When we walked into the theater we noticed several seats that were marked “Reserved for DBOX Customers” and so we simply avoided them and sat elsewhere. This cinema has stadium seating so you could really sit anywhere, except right up in front, and have an enjoyable experience.
The movie started, everything was going according to plan, trailers, opening credits, then the movie itself. Nothing exciting or untoward until the first battle scene. The loud noise from the speaker system was joined with a tactile vibration and a rather annoying single-note throbbing sound. Turns out, it was these DBOX seats. Someone apparently paid for one of them to be activated and it was making a hell of a racket. It was so unsettling and disturbing that it almost ruined the movie for me, except that the movie kind of ruined itself, sort of. It was unpleasant, to say the least.
This DBOX thing is the latest cash grab from movie theaters trying to make a buck. They screw you for concessions (there are two definitions for concession, yah) and then there are all the other little add-on bits, like the difference between primetime and matinée prices, which I will admit has been around for quite a while, but it’s still a cash grab, all the way to the most recent worthless misadventures in cinema:
– IMAX and IMAX 3D
– 42 FPS Projection
– Real3D
– DBOX “Feel Around” Seats
Each of these things is fluff. The 3D doesn’t really add anything more than eyestrain and cluster headaches, IMAX is just a double-sized screen and new projectors, the 42FPS schlock that Peter Jackson is trying to hawk is just as useless. One thing I will give 42FPS, when Peter Jackson uses quick-cut-scenes in his dialogue pieces in his movies, you can feel the crisp tight jarring all the more than you could with lower-FPS presented movies. The latest bit of movie-time bullshit is this DBOX crap. Seats and shake and throb, little more than magic fingers for movie seats. It’s the collision of sex toys and movie making that I never thought I would witness in my lifetime. It’s loud, it’s distracting, and it damages whatever movie it’s paired with.
I left the theater glad I only spent $10 bucks for two people, but bent that I had to endure exposure to this cash-grab DBOX bullshit.
What’s the answer? Now that movies take only one to two months to come out on BluRay or DVD, there is something to be said about just waiting around for them to hit Netflix, RedBox, or hell, even a video rental shop and just popping it in at home.
The only reason to go out to the movies is to actually GO. It’s a special space, it’s dark, lots of strangers, there’s a spectacle and you might just lose yourself in what you’re watching. Now, with all this assorted bullshit surrounding the experience you want, making it worse I would argue, it ruins the “going out to the movies” specialness. Not only is it distracting and unnecessary but the collateral damage from some of these fluff bits (like DBOX) just ruins it for everyone, and it adds more price and distance between the movie-going-public and these cinemas. For an IMAX 3D movie, with DBOX seats, with 42FPS projection, a soda, popcorn, perhaps a box of candy for two, you are starting to breach the $100 mark of obnoxiousness.
So what’s going to happen? Cinemas will add more bullshit and the public will eventually erode away. It’s like trying to grab a handful of sand, the harder you squeeze, the faster the sand runs out of your clenched hands. They will have priced themselves out of business with all this extra fluff bullshit. Then, because nature and capitalism abhor a vacuum, there will be new movie theaters without concessions, with a shoestring staff and plain projectors and people will flock to them because that’s what they are after. Not the fluff, but the movie. If things go from bad to worse for the economy, this could be the exact thing that kills the cinema for good. Movie makers will just switch to the “Direct to BluRay” channel and skip theatrical releases altogether.
Responsibility
I took Scott to work this morning for Barnes & Noble’s after-Christmas doorbuster sale that starts today. I pulled in to my driveway and parked my 2007 Santa Fe and was fiddling around cleaning things up and I put a check that has Christmas money on it behind the visor. When I opened the visor everything that I had put there, mostly just coupons that were expired all came tumbling out and all over the place. No big thing, so I start picking up whats in the car and since I had the drivers door open some of the slips fell out onto the driveway. I got out of my car, bent over and started picking up the debris, as I’m not one for littering. I looked up and at a sharp angle back at my car and my eyes settled on the rear passenger window and the interior light was on, I noticed something out of place and opened the door and looked closer.
The ceiling mounted handle for passengers to enter and exit was pulled out on one side and hanging drunkenly askew. I looked all around it looking for damage, perhaps something pulled out of the frame or something else and all I saw was the screw that held it together lolling in it’s case as part of the handle. I opened the case with a fingernail and the screw shuffled out and onto the floor in the rear drivers passenger side. I went inside, searched high and low and found a serviceable phillips head screwdriver in the basement and went back outside. I reassembled the handle and screwed it back into the frame of my vehicle. I tightened it up and then went around to the other handles and tightened them up too. All in all, not a huge problem.
But what does bother me is that this happened to someone who I had in my car, a friend, and they didn’t report what happened to me so I could take care of it. I don’t know who used that handle, and I don’t know if it failed while they were using it or if they used it and then it just jostled apart, but those sort of things don’t just happen on their own. Ceiling mounted handles like that just don’t shimmy until they run out their screws and just fall on the floor. What bothers me is that nobody noticed and nobody thought to draw my attention to a problem with my car, just use it and if it’s broken, ignore it – that way maybe they thought to escape responsibility for their actions? How do I know? It’s not like I would have dragged them to a repair place and made them pay for damaging my car – it was just a screw, easy fix. It’s not really the severity of the damage either that upsets me, it’s that nobody took responsibility for it when it happened.
I can’t assign blame and perhaps the person who broke it doesn’t know they broke it, therefore nobody is to blame. It does strike me that people in general are rather unobservant at least, if a handle seems jiggly or shaky perhaps you should tell the owner that there might be a problem coming down the pike? Car handles, especially those ceiling mounted ones are supposed to be firmly affixed to their assemblies. Perhaps I ask too much of people to notice such things.
As it is, there are new rules for being a passenger in my car. I value my car and I’m still making payments on the vehicle, so since people won’t grace me with responsibility or even basic observational reports I will have to insist that all use of the ceiling handles be forthwith out of bounds. You will have to enter and exit my vehicle without them and if you can’t do that, then you should find some other vehicle to use. My car is important to me as is it’s value and it not being broken. I also will be making regular inspections now to ensure that my vehicle is respected by those that I transport with it, because nobody is observant enough or respects me enough to let me know when things are falling apart.
It’s a sad statement that I have to do this, but this isn’t the only mystery damage I’ve had to deal with either. Someone or something put a foot-sized hole in the drywall in the upstairs and never thought to even mention it until I discovered it later on. That was fixed many moons ago, but either I’m plagued with an occasional poltergeist who is out to mildly irritate me or I have someone in my midst who lacks the basic respect and responsibility of being an adult. One of those is more likely than the other. Since I don’t know who did what, I can’t address this open letter to anyone in particular. Know that I find your lack of respect, responsibility, and observation to be cowardly and shameful. Don’t come forward and don’t take the blame for it now, but in the future, and for anything else you may accidentally damage, think upon these words and be an adult.
Knackers
So, a secular humanist goes to Midnight Mass and the holy water basin doesn’t burst into flames. Yeah, Catholics are weird. Also, someone changed all the words, came up with really odd “Carols” and apparently Michigan Catholics are really quick on the sacraments. But I enjoyed myself. Lots of up and down. Some genuflecting, which I skipped out on. Also, a lot of fear. I reflected during midnight mass and this is what I came up with: original sin created a context of inescapable failure. We’re never good enough or ever without sin, because of this pesky sentience thing we’ve got, so in a way, since there is only fail, being rotten is kind of expected. We’re wretched and hopeless, because we’re always bad and there is never any chance to win. At all.
With the game rigged in this fashion, no amount of love, forgiveness, or (and this is the best part) mercy will ever be well spent on the awfulness that is humanity. Or at least, that’s what’s being packaged up and sold.
What if humanity was good from the get go? What if we judged ourselves when we died? What if God is in every single thing, the good and the bad. The grace and the sin. What if sin is meaningless? What if we don’t have to always be losing out? Always afraid, needing to commit blood sacrifices or cannibalism in order to assuage our guilty consciences?
Then again, that’s picking a fight with Genesis. Perhaps it’s the best thing, the most adaptive thing to leave all of this mess for the Catholics and Christians to figure out and I can go back to feeling better about myself as a secular humanist. I don’t need God. I like Jesus, think he’s a fine fellow and a knackers teacher, but that’s as far as I’m gonna go with that. I don’t have sin. Sin is stupid.
Ta-dah! I feel better already. Knackers! 🙂 Merry Christmas. 😉
Commentary
Sometimes really good stuff comes when your patience is tried… this comment that I just wrote I think deserves to be elevated to a blog post all on its own.
Remember, if you don’t like what I write, you do not have to read it. Not reading this blog will not break my heart or hurt my feelings. You may want to think twice before trolling me.
***
My point wasn’t necessarily about the political argument surrounding welfare as much as it was about how we all need each other, socially, to do those things that must be done to make life better for us all. States that want to secede do not understand the larger context of their actions. Secession involves necessarily a new series of trade agreements between bordering states. If Texas, for example requires fresh drinking water from the Great Lakes Compact region, they will have to trade something they have and the Compact will have to determine what we are willing to sell our fresh water for, as an example. Plus for the states that abandon the Union, they’ll have to take on all those services that the Feds have taken care of, so, hard winters, hurricanes, tornadoes, and earthquakes will require even more exchange of goods and services to compensate for assistance. No man is an island, and no state is an island either. If Texas were to leave the Union, as they are fond of posturing that they will do, then their interdependencies with other states will be much more complicated. They may have a lot of oil, or in some other states as you say, natural gas or coal resources, but without access to shipping it would be a challenge for these states to get the drilling equipment as well, so they can make good on their resources.
I don’t engage with people who go out of their way to whine about socialized care programs because their arguments are always incredibly myopic and almost always come from a sense of unbearable greed, obnoxious heartlessness, and a general lack of human empathy to people who aren’t as fortunate as others. I get it a lot from my conservative family members, especially when they say blanket phrases like “If they’d just get a job, they wouldn’t need welfare!” Well, yes, that’s obvious – but where are the jobs? Sometimes you can’t find employment despite every effort; For conservatives these poor people are just parasites and nary a single thought is spent on whether or not lives are lost just because of economic misfortune. There is no pride in taking welfare and people are ashamed of doing so, but have no other choice. Conservatives never really go out of their way to find people who use these services so they are told by their media outlets and by each other what these people are like, they use various logical fallacies to magnify one instance of someone taking advantage of the system and then use that to denigrate the entire framework. There may be people who take advantage of the system, but for someone with a functioning sense of empathy, it’s far better for ten people to misuse the system than for one person to starve to death through no fault of their own.
We will never see eye to eye on this. It is my conclusion that there are two different camps, and they are drawn on the political continuum between liberalism and conservatism. There is no middle ground, it is effectively a DMZ loaded with dead bodies and land mines. I do not seek to change your mind. I do not offer arguments to you to alter how you see the world. I simply try to live my life according to my ethics and morals and how I think the world should work, just like you. Because I offer no argument, there really is no room for a reply from this statement that I write. Consider it a billboard for this blog, you can rail at a billboard until you grow hoarse, but it will do no good. You will not change my mind.
Some would argue that this is unfair, that I am not giving my blog readers a place to express themselves and by effectively shutting down an argument and asserting that mine is the last word is the height of arrogance. You would be the definition of right. Nowhere on this blog do I state that I will behave in any particular way, so, as my partner is fond of saying, learn to cope.
Citizens from 15 states have filed petitions to secede from the United States – Dallas Top News | Examiner.com
The list includes Louisiana, Texas, Montana, North Dakota, Indiana, Mississippi, Kentucky, North Carolina, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, New Jersey, Colorado, Oregon, and New York. Of that list, I would be dismayed only for the last three, the others? I couldn’t push them out the door fast enough.
What’s most curious is that most of these states consume a lot of federal money. If they left the union, life would become very difficult for them. Just imagine the new tollways that would open up on their now-not-federally-supported-segments of the Eisenhower Interstate System. You thought the NYS Thruway was an expensive axle-mangler, just wait until Albany has to figure out how to fix it all on their own.
I think we can all say with a fair amount of humor, that Texas can leave whenever it damn well likes. Stop posturing and threatening, just do it already. I can’t wait to see how OPEC deals with The Great Christian Domain of Texas. That’ll be hilarious.
Hurricanes that slam into Galveston will now be regarded as Reality TV as “Those poor fools in Texas” try to cope without the rest of us. A lot of these red states think they can exist outside of all socialized connections with the other states and the Union, and I think they should be allowed to leave to feel what being truly alone feels like.
How fast they would rush back. And my, what sort of concessions they’d have to part with just to get back in. Just ask South Carolina about secession. It’s been more than a hundred years and they still haven’t recovered from the last time. But you never know, it might be different this time. (no, it won’t, it’ll be worse)
How Lovely
I just got an email from my blog about a comment that was posted about my earlier post regarding controlling ammunition. There is no hidden agenda on my blog, I am a liberal and I proudly defend my opinions and thoughts and when it comes to weapons, what I write comes from the heart.
So, on with the comment from a user by the name of Joe Joe, email address bgyiu@gmail.com from IP address 166.152.62.75:
Move to chicago or new york ass munch. They have almost completely dis-armed their citizens, and now they are at the mercy of thugs who don’t follow the law anyway, dick mouth!! It’s candy ass turds like you who are the first to be raped and killed. Just because you don’t mind being defenseless, don’t expect the rest of us to be so anxious. Cowardly turds like you are precisely why this country has become a joke. Even if the criminals didn’t have guns, then we are at the mercy of an out of control, authoritative government. NO THANKS!!! Just move somewhere where they have disarmed everyone and allow YOUR family to be raped, pillaged, and plundered!!!! Keep your warped agenda to yourself, butt munch.
So that comment of course is certainly provocative. I find the actual word selection to be most interesting to me. Let’s set some assumptive defaults regarding the poster of the comment – first, I think it’s safe to say that anyone who reacts this way is likely a conservative and if so, we have to have pity for them because they are political lepers. Nobody wants to engage with them because all they have is vitriol, anger, and reactivity. This particular fellow also has a uniquely bent vocabulary.
Let’s move beyond the fear of control from the government and get at the core pillars of the comments contents. The first one is fear. This comment reeks of fear. Fear of criminals, fear of the government, and fear of what I said in my blog. I don’t feel anxious or attacked by the commenter, I feel sad for him – as I would anyone who lives in that much fear eventually would de-evolve into nothing more than a gross sort of pavlovian kicks and jerks. Now on to what really is entertaining about this comment, and these words are at the core of it: “ass munch”, “dick mouth”, “candy ass”, and of course, “rape”. Now my higher education is in psychology and english and I can’t help but feel excited at these very colorful phrases. The writer reveals more to me in his word selection than the actual content of what he is trying to convey. As I have said time and time again when it comes to conservatives who are so angry and upset with homosexuals, it has more to do with them fighting their reflections than it does anything else. This fellows comment is a perfect example of this. A rational argument could have been made without all these colorful epithets however this fellow spent time typing these in. I think this commenter has a deep psychosexual issue that he has not dealt with yet. He is typing “ass munch” and he is thinking about analingus. He writes “dick mouth” so obviously fellatio is foremost on his mind, “candy ass” has a rather well-known connotation to cowardice however when this phrase is in the same statement with the others, it’s not cowardice but rather a begging for anal sex. In the end we get to “rape”, and that imagery comes up quite a lot. I am unsure as to whether the commenter is fearful of being raped, anxious about having rape ideations or what, but he spends a rather long time thinking about it. I’d have to say that the phrasing is homosexually receptive, as it’s something that bottoms are fond of in general. So the commenter is probably a closet homosexual with ideations of being overwhelmed by a more masculine partner and likely fantasizes about having his will dominated by another man. The popular image of this is the ultra-butch muscle mary who at the drop of a hat drops their shorts for a righteous pounding. I would say that in the extremis, this fellow, if he wasn’t ruled by fear, would probably enjoy anal sex and from the sheer massive content of homosexual phrasing in such a short comment, how could anyone see it any other way?
So, I feel more pity for him than anything else. Joe Joe, I hope you stop trying to troll blogs like these because your deeper psychology is leaking out in your vocabulary and I suspect that you really would prefer people to not know of how much homosexual ideation goes on between your ears.
As for the message you tried to convey? It is lost on me. I know what you wanted to say and stripping off your homosexual panic and the fear, I do get you, however I still do not agree with you. I still believe that controlling ammunition is the best way to control guns. Obviously it isn’t a topic that a liberal or a conservative is willing to budge on so perhaps leaving the comment was a faux-pas on your behalf. In any case, you did entertain me and for that, I am thankful.
You should do something about all that homosexual panic though, it’s not good for you. Really.
Confusing Worthless Passbook
Apple has stepped in it quite badly when it comes to their Passbook app. It comes down to which metaphor they’d like to use and please, stick to whichever it is. I write specifically after updating my Starbucks app on my iPhone and the app asked if I wanted to add a card to my Passbook. So far my understanding of Passbook was that there was a stump-app which led you to the App Store to “buy” apps for different companies, so Target, Walgreens, that sort of thing and that those “Apps” were to be eventually organized in a Passbook folder.
So I start the Starbucks app, and it prompts me to add a Passbook card, so I figure there will be another app icon called “Starbucks” that I can put in the folder with all the other unused “Passbook” apps that I don’t use. And there is nothing. Huh. So I looked at the app for a while and couldn’t find where it put my Passbook “App” icon. I figured it must have been broken. That the download was buggy or broken. I completely ignored the Passbook app itself, because it was just a stump, why the hell would I use it again? It led to the App Store and that was how you entered the App Store if you wanted to waste time screwing around with Passbook bullshit. So I tapped on the app expecting to see the lame text and the link to the App Store, and there was my Starbucks Passbook card. As an added bit of huh, the link to the App Store is gone. So, okay. No more Passbook apps then for me, which I guess is fine.
It’s this really loopy “It’s an app” versus “it’s a card” metaphor that I’m griping at. It could have been more elegant, as for usefulness, eh. I don’t think of my phone when it comes to buying things. Phones don’t do that sort of thing, except now they do.
When it comes to Starbucks, we have a host of other problems that are going to pop up. I can’t use my Starbucks card at Barnes & Noble because it’s not a true Starbucks store, it’s B&N’s Cafe that serves Starbucks products. How many people will try to use their Starbucks card or this Passbook app? They’ll get irritated and be disinclined to use Passbook again. I know that feeling because I tried to use my Starbucks app at a Starbucks shop in McCormick Place in Chicago and was told they only accept cash or credit cards. That was the last time I used my Starbucks app except for just this morning to engage with this whole Passbook bullshit. So, even if you walk into a store that sells Starbucks, is a Starbucks, they may or may not use what you have. So having your phone out and ready to go and make things speedy utterly fails and you walk away without what you wanted, angry at the embarrassment. Then what are you supposed to do about some of those Starbucks that have drive-thru service? Do you honestly think people will hand their iPhones to a clerk for scanning? How stupid do you have to be to hand your expensive iPhone to anyone else? What if a compromising text pops up while they are scanning your iPhone? What then? I know why Apple would like Passbook to be useful and I’m all for new ways of addressing old problems, but there has to be a better way to do it. I suppose this really would only work well if you walked up to a Starbucks store, and there was some icon stating that the Passbook card would be accepted for purchases on the premises, then maybe then. But at that point how irritated would you be that you had to go hunting and searching for it? Then would you really even be interested in buying anything or just skipping it altogether?
So, the worthless Target and Walgreens apps, the weird App/Card thing with Starbucks, and how you can’t even be sure that any of it would work leads me to think that this is all just so much DOA technology. You aren’t going to use it because it’s too much bother. I can’t wait until some airline thinks they can stuff a boarding pass into this thing. Do you seriously think that a thieving TSA drone will give you back your iPhone? They’ll hand you back your Photo ID and pocket your phone. But that touches on the criminals that work for the TSA, but it’s still a REALLY BAD IDEA. Perhaps there will be something eventually that makes Passbook worth anyones time and trouble. I wouldn’t hold your breath.
Dust a Meeting
Meetings are insatiable productivity black holes that complicate lives and ruin workplace flow. I recently tried a collaborative online system called Basecamp in order to asynchronously develop a software strategy at work. What I wanted and what I observed diverged so thoroughly that there was absolutely no point in continuing with Basecamp as it was just in the way. The entire endeavor made me a little sad, not a huge fan of failure.
Meetings themselves are time vampires. I loathe them with every fiber of my being. They are massively interruptive and obnoxiously presumptive. You set aside a date and time and a place where people have to attend to discuss some topic. A meeting is a monster even when it’s in the cradle, being thought up by someone who desires to meet. Out of their heads pop a snarling tentacled beast with sharp fangs that serves no purpose but to interrupt flow and get in everyone’s way. Even the birth of a meeting is an arduous agony, with each participant (or combatant) the multiplexed temporal complexity grows. Two people can find a time to meet. Three people and it’s an order of magnitude harder. I was attempting to arrange a five-person collaboration and I wanted to avoid a five-person meeting with every ounce of willpower I could muster. My intentions were to establish a five-person collaboration which leveraged technology (Basecamp) to achieve speed and productivity because all five collaborators could function asynchronously. You could contribute what you felt you had to when it was right for you. It respected flow and was not supposed to be interruptive or presumptuous. Alas, the road to hell is paved with good intentions and this particular road lead to the very specific hell of a worthless unwanted but agonizingly unavoidable and loathsome meeting.
So now my efforts to avoid a meeting inexorably landed me right into setting a meeting up. Of course it was obvious that right after the first few responses I could tell the tell-tale sloppy-wet-sucking-sounds of a baby meeting unfurling it’s tentacles in my midst. The first agony of course is finding a time when everyone is free for a meeting. So right off the bat, two weeks went down the toilet as we had to wait for everyone to be ready. Then assembling it was a pain. It used to be easier with Groupwise, as a meeting organizer could see the public calendars of all the participants and select the time that would be best and then send it to all the participants which really reduced the interruption of flow quite a lot. Alas, we led Groupwise out behind the barn and we did-what-must-be-done. After we were done burying the corpse of Groupwise we were back to the way it was before – so A emails B, C, D, and E. Then they all reply, and then A shakes the magic eight ball and everyone agrees that in three weeks, we’ll all have time. It’s a lot of back and forth and this and that and it creates a nasty haze of meaningless email exchanges. So, the meeting is ripe for tomorrow at 3pm. Great.
So now I wait. I have a list of all the software we currently use and instead of spending the past two weeks discussing, asynchronously, the merits and flaws and coming up with a solution in at most a weeks time, this nascent baby meeting will likely take another month before there will be any resolution. Tomorrow is just going to be the First Meeting, where we trot out the new baby time vampire and give it a good feeding.
It’s a terrible way to do work. It trashes flow, it lowers morale, and it sucks time down a toilet drain. At least people aren’t fond of the parliamentary species of time vampire meetings, where you spend the first few iterations of the meeting discussing protocol on how subsequent meetings are to be held. That form of meeting is older, and much worse. I really must count my lucky stars that we usually only have the easier-to-cope-with modern meetings where the first three get-togethers aren’t set aflame with discussions on what words mean, how we are going to proceed, or what the definition of is, is.
There is wreckage however, even with a modern meeting. The person who had a problem and started all of this still doesn’t have what they need to get work done – we’ve been waiting for that special moment to arrive when we all can pet the baby time vampire and let it ruin our working lives. I can’t really get worked up very much, as least not as loudly as I used to a long time ago when I felt I could change things. It was pretty much obvious from the start that when the discussion immediately derailed with that most hated of questions “So, when shall we meet?”, heh, that was it. I knew that asynchronous collaboration was not going to work.
What’s really quite sad is that the technology has developed quite well and very elegantly. You see the edits and the collaboration realtime, there is “What’s new” and “Catch up” features, it’s free for 45 days, all of it – right there. Ready, willing, able, and if used, the promise of reaching a solution sooner-rather-than-later can be realized. Instead of that path however, we are going to have a meeting.
Not that anyones life is on the line for the work that has to be done, just the soul-crushing dread of having to endure another time vampire meeting. Having to go somewhere at a specific time, putting everything else on hold while we all waste our time and energy. The wry humor in the idea that we could have been already in the yea/nay phase and quite possibly be sending orders out to finalize the entire project, it could have been that way.
What have I learned? That I won’t ever do this again. Part of the agony of watching a grand design fail is watching it fail in flames. Modern business culture just isn’t ready for the kind of asynchronous ease and productivity that these tools can provide. I’ve written before, tongue-in-cheek that hateful meetings are like intellectual memetic herpes. It’s a theme that we play over and over again, not because actually having meetings leads anywhere but that instead we’ve always had meetings and our peers seem happy and life goes on, so why seek out anything else? It’s an idea, a meme, that is replayed again and again. The fact that meetings are time vampires that suck all the happiness and color out of life isn’t actually a part of the deal. Nobody seems to notice. Every once in a while one of us wakes up and shakes their head and asks “Why the hell are we having these stupid meetings?” and then tries something novel. Then that detestable question, “So, when are we meeting?”
That question should be engraved on a gun. Instead of asking it, just load one bullet, spin the revolver chamber, clack it home and pull the trigger. So, in the end this is all so much bellyaching over nothing. Asynchronous collaboration isn’t ready yet, or more specifically we aren’t ready for it, yet.
Not every industry has this problem however. You see companies like Automattic, which is the parent company that manages the WordPress technology – they make use of the P2 theme which is a central driver (so they say) in how they manage their projects and such. I’m sure Automattic has meetings, but I suspect that they use asynchronous collaboration a lot more elegantly than is done in higher education or the non-profit sector. When I first started exploring Basecamp, for example, I was blown away. I could collaborate with my assistant and material would build because when we were both working on the project and working together as a team brought a kind of science-fiction cool to the dull things we were collaborating on. There is something quite breathtaking about watching an entire project morph and change and grow as you sit there and watch it. Like timelapse only in real-time. Another little bit that I really found super-compelling was how these technologies enabled asynchronous collaboration and respected workplace flow. There was no interruption, if you were in the middle of a task you could polish it off quickly and confidently because time wasn’t important. The collaboration could occur at any time. It also occurred to me that asynchronous collaboration might also benefit from the differeing themes of cognition during different parts of the day. That you are more clever for some things right after dinner than you are before tea, or if you wake up at 11:30pm with a sudden Eureka moment, you could hop on to Basecamp and share your stroke of genius.
Alas, this is all just prattle against the memetic herpes epidemic that is the meeting.
It warms my heart to imagine a world without telephones and no rooms in which to meet. It would preclude meetings completely and banish them to extinction and force asynchronous collaboration. *sigh* It’s only a dream I suppose.
Mississippi Conservative Calls For Putting Gay People To Death On Facebook Page | Addicting Info
Mississippi Conservative Calls For Putting Gay People To Death On Facebook Page | Addicting Info.
Once again a politician who is picking and choosing from Leviticus. I’d love to know what his God thinks of the fact that he is clean-shaven and most likely has mixed textiles that he wears, as both of those are abominations in the eyes of his lord.
I mean, if you are going to pick and choose, why stop with just wanting to kill people like me? I’m flattered that I’m the target of your irrationally bloodthirsty version of Christianity, or, since you seem to be really jonesing on the Torah, perhaps Mr. Gipson would like a circumcision and a admittedly belated Bar’mitzvah? I’m looking very hard at you Mr. Gipson and I don’t see a Yarmulke. That’s offensive if you are a good Jew, but I think you aren’t a good Jew. I know you aren’t a good Christian because you’ve gone deaf to your messiah and his message, so which is it sir?
If you aren’t a Christian, and you have done really poorly at capering to be a Jew, perhaps you’d like a go at the Koran and try to be a Muslim? I’m sure that would be much more up your alley. I think you would be happiest as a Shi’ite, they are a little more driven than the Sunni’s are. I would advise you to tread carefully, the Christians and the Jews don’t really care if you pick-and-choose the rules but I’m pretty sure the Muslims actually do care.
So thank you sir, for your sweet words of bloodfeud. I look forward to the time when I get to defend myself against your bigoted, confused, irrational carryings-on. Go go gadget self-defense! Come on up to Michigan, I’ll make you dinner before you try to kill me. Knackers!
P.S. One of us is a better Christian than the other one. Sweetheart.
Timon Throws Mud At Athens
I wrote this on Facebook, but I think I should publicize it to a wider audience. This is my best argument for the election of 2012:
This is an excerpt from an email I wrote to my father after he told me about how awful socialists are. Enjoy.
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I honestly can’t say that I’m terribly upset by Quantitative Easing or that I harbor any fear of inflation. I find fear to be a worthless emotion. Fear and worry do nothing for anyone. It’s a lot like a rocking chair. Yes you shuffle about a lot but you don’t get anywhere. Plus fear is a kind of fog that sits on your mind and suppresses true joy and real happiness. I’m tired of the media telling me that I should be afraid or fear that or this or whatever. I get loads of it when I fly for work and it’s, to put it nicely, utter malarkey. The end isn’t coming, the politicians aren’t going to ruin the world. The globe will continue to spin day after day and people will continue to make a gamely try at it, doing what they always do. The color of the background may change, but life will go on.
As for Willard Romney, as I refuse to use his cutesy pet name, he’s got a lot of problems. He, and others in the Republican party seem to have fallen off the rightmost edge of existence. Even beyond you and your friends. That’s quite something! The GOP killed a paid-for-and-ready-to-go jobs bill for **VETERANS**. Dad, I know you look in the mirror to shave. I know you were in the Marine Corps and I also know that once you are a marine, you are one for life. So, that on some deep private level in your mind should bother you. That your party nailed a perfectly good bill just because they are racist and can’t stand to see a bunch of old white men subservient to a younger black man. I know you aren’t a racist, and I forgive you for being so incredibly conservative, but you have to admit that deep down, your inner Marine has got to smart at least a little to know that a jobs bill that was supposed to benefit vets got shot down for absolutely no good reason. Well, it bothers me. More than that though, is the entire GOP party being so intransigent. They started congress with the single aim of denying progress to our President beyond rational thought. They have killed and voted down every single effort, efforts that are meant to benefit the middle class. Middle class people like you, Theresa, and uh, THE REST OF US. Including me. I can’t say that I have a problem with taxing the rich, not really. I learned a little bit of history a few weeks ago that I will share with you. Trickle-Down Economics, that economic policy that if you cut the taxes on the very rich that everyone benefits because the rich will donate, they’ll start new businesses, and hire people and all of that. It sounds wonderful, but the rich really haven’t done anything they were supposed to do for the rest of us. They, especially Willard Romney, moved their money to Switzerland or the Cayman Islands. So, back to Trickle-Down, it used to be known by another more colorful name. It used to be called Horse and Sparrow Economics. The mental image was that you force fed a horse (the rich) with oats until it started to run oats in it’s droppings, and the droppings were for the Sparrows (the rest of us). I find that to be more accurate a representation of the economic policy of the GOP. Feed the rich until they start dropping food out of their ass for the rest of us to eat. It’s a delightfully filthy image, but that’s how a lot of us in the middle class feel. That the rich get richer and the rest of us could die for all they care – yet we’re doing ALL OF THE WORK. Then I learned that the rich do not create jobs. It is the Middle Class that creates jobs. The Middle Class makes enough money to buy en-masse, which encourages those who want to make money to cater to us and then they hire people to suit that need. The rich will not just create jobs because somehow they feel put-upon to do so! It’s the Middle Class that does the hard work and it’s the Middle Class that creates the need. So, really, when you get down to it, the rich are parasites. It’s diametrically opposite to how conservatives think – that the poor are the parasites. It hasn’t worked out in 200 years, perhaps you have it wrong.
Another thing that I’ve learned is the hot emotional core of old white man anger. There is a problem in your ranks, with the Republican party and it’s been happening for many many years. The GOP has switched in it’s leadership. It used to be run by Yankee power, by the Andrew Carnegies and Rockefellers . Now it’s run by Southern power. It’s got nothing to do with getting rich and leaving a lasting positive legacy behind. That’s a Yankee extract from the Puritan style of thinking. That if you make a lot of money you owe it to leave something behind that benefits everyone else. Compare that with how the GOP is currently structured – especially the Tea Party people, whom you are directly responsible for as a party member. It’s a Southern way. It’s all about fear, loathing, racism and hierarchy. There is a pecking order and that rules over everything else. Where does this come from? Not from the Puritans, but rather from English aristocracy running slavery plantations in Barbados. They brought their structure into the deep south and for at least 150 years the Yankees had power and the Southerners resented it. Now the tables have turned. All the things you remember and treasure about your dear conservatism have been perverted by Southern wretches who refuse to acknowledge your aspirations about what conservatism can do. You want Trickle-Down, or Horse-and-Sparrow to work, and I know it’s precious and dear to you. But it’s not being driven by the men you thought it was. It’s driven by men who are only concerned with the structure of hierarchy and maintaining the status quo. In many ways, the rank and file of the GOP are field slaves to your new Southern masters. The Southern Republican wants it only his way and no other. No room for anything else. And no room for someone as backwards as Andrew Carnegie or a Rockefeller to leave anything but a smoking husk behind.
So the rest of us, pretty much having to land behind the horse and eat whatever seeds might be dropping out of the rear of that animal see nothing but rigid structure and absolutely no progress. There aren’t jobs being made, the recovery is stultified and the men and women who are supposed to make things easier for us all are so racist that they’ve become nearly crystallized in their intransigence. Things aren’t getting better and then we hear about how the rich have $21 Trillion dollars stored overseas and how none of the rich are helping anyone else. There isn’t anymore bird seed for us Sparrows! The rich are sending their droppings off to Switzerland! So, we’re between a rock and a hard place. Nobody wants to help us, the conservatives don’t give a flying rip and the Republicans think we’re just a batch of worthless moochers, the 47% that Willard Romney spoke of. The 47% like YOUR MOTHER for all the time that I knew her when she was still alive, one of those 47%! So, the Middle Class, with nothing from the conservatives at all have to turn to anything else. So the liberals and democrats say that some socialization may help. You chafe at the word socialism yet you feed off of it. It’s a strange relationship, you know. The silent generation and the baby boomers are both entitled and you are reaping the benefits while castigating anyone else who might even show an interest in what you are taking advantage of. Socialism. Like your auto insurance and your homeowners insurance, which is socialized. Your Fire Departments and the public schools that educated… people you love… again, socialism. Medicare that pays for your trips to see the doctor. Socialism. Social Security, which has SOCIAL in it’s !@#$ name! Regular checks… on the backs of the rest of us. And we smile gamely and nod and wish you happiness, and what do we get in return? Sour grapes and angry yammerings about marxism and socialism. My tin ear aches.
So yes, socialism Dad. Wonderful glorious socialism. The poor and middle class are tired of eating horse shit. We are weary of the rich and their excesses and their rudeness and their stupid capering behaviors! They aren’t respectable. The rich are tapeworms that eat everything and leave nothing for anyone else. They contribute nothing but nasty snide comments and thanks to a disgustingly eroded public education system, they use fear to control the great unwashed masses.
And so, we come back to fear. Fear is what’s at the heart of the problem. The majority of Americans are too stupid and too fearful to engage in any rational thought. If they knew what the rich and the conservatives did to the rest of us, while they waddled off fat and happy there would be hell to pay. Thankfully we are an easily cowed lot. Obedient and silent and hard-working.
So, in a way, screw the rich. And frankly my dear, I don’t want to be rich. I want to be happy. Perhaps capitalism isn’t such a grand to-do after all. Maybe it’s something else. Maybe socialism isn’t oh-so-terrible! Maybe if the Sparrows are given fresh bird seed they might be able to fly again. I think that’s worth looking into.
So as a member of the Middle Class, I have no choice but to be deaf to the Republican party. The members of your party did their level best to hurt the rest of us through glorious inaction. We see the GOP’s intransigence and we’ll throw our chips in when it comes time to vote. The question will be simple for us: Select someone who has hurt us all or someone who offers at least a workable claim to want to move forward. Willard Romney or Barack Obama. At least for me, there is no real choice. The GOP are anti-American racist hypocritical ignorant bigots.
An empty chair would be better. Or maybe, a chair with Barack Obama actually sitting in it, leading. DOING SOMETHING. DOING ANYTHING.