Yeek Yeek, Whoop Whoop...

To be honest, I don’t really have a fleshed-out idea for this blog post; I just wanted to get this phrase down on “paper” since it sounded good in my head.

It wouldn’t be too hard to come up with a genuine sounding diatribe centered around how humanity seems to be adding more technological buffers between genuine human interaction, but it wouldn’t be sincere. I actually appreciate the fact that I can have asynchronous conversations with dozens of people around the world; that I can close my netbook and go do “real world stuff” and a message or two is waiting on me, and the conversation continues.

Not to mention the fact that the planet is getting progressively more crowded. As a futurist, I realize that unless we either manage to destroy ourselves or venture to the stars, as Carl Sagan put it, we’re going to be living shoulder-to-shoulder. The future envisioned in Snow Crash is an entirely plausible scenario, and when people are living in converted storage lockers (as apparently some in California have already tried), getting some social elbow room, even if virtual, will no doubt be essential to maintaining one’s mental health.

Just random ramblings on a Friday morning.

MS Paint by SA Forums Goon “Onic”.

Did I miss a memo on this? Was there some conference held recently that I failed to attend where they held a session on how it was now cool to wear black socks and gym shorts?

I’ve seen this more and more over the past few months, especially at 24 Hour Fatness where I work out.

Why do I have a problem with this? Well damnit, on some level I aspired to be the crotchety old guy mowing his yard in black socks and shorts. How the hell am I supposed to differentiate myself from the young punks all concerned about chasing what’s fashionable if what’s fashionable beats down my door like a no-knock SWAT raid?

Granted, I’ve never actually gone out of the house wearing black socks and shorts; I’m still too young to have been so un-fashionable. But christ on a stick, I sure was looking forward to embarrassing my kid with contrived apathy for culturally acceptable foot decor.

I guess I’ll just have to settle for picking her up from school in a luchador mask, or prepping a video montage of her temper tantrums to show her future dates.

Yes, I do have the footage, I just need to select a song for the soundtrack.

I generally consider myself to be a fairly easy-going guy. I’m about as high-strung as an unsprung bungee cord; rated to handle even the heaviest loads without snapping. And in my line of “work” this is undoubtedly an excellent trait to posses. Sometimes though, I do get into situations where the load rating is beyond the manufacturer’s recommended guidelines.

I paid a shitty latte’s worth of rent on a booth with an outlet nearby at a local chain coffee shop. The wifi here sucks more than a roomba programmed by Cyberdine, with the latte itself running a close second. Still, I figure, it’s a fair trade for the illusion of ambiance and a clear head to crank out some words. Too bad that wasn’t to be.

Shortly after setting up shop and getting my fingers primed to tap out English, a couple of evangelical christians in their late teens/early 20’s decide to take up residence a couple of tables away and have an obnoxiously, deliberately loud conversation about Jesus, the supernatural, prayer, and related subjects.

Whatever, I think. I’m easy like Sunday morning and I support free speech even more than I do the other 9 amendments in the Bill of Rights (especially the one about not having to let soldiers crash at my house, which I know would fucking suck having been one myself; nasty bastards).

So music is my anti-christ, and I queue up a playlist of Dethklok songs, to drown the twits out so I can think. Yes, death metal (or even a tongue-in-cheek tribute to it) is less distracting than the babble of people infected with the jesus meme.

Unfortunately, the black noise isn’t enough to overpower the bulk of those turkeys’ gobbling. Fortunately, a glare or two over my shoulder in their direction and they relocated a few tables away. All’s good in the hood, as they say (and by “they” I don’t mean anyone in particular you goddamn racist).

The ironic thing about this is that even Christ didn’t want his followers making a big public show of their religion. Matthew 6:6 reads: But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly. (King James Version)

Whatever. While enduring all of this and trying to make some headway on the book, I had to deal with the additional aggravation of the shop’s wifi signal going in and out on me. To me, this was worse than the knucklehead christicans, as I at least had the option of sacrificing my hearing to drown those bastards out. But every time the connection would drop, not only could I not save what written (since I’m using Google Docs) and research the odd factoid, but the damn music I was streaming would cut out. So I’d go from thundering guitars and cookie-monster vocals* (about coffee, oddly enough), to “…well what Jesus really wanted was for true Justice!“. It was like I was a battlefield detainee and Andy Kauffman’s zombie had been hired by a Gitmo interrogation squad to DJ directly into my head so I’d admit I once picked up a hitch-hiking Khalid Sheikh Mohammed on the way to the gym.

When the coffee ran out I decided to pack it in and head home. (I’ve actually been finishing this up from my living room, since the “ironic thing” paragraph.) Now as an avowed “Dick”, I was obligated to say something, to someone. My first inclination was obviously towards the Hitler Youth Twins, to make some kind of snarky request that would call their attention to the obnoxious volume of their conversation. But when I thought about it, that was unnecessary. I’d already glared at them, they’d moved a few tables over, and it most likely wasn’t their fault they were unable to overcome being groomed from birth as douchebags. I guess I could have insulted their parents, but I don’t think that even Harlan Ellison could have come up with an appropriately brief rebuke in that situation that would have, at the very least, still maintained some sort of dignity on his part.

Besides, I wouldn’t have gotten through to them anyway and more than likely would have just made the employees there uncomfortable. Seeing as I’m often at that coffee shop to burn a cigar and watch the sunset, and that I enjoy my coffee without extra helpings of counter grime and roach parts, the logical and productive choice was to bring up the shitty wifi connection instead. Which I did, only to find out that they’ve got fucking bandwidth filters that choke streaming content because of assholes coming in to play online games.

As I sit here wrapping this up, I genuinely don’t regret not** saying something to the Vienna Sausage Choir. But I do regret paying for that shitty latte.

*Credit: Brian Posehn
**Double negative, I know. Deal with it.

Sometimes I hate my generation…

It’s a two for one today.

Has anyone noticed how the Xbox logo looks like some kind of space avocado?

Also, it occurred to me that in all my time on the Internet, using this handle, nobody’s ever tried to use “dephrost” as a burn. Not that it’s a good one, but considering the overall lack of quality on the Internet in general (just read a few YouTube comments if you don’t see what I mean), I just would have expected it by now.

I wrote this almost two years ago, for Sociocide, but figured I should put it here. I recently came across a discussion thread on the Toonami forums which referenced it.

Let’s face it folks, kid’s television shows today are a festering cesspool of mind-rotting garbage. If you’ve ever been unlucky enough to flip over to the Disney Channel and catch “That’s So Raven”, or “The Suite Life of Zack and Cody”, for example, you know what I’m talking about. The plots regularly feature unrealistic kids getting into all kinds of trouble, with minimal if any consequences for their zany hijinks, while their parents are clueless idiots who can be easily manipulated.

Now I realize that when entertaining a child, you probably don’t want to club them over the head with the realities of how rough life really is, and a good amount of fantasy is healthy. Heck sometimes showing a kid-hero getting away with something harmless can be empowering for kids. But the idea that the world is a great big playground, free of painful consequences, is a dangerous one to teach our children; especially in an age where the children of our enemies are being indoctrinated with a desire to kill us while they’re barely out of their diapers.

This brings us to a cartoon called Naruto, based on a manga (Japanese comic book) by Masashi Kishimoto. Now I’m not the world’s biggest fan of Anime. I don’t own a collection of Katanas, nor do I have a burning desire to run off to Japan and marry a Japanese woman who still wears a school girl outfit. I’ve watched Akira twice, Ninja Scroll three times, and most of the Dragonball Z show when it was on Cartoon Network a few years back. But about a year ago I started noticing posts on the Bullshido forums about this anime/manga and recently I decided to see what all the talk was about.

The story

13 years ago, a massive, nine-tailed demon fox of legend attacked the hidden leaf ninja village of Konoha, one of several “hidden” ninja villages around the world of Naruto. The village’s ninja fought valiantly against the monster but to no avail until the Fourth Hokage (head ninja) showed up and sacrificed himself, sealing the demon in the body of an infant.

That boy was Naruto Uzumaki. Naruto grew up alone and unwanted. The Fourth Hokage had ordered that no one in the village was to speak about the demon fox, but that did not prevent them from shunning the boy. In his desperation for attention, Naruto had become the class clown at the ninja academy, and was generally a poor student.

This is where the story begins. I’ll admit that I had to force myself to watch the first few episodes of the show. I found them to be annoying, almost as if this were a version of Harry Potter, but with Ninjas. But as Naruto learns the secret of why everyone in the village seems to hate him, the story opens up and you get introduced to the amazing depth with which Kishimoto has developed not just the main character, but almost all of the supporting characters as well.

However, well fleshed-out characters aren’t the main reason why your kids should watch this show. As the story progresses, Naruto’s squad of four including his instructor, Kakashi, his rival, Sasuke, and the target of his affection, Sakura, go on their first “real mission” and the author takes this opportunity to introduce them to the realities of their chosen life as ninjas. These realities of life, presented in the context of fantasy, are what make the show perfect for children who are just starting to grasp the nature of how the world works.

Through the course of the story, Naruto and the other characters come to understand what it is to pursue a dream, to come to terms with the realities of death, and perhaps the foremost lesson or theme taught by the show: true strength is gained when you fight for your dreams or to defend those who are important to you.

In Naruto, even the “bad guys” have their own dreams to pursue, and people they care about. Instead of being stereotypical children’s show villains, the foes in Naruto come into conflict with the heroes through pursuing their own goals, which though contrary, are not always portrayed as “evil”. The rejection of a simplistic duality of good and evil enriches this show and provides an excellent opportunity for parents to discuss morality and conscience with their children. In one scene, a rival ninja fights not to kill, but to disable Naruto and his friends in order to protect his master. And when it becomes apparent that he cannot fulfill his purpose of protecting his master, he sacrifices his life for him. In another scene, Naruto struggles against a near-perfect ninja with a fatalist view on life, to prove that you do not have to be born with great talent to do great things.

As a parent, I am always thinking about what my child is learning about the world on a daily basis. I try my best to answer questions about things in a way that promotes independent thinking and allows her to come to her own conclusions based on facts and reason. If I do not let her watch a particular show, I make sure she understands why and give her the opportunity to provide justifications for why she should watch it, if there are any.

Life is complicated, and it doesn’t get any less complicated as a child approaches adulthood. Some parents, in a selfish desire to relive their childhood, seek to keep their kids innocent (ignorant) of the world around them. Instead of creating another generation of man-children, I believe in spoon-feeding small doses of reality to a child based on a well-intentioned assessment of how much that child can process and understand.

Childhood is not a magical time in and of itself. The very reason childhood is magical is because a child’s senses are on fire to take in everything about the world around them. But the magic is not meant to last forever and those who seek to selfishly prolong this state by keeping their children ignorant of the realities of life, are negligent and undeserving of the right to be called parents.

The best thing you can do for your child is to send them into the world ready to be an adult; a rational, thinking being with a broad understanding of the complexity of life and their role in it. And a show like Naruto, where things are not black and white, where dreams are pursued through effort, and where conflict is not avoided for the sake of preserving peace, is one of the best things you can expose your child to in this age where we seem to have lost the fortitude of our own identity.

Attention restaurant owners/website administrators:

Every time you put your menu in PDF form, you’re kicking your visitor’s browser in the crotch. For the love of Ramsay, please put your menu into the actual site content. There are plenty of content management systems that will allow even the illegal kitchen workers to update it if need be.

If freaking Chili’s can get it right, so can you. I’m talking to you in particular, Piropo’s.