Category: Uncategorized

A bit of housekeeping today.

Apparently BufBloPoFo has been enough of a success to date that our compatriots simply cannot resist starting blogs. Please welcome Greg at the Wannabe Outdoorsman and Amanda at Popcorn to the rewarding world of blogging.

I have been horribly remiss in responding to this week’s comments. I bought and HP, not a Toshiba. I have not seen Interstellar 5555 — I always assumed Daft Punk took an existing movie and re-cut it to fit their song, which is much cooler than what they actually did. Vista still sucks, though some of the features are pretty all right. I just wish it would stop clicking on things unasked.

1: I started this blog to get more practice writing. I’m not sure if the previous sentence is grammatically correct.
2: The best gift I have ever received was a combo — my dictionary and thesaurus, which are dope.
3: Things that went right today — It’s snowy enough to not do anything. Rad.
4: Play me in a movie. Depending on the type of movie, David Duchovny or James Marsden. Play Garv, Broderick.
5: Etiquette – already covered.
6: Stuff I was into as a kid: Star Wars, GI Joe, Victorian adventure literature, Voltron, Atari.
7: In my wallet. Standards.
8: Current music. The endless mix of post-medieval church music and suicide rock that Jess plays. And Rock It by Gorillaz. Hate the video, like the song.

Well, I’m bald. I participated in Bald For Bucks, a fundraiser for Roswell, and now have zero hair.

Now, what is wrong with the people I work with? Nobody called me Lex Luthor. Nobody called me Charles Xavier. No Destro, no Lobot. I did hear Jason Statham, though, which is tough to be unhappy about.

I’ll tell you this — my head is cold.

Dear Windows –

It’s about Vista. If I had wanted a Mac, I would have shelled out the dough to add one to my list of fashionable accessories*. As it turns out, I want a PC. You’ll note the use of the present tense “want”.

I was an Apple guy once, back when you needed to know what to put after a C prompt to make an IBM-clone do anything other than blink at you mockingly. I used to say ‘an Apple is a tool, and a PC is a hobby’. Used my tried and true Macintosh SE through college without issue. Then I grew up and got a job.

So, you hooked me. I left the world of smiling icons to enter one of deadly blue screens, happy to spend hours of my life watching Scandisk try to undo whatever horrible thing I had done to my PC (simply by trying to use it). My lifelong obsession with videogames reached new heights, and I came to love the accessibility of every aspect of a PC’s function offered by Windows 98 as I tweaked and tweaked, desperate to improve framerate.

Having become a willing devotee of Uncle Bill, I came to detest the Macolytes. Why pay so much for a pretty case wrapped around a machine that wouldn’t let you mess with it? They were useless from a business standpoint and had precisely crapola for games. Yet friends and family, people I care about, fell to the lure of the quick and easy path of Mac ownership.

And now, having carried the torch for these many years, I am slapped in the face with this new Mac-like OS. Why don’t you just replace the Start menu with the Finder and move the X to the other side of the window while you’re at it?

With unflagging love,

Alex

* This list is very, very short.

I blog to you now from the new laptop. I’m not going to tell you that Alanna’s recommendation of astrologyzone.com led to the purchase, but I will say that apparently one twelfth of the world’s population would do well to buy an electronic device in March according to the stars.

It is an indisputable fact of modern life that Best Buy’s 20-something staffers will try desperately to upsell you a bunch of stuff you don’t need. This is despicable, as they normally use the coarsest of scare tactics to get the ill-informed to make poor decisions with their money. Want to shut them up? I suggest the following:

BB – What are you using this computer for?
AL – Wireless internet and word processing.
BB – Are you familiar with Vista?
AL – Yes. (Technically not true, but assume our definitions of ‘familiar’ differ in this context.)
BB – Well, it doesn’t come with a word processor like…
AL – Not to worry. I use open source software for that.

At this point, the poor fellow blinked several times. ‘Open source’ is the blue-polo-shirt equivalent of ‘Rumplestiltskin’.

BB – Well, what do you use for security? Viruses…
AL – I use open source for that, too.
BB – (now sweating) How about a service plan? You know batteries for these things can cost up to BLANK (where BLANK is half the cost of the laptop). We can (three minutes of pathetic blathering).
AL – No thanks.
BB – Well, here you go, Have a nice day.
AL – That’s right, bitch. I know your secret. I am geekier than you pretend to be, and your three-card-monte bullshit doesn’t work. Now try to sell me a pre-order of Madden 2015. I dare you.

While I was on my safari in the Buffalo Central Library on the hunt for that Japan book, I found myself with plenty of time to look at the bulletin boards. It was then that I learned of the Buffalo News short fiction contest. They were looking for super-short stories set in Buffalo, so I re-tooled a piece I had (unsuccessfully) submitted to the Artvoice for their flash fiction purposes and sent it to the provided email address.

No response. Not a “thank you for submitting”, not a “we got yer thingy”, nothing.

The winners were posted recently, including some runners-up. Obviously there was some mistake. My piece is simply filled with quality. Sure, the Artvoice guy didn’t recognize it, but perhaps he has some kind of bias. (When I get my Nobel, he’ll rue the day he overlooked what was so clear to everyone else.) The News must not have received the complex gem of modern literature I offered them.

So, I emailed again today. A very polite and respectful note congratulating the winners and asking — just out of curiosity — for confirmation. Not confirmation for myself as a writer, of course (though an “oh, yours was simply magnificent but didn’t really meet requirement X, have you considered The Atlantic?” wasn’t outside of the realm of imaginable possibility) but simply confirmation that my opus had been received.

“Sorry, but we read 500 stories and can’t confirm receipt” came the reply. No lead-in, no “yours”, nothing but that sentence. And this not two hours after I sent my inquiry.

Now, I’ve received my share of rejection letters, and this one struck me as unusually rude. One might point out that if I had received a simple “thank you for your entry” I would not have been troubling them at this late date, or that a greeting and signature are normally considered the minimum acceptable etiquette, but these reminders would most certainly fall on ears deafened by the immense responsibility of being paid to read 250,000 words for the only paper in town.

So there you have it, Garvemus: a post on etiquette and protocol. Rejected-writer rage!!!

Dear MTV –

You must have heard I called in sick today. Why else would you play a straight hour of animated videos in the middle of the day?

You should know that all in all, I was satisfied with your choices. Daft Punk’s “One More Time” and “Money for Nothing” by Dire Straits are the obvious historical choices, and you did well to include them. “Move Your Feet” maintains its hilarity and “Breaking the Habit” will never cease to be awesome.

That being stated, why two Gorillaz videos? And why was neither of them 19/2000? Also, that Tupac video is awful. I am literally filled with awe at how bad it is.

My only additions might have been “Paranoid Android” (though its like seventy minutes long, weird, and only important to Radiohead freaks, so maybe “Pyramid Song“), Matthew Sweet’s “Girlfriend” in place of the Daft Punk thing, and lego-tastic “Fell in Love with a Girl“.

Yours,
Alex

“Youtube it!”

I overheard this imperative the other day. We all know you can google, fedex, and xerox, but does youtube merit a verb form?

I’m leaning towards no. The trouble is, one can search for videos on youtube as well as post them. So, does “youtube it” mean “look for that video on youtube” or “post that video on youtube”?

It could be argued that context would be the deciding factor between the two meanings,
but take for example the following conversation:

“Where did you get this video?”
“I youtubed it.”
“Oh, you posted it to youtube?”
“No, I found it on youtube.”
“I say. This would be easier if ‘youtube’ were not a verb.”
“Quite right, sir; quite right.”

Apparently all the Starbucks’ in the known universe were closed for three hours yesterday. They say it was for employee training, but we all know it was to assert their supreme dominance over American life.

“We believe that this is a bold demonstration of our commitment to our core and a reaffirmation of our coffee leadership,” said chief executive Howard Schultz in a statement.

Schultz was later quoted as saying “We also believe that this is a bold demonstration of how much you little fools depend on us. Comes the revolution, don’t say we didn’t warn you. Mwa ha. Mwa ha ha. MWA HA HA HA HAAAAA!”

Well, look who’s back.

Also, be sure to participate.

Odd synchronicities going on recently.

Fidel Castro resigns. Ivan Castro skis.

I’m watching Blade Runner tonight. On the way home from work, I heard “More Human Than Human“.

Been watching a lot of Doctor Who recently. Last night, I was referred to as “Doctor Who, here”.

Maybe it’s the eclipse.