I Think My iPod is Sentient

Remember Furbies? Yeah, me neither.

Anyway, one of the things that Furbies were designed to do was to have a built in vocabulary of English words that the Furby would only gradually use as time went on and the child spent more time "talking" to it. This created the illusion that the child was teaching the little creature how to speak.


What does this have to do with anything? Well, I've been thinking, Furbies came out years ago and technology advances at a exponential rate, so wouldn't it stand to reason that by now it would actually be possible for a machine to gradually learn things from and about their user?

I don't know. I'm just a Theater major. It seems plausible to me.



The reason I bring this up is because I'm beginning to think that my iPod has grown accustomed to my personality and habits. Furthermore, I think the iPod is using this knowledge not to entertain or help me, but to mock me like the sly white devil it is.



I used to think it was just always in the opposite mood I was in. When I put it on during a party, it would always make sure to play the dreariest, most depressing music possible. When I put it on during a romantic situation, it would play the least sexy music known to man (I have the full album). However, the other day it did something that led me to believe that it wasn't just a poor judge of mood, it was actually just trying to make fun of me.

I was waiting in line to buy books at the Co-Op (17 separate plays for one class? Jesus.) and this incredibly cute blonde girl comes in and gets in line next to me. As if I were living in a Cameron Crowe movie or something, my iPod instantly begins playing "Somewhere Someone's Falling in Love" by John Prine.

That's fine enough and I was really starting to feel a total serendipitous moment. Hell, the music selection had even emboldened me enough to start talking to this random girl (a very un-me thing to do). I probably would have had my iPod not suddenly switched tracks to Pino Donaggio's score for the Brian DePalma movie "Body Double". Specifically, it played music from the scene where the hero has become obsessed with the mystery girl and has devolved into a creepy stalker. Of course, this instantly shamed me into looking straight ahead and not even thinking about the girl for the rest of my time in the store.

Fuck you, iPod. I wouldn't have been surprised if the next track on its "random" shuffle had just been 3 minutes of derisive laughter.


(I've already posted this song on the blog but what the hell)

When the Right is Wrong: Sinful Schadenfreude

I know this may come as a huge shock to a lot of you out there, but I am a liberal.

I know, I know! Crazy! An east coast, half Jewish college student studying Theater and English who votes Democrat. I must be one in a million, right?

Anyway, as a liberal, there's plenty of things that the Religious Right does that irks me. Ok, maybe "irk" is too passive a word, but you know what I mean. However, there's one thing that I can always count on the Bible-thumpers to do to make up for their slow destruction of our country, and that is fall from grace.

You all remember that summer (was it the last one? Two ago? I'm too lazy to look it up) where it seemed like every single homo-bashing Reverend-cum-politician was caught with a gigolo in his car and a teenaged male intern under his desk. It was absolutely hilarious. However, not being gay, it was never really my victory. I was just cheering from the sidelines.

As a Theater student who wants to one day work in some area of the arts (probably craft services) there are some conservative jackasses who I feel a personal hatred for. That would be the censors. And some of the most jackassiest of those recent jackasses have been the people behind the Clean Flicks phenomenon.

Clean Flicks is this series of businesses that specialize in editing popular films to be more palatable to conservative of family audiences.

Obvious copyright problems aside (most of these companies have rightfully been under fire from the studios for making money off of their films) what these people are doing is disgusting, misguided, and damn near insane. They claim the real reason for their practise is for parents of young children who want to make sure what they're renting for their kids is nice and neat. Unfortunately, these parents are too stupid and lazy that it's not just the images themselves that can affect kids, but the themes behind them.
If Action Star McGee shoots 50 people with an assault rifle but some guy edited out the shot with all the blood squirting, Action Star McGee still shot 50 people with an assault rifle. If the movies weren't made for children, children shouldn't watch them no matter what's been artlessly hacked out.
And even if this plan worked, it would still be wrong. If I was a writer, director, or actor who had spent months pouring out everything on a movie, I wouldn't want there to be bastardized versions of it floating around with my name on it.

Anyway, I'm rambling. Now that you have the background on Clean Flicks and why it sucks more ass than all the deleted nude buttocks from a thousand of their "movies" you can hopefully get a taste of the pleasure I got from reading this article.

And, so I can at least pretend that this blog is anywhere near evenhanded, here's an article about a liberal douchebag who likes sex in movies and is big rapist asshole.

I'm An Adult Now

So, I turned 21 today. Wow. I suppose I'm fully past my developmental years now. They were good years, filled with my failed experiments with women, alcohol, and (worst of all) facial hair. Now things are going to be entirely different. I'll still experiment with women, alcohol, and facial hair but now when I fail, the consequences will be much more dire.

Ah, adulthood, where "content" is the new "ecstatic".

Song I'm Currently Obsessed With: Camera Obscura - Arrangements of Shapes and Space

It's amazing. It's like a great acoustic folk song made sweet love with an Explosions in the Sky song.

Democratic Kombat

So we were playing Mortal Kombat II today (yeah, we're cool) and then I made this (yeah, I'm cool).


http://demkom.ytmnd.com/

An Auto Body to Die For

I've moved back in to my Rutgers house for the most part. The place looked like absolute shit after a month of housing dozens of partiers, not one willing to clean. So we spent a couple of hours and cleaned it up. A New Brunswick house is a New Brunswick house though.

I went to the auto shop yesterday to get an estimate on my car (my friend's younger sister backed into it and now it sounds like 20 dying cats every time I hit a bump). The shop was in the middle of this incredibly trashy industrial park in Ewing. So I was surprised when I walked in and the girl behind the desk was incredibly, incredibly hot. She looked like a mixture of a girl I had a crush on in high school and the actress Marisa Coughlan.

There's something about ugly surroundings that make a hot girl hotter. If only that worked for us guys. We wouldn't have to keep waging the impossible cleanliness battle in our house.

In other news, my birthday's coming up. On Friday I'll be 21. How about that? I'm about as adult as you can get now.

Do adults spend their time coming up with the best car-related pun for the titles of their blog posts?

Song I'm Currently Obsessed With: Ultra Orange & Emmanuelle - Don't Kiss Me Goodbye

Setting Up the Ground Rules (in more ways than one!)

Ah, here it is: The all important first non-introductory blog entry.

The first entry merely declared the blog's existence. This entry needs to set the tone for all the entries that follow and keep the interest of the people who signed on last time merely for the excitement of something new.
In that respect, it's like the second episode of a network TV show. The pilot grabbed people's eyes because it had all the network advertising and probably premiered after a big football game or something. The second episode has a much lower budget and no celebrity guest stars, but still needs to keep people hooked while showing them what the series will be like from there on out.
So what is the series going to be like?

I have no idea.

A month or so ago, I had an essay due for one of my classes. So, like usual, I was putting it off and wandering the dank and dingy halls of the internet. After a while I somehow clicked on a link off someone's Facebook page that led to their blog. Then I clicked on their friend's page and saw the blogs for a bunch of other people I knew and I read those as well. After a while I came to the distinct revelation that nearly everyone I knew was incredibly, incredibly depressed. And some of them were terrible poets as well.

I don't want my blog like that. While I am, at heart, nothing but an emo kid with a better taste in music, that doesn't mean that I think it's a good idea to start ranting out in the open whenever one of my friends is totally mean to me.
Have you ever had a friend write in their blog that you were a total jerk? It's terrible. You see them the next day and you totally want to yell at them but you can't because then you'd be admitting that you read their lame ass Livejournal!

So none of that here. If, say, Cute Blonde Girl #18 breaks my heart in a month, there is not a chance that the next day you'll see some blog entry entitled "This is why you don't deserve me!!!" featuring a whiny rant or a crappy poem or an uploaded painting or a link to some interpretive dance video posted on YouTube. I ain't gonna do it (unless, of course, I get really drunk, in which case I'll delete the damn thing the next morning).

That's not to say that this thing's going to be completely impersonal. I'm definitely going to go with the traditional journal approach at some point. I just won't be all touchy feely about it. And if I have something shitty to say about someone who might actually read this blog (so not, like George Bush or someone) I'll say it to their face and not to the faceless people on the web.

But if I am going to post personal stories, just not all the time, what else am I going to fill these pages with? Well, I guess whatever the fuck I want. And to start things off on an appropriately out-of-left-field note, I now present the rules to an amazing drinking game I helped invent last weekend!

SECONDS: the greatest drinking game ever!

invented by

Zach, Takis, and myself while at Erika's house

Seconds (named for the amount of seconds a person has to drink for in a given turn) is a card game. It uses a standard deck of playing cards. The play goes around the table with each player taking turns being either the "dealer" or the "drinker", with the former drawing the card that tells the latter how long to drink for. The drinker gets the chance to "challenge" the dealer which may lead to the opposite player doing the drinking.

Equipment:

• 1 deck of cards
• 2 or more players
• Alcohol (most likely beer)

Official Rules:
The players sit in a circle with the shuffled deck of cards in the middle. Play goes around counter-clockwise with one person being the "dealer", and the person to his right being the "drinker".
The dealer picks a card. The drinker has to then drink for as many seconds (hence the name) as the number on the card. If the card is a face card, you just give it the corresponding number as its place in the deck (ie. Jack is 11 seconds, Queen is 12, King is 13, and Ace is 14).
Before the drinker drinks, however, he has a choice. He can take the number of that card, or he can challenge the dealer. If he challenges, the dealer draws another card.

• If the card is higher than the first card, the dealer has to drink the number on the higher card and the drinker doesn't have to drink anything.
• If, however, the second card is lower than the first, the drinker gets punished for challenging and getting it wrong and has to drink the combination of the two cards.
• On the rare instances that the drinker challenges and the second card is the same as the first, both the drinker and the dealer have to drink the combination of the two.

Once the seconds have been dealt out, the drinker becomes the new dealer and the person to his right becomes the new drinker and so on, around in a circle until you are out of cards or drink.

Optional Rule:
The game is occasionally played with the rule that if, at any time, the dealer draws a suicide king card (one of the two kings that appear to be stabbing themselves in the head), the drinker has to finish whatever drink they have in front of them.

And that's Seconds!

So, play the game (only if you're of the legal drinking age, of course!) because it really is a fun time and you will get incredibly drunk. And I hope you keep coming back to check out my stupid little blog thing!

Why did Jon start a blog and why should I read it?

Quick answers:
Because he's a loser. You shouldn't.

Longer answers:
God, I don't know. The truth is, I like blogs (in theory). And I like reading them (sometimes). And I like the idea that by starting a blog I can put forth literally anything I could possibly want and in an instant it will be out there for the world to soak in and judge. What if I want to write pithy anecdotes about my day? Fine, do it. What if I want to pretend that my opinion matters and list all my little viewpoints about my favorite politicians, movies, sports teams, or weather types? Great, go for it. What if I want to pretend I'm a snooping gossip hound from the golden age of Hollywood like Danny Devito in LA Confidential? Brilliant, I love it.

I can do any of these things and all I have to is just type away. I just have to write and suddenly something exists. Like, really exists. Doesn't just exist in some folder on my computer but exists in a much more tangible sense (in the view of our fucked up society) in that other people can see it and toss their two cents in. When I make a tree fall in the forrest, I'm going to have twenty people around to view it, digest it, and sum it up with a succinct "ROFL".

But there's a problem with this and a rather big one at that. There's something really wrong with this society where the young people are now obsessed with posting all of their private information into a public forum and believing that a) people give a rat's ass, and b) this somehow makes them important and interesting. In the words of The Who, I'm talking about my generation. Or, I guess, myGeneration. Or youGeneration. Or iGeneration.

In the past, when people wrote journals, no one ever read them. Unless you were, I don't know, Anne Frank or someone. People wrote it for themselves. They didn't need the reenforcement of their existence from strangers they know only as cutiexox69.

So, what am I going on about? I guess I'm just trying to rationalize my involvement in one of our culture's greatest diseases. I'm vainly attempting to erase my culpibility by showing that I know I'm part of the problem. I'm like that guy who makes a point of talking about how bad cigarettes are for you right before every drag he takes

But I started a blog. I did it. I'm a loser. Deal with it. Bitch.

Oh, I forgot to answer the second question. Why should you, the potential reader, spend time looking at my silly, little blog. Well, hmmm. I guess because I promise at least one Anne Frank joke a week. Ha! Beat that, old media!

ps. I promise less pretentious entries in the future.