It makes you think. 
Author: Tim
An animator, video producer, Lego artist, and author—I am moderately skilled at a lot of different things.
I can’t believe how people actually voted way back in the 20th century. FUN FACT! Did you know there were as many as THREE political parties back then?
I don’t know about you, but this election I’m voting for Officer John McClain.
Wait, John McCain? Aw, shit.
I booted up Word for the one thing it’s good at — writing resumes — and when I went to save my file, I was once again baffled by the ‘save’ icon in the upper left corner. It’s a goddam Zip disk. Still. What year is it, Word? 1998, maybe? Are people still using these quarter-gigabyte wonders to save all their precious files? Even as 80GB iPods and thumbdrives and CD-Rs abound, the ubiquitous icon for saveability is still the 250MB Iomega Zip disk??
Even the idea of removable storage is so outdated I’m guessing Microsoft still hasn’t gotten through ripping off ideas from the original Macintosh. Speaking of old things, that perennial burn on Microsoft. Yeah, they steal from Apple. I went there.
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I feel fantastic!
I can’t remember when I last slept! I had been cooped up in my apartment writing code all night, and when the sun began to shine through my mini-blinds I knew I wasn’t going to get any sleep now, since that’s exactly what happened yesterday morning. So I grabbed my ipod and went for a walk.
I headed down Santa Monica listening to Rebel Rebel when I caught my reflection in a guitar shop window. I’ve been letting my hair grow out, I was bedraggled, hadn’t shaved in days, and hid my eyes behind dark sunglasses. I looked and felt like a rockstar. And as I headed down the sunny side of the street at 8:30 this morning to destinations unknown, the commuter traffic was beginning to pile up. The people who had to go to sleep at a sensible hour, only to drag themselves out of bed to get into their car and sit in traffic on their way to another day at their hateful job. More grist for the mill. And I was out taking a walk, enjoying the morning sunshine. I never felt so free.
When I was working, I had that I couldn’t sleep I couldn’t sleep I couldn’t sleep insomnia gnawing at me, but this time it was different. It wasn’t the insomnia that was bothering me, it was the anxiety about when I had to wake up. Now I don’t have to sleep. I felt like I had finally found my own schedule, and it felt wonderful.
SMITH (the magazine whose name must be shouted) mentions an apocryphal bet once made to Hemingway that he couldn’t write a story only six words long. His answer was the touching, heartbreaking: “For Sale: baby shoes, never worn”.
Thanks to the internet, any jerkoff can now do the same thing and think they’re fucking Hemingway too. Just visit Six Word Memoirs and stand among the literary giants while simultaneously doing both the least amount of work and the maximum amount of navel-gazing. Not coincidentally, SMITH is also selling a book of these memoirs.
And now the moment you’ve all been waiting for, my memoir:
Oh great, it’s that sarcastic guy.
Me and everyone else on the internet decided. We’re going to make a LOLcats version of everything. Today we made a list and I got assigned the 1968 Kubrick film “2001: A Space Odyssey“, so here goes. The first LOLcats in 2:1 widescreen.
Hopefully it will turn out better than that ‘lolternative’ nonsense from last year.
An article is making its way up Reddit about how a Nigerian 5-year old is repairing OLPCs. Awesome. One more bit of malfunctioning technology for the third world to deal with, since it’s got that whole food/shelter/war/inflation/AIDS thing worked out already.
The spin is that this enterprising kindergartner is learning a trade fixing broken laptops, and by introducing broken products into the marketplace, OLPC is doing its part to magnanimously create labor for more children. It’s a business model Jean-Baptiste Zorg would be proud of.
Nevermind that some parts can be replaced for $1 when most kids can live on 80¢ a day. Nevermind that this opportunity came about because of broken hardware, or that this child’s time could be better spent elsewhere. Like at a school. Breaking things isn’t actually good for an economy. It’s all covered in the parable of the broken window.
To be honest, I’m not too enthused over my writing from the last several weeks. I feel like I missed my point on the 100% Pure Energy post in particular — that it’s hopeful and plausible to have energy-based life persist after the heat death of the universe — and so I want to take a step back and re-evaluate how I approach writing on my site.
I do have a theory on how to improve my writing: you know how there are people you converse with naturally? It may be in person, over IM or via e-mail but I know there are people I just communicate with more smoothly. If I imagine I’m writing to that person, I think my writing will come out more natural, whereas when I address the void of the internet, I feel like I’m writing a drab, monotonous manual, and so I cut the zing out of my writing.
Oh, nevermind that this site was supposed to have mostly cartoons. I’m getting to that!
Did you say you wanted a review of the Macbook Air several weeks after its debut? Well, you’re getting one anyway. I was going to call this review the “Macbook Who Cares” because I’m so witheringly clever, but I’m sure there’s a bandwagon of bad “air” puns out there already. Into “thin air”, “hot air”, “break like the air” — those are all for free.
The first thing you notice about the Air is how small it is. How did Apple do it? If you’d told me all you had to do to make a smaller laptop was remove the optical drive and a bunch of ports, I would never have believed you. But somehow Apple harnessed the power of “removing stuff” and produced the Air.
Will wonders never cease?
It was while reading a better review from Engadget that I realized what other Apple product the Air most resembles: the G4 Cube.
Both were received to great enthusiasm and are a marvel to look at. They are also too small, too expensive, oddly-ported, difficult to upgrade one-offs that have no long-term sustainability. In both cases, Apple has released to manufacturing what are the computer equivalent of concept cars. Just as the slot-loading drive, touch-sensitive buttons, smaller form factor and DVI port of the Cube began to appear on a lot of later Mac hardware, the features and advances of the Air will soon find their way into much cooler — and more practical — iMacs, Power Macs and iPods.
Yes, “there’s something in the air” — unfortunately it’s Icarus.
He’s been on the air since before the invention of television, so I’ll cut Larry King some slack when he runs short on credible topics to cover, but last weekend after reawakening from a surprise nap in a Las Vegas hotel room, I found myself with an hour to kill and Larry King’s episode about UFOs caught my befuddled attention. I guess there’s a conference in Dublin, Texas this week covering UFOs and Larry wanted to put a couple of housewives trained observers on the air to tell their tale about a sighting of a ludicrously large UFO over their house.
The observers know it was a spacecraft of alien origin because they saw five lights in the sky which looked connected. Of course. This begs an oft-overlooked question: do UFOs even have running lights? None of the satellites earth has sent into orbit or to the surface of another planet have blinking lights on their wings or bodies. Even the space shuttle — the only craft we know to have visited the earth from outer space — doesn’t have running lights. Navigation lights are an earth contrivance, standardized by the FAA. Are we to assume that the Greys from Omicron Persei-8 stopped to certify their craft with the feds before taking their silent, mile-long boomerang out for a joyride?
I’m guessing that idea hasn’t occurred to the brainiac sisters in the clip below. I feel for skeptic James McGaha when having to deal with the staggering genius of a UFO witness who refutes him with, “I don’t really care about the subject enough. I saw what I saw.”