If Only Life Were So Symple

I would like to open by saying that I like Alfred University, the faculty, the staff, the students. I'm very happy here. The village of Alfred reminds me of the County, this small little enclave of academia in the middle of the woods makes me happy.

That being said, if I had a nickel for every night I was kept up thinking very seriously about walking down to Residence Life or Dining Services and taking a dump on their porch, I would be able to buy a yacht so big that there is a god damned yacht in the pool. A yacht so big that it's gravitational pull in conjunction with the water displaced actually fucks up the tides of whatever ocean it is in. A yacht so unimaginably massive that geographers have to sit down and have a serious god damned discussion about the definition of a continent. A yacht so monstrously big, your mom could actually ride on it. Then, with the spare nickels in my Piggy Bank Death Star, hire SpaceX to divert their engineering talent to firing that Yacht to Saturn. There it would remain in orbit for my three year "Yachtin' 'round Saturn Festive Celabratory Extravaganzery Party". Why? Why do I think so often about defecating on their porch? Because, Fuck Those Guys.

Seriously, they are like one Whore of Babylon
away from being smoted to all fuck.

Now I'm not writing about dining services in this post, because I enjoyed my tuna sandwich today at lunch and as of this moment I am still stacked to be on the 77 meal plan next year. They have been spared this day. No, for this week, as it was this time last year, I have been enslaved by Residence Life. What does that mean? They got me jacked into Symplicity. It's like being jacked into the Matrix, if the Matrix replaced the dehumanizing corporate structure that Neo finds himself in during the intro with a 234-tentacled Japanese rape monster.

Mr. Wizard, get me the hell out of here.

Last year, we got our group together of six people a few weeks in advance like the responsible god damned students that we are. We did everything the damned system told us to, exchanged pass codes, had a little room sign up party at our alloted time, had a previously researched room lined up. The day came, we entered in the system and it had the nerve to look us straight in the eye and tell us no. So we literally lived in the Residential Life office for a week, it took a whole god damned week to figure out why the system had a vendetta against us. Meanwhile all the good rooms were filling up. Finally we got our stuff in and let out a sigh of relief that lasted until the summer when we got our confirmation emails that informed us that the system had placed us all in the wrong room, with the wrong roommate in the wrong god damned building, just as it was designed to do. They finally got their shit together and put us all with our right roommates in the wrong room in the wrong building.

So you can imagine how excited I am to be entering this season once again. Once again I have gotten my room together well in advance and yesterday awaited my 7:30 slot, the best of our group.At two hours left I noticed something funny, my countdown clock said one day and an hour left until two hours from now. I pulled out the nearest speedometer and made sure my computer and I were going the same fucking velocity, well relativity could not account for this bullshit. So after panicking, we finally located the aptly named "fuck you guys" loophole in the Resonomicon (location un-fucking-known) and found out that it's not your groups best time, but the average of all your groups credits class standings best time. Did you hear that? It was the drip drop of my brain melting out my ears.

Then the room we picked in advance had filled out. No problem, there are two left, we'll pick one of those. We have four people and they are four person apartments, nothing can go wrong here, 4 = 4, that much I believe a computer can figure out. So we select to change the room that is now occupied. We want to switch from Thor Floor 3 to Thor Floor 1, Thor Floor 1 is empty, we switch to it, the computer informs us that we can't Thor Floor 3 is full. Well we want to go to Floor 1, you can't, Floor 3 is full. Finally that glitch faded when I deleted all knowledge of our previous selection. Then it informed us that our 4 roommates did not meet the occupancy requirements of our 4 person apartment.

Well we've played your game, so we can finally agree with the others now that you are the world's worst web interface. We weren't sure before. Symplicity? Don't you think you should suffer for the harm you've done to the human race? Don't you think the world's worst web interface ought to be punished for the most effective deforming of reality? Death to sYmplicitY!

Obscure Jude Law reference ftw.

Den Haushalt

President Barack Obama, or as I will call him for the remainder of this post, Le Roi de l'Internet, hath decreed his budget proposal, and the people did say that it was meh. 

It's okay, I guess...

Several people think it doesn't go far enough, others think it could go farther, and still others question how these people measure distance of budgets. I don't know if anyones read it and I'm not 100% sure if a person wrote it. How many times in your life have you heard someone tell you that the bible must be true, because how could one person make all that up? This logic has been presented to me by several people on several occasions and if you haven't heard this argument before, God bless you. If that is good enough justification to believe in a supernatural deity than things like the healthcare bill and the federal register (622 pages have been written in the Federal Register in the time it took me to write this blog post) are irrefutable evidence that the Flying Spaghetti Monster is not only real, but types federal documents really fast.

The bureaucracy has been touched by his noodley appendage.

But I digress (majorly, that whole FSM bullshit was not part of the original outline). As I was saying, King Barry, Lord of Internet and Protector of Locomotives did decree-eth some budgets, it was decreed unto the media, and unto the Twitters and unto the Book of Face. It was there on the Book of Face that I saw the great King of the Interblags did hand some of his power unto the people. He wanted the opinion of the humble American citizen in this great fiscal debacle. I wondered what kind of stirring discussions and debates I would find on the other side of that link. The rousing Libertarian cry for the end of government intervention, or the impassioned liberal pleading for a government that will care for all it's citizens. I was excited to partake in this grand forum of true democracy. Then I clicked the link and this is what I found.

I guess at the end of the day democracy usually dissolves into multiple choice.

Uhm, okay, not what I had mine. But wait! I clicked the link on Facebook, so theoretically I can join the comments thread there! Lets see,

A fair point Ann. Let us hear the voice of the people, not in multiple choice, but short answer form! Now the Once and Future King of All That is Cyberspace is a very busy man, so I will offer myself and my sense of civic duty to sorting through and reading the opinions of everyday Americans! Lets see,

Uhm, I think most everyday Americans speak English, I'm gonna try again.

I don't think that those are words.

I'll hand it to you Shirley, at least you make a bold attempt at the English language. 

 You know Obama, I see why you didn't leave room for an "Other" option on your survey.

Someday. Someday...

I DON'T LIKE SPAM! Have you got anything without spam?

Truth. He speaks it.

God I hope he clicked the Education button.

Wait, what in the name of all that is fuck?! The Arch Angel Michael has a Facebook account! God damn Obama, when they say you got friends in high places, damn.

You know Noah? I'm just not sure if that's true anymore. 

So what has been the point of all this. First, Facebook needs a highest rated comment system like Youtube on fan pages. I think I have presented enough evidence of this. Second, you can totally give the president's budget a product review on Amazon. I demand all my readers to do so. So get to work, both of you!

Never can there come fog too thick

So one of my good friends recently bought a box full of Earl Grey tea for us to drink when everyones over. I ended up looking up the Wikipedia article on it while drinking some when a debate about what it's made of started up. There I found out about a brilliant invention known as London Fog. It's a combination of Earl Grey, steamed milk and vanilla that is just made out of awesome. Apparently after some Googling it's been a popular item at Starbucks, of course I wouldn't know that because fuck Starbucks.

But steaming milk was out of the question, for I did not have the expensive tools to do it. I wasn't going to go blow 500 bajillion pesos on a stupid thing to steam milk for me. Then I remembered that I have the greatest culinary tool since Tater Mitts, the Internet! So I Googled it and the very first thing that came up was an eHow on how to steam milk without an espresso machine! So we quickly stole vanilla from the school and got to work. The results were astounding. I then went on to make some Bustelocino. Overall, another glorious victory for the internet.

Rock Like An Egyptian

First Tunisia, now Egypt. The whole Middle East is up in arms. There isn't much I can add to this that isn't already said, so here is my response to both situations, to the tune of "London Bridge is Burning Down".

Tunisia is burning down, burning down, burning down.
Tunisia is burning down, run Ben Ali!


Mubarak is going down, going down, going down.
Mubarak is going down, so much for the army!

We Can Defeat the World and Win "The Future"

Last night was the State of the Union address and Barack Obama has laid the foundation for the next year in Washington. He called for a lot of fun things like fast trains to keep Joe happy and a nifty high score system so teachers can see how good they're doing. Competition always makes things more fun! (grumble grumble) So after listening to the speech, I picked up two major points.

1. There is a game, it is called "The Future", and apparently we need to win the hell out of it.

2. We are apparently playing this game against the ENTIRE GOD DAMNED PLANET EARTH.

"We need to out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the world [...]  we need to win The Future."
-President Barack Obama

For those of you doing the math at home, we're talking 6583779486 players against our 311951347 or approximately 20 to 1. Well I've played my fair share of RTS games and I know that we have our work cut our for us. Luckily we have the resources to even the playing field, if only we could wean ourselves off of the Vespian Gas. I sat there, thinking about the big questions like how to defeat the world and whether to get chicken tenders or a wrap after the speech was done when Obama came to his thrilling conclusion.


We are a nation that says, "I might not have a lot of money, but I have this great idea for a new company. I might not come from a family of college graduates, but I will be the first to get my degree. I might not know those people in trouble, but I think I can help them, and I need to try. I'm not sure how we'll reach that better place beyond the horizon, but I know we'll get there. I know we will." We do big things.

"She told me her name was Billie Jean, as she caused a scene. Then every head turned with eyes that dreamed of being the one." -Michael Jackson

There it is. We do big things. I like it. It's how we roll. It made me think about a blog post I almost put up a few weeks ago about American awesomenessocity that was inspired, not by the leader of the free world, but by Richard Hammond, who while speeding along in a 1970 Pontiac GTO, said this,

The Germans will be remembered for their engineering. The French for their quirky brilliance. The Italians for passion. The British for the nimble roadster. But the Americans, they'll be remembered for giving us a laugh. I don't mean that spitefully. What I mean is they make cars like this that basically just say "Oh calm down, nobody died, it's just a bit of fun. Enjoy it!"

That ladies and gentlemen is the American spirit as outlined by a small British man. At least the former American spirit. We used to be a country that embraced stupidly hilarious ideas. We built cars that were just stupidly powerful. When we heard the Russians had sent a blippy box thingy into space, we decided "Fuck you guys, we'll play golf on the moon." We built a cities economy off of testing nuclear explosions that were stupidly close by. We even wanted to send men to Saturn using a giant nuclear machine gun strapped to a Hilton Hotel. Now we shut down major space programs faster than we eat Baconators, and we know how to eat some motherfuckin' Baconators. 

"No workers are more productive than ours."
-President Barack Obama

So yes, we have unlocked many achievements, we beat the fuck out of "The Past". I think today we take all of that stuff as a given and forget how hard some of them really tricky levels were. Now we have to beat "The Future". I'm sure it'll be a bitch. But we can beat it as long we continue our tradition of playing like a bunch of god damned mad men who create crazy awesome things for the fuck of it. As Steve Carrell once famously said, 


"The Wright Brothers decided to make themselves a flying machine. 'You fools, you idiots! What's your problem?' everyone shouted. 'That will never work because plywood weighs more than air.' To which the Wright Brothers responded, 'No, it doesn’t.'"


So get out there and unlock some achievements, for America.

"If you want to make a difference in the life of our nation [...] become a teacher. Your country needs you."
-President Barack Obama
"Alright, I'll do it. Just get off my back. Jeeeeeeeez."
-Moi

Screw Real Life Applications

Yesterday I moved back to Alfred and set up my computer and inevitably caught up on some web comics. Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal has this excellent comic about science education that made me lqtm.

And then this happened...

Six years might be too short a time to jump on this project if you've been ignoring science your whole life, but it's not too late to learn the ancient art of leather tanning. Someone has to make that saddle, maybe you can get a free ride!

The Media Needs to Start Fresh, With Garlic and Herbs

This year it seems that the big target of mass hatred is the media. At this point the unanimous conclusion seems to be that the American media is a load of horse shit that isn't doing it's job. Most people turn to Jon Stewart or the blogosphere or anything that isn't a major news organization for their information. They're tired of the bullshit, tired of hearing about Ashton Kutcher when major historical events are in progress. It hit a fever pitch with the Rally to Restore Sanity and then the emergence of Wikileaks.

There have been a lot of suggestions on how to correct this situation. Jay Rosen said that the "watchdog press is dead" and a lot of people would like to see the media return to the days of serious investigative journalism. Currently major media outlets pretty much do as the government tells them. I'm certain if Bradley Manning had sent the war logs to CNN they'd have ignored it to avoid trouble or worse, reported him.

But I don't think that these companies need to look at legendary figures of the old press to figure out what they need to do. There is already a company that has dealt with these type of smear campaigns by running into them head on. They need to take the cardboard crust and bad ingredients of their journalism practices and startover fresh, with garlic. They need to pull a Dominos.



They need to just come out say it, we've been feeding you horse shit with ketchup flavored sauce for years, and we want to change. First major media outlet to do that gets my respect.

GO!

Tis The Season To Kill Zombies. Fa la la la la, la la la la.

It's good to be home finally. I got back in the county on Monday and I was shocked to learn that today is apparently Saturday. If you were to ask me what I've been up to this week, I'd probably just let out a long "uhhhhhhhhhhh". I guess I need to set up some goal/projects to keep my unemployed/vacationing self busy for 4 more weeks.

Something other than Minecraft.

Yup, that's David Tennant in leather battle armor
and a diamond pick axe.

I guess I could try and write a blog post every day. Oh god damn it, that looks like a goal I'll fail catastrophically at that I just typed. DAMN YOU STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS! 

Well now it's published on the internet, guess I got to do it. Lame.