MySpace Eats Brains for Breakfast

Yes, I’ve been busy and sick since my last post, but mostly I’ve been lazy. And busy. But also lazy. This is my problem. I lack long-term focus and am easily side-tracked. I was diagnosed with ADD ages ago, but I hate taking medication unless I absolutely need it to, say, keep me living or from ripping my own skull off.

Anyway, I’ve been trying to condense the multitude of reasons I hate MySpace so much (and yet use it anyway) and managed to limit it to four. This is amazing since I generally lack the ability to condense anything into under a 200 item list.

1. The shit that people do to their pages. If you think hot pink text on a sparkling green background is readable, you should be sent to aesthetics hell.

2. A lot of my offline friends are idiots on the internet. My friends can’t type, don’t understand about spam, and are emo on the internet. It’s embarrassing to be associated with these people.

Why do you care if you’re not in my Top 4?

Oh, yes. I do not have a Top 8. I don’t like my friends enough when they’re online to keep most of them on there. In fact, I have Barack Obama and Dexter Morgan in my Top 4 because MySpace wouldn’t allow me to have a Top 2.

3. MySpace is now a verb. The first time a friend said “I’ll MySpace you later”, I nearly wept. It sounds dirty, but not in a happy way. :(

4. Now I use MySpace as a verb with certain friends who need to contact me. It’s terrible, really.

And yet I have a MySpace purely to keep up with people I might not have otherwise. I’ve found people I’ve not talked to for five to twelve years. I’ve found a girl I went to high school with only to find out he’s not a girl anymore which was handy to know up front the next time I saw him.

Months ago I had a dream about a girl I knew in primary school. She was a cool kid so I figured she may have grown up to be awesome. And, as a sidenote, I was sure she was gay.

Oh, how gaydar and cool-kid-detector failed me.

I decided to look her up on MySpace only to find out she’s now stupid, skanky, greasy, blonde¹, alcoholic, and the kind of straight girl that makes out with other girls just so she can post pictures on the internet.

What are other problems with MySpace? And are any other social networking sites necessarily better? Or are there other aspects that make them just as annoying?

1. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. ;) ↩

A Blog in Five Parts

Today I have a trilogy blog in five parts¹.

Part I: Seven Five Things You [Probably] Didn’t [Want] Know About Me

Chanel tagged me for this a while back, but it took me a while to think of seven things.

Actually, it took me so long to think of seven things that there are only five things.

1. I have a lip piercing (more specifically, a ‘Monroe’ piercing). I got it in August. To clear things up: I’m too old to rebel against my parents, society doesn’t really care if I pierce my face. It’s cute. My mom hates looking at my face now, but that might stem from the fact that I just turned up with a shiny new piercing on the same day my brother got his eyebrow done; now he’s addicted. No, we didn’t plan it. Just a coincidence.
2. I was once voted Least Likely to Be Murdered by a group of friends. Perhaps this will help in my Zombie Survival Guide (see Part II).
3. I’ve recently been informed by someone who has much more money than I do, that it’s sad that the only designer item I’ve ever owned are glasses² Who has money for designer clothes? Optical insurance covered all but US$20 of my glasses. Is there someone who will pay for 90% of my clothes³ too?
4. I love listening to languages being spoken, even if I have no idea what’s being said. I find languages fascinating which is another reason why I love to study them.
5. I once seriously considered going to culinary school to become a pastry chef.

Part II: The Zombie Survival Guide

Part one of my zombie survival guide, which will focus on necessary skills for surviving zombie attacks–mainly skills you should work on acquiring now before the event of a zombie attack, robot uprising, and/or civilian revolution against a corrupt government, will be posted as soon as I type it. It’s written in my head, I swear. And it’s also made me realize how many of these skills I lack. I’ve never fired a gun and I can’t drive. I also need to start working out pronto. At least I can run fast, even in my current state.

Part III: Wisdom Teeth

I was supposed to have my wisdom teeth out ages ago because they are were impacted, but I only get a certain amount of money for my dental insurance annually. In years previous, I’ve needed cavities filled and root canals…canalled. And I simply did not want to have all four impacted wisdom teeth forcibly extracted from my face.

I finally got it done on the last day of November and ended up spending the next week in hell. Projectile vomiting isn’t as fun as it looks in The Exorcist. Dry socket wasn’t fun either. Boo crap dental insurance and wisdom teeth. Who decided those were a good idea?

Part IV: Erectile Disfunction

I keep getting spam on one specific entry about erectile disfunction except it’s in Italian so it’s really about disfunzione erettile.

Part V: MySpace Rants

I also have a post written up about my love/hate relationship with MySpace (in which I don’t love it at all, but grudgingly use it anyway). To post or not to post?

I can’t be the only one who has to use MySpace in order to find and keep up with old friends and hates every moment of it. MySpace makes my normally intelligent friends look like idiots who have no concept of aesthetics!

1. And thus begins a post with too many strikethroughs and footnotes. ↩
2. I just got reading glasses on top of my usual glasses. I forget to put them on and when I finally do put them on, I forget to take them off and don’t understand why I can’t see anything. They’re by Coach and that apparently means something. They’re also adorable. ↩
3. Except there’s no way I can afford to pay for 10% of a designer outfit. ↩

Eco-Geekery: A Rant, What You Can Do, and Other Commentary

Now, this would have been posted on real Blog Action Day had it not been for my server switching issues and the fact that I lost power due to a wind storm, hence my lack of posts as well as the lateness of my replies and returned comments.

I’m an avid lurker at Hugg, the environmental version of Digg, and EcoGeek¹ because 1) I’m really big on the environment because hey, it keeps us alive and 2) I’m a geek who loves technology.

I’m sort of obsessed with turning lights off and electronic things I’m not using and it drives my family mad. My family is fairly ignorant when it comes to the environment, no matter how much I babble. My dad, as usual, sort of makes stuff up if he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. It’d be amusing if it weren’t infuriating half the time.

I’ve learned to tune him out unless he says something extremely stupid. Like people driving cars (and you know, breathing too much) doesn’t matter because Mammoth Mountain and other mountains release more carbon dioxide per day than cars.

Yep. He wasn’t particularly happy with me when I told him that the “Well, this mountain is killing trees so therefore it’s okay for humans to kill the entire planet” was possibly the worst argument I’d ever heard…and I’ve been involved in big e-drama. E-drama is notorious for it’s idiotic arguments.

My brother (age 15) says I wouldn’t be against gas-guzzling vehicles if I drove². I’ll let that sink in for a moment.

Right. If I drove I’d cease to care about the environment. Because nobody who drives cares about the planet, clearly. I never said the men of my family had good logic skills (because they don’t and generally lack common sense as well).

If the entire world owned cars at the rate USians³ do, we’d likely all be dead.

What You Can Do

Last week was No Trash Week. I didn’t participate, but I’m definitely going to try in the future. It’s a really interesting site as they have tips to help you reduce the amount of crap you throw in the bin, a FAQ, a few projects you can undertake, as well as a forum.

The Compact is a project in which you do not buy new items for an entire year. This means you don’t buy new products of any kind from stores, web sites, etc. You buy used, borrow, barter, etc. I’ve never been one for New Year’s resolutions because I know I’ll never stick to it, but I think I’m going to seriously try this in 2008. It’ll definitely be difficult because I have an addiction to buying books. It seems the Amazon Marketplace, eBay, second-hand shops, as well as Freecycle.org will be my friend in 2008. I also need a new computer since I fucked up my beloved MacBook Pro a few weeks ago with evil milk. I’m still crying about that, by the way.

10 of the More Obvious Things

1. drive less
2. take public transportation
3. walk to your destination
4. ride your bicycle to work
5. recycle
6. don’t let water run unneeded
7. use rechargeable items instead of disposables
8. don’t litter
9. turn off lights and other things when you’re not using them
10. donate even $/£/€1 to an organisation listed at Blog Action Day’s website or one of the top 12 environmental organisations who use their donations well.

17 of the Perhaps Less Obvious Things

1. eat less meat
2. use your own bags at shops
3. download music from iTunes and other online music stores instead of buying physical CDs, cassettes, and/or records
4. use a laptop instead of a desktop computer
5. buy local produce rather than imported produce
6. buy water-efficient showerheads
7. pay attention to packaging
8. use fluorescent light bulbs
9. quit smoking
10. start a vegetable garden
11. bring your own cup or ‘travel mug’ to your coffee shop
12. volunteer
13. join Greenpeace
14. reduce or offset your carbon footprint
15. offset your blog’s carbon footprint!
16. educate yourself on green issues–it’s a fantastic way to start
17. do something

For Teens

Many teenagers feel as if they don’t get a say and that’s often true. Your parents may not care about green issues, but talking to them (and not just once) is a great first step. There are things just you can do without involving your parents as well.

• Eight Ways to Go Green at Red is an article geared towards teens.
• Forum Thread: Looking for Suggestions for Teens to Go Green at the TreeHugger Forums
• Green Teens Hug the Web at News.com is an article about a study that says more environmentally-oriented teens flock to the internet.

A Few of Random Earth-Related Links

1. Ten First Steps from Lighter Footstep has ten ways for you to get started towards a more sustainable green lifestyle.
2. 13 Easy, Inexpensive Ways to Go Green from MSN Money is a great article for those of us for whom money is an issue.
3. Yahoo! Green is Yahoo!’s contribution to the fight against global warming. Hank Green of EcoGeek (and Brotherhood 2.0) was involved in the project. One thing you should never say to Yahoo! is “I’ll google it” because people at Yahoo! do not google things.⁴
4. 10 Amazing Sea Creatures You Didn’t Know About at Green Expander reminds me why box jellyfish scare the shit out of me. That plus sharks and the brain-eating bacteria that live in lakes remind me why I like pools. As long as the filters don’t suck out my innards.
5. Daughter’s Efforts to Save Planet ‘Really Annoying’ from the Nashville Scene includes a cute kid and irritating parents who whine about their daughter’s interest in saving the planet and her stuffed polar bear, Blanco.
6. The 10 Rarest Animals in the World and 10 of the Most Endangered Animals at Green Expander are both prime examples of how much humans have harmed the earth in the past 100+ years. Many of these species were thriving 100-150 years ago, but some are now down to as low one individual animal of the species left. Some of them are an example of how much humans harmed the environment long before cars were invented as well.
7. 10 Amazing Animals Saved from Extinction at Green Expander has some of the success stories–many of which would be far more fantastic if global warming wasn’t such an issue today.
8. Extinct in the 20th Century at Green Expander shows that while there is still a chance to save many of the species listed as endangered now, for others it’s too late.

Pictures of Seals

If you hate seals, you’re probably evil.

All images contained within this post are royalty-free and come from stock.xchng.

1. Which I found via my favourite vlog, Brotherhood 2.0–go nerdfighters! ↩
2. That’s right, I don’t drive. I drove around a local church’s parking lot a couple of times when I was 17, but never even tested for a learner’s permit. Not only am I afraid of driving, but as it says on my about me page, I’m an avid pedestrian and I’m actually fond of taking public transportation. ↩
3. A term I’ve nicked from others to refer to Americans from the US. I quite like it, but I may be alone. ↩
4. Secretly, they probably do. We all know which is the superior search engine here. ↩

Three Annoying Things Bloggers Do

1. Hiding your blog’s RSS feed(s).

Why in the hell do some blogs make it so impossible to subscribe to their feed? Do you not want readers to be able to keep track of your updates? A couple times recently I’ve just given up. I had even tried random URLs such as http://evilfeedwithholder.com/feed/ and http://evilfeedwithholder.com/index.xml

It’s bad enough to remove the <link href="http://evilfeedwithholder.com/feed" rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="The Forbidden RSS 2.0 Feed" /> bit as it is, but then not have a link anywhere on your website? Not in the sidebar, footer, site page, or anywhere else? Evil.

Don’t make me work for it! Make it simple! I’m likely to never return to your site again no matter how much I liked it.

2. Mixing trackbacks & pingbacks with your comments.

Often it’s difficult to tell where the trackbacks end and the comments start again, particularly when there’s just one or two comments nestled between seemingly endless trackbacks. I generally skip over all trackbacks or anything that looks like one. I might be missing something integral to the flow of conversation in the comments because that one important comment was stuck amongst the trackbacks.

3. Lack of context in your posts.

Sometimes I’ll find a new blog that could be interesting…if I knew what the hell they were babbling about.

I hate the feeling that I’m coming into a conversation late or that I’ve just walked into a room and everyone else has just started laughing, but I’m stuck in the dark.

When you’re referring to something that’s happened in the past, particularly a specific past entry, it’s generally a good idea to link to those entries that give it context for your new or occasional readers. If it’s not in the posts displayed on your main page, chances are, I’m not going to find it and I’m not going to waste my time finding it.

Contact. RSS Feed.