The short form of this weblog entry is that I am looking for employment, and would like the job to be one that is happy to hire me.  If you are a concern or entity that might consider hiring me, please mail me and I’ll send along my resume to you. Questions or simple non-committal inquiries are also welcome.

My father worked for IBM for 30 years, starting in the late 1960’s and well into the 1990’s. IBM was the reason I was born in the town I was, with the IBM plant down the road and my father investing in a new development on what was once farmland to build a new home for his soon-to-be-growing family. His titles, from when I first started paying attention to them, were gibberish to me: compound-phrases with “manager” or “technology” or “research” scattered among them, and all I saw was that he wore a tie and disappeared for most of the day. If you had asked me, at any time, what my dad did during those years, I’d say he “worked at IBM” because that’s what I saw it as, a job involving some sort of entering of a giant conglomerate morass.  He brought home computers from the lab that he borrowed for his son to try, and this was very successful in interesting me, but it didn’t tell me, specifically, what he did.

When I got into my snotty phase, somewhere in my early teens, I just started calling him “The Cog”. This, I might add, to his face, as one might call someone “pops” or “smitty” or whatever.

The reason for calling him “the Cog” was my perception of his life at IBM – that he was a simple turning part in a huge, dominating machine, and that should anything go wrong with him or the machine would find him redundant, he would simply burn out, and a new cog would be snapped into place instantaneously, as if he never existed. Harsh, I know, but we’re that kind of family, if any of my other weblog postings help to indicate such. It was, in most ways, an endearing nickname, but the perception was real – that my father’s work was nameless, faceless, uninteresting and easily replaceable by forces unknown.

I say that, but in point of fact my father was valuable indeed. He worked, as I said, for many years for IBM, at one point being dropped off the official roster because of their huge restructuring in the 90s, but then being hired immediately back as a consultant. After he fully retired from IBM, with full benefits and a pension, he was scouted and went to work for ex-IBMers at other companies, gaining greater and greater responsibilities at those companies as well. In other words, he was anything but a cog; he was a prized part of the endeavors he was a part of, and when he essentially retired for good, which is how he is these days in his late 60’s, he could focus on his new loves of painting and travel with impunity. One could hardly ask for more.

But, I, myself… well.

When I was laid off, let go, or whatever term was used, the process was, shall we say, sterile. Sterile like a hired cleaner brought in to dispense of a library’s collection or a hapless relative tasked with selling a well-tended car on Craigslist, its owner long gone. Imagine being asked a couple of questions over a few months – your current vacation list from the year, your availability a certain week. Imagine being brought into a room you never visit, and being read a paragraph off of a laptop explaining why your employment with a company is coming to an end. Read, I might add, with no eye contact, a pre-formed script written long ago and at a different place, intended to state in the most general and non-hostile of phrasings why you shouldn’t show up tomorrow.

My term came to an end after 13 years at the company (save a year elsewhere during rough times for the firm, a self-directed furlough). 13 years of often-difficult work, of 24-hour on-call, of treacherous drives in snow to repair failing machinery and shared moments of elation and teamwork and pulling off the difficult or the impossible.  As explained by an accompanying voice on the speakerphone, I was not to return, I would not be in the building ever again, any major items would be pulled out of my cubicle and sent to me at a later date. And then I was escorted out of the building, asked for all company material on my person, and left standing in a courtyard.

And the bastard wanted to shake my hand.

I had things to do and stuff to sort out elsewhere, but it was truly a week or so later that I made the major realization.

I was the cog.

My father’s job ended with dignity, punctuated towards the end with a 30-year ceremony in which his children were invited to come and have his long term with IBM lauded by co-workers and manager. A small gesture, but meaningful, and accompanied with a small gift from the company, an appreciation above mere salary for his years given. He was not a replaceable part in so many words, although of course the company did eventually move in directions not needing his talents. He took his breath in and moved to the next adventure.

I make this declaration and revelation not for pity, or concern, or a comment stream filled with pedantic explanations of modern workplace reduction procedures. It’s simply to point out that I let myself spend many years in an environment that, ultimately, had little use for my real talents. Sure, I wrote scripts that reduced overnight alarms by a significant percentage, and I installed more parts into more servers than I could ever possibly count. And I definitely could triage a problem with the best of them, bringing near-minutes turnaround on failures that could threaten the stability of rather important and wide-facing systems. But this was not joy I felt when these things happened, only the grim regard of a needed repair being executed before turning to the next mundane hoop.

Compare that, if you will, to being told of people attending conferences specifically to hear my presentations, or teary-eyed conversations about my documentary work. Delight from finding nearly-lost history, or accolades for archives and collections and writing in all matters I choose (and the important term is choose) to address.  Imagine a slightly bumpy red line in the center of a graph, and then a blue line of highs and lows waving around it like a jagged mountain range. At work, hours a day, I lived the red line, when I wanted the blue line of life outside work.

Therefore, I am making it clear that I am looking for employment, and places and persons who think they could use someone like me should feel free to contact me for my resume.  My resume is odd and varied, but it represents a passionate person who wants to do in his days what once he could only squeeze into variant stretches of snatched hours. I wish to have a place that’s proud of what I do, and can use those skills, and will consider it a thing worth talking about, something worth mentioning to others, and worth working with me to accomplish even more.

I wish, no longer, to be a cog.

Surely, out there, is a group who is looking for someone like me.

I’m here.

Come get me.

Well now, hasn’t it been a while!

It’s now just about October. The powers that be at Yahoo have decreed that October 26th is the last day of Geocities. Let’s assume that it’s really the 20th, or the 15th, because you know how these things go.  Have I and others been backing it up as fast as we can? Why yes indeed, we have. We haven’t gotten every last thing, but we wouldn’t be ashamed with what we have gotten so far, either.

But like any marathon, you gotta keep going.  Hence, it’s time for the final round-up of this mess.

Stop on by the #archiveteam channel on EFnet or e-mail me. We’re looking for:

• People willing to do a little searching and generating of URLs (we have scripts)
• People with about 1tb of disk space they don’t mind blowing over to a cause
• People willing to edit the archive team wiki with all sorts of stuff

See you all there, one way or another. It’s been fun backing up Geocities!

I will be in San Francisco on October 1-4, attending the Monochrom-and-others-sponsored event, Arse Elektronika.

If you check the schedule, you will see that I am speaking on October 2nd, at the Center for Sex and Culture, and that my talk will be entitled “Atomic Porn: What is the smallest particle of erotica?”.

Make of that what you will.

Your limo is waiting for you at 7:15 in the morning.

After a 45 minute drive, the french-canadian limo driver will then take you to the lobby of the TV station, which is near nothing. The lobby will look like this:

The historian in you, which nobody cares about today, is pleased that a TV station would keep a remnant of the old days around in the lobby to show where they have come from:

While you wait for the nice person who will escort you to come out to the lobby, you notice that your cat is being seen by 1.2 million Canadians.

You have scanned 4,000 Infocom documents, and you have backed up Geocities, and goatse’d myspace, and made some documentaries, but today you are a famous cat owner, and you are going to go on TV. After your cat.

You are also an ugly son of a bitch, so your face will have to be repaired for television. Luckily, a very nice professional will be there to help fix you.

You will also be wired for sound. You have worked with these sorts of microphones before, so you’re smart enough to loop them up into your shirt, and not have it hanging outside like some drooling retard.

After this, you will wait in a Green Room, which is not green at all. The other people in the green room are going to go on TV too, but not because of their famous cat. That would be redundant. Although it should be noted that besides the expert on fraud investigation, the other appearing person is an expert on Lions, which are cats, but his cats are not famous, so it doesn’t really count.

People are shuffling around fast, and have been doing this a long time, so you are not attended to after the makeup. You will have to make do with your non-functioning Blackberry and the knowledge that you are going to talk to a million Canadians about your cat. You watch the show that is going on that will have you on it and you do not drink the coffee or water. Otherwise, you’d find a way to wet your pants on live Canadian television. You know you would.

There is a schedule. You see that you and your cat will be scheduled near Matt Damon. This is rather surprising. You look around for Matt Damon. The joke is on you, famous cat owner on TV, because Matt Damon’s interview was recorded several days ago and he is not here. Ha ha.

You are brought into the studio, which is rather surprisingly small, does not surprisingly have an audience, and has a series of small set-like areas throughout it. You are sat down on a chair and start chatting with the host, who you have just met. She is very pretty and as made up as you are, and just heard about twitter yesterday and your cat today. She asks about Facebook and a few things, to get an idea of what of the 10 questions on her pad of paper are best to ask you. 10 feet away, a man is chatting with another man about fraud investigation. It is your friend from the green room, although he is probably not really your friend, just like many of your twitter followers and facebook friends are not your friend. You are probably really not his friend because while he is talking about something as serious as fraud, the television show is telling people to please stick around and meet a cat and Matt Damon.

Finally, someone counts down from 4, the host smiles brilliantly at a camera that has snuck up behind you, and another camera has turned and focused itself on you. A water bottle, empty, falls off the camera swinging towards you, but nobody watching TV can hear it. In fact, nobody on TV can hear the people in the studio talking at normal volume about the next shots and whatever else they’re talking about. The sound setup is obviously very well-done and very well-directed, because none of this can be heard while you are suddenly on morning television talking to over 1.2 million people about your cat.

The interview itself looks like this: http://watch.ctv.ca/news/top-picks/meet-sockington/#clip213746

After the interview, you shake the hand of your questioner, wave hello to the other host getting ready for the next shot, and you are out the door.

The other guests are surprised you are the Sockington guy. You chat about big cats and zoos.

Then you are shown the door.  You decide to leave the makeup on because you look pretty good for the moment.

Your driver is waiting for you outside, and you are driven back to where you are staying.

All throughout Canada, a million people saw you, or heard you in the background, or ignored you. For as long as they retain your memory, you are a guy with huge sideburns who owns some sort of famous cat on something called fwitter or mitter or sinner or something. You had very large sideburns. Your cat was cute.  Matt Damon was also cute. It is 8:45.

And that’s what TV is like.

Even with unemployment, life goes on, especially life you planned before you became unemployed.  As a result, I spent most of the last week in Toronto. Besides a television appearance and a speaking engagement at a conference I didn’t go out of my way to mention, I also attended the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), a great collection of movies and called by some the opener to the Oscar season.

I saw 10 movies during this time: Kamui, Cleanflix, Whip It, Symbol, Like You Know It All, Mr. Nobody, Hugh Hefner: Playboy Activist Rebel, Good Hair, Perrier’s Bounty, Waking Sleeping Beauty.

In terms of movie reviews, I’ll just give you two-liners.

• Kamui: Ambitious and uneven – adapted from a Manga, it suffers from being close to that form, with parts of it done rather hamfistedly next to much better scenes.
• Cleanflix: Great documentary on a neat subject (companies re-editing movies to remove “immoral” parts), and with a great “plot” moving throughout it.
• Whip It: The perfect movie for teenage girls to see themselves in and feel great coming out of, and a great film for everyone else as well.
• Symbol: Nobody will ever see this film again in North America, and that’s a shame.
• Like You Know It all: Nobody will ever see this film again in North America, and that is fucking awesome.
• Good Hair: Brilliantly done documentary on the subject of hair in black culture, with Chris Rock making it a roller coaster.
• Perrier’s Bounty: Let’s make Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels over and over and never get tired of it – I sure won’t. Fun.
• Hugh Hefner: Over two hours long, should have been 2-3 episodes. Even nudity can’t save the length.
• Mr. Nobody: A graduate of the class of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind – if you loved that you will love this.
• Waking Sleeping Beauty: If you’re into disney history, this documentary is a glittering gold mine of the behind-the-scenes of Disney’s second golden age of 1984-1994.

I don’t like doing short, one-off entries, but the nature of a survey is you don’t pollute it with too much verbiage, lest you end up pushing people in weird directions.

That said, I’d like to invite people who think they might buy my next documentary to take a survey over on the GET LAMP site. It’s 4 questions. Should take you milliseconds. It would help me a lot, because it’s one thing to “decide” how things will go, but when you’re selling stuff, you want people to be happy with what they’re being offered. This survey will help me recalibrate things.

Here’s the survey. Thanks.

I get a lot of ideas. Some of them are not very good, like I bet I can drive without completely scraping all the snow off this windshield, or the classic I probably don’t have to wait a couple minutes before pulling this out of the microwave.

Other ones are pretty good, like hey, let’s bring a VAX and a PDP-11 to a hacker conference, or it appears there hasn’t been a documentary on bulletin board systems so maybe I should do one.

And then there’s the really good ones, the ones that fall into my lap or come to me and they burn with such passion that I spend more time contemplating and planning their repurcussions than coming up with the idea in the first place. And one of those hit this morning thanks to a poster on this thread.

The idea is this:

What if I released GET LAMP on a USB Stick?

Here’s the thinking.

First of all, there’s no way I’m using Blu-Ray, and Blu-Ray is the defacto standard for “it goes on a plastic disk thing and you shove it into a machine” for high definition.  This leaves regular ol’ DVD-ROM. Regular ol’ DVD-ROM is a very mature format and I can do a lot with it, but I will end up with a SD version of the HD stuff I shot, AND it’s using a standard called MPEG-2, which is a pretty puffy little standard as far as video goes – it predates the first Playstation.

MPEG-2 currently is supplanted by MPEG-4, which can put a lot more detail into a much smaller space. There’s also the matter of the Matroska media container, which is an open-source spec that lets you shove in a bunch of subtitles, video streams, and other cool stuff into a single file.

USB sticks are now pretty ubiquitous. The USB2 standard (which is about to be supplanted by a higher-speed version) is a pretty robust little sucker, and USB flash drives have been around long enough that they’re getting pretty cheap and definitely getting accepted enough that there’s crazy customized versions of them available. Witness:

Now, granted, the per-unit costs are higher – but only if you compare them to DVD-ROMs – with Blu-Ray as it currently is (and always will be, if the current regime holds), these will be cheaper. And hold more stuff. And be cooler.

I mean, look at some of these selections.

You’d get all the footage I was intending to put on there, PLUS even MORE bonus stuff, like scanned images, photos, audio, maybe some games, and it would be even easier to make it accessible to the blind and deaf, which was on my list. 4gb or 8gb, it’d all be on one little item, and it’d work, and I’d be paying nothing to any cartel.

So, hit me up, folks. Tell me why I shouldn’t go for this, this way. Is there any downside? Any?

Oh, these ideas fire me up. I’m delighted when they happen.

Some time ago I wrote an entry that got some attention about the Blu-ray format and why I refuse to release anything on it. It’d be nice to release the text adventure documentary in what Blu-Ray claims to be, but reality showed it not to be the case.

I was alerted recently to the fact that the Blu-ray fees I quoted had been modified, and were “more friendly” to independents, that is, groups for whom $5-$10k in fees are  not chump change or somewhere near a couple days of catering bill. Obviously this is not everyone but it’s basically everyone I care about. Naturally, I took a look.

I am referring, here, to this document, which is an excellent overview of the current fee schedule and changes made. However, bear in mind that to truly understand what all the fees, licensing and issues are for you, you’re really going to have to hit up the AACS site and download all the licensing agreements.  I am not in any way suggesting normal people do this, but to really get a handle on what it all means, you have to grab all that stuff, and trust me, any document with the words “WITNESSETH” in the contracts you have to sign is probably not something you want to waste your time on, unless you’re a lawyer or hiring one, or actually want to release stuff on Blu-ray. Then you kind of have to do it.

So here’s the high-level message relating to these new changes related to the Blu-ray fees:

FUCK BLU-RAY.

I just wanted to make it clear. The new changes, which are the “final” licensing setups (the previous terms I covered were “interim”), are just as henious and stupid as they’ve always been. The pain has been shifted around and I guess for people who are looking for any silver lining in a fart you can convince yourself that the new terms are more “independent friendly”. But the fact is they’re more independent friendly just as not setting a house on fire that you just robbed is “homeowner friendly”. A reasonable person whose tab is not being picked up by a huge, fat company with insider lines and entire legions of lawyers looking for some leathery contract to chew on still has no reason to go with Blu-ray. Steady as she goes – this thing is as open and loving as a customized cartridge that plugs into a customized system and charges you an arm and a leg to make the cartridge. Just because the “cartridge” is a disc that in ye olde days was a pretty inexpensive way to get your message out does not mean we’re anywhere near the same animal. Listen to me, people: a/v components being built now will decrease resolution on images if it “suspects” you’re doing anything “wrong” with it. Do you realize how sick that is? That we let it come to this?

I mean, check this ass-fuckery:

Analog “Sunset” provision

The final AACS License agreements also include provisions to phase out the use of analog output in Blu-ray players.  It says that all Blu-ray players manufactured after December 31, 2010 must limit the analog output to SD resolution.  After December 31, 2013, no device that can decrypt AACS content can have any analog outputs.  The intent of this is to limit casual piracy and has no effect on how you author your Blu-ray discs.

Did you see that? And you’re fine with this? They’re fucking breaking the functionality of shit just because they can and you’re fine with this?

Anyway, back to the new terms.

As mentioned before, these fees are related to the innovation and R&D of a given format. The idea is that because a lot of research went into the items, the groups who have patents on them will get fees and payments related to the creation of the items. It’s a way to ensure that people who create stuff are then given money and credit for the years they spent working through all the hurdles of their technology. You make an amazing new nail-clipper, and then everyone who buys your nail-clipper is paying $0.05 to the nail clipper inventor. CDs and DVDs had this going on for many years, and we didn’t really care because the cost (as low as pennies a disc) were in the realm of chump change.  DVDs charged more, but again, it was enough that a duplicator wouldn’t even bring it up as a cost on your side; you were just charged X for each duplicated disc, and some piece of that went to fees and to licensing and whatever.

The situation with Blu-ray is that the fees are significant enough, and the AACS bullshit is so mandatory now, that even duplicators have to let you know about it, lest you find them entirely uncompetitive or in some way ripping you off.

So let’s address the base issue here: copy protection is mandatory. That is, if you want to make a Blu-Ray disc, you have to put copy protection on it. You have to pay for the privilege of the copy protection. There is no situation where you can’t have that copy protection. It’s not even particularly good copy protection, since people are ripping Blu-Ray discs quite happily and have for significant months now. But you have to have it and you have to pay for it.

A bunch of my issues with this format rise from this set of situations, where you are being latched onto mandatory crap-ass restrictions and licensing for something you very likely don’t even fucking want. Any of the changes they’ve made to the fee structure is just a shell game after that.

Previously, you had to pay $3000 for your special key for your Blu-ray disc. You had to buy this thing and you had to use it, and if the duplicator didn’t use it they’d lose the license to duplicate discs. Now, you can choose to pay $500 a year for this special key, paying every year you are duplicating discs (up to ten years) for a total of $5000. Or, you can pay the $3000 up front. In other words, they have composed a loan-shark system around the key payment.  I don’t know what part of that makes you say “wow, they’re opening up to independents”.

The rest of the changes are similar. You pay $500 for the use of a key you just paid that $500 to get. You pay per disc for the use of that key. You also have a number in there, a special arbitrary number, that defines you as an “independent”. It is all wasted money, so you can buy into a system trying to close itself off and go completely vertical and keep people who are not part of the syndicate out.

It’s heinous.

Sorry, I’m sticking with it. Fuck Blu-Ray.

So, in scanning thousands of pages of Infocom history, the next question is what use this all might have.

As it stands, I can give an extremely obscure example. Likely you’re going to be left with the same impression you previously had; that is, you will continue to think what I’ve been doing is a waste of time or an excellent choice. But let’s go with it anyway.

I was alerted to this weblog entry in which someone sat down with the feelies (included extras) for the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy game, and translated the “alien language” of one of the documents.

The document in question is an alien version of the “Order for Destruction” included in the packaging as well; the joke is that the main character’s house is set to be destroyed, and then it turns out the entire Earth is set to be destroyed, and the documents are the same.

In his weblog posting, Mike Schiraldi figures out this document is a simple cryptogram, and sets about translating it. As it turns out, the cryptographic message is riddled with errors and kind of random. He does not concern himself with speculation as to why this is the case, and why phrases would be in the document like “destroyed andotherwi se transformed into nondescript heap of pulverized rubble”, broken syntax and all.

I have an advantage over Mike, having scanned Steve Meretzky’s excellent documentation related to this game (and his other Infocom works, as well). I don’t think this really needs to have Steve be bothered with asking him why things were like they were – instead, I just looked at what was scanned in and here’s my two cents.

Much heavy lifting in design, layout, and verbiage for Infocom was done by a firm called Giardini/Russell, Inc. out of Watertown, Massachusetts. In fact, let’s just make it clear – a lot of what people think of as “Infocom” is in fact Giardini/Russell.  For example: The Zork logo, the names Infidel and Deadline, and, of course, the verbiage of the advertisements I previously discussed.  They wrote manual copy (some of which was then re-written by the implementors) and a pile of other stuff. The story of Infocom’s success, for all its considerable talents, is incomplete unless you realize this firm that contributed so much. (The firm was acquired in 1993.)

What the scanned documents show is that anything from completed ideas (full maps, paragraphs of writing, lists) to barely considered thoughts would be sent over to G/R, who would then pull together ideas and prototypes for Infocom to look over. Some of the Implementors appear to appreciate this additional input, while others resist it. And sometimes, like this case, they do work which ends up in the final product.

On July 5th, 1984, G/R sends over a draft of the Order of Destruction for Arthur Dent’s house. It’s given to Steve Meretzky to proof and send back. Among this draft is the phrase “Domicile Demoltion Department of Randomshire County”. Steve crosses out “Randomshire” and puts in “Cottingshire”.  (The book doesn’t mention what town the house is in.)

The final Order Destruction included in the package, therefore, says “Cottingshire”. But as Mike’s translation shows, the text in the alien document is “Randomshire”, the original draft.

This is a very strong indication that the choice to do the alien document as a vaguely cryptographic puzzle was done by an artist/writer at G/R and not Infocom. The choice of first draft language not used in the final draft for the home destruction order bears this out.

Is this important? Important’s a funny word. I think it demonstrates the layer of independence that G/R had in making some aspects of Infocom creations, and where the idea/creation likely came from. This might clear things up for people down the line about other aspects of Infocom, or how ad/PR agencies could work, and so on. So I think it’s helpful, and not unhelpful to have this extra information.

When the scans become public, I hope many such little things will come to light.

By the way, a spectacular weblog entry about included packaging in Infocom games (the feelies) is at the sceptical futuryst.

Recently, I swapped a lot of my stuff to gmail.

Let’s address this immediately: What? Jason Scott switched to a “cloud” service? Well, no, I’m paying Google for this service and they’ve demonstrated excellent uptime, except when they haven’t. But I am paying them (and Flickr, and a bunch of other services) when I use them, and they all have export/backup functions, and so on. Remember, the “cloud” is whatever people want it to be, which is why it’s worthless as a term. The fact someone you’ve never heard of with a rounded PNG logo and a javascript drag-and-drop can get your respect as quickly as Google… well..

Anyway, so now a lot of addresses and mail that used to shove through a very unhappy FreeBSD box now go off into Google and get mangled up by their machinery. And among that are some of my oldest and most proliferated hostnames, like cow.net and snuh.com. You know – short and old in an era when a 4 or 3 letter domain is unfathomable as being available to mortals. But available they once were, and that was 15 years ago or thereabouts.

Google’s pretty good with spam removal, although it does occasionally encounter a false positive or a false negative, and I get a quite-manageable amount of spam in my mailbox.  Again reminding ourselves that I have 8 domains piling through here, the 10-15 pieces of spam a day are not too hairy.

What I didn’t expect, or, more accurately, didn’t know I’d have to deal with are the chain letters.

Maybe I’ve been lucky, or, more likely, rather strict with people who mail me – send me crap that you didn’t write that you’re forwarding along because the thing you’re forwarding told you to forward it, and I am going to not treat you well, and respond to everyone on the forward list with a link that explains the forwarded material is bullshit. I totally ruin the party – facts are what I’m into, facts are what you get, and that makes it not as fun for you if you’re forwarding along an “amazing” or “incredible” story that is, fundamentally both too good to be true and describing completely impossible history. Most family and friends got the message, so I get very little of these now.

Well, until now.

Now all these mistyped, misphrased and perhaps intentional misdirections into my various domains are going through the Goog’s spam system, determining that the chain letters are in fact written by human beings, and giving them to me. It’s been a while since I’ve seen so many “PLEASE FORWARD” and “YOU WON’T BELIEVE THIS” messages come through. I’ve read a bunch, idly, between other work.

Can I simply say I had forgotten how much ignorant, racist, poorly-researched, badly-written, intellectually dishonest and all-around craptastic mail makes the rounds?

I mean, come on, people. I’m trying to imagine someone whose viciously underpowered, 640×480 resolution, slow-loading e-mail client has all this toxic crap spill into their mailbox, each one a comet of shame trailing the piles of gullible huckleberries it has convinced to pass itself along, and I wonder how you could possibly think you’re getting anything informative, or accurate.  But I guess people do; maybe they’re not otherwise occupied with the goings-on of a life spent online and have time to honestly be “informed” of some biblical meaning in a recently posted CNN interview, or to be shown a picture of a rock and told a set of circumstances that never happened formed the rock and scientists are “stumped”. Or they’re desperately in need of a terrible poem involving Jesus, trucks, killing or otherwise injuring various racial groups. Or being given a 4-5 line “fact” that has been forwarded (by my count) over one hundred times, and apparently nobody noticed that it’s a mildly-burnished paragraph from a comedy routine from HBO from 1987.

This is not exactly groundbreaking insight I’m passing along here, but I guess I’d just make a note of it, because I hadn’t had to swim upstream through all this mentally-damaging garbage in a while. I can’t imagine what it must do to world outlook and informativeness to have all this constitute your “getting the real story” quota for a given day/week. For the record, you’re not getting the real story or the underground truth from this bile – you’re just a memetic dumping ground, picked clean as if by a herd of bison and being left covered in their droppings as they move on down the field.

Oh, and let me save you some time:

• If a political/news posting contains the term “antichrist”, it’s probably not really that journalistically sound.
• Yes, those are really cute fucking kittens.
• If the signature line is a pile of biblical citations, don’t file the letter under “science facts”.
• If the “information XXX doesn’t want you to see” indicates that it appeared on nationwide media and spends 5 paragraphs explaining how the person saying the information XXX doesn’t want you to see is an impeccable source, maybe you should go that extra logical step, buckeye, and consider how information XXX doesn’t want you to see got on national media. Stick with it. You’ll work it out. I have faith in you.
• Don’t forward. Trust me.