll just go the two-part-time-jobs route. (Luckily my gig schedules are usually solid pretty far in advance, so I’ll just be that old crafty bitch who asks for weekends off three months before the kids remember to.)
I’ll be performing at Ritzville this weekend. Yay! So excited!
I know it’s finally summer and therefore really quite hot out, but I’m making chili for dinner anyway.
In which I have nothing to do.
School’s out. I’m still unemployed. Aside from having to apply to three positions per week and recording them on my official Job Search Log – well, that and the occasional gig – I have literally nothing to do.
Is it cool? Yes. Is it weird? Also yes. I feel like I’m getting away with something that’ll cost me later, know what I mean?
I got a fucking C in one of my classes. Final grade. No, I am not shitting you. I’m not stupid; those CCNA test questions are written with malice.
In other news, my ex sent me a text today to let me know that “signed papers” will be arriving at end of the week in the mail. Which means I need to find a lawyer to read them for me, which sucks because I’m poor, but at least it looks like I’ll finally get my name back after an entire decade of having to explain that “Mook rhymes with book” all the goddamned time.
In which everyone wants to be thin and rich and have great sex. They also want to be more right than everyone else about what God wants.
The top 25 most-highlighted books on the Kindle are about vanity and fucking, the love of money, self-help, and God.
The Bible appears five times.
The other “religious” books are tortured odes to human ego’s self-worship, and are written by the unenlightened. Because when the blind lead the blind, it always works out so well!
There are six novels.
Considering how many Kindles are in use and the type of people who use them, this list is terrifying to me.
In which I do something I don’t think I’ve ever done here: give a vocal lesson!
I have a friend who kicks ass when she shows up at karaoke. She’s been in bands. She’s a singer. She comes to my gigs sometimes.
She posted this article on Facebook today, and I read it, and damn if it doesn’t need a rebuttal. And I’m just the woman to do it! (If you’re too lazy to read the link, it’s basically a bunch of bullshit about how your diet has a profound effect on your voice box, and how you should “eat light proteins” and “avoid dairy” before gigs.)
Over the years I’ve tried it all, and I’m here to tell you that it’s all bullshit. Your voice is no more sensitive to environmental factors than your ankles are. Yes, if you sprain your ankle you’ll need to rest it until it’s healed, but other than that you probably never really think about how your diet or the weather are affecting your gait. No one ever goes around saying dumb shit like, “I can’t have dairy an hour before I walk, because it messes up my ankles.”
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In which it’s finals week.
I shall {seriously endeavor to} be (mostly) AFK until Thursday night after I’m done with school.
Why? Because it’s finals week, and I’m totally not ready. I have HOURS of LabSim left to slog through, a chapter test and a practice test and and moar practice tests and a final for CCNA 4, and two chapters plus a final exam for SuSE Linux Admin!
All in four days! Gah!
Procrastination, thy name is Mush.
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4 random books from my Library!
