The Great Geek Manual

2016-05-24T10:00:00.000-04:00

82.) Patience is just remembering that, as soon as it's over, you're just going to wish you could do it all over again.

Journal

2016-05-20T10:00:00.000-04:00

My parents have reached an age where they repeat stories so often that I've started to think of them as my own personal NPCs. It doesn't help that they occasionally give me some random task that does nothing to help me level up.

Rant

2016-04-11T10:00:00.000-04:00

Damn it. Why is my movie I’m watching illegally online buffering so much? This isn't what I didn’t pay for!

Rant

2016-01-04T10:00:00.000-05:00

I'm watching YouTube videos of the Rocking New Year's Eve concerts that I missed, and it occurs to me that music was better when ugly people were allowed to make it.

Rant

2015-11-02T10:00:00.000-05:00

To be fair, we should have a holiday in November to balance out Valentines Day by making people feel bad about having people who love them.

Oh wait, I forgot about Thanksgiving dinner. Nevermind.

Journal

2015-09-04T10:00:00.000-04:00

At 14, all my mom could talk about was how getting a girl pregnant would ruin my life. At 34, all my mom can talk about is how never getting a girl pregnant has ruined her life.

Journal

2015-08-28T10:00:00.000-04:00

Sure, by my age my grandfather had fought a war, bought a farm, married, and had two kids, but I've got a phone that plays music AND video games. Who's got time for kids with all that on my plate?

Journal

2015-08-21T10:00:00.000-04:00

I want a girl I can take to Ikea, not in some bullshit "500 Days of Summer" way but because she's seriously passionate about Swedish design practices.

Journal

2015-08-14T10:00:00.000-04:00

Whenever I pass a person preaching the apocalypse on a street corner, I just wanna stop, hand him a book of Lovecraft and ask "Have you read the Good News?"

Seriously. Every Revelations preacher is just a goth kid who never blossomed, and it's all I can do not to help them along their way.

Journal

2015-08-07T10:00:00.001-04:00

Have you ever just had one of those moments where you stop and think to yourself, "This is it. This is how I become a super villain." Mine are starting to come one on top of the next.

I knew I was evil from a very young age. I was always been very well organized, and really, that's the thing about evil. It's always got a plan. It's just that, lately, I feel like things are coming to a head. I feel like, at any moment, someone's going to push me a hair's breadth too hair and BOOM, there's my super villain gimmick.

Rant

2015-08-07T10:00:00.000-04:00

Honestly, at this point, I don't even watch television with any expectation of enjoying it. I only watch series so that I understand what everybody is talking about online.

2015-08-07T08:00:00.000-04:00

"Bullshit is everywhere. (Are the kids still in here? We'll deal with that later.)

Bullshit is everywhere. There is very little that you will encounter in life that has not been, in some ways, infused with bullshit. Not all of it bad! Your general, day-to-day, organic free-range bullshit is often necessary, or, at the very least, innocuous. "Oh, what a beautiful baby. I'm sure it'll grow into that." That kind of bullshit in many ways provides important social-contract fertilizer. It keeps people from making each other cry all day. But then there's the more pernicious bullshit. Your premeditated, institutional bullshit, designed to obscure and distract. Designed by whom? The bullshitocracy.

It comes in three basic flavors. One, making bad things sound like good things. "Organic, all-natural cupcakes." Because factory-made sugar oatmeal balls doesn't sell. Patriot Act. Because "Are you scare enough to let me look at all your phone records" Act doesn't sell. So, whenever something's been titled Freedom, Family, Fairness, Health, and America, take a good long sniff. Chance are it's been manufactured in a facility that may contain traces of bullshit.

Number two. The second way: hiding the bad things under mountains of bullshit. Complexity. You know, I would love to download Drizzy's latest Meek Mill diss... (Everyone promised me that made sense.) ...but I'm not really interest right now in reading Tolstoy's iTunes agreement. So I'll just click agree, even if it grants Apple prima nocta with my spouse.

Here's another one: "simply put." Simply put, banks shouldn't be able to bet your pension money on red. Bullshitly put, it's "Hey, this." [Drops a very tall stack of official-looking documents on desk.] Dodd-Frank.

Hey, a handful of billionaires can't buy our elections, right? Of course not. They can only pour unlimited, anonymous cash into a 501(c)4 if fifty-percent is devoted to issue education, otherwise they'd have to 501(c)6 it, or funnel it openly through a non-campaign coordinated super PAC with a quarter... (I think they're asleep now. We can sneak out.)

And finally... finally... it's the bullshit of infinite possibility. These bullshitters cover their unwillingness to act under the guise of unending inquiry. We can't do anything because we don't yet know everything. We cannot take action on climate change until everyone in the world agrees gay-marriage vaccines won't cause our children to marry goats who are going to come for our guns. Until then, I say teach the controversy.

Now, the good news is this. Bullshitters have gotten pretty lazy, and their work is easily detected, and looking for it is kind of a pleasant way to pass the time. Like an "I Spy" of bullshit. So, I say to you tonight, friends, the best defense against bullshit is vigilance. So if you smell something, say something."

The Daily Show

Rant

2015-08-05T10:00:00.000-04:00

Mama always said, if you can't be a good influence, you just have to be a horrible warning.

The best of my many original (de)Motivation Posters and possibly my all-time favorite platitude. As far as I'm concerned, you either wake up every morning of your life and work like a dog to meet the world's expectations, or else you get on with the business of unabashedly enjoying your life without shame. Nothing in between has ever made any sense to me.

2015-08-04T10:00:00.000-04:00

81.) The things you put into the world will be used in ways you never expected. And by idiots.

Don't ever think that you know what people will do with what you release.

Rant

2015-08-03T10:00:00.000-04:00

Girls, if a guy wants you to learn how to play a video game, it means you are the most important person in his life... or, he needs a healer.

Journal

2015-07-31T10:00:00.001-04:00

Girls: So... do you have any hobbies?
Me: Mostly, I just make sure that the internet doesn't get lonely. It's not so much a hobby as a calling.

Rant

2015-07-31T10:00:00.000-04:00

Remember the good old days when ms paint was enough to keep you happy for hours?

Rant

2015-07-29T10:00:00.000-04:00

If I ever climb up a building and begin shooting people, it will have far more to do with Ray Bradbury's "And the Moon Be Still as Bright" than any video game.

Rant

2015-07-27T10:00:00.001-04:00

Nineties Kids make the saddest adults.

Having witnessed the transition from the Industrial Age to the Information Age first-hand, we've become a generation mired in nostalgia for technologies that have been rendered obsolete.
We grew up playing with action figures and board games, only to graduate to Speak-n-Spells, Simon Memory Games, and Nintendos. We've marveled as huge corded telephones have shrunk down to wafer thin computers carried in our pockets. We've watched as our television offerings expanded from three fuzzy channels on a day with clear weather to five hundred channels of cinema-quality definition. And we've reveled in the growing freedom afforded to us by global data networks that have evolved from BBS chat boards into realtime streaming video that carries the world into our home.

As a result of that rapid technological development, we've been left yearning for a childhood that seems to us to have been both simpler and far further in the past than reality. For most of us "ten years ago" still means 1995, not 2005. Cursive feels like an old friend, and each book sitting on our shelves is a treasured trophy of a journey through foreign lands to our eyes.

We understand the technologies our parents are still uncomfortable with, but we still remain capable of seeing the technologies our children take for granted as the miracles they are.

Torn between the two generation, we stand apart, the saddest adults.

Rant

2015-07-24T10:00:00.000-04:00

Ladies, want to look five years younger? Nothing makes you look like a broke ass college kid faster than an iPhone with a cracked screen.

2015-07-22T10:00:00.001-04:00

80.) The smarter your technology is, the less control you have over it.

While hardware defines what a technology can do, it's software defines what it will do. Slowly but surely, that software is being designed to resist our wishes in favor of the best interests of corporations (such is the case with DRM), and it won't be long before it is designed to resist competing technologies, too. As we enter the age of the Internet of Things, we run the risk of transforming our households into either technological battlefields or fiefdoms.

Rant

2015-07-22T10:00:00.000-04:00

Sorry, but your password must contain an uppercase letter, a number, a haiku, a hieroglyph, and the blood of a virgin.

2015-07-20T10:00:00.001-04:00

79.) All systems have embedded purposes. The less we recognize them, more we mistake them for given circumstances. We start to treat the map as the territory.

At the very least we must come to recognize the biases - the tendencies- of the technologies we are using, and encourage our young people to do the same. If we don't participate in building our digital future together, it will be done by someone - or something - else.

Source: "Why Johnny Can't Program" by Douglas Rushkoff

Rant

2015-07-20T10:00:00.000-04:00

I once read a short story about a cineplex of the future that claimed to have a thousand different movies playing on any given day. The story followed a teenage girl who discovers that, at any given time, a large portion of the movies are fakes, only zany trailers and posters marked "sold out."

I suspect that one day, the real world Hollywood marketing apparatus is going to catch on that a series of two minute trailers released strategically over the course of two years sells just as much merchandise as an actual movie, and it'll won't be until years later that we realize no one we know has ever seen any of the movies that our toys were supposed to be inspired by.

Journal

2015-07-17T10:00:00.001-04:00

My family went to an outdoor wedding last Sunday. About halfway through, my brother starts complaining about a rash. My mother had to explain to him that it was a sunburn.

There are many words to describe us, but "outdoorsy" is not one of them.