Antithesys

A Million Things That Bug Me

2006-01-15T23:18:00.000-06:00

I'm pissed off and I'm going to rant about random things. Try and stop me.

A Million Things That Bug Me

1. "Your/you're" and "their/they're". And all the other grammatical brainfarts people do all the time. It makes you look stupid. Just so you know.

2. When people respond to one thing from a long-ass post but quote the whole fucking thing. You can delete what you don't need! It was too long to read before, I'm not going to read it in a quote box! My scrolling finger can't take much more of this!

3. Old Navy commercials. Anyone who goes anywhere that place should be shot merely because of the commercials. Fashion is for losers. I'm a loser and I'm calling you a loser, so that should tell you something.

4. The pop-up ads that splash onto the page you're reading and won't go away. Do you honestly think I appreciate that? Am I going to think, oh, Vonage seems like a nice outfit, I think I'll click on their extremely obtrusive ad! Why yes, I'm very interested in seeing the latest unoriginal horror movie!

5. Excessively negative people.

War of the Worlds

2005-11-08T23:30:00.000-06:00

The original film had an effect on me as a small child, to the extent that I would always be afraid of the street lamps on the freeway. Watching it later as an adult, I found it no more impressive than any other 50s B-movie...those films are classics only to the people who were around to remember when they were considered good. To my generation they're MST3K fodder. Still, I have nothing against it and if it's one of your favorite movies, then good on you.

I've also indulged in the original radio production, which is quaint and appreciable as a pivotal moment in American culture, when the mass media first had an instantaneous impact on society. The first "water-cooler show", as it were.

Now comes Spielberg's version to DVD, and watching it for the first time I was blown away. Spielberg never makes mistakes, always knows exactly what he's doing, and I looked at this and my visceral reaction was that it was one of his finest non-prestige efforts. Cruise knows his way around an action picture, and here he plays a character so flawed that it's nearly impossible to like him, which works out fine since it's nearly impossible to like Cruise anyway. So as the credits rolled I thought, wow. Just wow, what a movie.

Then I sat back and let it sink in and started to think about it some more. And naturally, one or two questions began to creep into my cerebellum.

**Spoilers Ahead** (but really, who doesn't know the plot of War of the Worlds)

Martians decide to take over Earth. To do this they send killer machines to our planet and bury them beneath the soil, wait a million years, and then send their fighter pilots to enter the machines and start frying everybody.

- If Martians can send machines to Earth and bury them so deep that no one ever finds them, why didn't they just take the planet a million years ago? They clearly didn't want our technology, because they fried all of our cities, and there's no way they could possibly have known back then that we, or any other terrestrial species, would make it this far, and even after a million years our technology is nothing compared to the impenetrable tripods they've had all along.

- How many machines were there? Did every single pilot catch the flu? It's reasonable to guess there were a limited number, so they'd have to disperse them evenly throughout the planet to make sure that they got everyone. How big a coincidence is it that at least one machine was buried on the east coast of a continent that, at the time, had no populations of humans or anything close, but would someday become the center of the largest metropolitan area in the most powerful nation on the planet?

- If they wanted to harvest our blood or what-have-you, why did they keep frying us with the laser? Did they want to keep human meat at a premium?

- If these machines are a million years old, how do they match up with "modern" Martian technology? Are the Martians just slower than us at innovation, or do the pilots have to put up with ridiculously outdated weaponry? It'd be like if the French suddenly ran into Europe and grabbed the cannons that Napoleon had left behind. It would certainly catch the Polish off their guard, but so would the nuclear stockpile they've developed in the meantime.

- Similarly, it's been a million years, and they still have the exact same plan? They didn't come up with anything better? Untold generations of Martians stirred and stewed and not one of them ever piped up and said "hey, why don't we build a giant death ray and just fry them from here?"

- Most importantly, if this exact same plan has been in place for a million years, and they've been waiting all this time...did they do NO further research into terrestrial life? Not one of them thought to check whether it was safe for them to start running around on an alien world? First of all, what do these cats breathe? It ain't oxygen, because there isn't enough on Mars for a species to depend on it. It ain't CO2, which is 95% of the Martian atmosphere, because there isn't enough on Earth for a species that's dependent on it to live. Perhaps they get by on nitrogen, or perhaps they have some sort of air mask that blends in with their bodies. It probably isn't a mask, of course, because if it was then they wouldn't be breathing in the microbes that killed them off. The microbes they seemed to completely miss on whatever ridiculously unsuccessful survey missions they must have taken. What kind of species is intelligent enough to build and operate sophisticated weapons, blockheaded enough to coldly exterminate the entire population of a planet, and stupid enough to start walking around an alien environment unprotected and start drinking the blood of an animal they clearly know nothing about? Does Dubya run Mars too? It is the god of war, after all.

But yeah, it was a good flick.

A Conversation

2005-11-05T00:34:00.000-06:00

Steve: Thanks for calling The History Channel, this is Steve, how can I help you today?

Me: Yeah, hi, I'd like to report some technical difficulties with your network.

Steve: Okay, what seems to be the problem?

Me: Well, there's something wrong with the show I'm watching.

Steve: Is the picture fuzzy, or pixelated?

Me: No, there's nothing wrong with the actual picture...

Steve: Okay then, is the sound cutting out or skipping?

Me: No, the sound is technically fine...

Steve: All right then, could you describe the exact problem to me?

Me: Well, I'm watching it, and the show is playing, and everything else seems to be fine, except that they're not talking about World War II.

Steve: .......

Me: .......

Steve: .......they're not?

Me: No. They're showing planes, but they're fueled by jets or something, and they're fighting other jets, but it's not in Europe or Japan.

Steve: ...did you say it's not in Europe or Japan?

Me: Yeah, it's somewhere called "Korea?"

Steve: Are you absolutely sure there's nothing wrong with your tv?

Me: No, I turn it to other channels and they all come in fine. Discovery is showing a program about early primates, TLC is renovating a home, A&E is taking us through the minds of a serial killer and the detectives hunting him down, and naturally I skipped over Animal Planet because no one in their right mind gives a fuck about them. Everyone's showing what they should be showing. But here on History...no WWII.

Steve: Yes, I've punched it up here too and I'm getting the same thing. This is really weird.

Me: I just had a thought...maybe this Korea thing is a classified mission and the show is called "Secret Battles of World War II." Could that be it?

Steve: ...No, we don't have any programming like that, at least not that I'm aware of. Maybe some wires got crossed and it's showing programming from a different network.

Me: I don't think so. Every time they come back from the commercial break, they recap everything that has happened in the show so far including the last three minutes in excruciatingly unnecessary detail. It's got to be History.

Steve: Okay, I'll tell you what I'm going to do. I'm going to put you on hold and call up to the corporate floor, and see if they can shed some light on this mystery. Can you wait a few minutes?

Me: Sure.

...

Recording: Thank you for your patience. We here at The History Channel are committed to providing you with 24-hour nonstop quality programming dedicated to all aspects of the Second World War. Please continue to hold so that we may assist you.

...

Steve: You still there?

Me: Yep.

Steve: Okay, I just talked to the senior vice-president of programming. And he said that this "Korea" show is perfectly normal.

Me: ...uh, okay.

Steve: He said there was an intense conflict between Western and Eastern forces over the spread of communism in Southeast Asia, culminating in open hostilities in Vietnam in the 60s and...Korea in the 50s.

Me: Ah....So the war didn't actually end with the dropping of the atom bombs?

Steve: Well apparently this is a completely different war, fought over clashing ideologies and economic systems.

Me: So let me get this straight. Something...happened...at some point...that wasn't World War II...and you're...talking about it on The History Channel.

Steve: It would seem so.

Me: ...

Steve: ...

Me: ...Well all right then. Thanks for your help.

Steve: No problem. Have a super day.

Get this freakin' duck away from me

2005-11-05T00:15:00.000-06:00

The Atari 2600 had 128 bytes of RAM. 128 bytes. The cartridges had a maximum file size of 4K. This means that a thumbnail screenshot of an Atari game is larger than the game itself.

The Atari console in its own right was mind-boggingly more advanced than ENIAC. If properly configured, your cellphone could have decrypted Enigma in seconds. In another sixty years, artificial intelligence will likely have the right to vote.

But can they love? CAN THEY LOVE???

A Taste of Home

2005-09-11T13:13:00.000-05:00

The world was always so much simpler when we were young, though of course we didn't know it at the time. There was a whole lifetime to look forward to, you had no responsibilities, everything was safe and secure. For most people, feelings of "youth" go hand-in-hand with feelings of "home". It comes as no surprise to me that whenever I have dreams that take place at home, they occur in the house I grew up in, not the house I'm in now. I don't know if everybody is like that. I'd wager that many people are.

And the only great, true tragedy in our lives is that we must inevitably lose our youth, our passions, our potentials, our freedom, when we grow up, and what is so sad is that when we were young we never knew or appreciated any of it. A child's mind is something so beautiful and unique, but when it is hardened by experience and outside stimuli, it erodes into adulthood. The dandelion blossom falls away and all that is left is grey seeds. Very few people can understand what being young is like, even though they all understood it once.

Consider those thoughts, and go back and listen to "Brain Damage" at the end of Dark Side of the Moon. The band you're in starts playing different tunes.

Every so often an adult can still grasp the mind of a child, and these few souls can often be found in the annals of our most revered artists. One such person spoke to me for ten years during my own youth, and it was a sad, sad day when he stopped speaking. Starting today his wisdom is being rebroadcast in the medium which made it famous, the newspaper, and this morning I found it exactly where I had left it, covering half of the front page of the comics section, right where it deserves to be. A glimpse of his youth, and a taste of mine.

Pickles

2005-08-08T09:45:00.000-05:00

I know I've ranted about this elsewhere, but it still makes me insane.

I don't like pickles.

I do, however, accept that my dislike of pickles is a result of my simply not having acquired a taste for them, and not because they are objects which deserve to be hated. In other words, I have no problem with the idea that other people could like pickles, or with the people who profess as much. If pickles were sentient life-forms I could probably sit and have a beer with them...or at least I might if I liked beer, which I don't. I'm just not about to eat them.

Now, the good people at McDonald's have an interesting way of preparing their world-famous cheeseburgers. The method must be the product of painstaking market research into what exactly consumers want on a cheeseburger, and exactly how much they want. Too much and it is pointlessly indistinguishable from one of the larger sandwiches, and too little makes it a White Castle turd. So they undoubtedly have just the right size patty, the right amount of cheese, the right amount of onions, and the right amount of...pickles.

At least, that's what I have to assume. That's what I have to hold faith in.

You see, the average McDonald's cheeseburger contains one (1) pickle. Not seven, not two, not zero, but one. Just one. It is a small slice of pickle, never more than an inch in diameter, as though there were special McDonald's-size pickles grown somewhere where they cross ordinary foodstuffs with cocktail weenies. It is always smack dab in the exact center of the burger, which is quite impressive considering all the other things that their chefs will often get wrong.

The inclusion of the lone pickle leads me to the logical conclusion that the majority of the restaurant's patrons enjoy the occurrence of the pickle; if this thesis were faulty, then very few explanations for the pickle's presence would exist. I, being one who does not care for pickles, am therefore in the minority. The fact that the pickle is included by default does not bother me in the least, for two reasons: a) I have the opportunity to request my order be devoid of pickles, which I do not exploit, because in practical experimentation the preparer is usually confused by extra directions and will either ignore my request and include the pickle anyway or commit some far more eggregious error; and b) I do not mind removing the pickle myself before beginning my meal, seeing as how there is only one to remove (though the meal itself consists of two cheeseburgers), and requesting its absence would force me to open the burger to check anyway, lest I bite trustingly into it and discover the Cracker Jack prize within.

But as I remove my pickle, I think to myself: if the pickle is there, then most people are comfortable with its being there. And if most people like it there, then most people must enjoy pickles in a general sense, to some degree. So if most people like pickles, then why is there only one on the burger? Why is the burger not covered in tiny little pickle slices? It's covered in little tiny onion specks. Market research must have shown people like or do not mind onions. But there isn't just one onion speck in the middle, there are tons spread out across the burger. So why include one measly, insignificant pickle? Why be so half-hearted about pickles? Either go all out with them, or don't put them on there at all. I don't want a pickle.

I just wanna ride on my motorsickle.

For EZers, I'll be on the HotSeat at Harry's board tomorrow.

New Slang

2005-07-26T21:28:00.000-05:00

The Shins' "New Slang" is the signature rock song of the 00's.

It picks up right where Teen Spirit, the song of the 90's, left off. It is a paroxysm of wondrous depression, a classic ballad of resigned, disjointed reflection. To me it says more in the chords and melody than it does with the lyrics...to me it says "things were going so well, everything was going to be okay, and then the towers came down and our futures were stolen. Now all we can do is hang out and wait to die." It's exactly how I feel about the way things have been going since, well, basically the first election, when things didn't quite go the way they should have, and it didn't seem like too big a roadblock at the time but kept getting worse from there. My generation is lost on a far deeper level than any in the history of this country. I put the tune on repeat and listen to it ten, twenty times in a row. It's one of the greatest songs I've ever heard.

The entire Garden State soundtrack is also the best score to come along in many a moon. Braff actually submitted the soundtrack with the script, and the whole thing stuck. That's to say nothing of the movie itself, which was my favorite of last year and says pretty much what the song says. To me, anyway.

A Eulogy

2005-06-14T00:36:00.000-05:00

I laid you to rest
On the shores of the lake
And there shall you sleep
Forever
I failed to know you
Through little fault of my own
And my sorrow comes in fearing
That will be my excuse
For all who I lay to rest
On the shores of the lake.

On the shores of the lake
The sun will trace the day
And chasing it, the moon at night
Venus in the evening, Mars in the morning
Planes in the air and rockets in space
And the grass will grow unchecked
And the flowers will wither
And the weeds will colonize
The shores of the lake.

As you rest there unmoving
The world shall move around you
And your fruit shall bear fruit
Then their fruit shall bear fruit
And all will ripen
And seed
Then wither
All in turn will go to rest
On the shores of the lake.

And the world will keep moving
And the grass will keep growing
The mountains will rise
The valleys will fall
The lake will go dry
And with it the flowers
The stone with your name
Will always be there

And though it may wear smooth
The seeds of the fruit that we
Cannot yet dream of
Will someday find a hill of stones
On the shores of a lake
And if they remember the trees
That have borne them
They will know you as I did
I hope they will know you better.

Reverse Psychology

2005-05-21T11:14:00.000-05:00

I've never been so happy as I've been this week. It's definitely been the best few days of my entire life. I'm completely worthwhile and I have no regrets and life is great. I absolutely do not feel like putting a bullet through my head.

Sucks

2005-05-03T01:27:00.000-05:00

It rises above the landscape like a virtual city.

Its forums spiral up, from the sea of electrons, towering into the sky like skyscrapers from the coastal islands.

Its threads are teeming, pulsing with life, in every corner, every post, like the crowded thoroughfares of the modern metropolis.

It greets you each morning as you open your window, just as the city greets you as you open your window. It welcomes you with the logo, and the title, and the faces of the demons, cursed and sacrificed on the altar.

The clarinet takes up the song. Rhapsody in Blue.

It is the New York of the Internet.

The pictures adapt to fit each season, yet the simple, practical straight lines never curve, the fonts remain default, the javascript goes unused. Unforgiving to art, to aesthetics, it sits defiantly amongst the rebellious ezboards, a metal slide in a playground of plastic.

But still it changes, and the poster who returns after six months will not recognize the forum he grew up in. The old is paved over, washed away; this is the way of things, the lifeblood of the virtual city.

In the suburbs, posters awaken in their splinterboards and commute to the mother land, the central hub of commerce and culture. They meet here, mingle here, admin and newbie, spoiler and spammer, drawn here, drawn here day after day after day.

It is bursting with life. I lurk in a forum and watch the people. All sorts of people. The bumper finds another thread to which he can attach his name. The troll discovers a new wound to open. An ocean of humanity, all anonymous, all adrift in cyberspace but tethered to the same raft.

Day after day they come.

Citizens of the virtual city.

Flower Blue

2005-04-20T01:39:00.000-05:00

Six years ago today, two young men walked calmly across their school parking lot, knowing beyond doubt that they were about to set in motion the defining event of their generation. They knew that what they were about to commit was an act that would be etched in the minds of their peers forever, and cause shock and bewilderment to everyone too old to understand. They were about to achieve immortality, in the easiest, quickest, most basic way possible.

Back then I was still naive enough to think that my generation would finally be the ones to pull it off. I looked around my graduating class and saw nothing but potential. We were the culmination of all the hard work which came before us, and we were going to solve whatever problems stood in our way. I actually thought that.

But we were not the final answer. What we learned from those who came before us...that knowledge was no blessing. It was our downfall.

Eric and Dylan are their fathers' sons. Your sons. The kids they killed, the kids who drove them to this, and the kids who merely stood by in ignorance...they are your sons and daughters as well. They used your guns. They used your hatred, your ignorance, and your violence and used them to reject your model of perfection and achieve it on their own terms. They are made in your image. All of us are; it's all we know how to be, and we hate it, and some of us will do anything, anything to break your mold.

And afterward as you argued relentlessly over which one of you was to blame, we buried our dead and added their strength to the ladder we were building. We didn't care who was at fault. We were willing to accept the responsibility ourselves. From April 20, 1999 onward, we would shoulder the burden that had been bequeathed to us by cruel fate of heritage: to do something about our world. Now was our time.

Then before we knew what hit us, the Trade Center came down, and that was the end of that. That was your tragedy, not ours, but you thrust it upon us anyway. We'd already been hurt, already had our moment of weakness and of renewed strength. But nothing could not match up to this new terror. So, we are labelled with your legacy, not ours. We live in your country, not ours. We die in your war, not ours.

Of course, we probably would have wound up even worse off. At the end of the day, we are still our fathers' sons.

Cassie Bernall
Steven Curnow
Corey DePooter
Kelly Fleming
Matthew Kechter
Daniel Mauser
Daniel Rohrbough
Dave Sanders
Rachel Scott
Isaiah Shoels
John Tomlin
Lauren Townsend
Kyle Velasquez

We Are Columbine

The DVD Shredder

2005-04-13T21:08:00.000-05:00

The company has been negotiating to vastly increase copy depth for every movie. The studios aren't too keen on this, specifically because more rental copies means more previously-viewed copies are put on sale once the title doesn't rent anymore, and saturating the market with cheaper used copies devalues the new retail copies the studios profit more from.

So the company has agreed that a certain percentage of most rental copies will not be sold...they will be destroyed, and sent back to the studios as proof.

We've always destroyed stuff for this reason, but now it will be done en masse on a weekly basis. The tried and true methods for destroying movies has always centered around physical activity: tapes are held on either end and thrust into the corner of the counter, whilst DVDs are either defaced with box cutters, microwaved, or burned in the shrink-wrapping machine.

With the new regularity of disc destruction, however, a new weapon has been sent to us: the DVD Shredder. It is exactly as it sounds: a horizontal paper shredder that eats plastic instead of trees. To our dismay, the device did not actually shred movies into jagged ribbons. When a DVD is fed into the beast, it merely perforates both sides with tiny holes, rendering it completely and permanently unwatchable. While this sin ensures that unscrupulous employees cannot pocket doomed movies for later enjoyment or profit, it does provide an equal return of pleasure, as it is situated in the break room next to a box of last year's CBS Sneak Peek promotional discs.

Life is good.

The Voice from Above

2005-03-27T17:22:00.000-06:00

Bob Casey is dead. The Twins lost a lot of core players in the offseason, but Casey's absence will be the most noticed. He was perhaps the one lingering artifact of the old days of Minnesota baseball. Now he's gone.

Maybe they will give us a new park now.

Sunshine

2005-03-25T17:49:00.000-06:00

It's sunny out today. Sunny but cold. Not as cold as it's been all winter, but when it's sunny in March it should be warm. Still jacket weather. I'm getting impatient. Not that I'd actually spend any time outside if it were warm, but I'd like to think that the option were available nonetheless.

I took the whole week off. This is the fourth day of six straight days off, and creating this blog is probably the most productive thing I've done so far, besides eating and laundry.

I've stopped growing up. Now I'm just sitting around waiting to die.

In other words, it's a nice day.

Mersaydeez

2005-03-25T16:15:00.000-06:00

The full extent of the Mersaydeez spoiler has perhaps not been realized by many. People are going to be dogging her all the way through the season, waiting for her to trip up. But, when it comes right down to it, she's only got two more weeks to trip up, and then the meat of her spoiler has already come to pass. She originally spoiled the jury, and we're two boots away from the jury. If the two remaining losers go home, the spoiler is essentially a success. Even if the F6 or the F4 or F2 or whatever turn out to be wrong, the idea that these players make it far is much more important then the specific placement of their expiration. It's the same as with S6 ChillOne. He didn't even get a single specific boot right, but what he did spoil was the general outline for most of the players in the show: Ryan/Daniel/Joanna etc. are losers, Christy/Matt/Butch etc. are jurors. The only undeniably specific misstep by ChillOne -- the Christy boot -- didn't take away his contribution to the spoiling world that season.

And so it is with Mersaydeez. If Ibrehem and Bobby Jon are booted in the next two weeks, we've basically gotten all we need from her information, whether the detailed finalist predictions pan out or not. Without this spoiler, no one would have guessed one tribe would completely annihilate itself before the merge. That was crucial information. The notion that Mersaydeez is a plant is rapidly increasing in absurdity; in two weeks it will be impossible, unless SEG has exceptionally stupid plants (why spoil most of the season only to trip us up in the final weeks? We benefit far more during the journey than we lose at the end).

Even so, the thread needs to slow down. I'm seriously considering locking it for one or two days at a time to keep chatters from unnecessarily bloating it.