Allright, the last couple months I’ve been spending a lot of time composing exhaustive essays of upwards 3000 words in length. And while I’m proud of these efforts, I’m going to be taking a bit of a break from these longer articles for a while, because I frankly don’t really have the time or energy right now required for crafting them.

However, in place of this vacuum, I hope to introduce a new, regular weekly feature on the site. Every Sunday (or around that time), I’ll be posting a new feature entitled “This Week in Failures”, where I’ll offer my picks for the biggest exemplification of fraudulent, crooked, or otherwise politically-crude behavior of the past week; this is a great summational posting mechanism for someone who can’t update every day.

Of course there’s an endless supply of material in this regard, and I’ve already compiled a list of potential candidates for this week, and its only Monday, so this should be fun. In between of course I’ll post updates now and then, but I hope to have a circadian schedule for this feature, always good to keep to a routine.

See you at the dishonors ceremony.

At a recent press event entertaining the usual bobble-headed lemmings, Clinton was forced to take shelter as she was mercilessly targeted by ricocheting crosshair rounds. The perpetrators managed to escape before the Clintons private task-forces arrived on scene, but it is suspected that the attack was instigated by surrogate proxies conscripted by the Obama campaign to finally neutralize the Clintons before their egomania fueled protracted internecine strife completely self-destructively implodes the Democratic party.

Eye-witness accounts relay that the entire Clinton entourage, Hillary Rodham herself, club-wielding grunt security personnel, PR spindoctors and all, scurried away from the scene like cowardly puppies who’s established territory and sense of protection were finally penetrated.

When asked for comment, Clinton expressed absolute bemusement, confessing that “this was even worse than Bosnia!”.

Asked about his reaction to the incident, Obama drly replied “Senator Clinton acted like a typical white person.”

(Dramatic enterance) 

Well, the semester begins anew next week, and my 4 week break is nearing its conclusion. During the site’s period of suspended animation the past few weeks I’ve been up to a lot of stuff, including taking advantage of my behemoth quad-core  Vista 64x, Geforce 8800 4 gig powerhouse system, syncing up my exponentially superior to “i-Poo’d” new 30gb white Zune, and slacking in general.

 Theres a lot to pontificate about, but as for the very immediate future, I should have a politically-oriented editorial up on the site later in the day, as well as a review for Cloverfield either later tonight or early tomorrow.

Well, I’m on the eve of the last week of the semester, which means all the almost obligatory relentless, ad nauseum studying banality and mostly trivial factoid (mandatory gen-ed curriculum) mental penetration; aka the woeful seasonal preamble to final exam preparation. So naturally I have very little time to update for the next week, so don’t expect anything. Maybe one small update if I can get the chance and if its warranted, but if not I’ll be liberated from this ilk by Friday. My return post will be a Christmas Special of sorts, so hang tight.

Keep it prog.

Well, not much new to report from the frontlines. New month, and a little exercise in database management banality on my part; cleaned up The Brig, purging some of the older, less worthwhile/humorous scholarly conjecture (leftist spam) from the archives. Also, if you look to the right you’ll notice some new additions to the Blogroll, feel free to check them out if you feel so inclined.

And that was my deliciously sententious status report, till next time.

Keep it prog.

I revile colds. They agitate and slow down your biological processes just enough so that you can’t function with optimal expediency in most every task, but they don’t pose enough of an impediment to justify an excuse for outright state of lax sedentarianism.

All the rambling aside, the pith of this post is that I may still be forcefully subjected to undertake my academic duties, but I don’t have to do any work here. I was planning a column for today, but this cold is just too much of a pain. I’ll be back in a day or two.

Keep it prog.

I started the blogcast series earlier this year mainly as a kind of humorous diversion, a little excercise in mock talk-show shock-jockery, initially mainly distributed as a joke between me and some of my friends. Lately its kind of lost the “magic”, and recording them has been more of a obligatory, grudgeous enterprise than anything else. Honestly they’re really not the direction I want this site to go in, which has always been to act a s a platform for my linguistic expositional efforts.

I hardly need to point out the production values are really quite abysmal for my high technical standards, the sound quality is almost embarassing at times and really not too many people even download them anymore. So even for an extemporaneous improvised recording run with very little actual work involved, its just not worth the trouble right now.

Will there ever be another blogcast? Probably, yes, at some point or another I might produce one just for fun or whatever the occasion may be. But they will be put on the back-burner so that I’ll have more breathing space for my true passion and intention for TDP, my writing.

That being said, I’m rather busy this week with mid-terms and some papers, so I’ll have a little less time to post for a couple days. If I have time I may have an update up tomorrow night.

Till then, keep it prog.

There is little more pricelessly funny in this world than watching the technically-illiterate or intellectually-deficient discussing and interfacing with conventions of technology. Where 10 years ago the practice of sitting in front of computers for hours at a time was the sole domain of prospective or professional computer scientists, mechanical engineers or plain tech-enthusiasts and afficianados, now every preppie-primitive and his grandma is attempting to prove their IT sophistication by coresponding through Facebook when a myriad of more effective communication avenues are freely available, or thinking they’re movie stars because they can make pathetically-embarassing videos of themselves using the worthless webcam that came packaged with their low-tech Inspiron and post it on Youtube with a smug little self-satisfied grin on their face.

The last few years has seen a startling retrogression in the consumer and popular culture gravitating from the outlook on computers and those who utilize them. Whereas it was once the case that an esoteric echelon of “nerds” monoopolized the keyboards, having mastered and re-engineered every component and process domiciled within their systems, cultivating highly tightly-knit and fundamentally-sound communities and networks, even going so far as to ferment their own linguistic dialect (aka 1337speak, next to English and Farsi my third most fluent language) now the entirety of America has given way to a generation of self-proclaimed tech-savvy jackasses.

These socialite-wannabees turned sophisticated social-networkers have absolutely zero grasp of the trend-based fluctuations and norm-paradigms of the internet, and whenever they slobber on and on about how they’ve become “experts” at whatever the hell it is they think they’re doing online, it really is doing a great disservice to those of us who actually have a clue as to whats going on.

The entire history of the internet has been a tableau of constant change and perpetual progression. Ebaumsworld and Newgrounds gave way to Atomfilms gave way to Youtube. Myspace gave way to Facebook, AOHell and AIM have all but disintegrated, the illustrations of this are endless. You’re either a hopeless moron or an amnesiac if whenever a new site comes along you start foaming at the mouth and act elitist about it, all of these silly networking and time-wasting portals dissolve within a matter of a few years at the most.

Why do these sits keep springing up and fading away? Its quite simple, they never had any substance, that was the whole concept to begin with. The goal in mind when sites like Facebook are created is to accomodate those too stupid to program real websites by giving them the opportunity to design imitations of them. Thats it. For all those too lazy, illiterate or incapable of learning HTML, PHP or CSS, let them play around with this for a while. They’re even more dimunitive and laughable than Microsoft Frontpage or Apple’s iWeb, they might as well have “Web Design for the Handicaped” under the Facebook logo.

Sometimes I just wonder at how even the most sycophantic and synaptically-disjointed social networking peons buy into this nonsense. It just staggers the mind how people can waste hours of their time just posting stupid, meaningless messages to each other using a cluttered and superfluous web interface when they could just be sending email, or IMing, using voice-over IP, or using that truly arcane artifact of yore a fucking phone. Facebook doesn’t cater to any of that, it doesn’t even boast the most basic of 90s caliber live chat or BBS functionality, its just a place for people to indulge themselves with their own mind-rotting message “wall” quips and that of others. Basically Facebook and everything like it is cerebral-prostitution, I hope you guys are proud of yourselves.

Many sites are guilty in this regard. Remember when Geocities was all the rage? Or Xanga? Or Myspace? These are all innately, patently, by definition hypertext modification tools for the technologically-disabled. And notice how they’ve all gone into the darkness of obscurity oblivion? Things this stupid and simple can’t last for long, even their braindead constiutiencies grow weary of them.

The net has also been subject to a wrathful scourge by many, many other self-professed idiot bloggers. This is mainly due to the meteorically-mediocre blog hosting service Blogspot; bar none the single most waterd down, rudimentary and childishly accessible column-posting outlet available. Its design parameters are so hopelessly narrow and its templates and interface so uninspired and unintuitive that its little more than a prototypical beginner’s tool, at best; unfortunately thanks to this newfound net-savvy fever a horde of clowns who fancy themselves serious adult commentators actually employ its services.

You’d be better off rolling down your sleeves and making a site from scratch through Notepad than try using this garbage. And this is true for every single other blog construction service besides WordPress, which is the only open-source, fully scalable and programmable weblog-design architecture on the face of the web. Everything else is for blowhards and losers spouting off their pointless opinions on bland, ugly little sites that will go completely unread for the entirety of their short lifespan.

So I’ve adequately scorched the social-networking/blogging community, now I think its Youtube’s turn to get its long-deserved due. The Tube is a more nefarious beast to tackle in the sense that its not so easily lampoonable, unlike Facebook or Blogspot its not by its very nature a fraud or a scam for th easily impressed and delusional. The concept of free, seamless video distribution is a good one, and I hardly need to say that I’ve linked to Youtube videos on numerous occasiosn, not to mention spent hours upon hours of time there, not only on mindless frivolity but also genuine scholarly investigation. Its a fantasitc idea in principle that one can watch Aqua Teen Hunger Force clips and C-SPAN debates over theological existentialism’s implications upon politics using the same search engine.

But the dark side of Youtube is very, very dark. And stupid. First off, like Blogspot Youtube has been employed as a platform for legions of inarticulate plebians to spout off their incoherent views to an audience that couldn’t care less. Just type in any given issue or event into Youtube and you’ll find hundreds, thousands of clueless half-wits declaratively pronouncing their opinions, apparently totally unaware that their videos never receive any comments because people just reflexively click the back button on their browsers upon discovering how fucking retarded they are.

Now, the problem of an incredibly obtuse community could normally be mitigated through comprehensive rebukes and retalliations against outlandish political capitulations or something of that sort. Or maybe theres just a particularly aggravating, but nonetheless ridiculously circulated video that you want to shred to pieces in full. In either case this could normally be easily facilitated through even a basic feedback system, even the most underdeveloped of networking sites maintain a decent commenting mechanism.

But the software engineers at Youtube decided to just go ahead and circumvent such a tried and true page component as establishing a functioning feedback protocol. See, Youtube comments can’t exceed a meager 500 characters. Thats barely enough to respond to a pointless video involving some doofus making an ass out of himself attempting to sing, let alone composing a serious contention to a crazed political rambling you find distasteful. This makes it completely impossible to engage in serious debates with people, or to thoroughly refute false assertions or defend yourself if you’re attacked for posting your opinion. It was as if Youtube was intentionally attempting to stultify dissent, and thats not the only fascistic tendency they’ve exhibited as of late.

No, not at all. Everyone should be quite wary of right now is Youtube’s insane enforcement of self-concocted, totallitarian copyright laws. Right and left some of the best videos in Youtube’s database are being mercilessly purged and their contributors banned because of innane outcries of “intellectual property theft” by media leviathan conglomerates like Fox. This vicious witch-hunt has gone as far as banning 5 second clips from movies and TV shows, for fear that a fraction of a cent in stock prices may be compromised somehow.

This is contemptible corporate bullying at its best, and Youtube is pandering to it. The situation isn’t likely to improve, worst case scenario being that the Youtube filled with a vast multitude of videos from every corner of the culture was just a temporary pipedream, like pre-RIAA meddled Napster. Most people don’t realize it, but those of us with some degree of knowledge of the intricacies of the information superhighway can already see the beginning of the end of Youtube. Unless serious change is inacted the decimation of more and more Youtube videos based on absurdist copyright pretensions will only intensify.

The saddest part is that the demise of Youtube will be relatively quiet, the underlying substance of the populous is carefree ineptitude in all things, let alone some website; they’ll just move on to something else, forgetting how or why these events even came to pass. Incidentally this unfocused, erratic, unprincipled, uninquisitive, conformist, pedantic frame of mind is highly reminiscent of the public’s attitude towards socio-political issues, which actually accounts for and explains quite a deal.

This testifies to the impossibly low-standards of those who subscribe to popular culture, and how it corrodes their perception of the technological. Comparative standards and judgements have been completely reduced to mere aesthetic appeal, or what I like to call the “cybernetic sexiness quotient”. This demonstrates the rise of Apple, in reality Apple’s products really aren’t anything to be impressed about, alternative mp3 storage units such as Creative Labs Zen or iRiver had all the functionality of later generation iPods long before Apple dished out their overpriced versions; they had video way before iPods, and some still have features that iPods don’t, including built-in FM tuners, Bluetooth and wi-fi. And yet Apple monopolizes the market because of the supposed sleekness factor.

This is also the case with the iPhone, which attracted almost uniformal, vitriolic animus from real tech journals. And yet the average self-loathing moron drooled over it, chastising themselves that their lousy jobs weren’t sufficient enough to contend with the exorbitantly overpriced gizmo. Likewise for iMacs and MacBooks, they look nifty and have bouncy GUIs, but very minimal in the actual substance criterion. And FYI the only reason Macs don’t get viruses is because not enough people actually own them to warrant hackers to waste their time engineering them, its very simple. And yet upper-middle class high-society hopefuls buy them. Not as genuine computing instruments, mind you, but as furniture, to show off.

Thats what this generation of tools have reduced the discourse and overall public consciousness of the tech-world to. It may be unrelated, but its rather symbolic that Tech TV devolved to G4 around the same period of this conceptual metamorphosis. See, Comcast calculated that since the current channel catered to a far more recondite and inclusive community than the rest of America could possibly hope to penetrate, they figured it would be a much more profittable enterprise to simply make Tech TV “consumer friendly”.

Well, for once, they got something right. But I wonder if they could have forseen the schizmatic cultural implications.

Not that anyone on that side would care.

Listen to it or I’ll make Ahmadinejad lecture at your house.