I totally forgot I was making eggs…, originally uploaded by Lintilla.

I’m a little absent minded these days.

Oh well.

More booze.

More pills.

More hours and hours of tedious, torturous audiobooks about vampires by Stephanie Meyer.

I am addicted to pain.

Ugh, I just got to the part where she tries clumsily to write dialogue between two teenagers deciding whether or not to have sex.

I very nearly vomited.

So, so, so very awful. I didn’t think the writing could get more torturous. I hope nobody was looking at my face while I was listening to that garbage on the bus. I must have looked ghastly.

(Synonyms for ghastly: grim, grisly, gruesome, hideous, horrible, horrid, lurid, macabre… If I was Meyer, I would be using each one three times in the next paragraph. That woman must have hours of fun hitting [Shift]-[F7] in Microsoft Word.) (Remind you to post a [Shift]-[F7]-encoded secret message post here sometime in the near future… it was a favourite game back in grade school…)

Plus, that Edward fuck is a dick, prick, cocky sonnuvabitch penis wiener, and Bella is dumb as rocks. The entire plot is so unbearably obvious (almost as unbearably beautiful as Edward, whose beauty is too beautiful to bear), and they take pages and pages and pages and pages to figure out the simplest of things. It’s infuriating. It makes me clench my fists nearly 1% as often as the characters in the books do, so… yeah, that’s a lot of fist clenching.

Gives me something better to be infuriated about than having to go to work, I guess?

And still, I gotta keep up with what the kids are into…

I’m going to go try to cook something edible now.

This is all part of the 20 Something Bloggers “Blog Swap 3”
Don’t forget to go check out my post over on her site.

Candice has a little bit of a rant blog, but one of those good rant blogs, not one of those annoying rant blogs (you know the type I am talking about). I tend to get into the rant myself from time to time, but I want to post a specific rant here on a topic Candice has touched on in various forms through her posts: The Perpetual Stupidity of Women On The Internet and Also In Real Life.

Now, I’ve talked about my occasional airheadedness in the past. But at least I present myself to the world with a little bit of class and intelligence. I think, in general, I am confused about why class and intelligence have fallen out of favor with young women.

Example: Facebook. If I see one more goddamn picture on Facebook (and by picture, I mean ENTIRE ALBUMS) tagged of a girl wearing a shirt as a dress and drunk or puking or sitting on some guys face or puking while sitting on some guys face, I am going to throw my computer out the window. Actually, I might just plant a virus so that all these girls get punched in the face every time they tag that shit. The question is, when did it become cool to show the world what a fucking idiot you are?

I’m not saying that I never puke while sitting on a guys face, but I don’t publicize it over and over again for the public to revel in. I don’t make albums entitled “Let’s drink up sluts!” and “My bitches, my bong.” (OK, that one is actually kind of funny) or “Sluts! Skanks!”. And I certainly do not make albums entitled “Lil’ Hottie” full of pictures THAT I TOOK OF MYSELF.

I think this trend is making our gender/generation look foolish. It actually concerns me sometimes. I am a big believer in fun, don’t get me wrong, but where are we going to draw the line?

So here is a list of cringe-worthy stupidity that women our age need to stop doing immediately:

• Uhh, wearing uggs, sweatpants and northface jackets all the time in public. Thanks for noting this Candice (PS- stealing “clonetastic”… genius).
• Saying “Oh, I like all music except, like, country.” and other similar phrases. You should probably think about having an opinion. It’s not offensive (or hard) to have a preference.
• Staying in dead-end relationships/hooking up with people they don’t actually like. This one frustrates me to no end. I may be perpetually single, but at least I can last more than a week without hooking up with a random douche just out of boredom.
• Not using birth control, or misusing birth control. … Really, ladies? We’re still doing this?
• Getting into drunken physical altercations.

Feel free to comment with more; I’m sure there are endless examples. And like I said, by no means am I Anti-Fun, but I am more Pro-Using Brains. I think we all need to wikipedia the word “class” and learn a few things.
In summary, I need to turn my blog into a rant blog because that was way too satisfying. And as Ron Burgundy says, stay classy San Diego skanks.

But this weekend shit is stressful. I don’t need all this pressure to have a good time. I kind of feel like sitting here, doing absolutely nothing, which is pretty much what I am actually doing. But I feel like I could be enjoying myself so much more effectively doing something else. I’m going to regret this later on, I know it. Tonight, just as soon as I realize that there were so many other things I could have done instead, and I missed the opportunity. Definitely tomorrow, when it’s Sunday, and it’s my last chance to get things done (before 5pm when everything closes, at that — talk about pressure). And on Sunday night, when it’s the last minute, it’ll really already be too late. I’ll have to go to bed early to wake up on Monday. Ah, Monday. When I’ll want to shoot myself in the face for having wasted the weekend.

I really kind of like sitting around doing nothing. So why does it feel like such a waste of time? Or, why should I feel like wasting time is not something I should be okay with?

Here’s the only tip that matters: have a blog that doesn’t suck. Then make money as an afterthought. Preferably by supplementing your excellent content with more excellent content, in a form that people might potentially pay for.

Or just do as everyone else does… Have an entire blog entirely about making money with your blog, for other people with blogs about making money (with your blog). Have fun with your little optimization clusterfuck of optimal lameness, and keep your shit off of the rest of the internet. Thank you.

I dunno. Do you really want readers who are lame enough to stick around as regulars to read your PayPerPost BS, anyway? I don’t like lame readers. I don’t have a terrible lot of readers, but the ones I do have are typically not idiots, or at the very least, are smart enough not to make stupid comments. I could never tolerate the kind of reader who might actually believe that I was motivated to try out such and such a software package on my own, or that I’m seriously looking into a vacation at some dumbshit resort. Or worse, to know that it wasn’t the case, and read with interest anyway. You dopes with sites like this might not be lying, but at the same time, you certainly don’t come off as genuine, and reading your textual diarrhea makes me textually vomit (as seen here).

Bleh bleh. Fuck, I can’t wait until the whole thing collapses under the weight of its own stupidosity. Does anyone visit any of those sites with any regularity, other than people trying to do the same shit? Oh, wait. I might be doomed to deal with it a little while longer, until people smarten up (riiiiight). Because while you’re looking for regular readers to visit on a regular basis and comment with regularity (and they will — but only because they want the regular return traffic), what you really want is organic traffic. In other words, hits from people who are probably looking for something other than your dumb shit site, but are too dumb to find it, and miss their target. In which case, your entire website is a giant hunk o’ spam. Shit they weren’t looking for, and don’t want. They might stick around, because like attracts like, but the ones that click your ads are looking for a way out. Hopefully one that leads them to what they were looking for in the first place. Please delete. Your niche-garbage is polluting my internets with stupid. And ugly.

I have one freakin’ block of ads on my site, and I use it to cover the whoooole $5 that my hosting costs (in fact, I’ll probably start taking it down after I reach that point each month), and I really do hope that the majority of you are using an ad-blocker, because really, I only want the people searching for vagina and fucking vagina and penis fucking vagina and gay penis fucking vagina (what?) etc. to see the darn thing. If I knew that any of you regular readers were stupid enough to move their mouse-cursor anywhere near it… (hm, is it against the rules to tell people not to click my ads? I’ll have to check into that…)

I liked the internet better in 1994.

How about we start calling this shit what it is, though. If making money is the first thing on your mind… if you’re picking a “niche” specifically because you think it will earn you cash… if you’re optimizing things for search engines first and regular, intelligent readers second (or as often seems the case — not at all)… You’re not monetizing, you’re blogetizing. And I don’t like you.

I don’t care about your iPhone. I don’t care that nobody else cares about your iPhone. I was sick of Web 2.0 five minutes before I ever heard of it, and I’m sick of hearing about how sick everybody else is about hearing about Web 2.0, and about how ironic it is that everyone, in talking about how sick they are of hearing about Web 2.0, is contributing to the overabundance of bullshit on the Web 2.0 about Web 2.0. I’m not going to attend the Web 2.0 panel at the Web 2.0 conference, and since I’m not cool enough to attend anyway, I’m not going to use Web 2.0 applications to experience it vicariously, because I’m too cool for that. And I’ll be damned if I’m going to read Tweets about your lifecast while watching you read Tweets about lifecasting on your lifecast. Lifecast is a misnomer, anyway. There ought to be more lifecasts by people who actually have lives.

I don’t want to read eight million blogging blogs about how to blog about blogging about blogs about blogging. I’m pretty sure the best way to start a money-making blog these days is to make sure it tells other people all about the best way to start a money-making blog. I’m not going to read your blog carnival of blog carnival carnivals, and that is one carnival I would certainly not spend an afternoon. I’ll stick to the sort where they serve funnel cakes, thank you. The only thing I can be paid to post about is how lame it is to be paid to post. This shit is self perpetuating. It’s cheesy. It’s phony. It’s boring. You’re all a bunch of big, fat, boring, cheesy phonies. I can’t wait until this non-industry crashes, or at least evolves into something else that I can rant about with renewed vehement vigour using whatever new overrated emerging technology emerges. Until then, ceiling cat is watching your circlejerk, jerkoffs.

When did cynicism, sarcasm, snarkism become negative things?

P.S. “Negativity can be treated by several types of intervention strategy, including cognitive-affective stress management and progressive muscle relaxation.”

P.P.S. I do have one productivity tip to offer. Stop reading so much about productivity tips. You’ll find you’ve got at least 17 extra hours a day to devote to figuring out where to stick your widget. (I have a few tips about that, too.)

Reddit ready for the summary? Suck my Digg dick.

• Sore arches and heels, which can progress to chronic conditions, including inflamed Achilles tendons and plantar fasciitis, inflammation of the connective tissue between the heel bone and the toes.
• Heel calluses (from the pounding).
• Hammer toes (from the gripping).
• Irritation between the toes (from the toe thongs), which can lead to nasty fungal infections.

(From Trouble afoot with flip-flops - USATODAY.com)

(Sorry, I was just outside, and saw one too many pairs of ugly-ass feet with fallen arches and ragged toenails. At least remove your chipped nail polish?)

1. USCIS
2. NSLSC/OSAP
3. UPS
4. Comcast
5. Microsoft
6. Dell
7. Capital One
8. Wells Fargo
9. Wal-Mart
10. AT&T

Apparently, AMC doesn’t carry nickels (uh, duh, see the headline above). Presumably, then, they don’t carry pennies, either. And why should they? When a teensy tray of nachos costs $8, and you’re already being ripped off (fer fuck’s sake — maybe get rid of the 9,823,745 flat screens showing a static menu, and charge a bit less), why would anyone care about five cents? And why the hell would anyone care about one cent? They fucking wouldn’t.

There are a number of people passing through my apartment on a regular basis, and three or four or five people here on a regular basis. These people obviously don’t care about pennies at all, because when I go to vacuum (and I’m the only one that ever does it, by the way…), there are 982,734 pennies on the floor. I have to stop every time I find one to bend over and pick it up. The value of a penny is now less than the amount we’d expect to be paid to bend over. Seriously. If someone was to ask me to bend over, I’d demand… at least a quarter. And if you ask me… any denomination of currency that the average person can’t be bothered to reach down to the ground to pick up… That denomination has no sense existing. The sooner we eliminate the penny, the sooner my back rejoices.

Cable went out today. After checking all the connections in our apartment pointlessly (because this shit is never our fault), I concluded that it must have been some Comcast-related asshattery. It wasn’t that we hadn’t paid them (for once), so I walked over to the laundry room, where the incoming line to our apartment building is split.

Seems that Comcast had been around to physically disconnect one of our neighbours (I helpfully reconnected them), and that in doing so, they’d also unplugged the transformer belonging to the main signal amplifier for every cable line connected in that room. Thanks for that! At least they hadn’t completely removed it.

Infinitely more satisfying than calling Comcast, and getting a tech to come out sometime between tomorrow at 9am and never. Especially since I can pretty much guarantee that tech would say “I don’t know what’s wrong with it, we’ll have to get one of the techs that actually has some training to come take a look at it — in a month”.

Die die die die die.

You’re welcome, neighbours.

I’ve been getting eleventy-seven of these for the past month or so. My spam filter still hasn’t caught on. Kill, kill, kill.

Oh, also… I’m back in Chicago for the foreseeable future. Not that I’m psychic, so I can’t foresee very far into the future at all. In fact, I can’t foresee at all. So rather, I’m back in Chicago for the time being, and will be here in from now on with a probability of 1 for the present, and declining at a rate that I don’t know enough about anything to determine towards a probability of 0 at some time in the future. Or something. Whatever. Hi again, Internet.

Why is it so hard to get something delivered?

Why have I had to complain about this 87 other times on this website? (I’d add appropriate links here, but my site is down at the moment, so I’m posting this by e-mail in hopes that it will show up eventually.)

Delivering packages is pretty much the only thing that FedEx and UPS do. You’d think that a business that does one thing would be able to do that one thing reasonably well, and would hire people who have at least one or two of the rudimentary skills required to do that one thing, including:

The ability to count (so I probably shouldn’t be getting calls asking me “I’m at 3943, but I can’t find 3943 1/2″, since anyone with half a brain should be able to figure out that it’s probably somewhere between 3943 and 3945).

The ability to follow simple directions (so when I tell the genius who can’t figure out how to find 3943 1/2 to go past 3943 and try the very next door in the courtyard, I probably shouldn’t get another call 10 minutes later from an entirely different street) (and okay, maybe 3943 1/2 isn’t as straightforward as other addresses — but these guys spend all day every day finding addresses — they should at least be able to figure out that 3934 1/2 N Janssen Ave is not located anywhere on N Greenview Ave).

The ability to read (so I probably shouldn’t have to write a note that says “our buzzer is on the bottom” when our buzzer is clearly labelled to begin with, but when I do it anyway because I have experience with delivery drivers’ limited mental capacities, I probably shouldn’t be sitting in my living room all afternoon listening to absolute silence only to later on find a missed delivery tag stuck to my door, and to be told upon calling the delivery company and asking them to check up on things that the driver explained that no one answered the buzzer — no shit, Sherlock, you didn’t press it).

Hm. Um. Yeah. That’s about all they need to know, as far as I can tell. And yet, they could hire a monkey and get better results. Dear Bob, and they trust these retards to drive company-owned vehicles? If they can’t match “G” on a package to “G” on a label next to a doorbell, is it really safe to assume that they can understand the meaning of a stop sign?

Maybe I need to give up and just leave a sign that says “Dear UPS / FedEx — Get fucked. Just take the damned thing back to the warehouse. I’m sick of playing your little game. We all know I’m going to end up picking it up there eventually, anyway. I will be complaining about you to your supervisor (again) this evening. Have fun with that. I hope you die horribly.”

Seriously, why do they bother sending drivers, when seemingly nothing ever gets successfully delivered to anyone?

Evidently, this stench is something that the gas company’s technicians encounter all the time. So I thought I’d put this out there for future idiotic Google-searchers (if you, like me, would sit around in your living room, getting a pounding headache and slightly woozy, while taking deeeeep breaths of chemicals while wondering “what is this terrible odor that’s making my eyes burn?” you can’t possibly be all that bright — at the very least, not after those chemicals kill off your remaining braincells). Fumes + gas stove = lung-burning death-fog. It will get worse the more you use your oven or stove, and the problem will persist for several days, apparently. The only way around it is to shut off the gas to your stove completely.

This is obviously very good for the health of everyone involved. As if paint fumes aren’t bad enough on their own — now I have to deal with burning paint fumes? In combination with the aforementioned plant bukkake, well… I’m going back to bed. My head hurts like hell.

Out of the gay-nay pool, immediately!

The internet has just told me that the most common romanization system for Chinese is Hanyu Pinyin. Apparently, the Wade Giles system is also kinda sorta still around. I didn’t know which system the spelling of “feng shui” came from, but this conversion table has informed me that both syllables are the same in both systems. So, it shouldn’t matter, and I’m assuming (I could be wrong… reading takes effort) that “feng shui” is a correct rendering using the Hanyu Pinyin system. And, according to Wikipedia:

In its final form Hanyu Pinyin:

• was used to indicate pronunciation only
• was exclusively based on the pronunciation of the Beijing dialect
• included tone marks
• embodied the traditional “initial sound”, “final sound”, and “suprasegmental tone” model
• was written in the Latin alphabet

So, why the crap is “feng shui” pronounced “fung shway”? Especially considering the first point.

I require answers. How useful is a system that is meant to indicate pronunciation when the words aren’t pronounced the way they’re spelled in English at all? I realize there are rules for how all of the junk in the system are meant to be pronounced. But why should I memorize those, when instead of having to remember that e is more like u, they could just use a freakin’ u? Is it because u is already used for oo? So why can’t they use oo instead of u? I’m not seeing the logic.

Meh. Okay, okay. Wikipedia explains this thusly:

By letting Roman characters refer to specific Chinese sounds, pinyin produces a compact and accurate romanization, which is convenient for native Chinese speakers and scholars. However, it also means that a person who has not studied Chinese or the pinyin system is likely to severely mispronounce words, which is a less serious problem with some earlier romanization systems such as Wade-Giles.

But that doesn’t lessen my confusion. “Feng shui”, which is still “feng shui” using Wade-Giles, which should make mispronouncing words less of a problem, is still not properly pronounced “feng shui”, and I don’t approve.

I mean, really, I’m sure there is a good reason, right?

Yeah. Answers. Immediately.

(P.S. for you uptight asstards reading this that are going to proceed to tell me what that good reason is… you take me too seriously, and I am issuing you a preemptive STFU. I realize that it is not simple to translate one language into the entirely different written form of a second language that does not contain the same phonemes. Go boil your head.)

(You’re the same asstards that get bet out of shape when people say this shit the way it’s spelled. I dunno, I guess most people probably see the purpose of translating Chinese words into the Roman alphabet is to help guide one in saying the crap.)

(For the record, I don’t pronounce it “fung shway”, because I don’t pronounce it at all. Feng shui is for crazies.)

Microsoft, I hate you.

I figure we’ll probably move out of here before I manage to get a tech guy out… even if we don’t wind up moving out in the next month or two like Sean wants to. Because I think I misheard the time span I was given on the phone. I don’t think they said between 10 and 12 AM. I think they might really have said between 2010 and 2012.

Anyway, I’m posting this mostly to point out that I’m not (necessarily) ignoring anyone’s e-mails or IMs etc… It’s just such a pain in the ass to have to press send 87 times to get anything to work. Packet loss packet loss packet loss packet loss packet loss packet loss packet loss packet loss packet loss packet loss.