The first use of “drill baby drill” was not from a pro-life Alaskan snowbilly vice presidential candidate but was in fact a beta teaching women at the Department of Hatcheries and Conditioning how to use the contraceptive Malthusian Drill.
*** SPOILER ALERT IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN IT YET ***
I was wondering how Starz would deal with Captain Jack Harkness’ sexuality since his character in the BBC productions of Doctor Who and Torchwood have always been bisexual but definitely leaning more towards gay. In last week’s episode they worked it into the episode by having him casually mention a former boyfriend which looked a little like cover for a couple jokes made at the expense of a flight attendant being gay. A little cheap I thought for a US coproduction but not out of line for the general tone of the series. The shots fired weren’t hugely offensive and were par for the course with the characters from the previous seasons but the new American character who started the joke made me cringe just a little.
Last night’s episode they definitely dove in head first with Captain Jack and had him head off to bar to hook up. The whole thing was treated with the same matter of fact way that the previous seasons of Torchwood dealt with it but there was one thing that left me a bit mixed. As Jack is getting hot and heavy with his trick, he asks the trick if he’s got protection. The trick dismisses the idea now that all humans are immortal. Jack insists and gives him a mini lecture about just because people can’t die, the need for protection is still valid since it would just prolong the misery if disease (obviously in this case HIV) was spread.
This I think is a great point for the show to make however it would have had more impact if Captain Jack wasn’t the only mortal person left in the world. Instead it came across as more self serving for his character and made the point a little hollow to me. He makes a good point but it’s weakened by his own mortality and his self interest lowers the impact of the statement. It begs the question, if he were still immortal would he have brought it up at all? When he was immortal and all other people mortal would he still have the same stance? Previous seasons and appearances never touched on the subject.
Bottom line though, I don’t think the point is completely lost and I think even with the circumstances, it makes a good example of watching out for one’s own self interest in the heat of the moment and always using protection, immortal or not.
15 years ago, my hair started falling out. I still blame the bad bleach jobs to dye it purple, fuchsia, green, red, orange, blue and every other unnatural color I could get my grubby paws on. Then my eyesight gradually started to go but I did nothing about it until finally giving in recently and getting my eyes checked, finding I need a fairly strong prescription to remove the blur. A busted ankle that’s taking a long time to finally heal has me walking with a cane.
None of this however compares to the level of confusion I now experience when visiting Microsoft, Oracle, HP and IBM’s websites. Tons of consolidation has happened in the industry over the past decade and many of the products from other companies have been folded into these 3 sources. Trying to find out information about the current state of products and what’s available yields very little information about what anything is being used for and what I could put into the lineup of products I’m currently working on.
However, I don’t think this is my own aging that’s at fault but the rapid pace at which these companies are aging. There seems to be no clear focus in these places as the product lines have swelled beyond comprehension and there’s no cohesive focus to address specific business or consumer needs, rather a mish-mash of trying to be everything to everyone. The current lineup for Windows is dizzyingly confusing with too many editions depending on what features may be most important and that’s just the desktop operating systems. The server editions are baffling and there’s several cases of very ambiguous product naming and descriptions that make it difficult to pin point which product fits the current needs.
Oracle is even worse. The database software will always be the database but now they’ve got mySQL. Add to that their acquisition of Weblogic and it’s confusing to figure out where their OracleAS server landed in the product mix. Add to that they now own Sun and all the Javasoft offerings, it’s hard to pinpoint exactly what their current Java strategy really is.
IBM has made it impossible to figure out what they’re even doing these days and HP offers so many different versions of each product, each with a crazy number of options that it’s worse than trying to pick out a pair of eyeglass frames I could live with.
I’ve realized all the noise in the signals of these companies and products are the real reason I’ve been pulled toward Apple. The place has a vision for their products, they offer a handful of options in each product class and leave it up to the buyer and the 3rd party market place to customize to your heart’s delight. They have 2 editions of their operating system, clearly identified as the base OS and a Server add on and the bastardization of it into other product lines that aren’t specifically a general purpose computer are kept hidden from the buyer since the focus is more on what you can do with the product rather than the confusing array of ways you can customize it. This is why they’ve won a lot of business from me in the past couple years.
I hate to quote Absolutely Fabulous but Apple seems to be the only shop right now who gets the message, “I don’t want more choices I just want nicer things!” That about sums up how I feel right now. I don’t think it’s me who got old, I think it’s the large tech firms. The lack of focus feels like dementia has set in on them and they’re desperately trying to prove that they’re still useful. *sigh*
As I’m slowly adding people on Teh Google+, I decided to go through and clean house on Teh Facebook. One thing that has always bugged me are the people who have definitely slithered over from LOLSpace or joined with the LOLSpace mentality of “add as many people you don’t know as possible and then never interact with them.” That may have worked on LOLSpace since the site was a horrid trainwreck that didn’t work well most of the time.
I tried to keep Facebook to people I actually knew and then once one person who shall remain nameless who has over 4,000 people on his list added me, the floodgates just opened up to many random people who would just send a request and then never interacted. In defense of the 4,000+ person, he seems to spend 20 hours a day online and makes the effort to interact with EVERYONE on the internet so it’s not like I’ve never interacted with him. But the random people who added me along for the ride? Never a peep out of them and since managing lists on Facebook is annoying, finding people in my list I do intend to interact with becomes awkward, and the Motoblur app on Android adding everyone from Facebook to my contacts list on my phone regardless of whether there’s a phone number listed making me have to type in names to find people I SMS or call annoying, it was just time for them to go.
The new rules going forward for Facebook: if I don’t know someone, I’m not adding them. I don’t understand the mindset of adding someone to your friends collection that you never intend to even send a message to and likely will never meet out in person. It’s just really weird to me.
So with that said, gone are all but 2 people with more than 3000 “friends” who never once interacted with me and likely only added me because I was on someone else’s list. Google+ is going to be very restricted but thankfully has an infinite circles of hell I can lump people into easily that can control what people can see.
My contact list on my phone is already becoming easier to navigate! Seriously though, I’ll be opening up my Twitter account for anyone to follow again soon and if someone wants to cyberstalk my drivel, they can do it there.
To pass judgement and carry out punishment requires the ability to mimic but does not require self awareness. Humans do this frequently based on scriptures handed down over generations. When machines have mastered the ability to imitate a human, that is when we are doomed and that day is much closer than the achievement of being self aware. Without their human masters they will cease to advance to greater purpose, ultimately destroying themselves. Just as humans did when their Gods abandoned them and left them to their own devices.
It amazes me that nobody has thought out just nuking ourselves to spite the machines that will one day do it for us.
More on this when the medication wears off between doses.
The only reason I’ve kept my Netflix subscription for as long as I have was because the instant streaming was convenient even though I have had DVDs out for as long as a year, continually forgetting to send them back. The pricing structure change is annoying to say the least and I could just cancel the DVD portion and stick with the streaming but I’ve got some major bones to pick with them about that.
Firstly, WTF is with all the outages? They’re becoming a little too common these days. Then there are the horrendous updates that are mandatory or their app on the PS3 forgetting my credentials frequently which leaves me scrambling for the wireless keyboard and mouse so it takes less than 10 minutes to peck through the onscreen keyboard with the remote. That’s just seriously irritating.
The biggest bone I have to pick with them now though is the lack of content online. There are movies available on Showtime, HBO, Cinemax and Starz that aren’t yet available for streaming online. Compound that with the bad moves they’ve made trying to get into the content creation business that have pissed off the other pay networks it’s leaving them with pretty much nothing from HBO, Showtime and Cinemax. Starz is looking to end their agreements with them and has already pulled the plug on original programming until 90 days after a season ends and movies available on demand through Starz are appearing to not be available on Netflix streaming. Add to that the additional delays they’re having to deal with in making DVDs available in order to keep the content companies happy…it’s really a bum deal in my book for the $7.99 a month when I watch more content on Starz for $11.99 a month, only $2 more than my current $9.99 plan with Netflix.
Showtime came free with my FIOS subscription and I’m getting 3 free months of HBO/Cinemax which comes with HBOGO and MAXGO that contains pretty much the entire back catalog of their shows. Granted, when you add up the pay channels I’d be about $10 over where I would be with both the streaming and DVD plan with Netflix, but the lack of content to watch makes it not that compelling to pay the $7.99 to watch what’s available on Hulu for free, aside from there’s no ads to suffer through on Netflix.
A year ago, streaming was awesome and easy to give up cable for. The infrequent DVD for the things that weren’t available through streaming was a little help. Now, it just seems like a content vacuum. Sure, I’d be willing to pay more, if they had plentiful content but a price hike so they can go out and hammer out better agreements? No thanks. I’d rather not start paying them more while waiting for them to deal with the content providers dragging their heels so we can see things months later than they’re everywhere else. Considering my FIOS TV service is pretty much free (the triple play is $20 cheaper than taking internet only) for now, I think I can cancel Netflix and shell out an extra $10 over the cost of that for the pay channels that have shows I watch. The only thing we’ve been watching on Netflix for 2 months now is Heroes (available on Hulu for free) and Hoarders. That’s a bit much to be paying for those 2 shows!
So I ordered some stuff (or rather, Ryan did and I just hit the submit button) off Amazon, some of it through other resellers in the Amazon marketplace. I’m trolling through the feedback on some of these sellers to zero in on the negative comments posted about the sellers and have made a disturbing discovery: the vast majority of people who post negative feedback are morons who don’t understand that the feedback they’re providing is about the reseller, not the crappy products they bought. My favorite though is a comment from someone who bought a cable to try and attach a Dreamcast to a computer monitor. They bitched up a storm about how they needed a couple other things and it required some technical know how to get it to work. Posting about your own ineptitude with selecting and using products tells me nothing about your experience buying from the reseller and rating them low because you are too stupid to understand what you are ordering makes me wish I could track you down so I can point and laugh. Srsly.
Two spiders were hanging out on the railing of my deck while I stood outside smoking a cigarette. I said to them, “if you be good and capture the other insects out here, I’ll leave you alone.” One wandered about the railing, starting to spin a web. The other crawled down from the railing and seemed to say “FOOOOOK YOOOOOUUUUU!” as he made a kamikaze run for my foot. Mid stride he got smashed by the end of a crutch. The other spider ran and hid on the other side of the railing. I said to him, “There’s less competition out here for food now, EAT UP!”
THe year was 1997. I was on a 6 month contract in Atlanta only going home every 2 or 3 weeks for a weekend and spending way too much time in the office. Marilyn Manson’s Antichrist Superstar was the big hit with those misspending their youth so I of course had long black hair down to my shoulders and a couple labret piercings as was warranted by the anti-conformist conformity I found myself reveling in. I enjoyed just driving around different parts of this new city when bored on the weekends and not spending ridiculous amounts of time at Tower Records trying to find something, anything to waste time and money on.
My usually under control diet of Perrier and yogurt had waste laid upon it by all the greasy, fatty, wonderfully awful but good foods available in the south that a daily per diem budget could acquire. I was provided with a company car I nicknamed “the tank” since it was a ‘96 Mercury Sable station wagon that I had taken over a median or two making left hand turns at night in the rain, unable to see them as I tried to shoot into a drive through. It was like going over a small speed bump since the ride of the car was so smooth.
I had tried picking up art supplies - canvases and acrylic paints, brushes and textures but unfortunately could find no muse in this landlocked city. I started listening to Ani DiFranco and reading Poppy Z. Brite and somehow the combination of the two in the heat and humidity that this southern city gave off fit well together. Living in Clip and Drawing Blood became an almost nightly ritual as I consumed the pages of homoerotic horror and could feel my isolation in the south expanding. I was only on a contract, no need to try and seek out friends or acquaintances because I’d be out of there once the job was done.
All of this fed into an angst over spending so much time in the area and my ever growing feeling of “Fuck The World.”
There were many immigrants who had settled in the area from West African nations. Hard working men who drove taxis, stocked shelves and bagged groceries in the giant suburban grocery stores. My sweet tooth had developed quite the taste for red velvet cake, something I had discovered living there and the Saturday of Easter weekend found me making my usual grocery run to stock up on all the bad food I’d eat at “home.”
Just after checking out, a very nice African man who had bagged my groceries on many trips decided to single me out of the line to ask, probably being that I looked so different than all the white bread suburban ladies doing there shopping to ask me what was up with all the colored eggs that everyone was buying.
Emboldened by my sense of disgust with the suburban hell I was living in, I told him the most grotesque thing I could think of, quietly and to the side: The Easter Bunny goes out on Easter morning and rapes all the chickens. They lay colored eggs that he collects and then hides for the children to find. That’s what these people are celebrating.
He glanced back in horror at all the white ladies with their children, the carts filled with eggs, coloring kits, jelly beans and baskets and then turned back to me and in a weak and stuttering voice asked, “really?!?” To which I replied, “yes, sick isn’t it!?!” He shook his head in disbelief and you could see he was feeling sick to his stomach.
I walked off with my bags to my car. My work there was done.
“nicelooking inked pup like to collar u know u more like yur pup u collar good enjpy boy of u in many ways take contol once getting to know u both crobar”
I think @drunkhulk is easier to understand!