Tag: Genuine Sarcasm

Yep, it finally happened. I’ve put on my internet blogging tinfoil hat.

It started with an insightful, possibly apocryphal, letter from Thomas Paine to Andrew Dean claiming “The fable of Christ and his twelve apostles … is a parody on the sun and the twelve signs of the zodiac”. It is still a relevant letter to this day, as Paine takes a moment to call out anyone who would wear their religion on their sleeve, cynically claiming to be a Christian without actually acting like one. “Their religion is all creed and no morals.”

This then led me to one of those interminable conspiracy documentaries a-la “Loose Change” entitled Zeitgeist. I skipped past the worthless first ten minutes, past some laden anti-religious indoctrination and bad clip art until I found a compelling argument for the astrological basis of the story of Jesus and his 12 disciples — an analog Paine discovered long before I did. Maybe he had Google Video, too?

I booted up Word for the one thing it’s good at — writing resumes — and when I went to save my file, I was once again baffled by the ‘save’ icon in the upper left corner. It’s a goddam Zip disk. Still. What year is it, Word? 1998, maybe? Are people still using these quarter-gigabyte wonders to save all their precious files? Even as 80GB iPods and thumbdrives and CD-Rs abound, the ubiquitous icon for saveability is still the 250MB Iomega Zip disk??

Even the idea of removable storage is so outdated I’m guessing Microsoft still hasn’t gotten through ripping off ideas from the original Macintosh. Speaking of old things, that perennial burn on Microsoft. Yeah, they steal from Apple. I went there.

An article is making its way up Reddit about how a Nigerian 5-year old is repairing OLPCs. Awesome. One more bit of malfunctioning technology for the third world to deal with, since it’s got that whole food/shelter/war/inflation/AIDS thing worked out already.

The spin is that this enterprising kindergartner is learning a trade fixing broken laptops, and by introducing broken products into the marketplace, OLPC is doing its part to magnanimously create labor for more children. It’s a business model Jean-Baptiste Zorg would be proud of.

Nevermind that some parts can be replaced for $1 when most kids can live on 80¢ a day. Nevermind that this opportunity came about because of broken hardware, or that this child’s time could be better spent elsewhere. Like at a school. Breaking things isn’t actually good for an economy. It’s all covered in the parable of the broken window.

To be honest, I’m not too enthused over my writing from the last several weeks. I feel like I missed my point on the 100% Pure Energy post in particular — that it’s hopeful and plausible to have energy-based life persist after the heat death of the universe — and so I want to take a step back and re-evaluate how I approach writing on my site.

I do have a theory on how to improve my writing: you know how there are people you converse with naturally? It may be in person, over IM or via e-mail but I know there are people I just communicate with more smoothly. If I imagine I’m writing to that person, I think my writing will come out more natural, whereas when I address the void of the internet, I feel like I’m writing a drab, monotonous manual, and so I cut the zing out of my writing.

Oh, nevermind that this site was supposed to have mostly cartoons. I’m getting to that!

It was one of those “JAPAN IS SO CRAZY LOL!!” stories from the otherday where mourners at a funeral were asked to please refrain from taking pictures of the deceased on your cellphone.

I had to ask myself why a photo? Why then? A death in the family used to be an important enough event that you didn’t have to commemorate it with a photograph to grasp the significance of it. You say your grandma died? Yeah, well, I’ve still got work on Monday.

When faced with a deluge of disparate, disjointed moments throughout life, it’s hard to keep track of what happened when, or whether it even happened at all. I’m pretty sure I went to Toronto, but I don’t feel any different as a result. Did I really go? I completely forgot that my girlfriend last October made me a cake for my 30th birthday. Without photographic proof, did either of these things really happen?

Maybe we take photos so at the end of our lives, we can go back and sift through all the moments we didn’t stop to appreciate at the time, a snapshot reminding us of a moment we were supposed save in our hearts, saved instead on a memory card. An experience that we were so busy capturing we forgot to, y’know, experience it.

(Incidentally, I can’t find the original camera phone story on Reuters… am I remembering it, or just making it up?)

the•oth•er•day (n): referring to an event from the deliberately indistinct past, as recently as yesterday.

Tim: Remember that conversation we had theotherday?

Hapless friend: You mean yesterday?

Tim: Sure, whenever.

The UK Telegraph included a book review of Why Not Catch-21? The Stories Behind the Titles that got me thinking about some other naming conventions.

• Name your book something pedestrian but enigmatic. Name it after something ordinary, but nothing too specific.
• Name your website an english word; you can allow one spelling error or clever punctuation, but don’t get all cutesy. NO AFRICAN WORDS.
• Go ahead and give your movie a long name, as the title of the remakes will be shorter, and shorter, and shorter…
• Name your video game using three words or less, something like “Ms. Pac-Man” or “Guitar Hero 2” and not “Guitar Hero Encore Rocks the 80s”. Only sequels should have a colon in the title. (And no, a sequel to a sequel does not get two colons.)
• Do not name your kids after proper nouns.

I don’t know whether timtoon necessarily passes this test, but I’ll bet it fares a lot better than Ubuntu or Utterz. Or just anything starting with a U. For example, you know what you’ll find in My Space, what’s in a Face Book, what to expect from a Live Journal, and what’s kept in an Image Bucket more so than what happens when you’re Flickr’d.

But a name is only part of having a successful site, and since I’m going to forget these helpful tips to having good content, I’ll link to them from a site called websitesthatsuck.com (can you guess what they have there?):

Blogs only work when they meet four of the following five conditions:

1. Candor
2. Urgency
3. Timeliness
4. Pithiness
5. Controversy

Content Trumps Design.

I don’t even want to think about how my site rates there.

And while we’re at it, the ages-old list of bad domain names.

What started innocently as flame bait on thepete.com managed to turn into a full-length tirade, in which I reply to my friend the eponymous Pete, about how the $400 OLPC laptop is just about the most extravagant, useless toy self-satisfied geeks have bestowed upon the third world. The idea behind the laptop is that it is a tool to better educate the children of developing nations so they can become better farmers, diplomats, 419 scammers, and camwhores, but it doesn’t live up to the hype.

And I hope they don’t mean for the laptop to be a literal tool for farming, because things like shovels, seed, and a plough will do a lot more to actually feed a family than a link to subsistence farming on WikiHow.

This laptop is a luxury item, and to developing nations, it’s a bowling ball present. When the people buying them are singing its praises about how one can chat, surf the web and blog with it, I’m not convinced of the laptop’s efficacy as an educational tool. The thing’s got a D-pad and buttons. This isn’t an educational tool, it’s a Nintendo DS! A school I would believe.

Nevermind that the laptop also needs an internet connection to actually find any of this essential information online, and trained people to maintain that network infrastructure. I don’t know if countries that lost a third of their population to civil war will find the time to spec out an IT department.

But most of all, this sounds like the 21st century equivalent of the wide-eyed optimism of the 1950s that the television would become some sort of learning box panacea. And we all know how that turned out (Baby Einstein, anyone?).

I think the OLPC is a neat little laptop, if a little underpowered and with a smaller HD than my phone, and owning one might be fun. But the idea that this is what the 3rd world really needs, over things like food, medicine, sustainable farming methods and free public education? Give me a break. This is an over-extravagant way of educating one child. A school would be better, and is less likely to get stolen or sold for something useful.

Oh, and we don’t have one laptop per child in America… and we’re expecting this to catch on in Somalia?