Getting Pumped

People often ask me how, facing unemployment, basement dweller status, I manage to stay so upbeat-- how I muster up the energy to tear apart my enemies and attack the day like a hungry dog. It's true that from the surface, the odds are stacked against me, and yet like a salmon swimming up against the current, I soldier bravely onward. The secret to my success isn't exercise, since I can't face that until late at night, nor do I rely upon prayer or a hearty breakfast, since I don't get hungry until around noon-- the correct time for a human being to be up. Instead I look back to the old masters for inspiration, and every morning I watch the following videos:








When I see these high levels of badassery and douchebaggery I know I can succeed as long as I turn myself into a high operating hate machine.

Love

Ace

Embrace All Things Unholy: A Plan for the Raiders

So I was watching the Chargers play the raiders on Monday Night Football and the announcer was kind enough to warn me that any accounts of the game that I give without the express written permission of ESPN and the National Football League will land me in the slammer, but suffice it to say, the night did not end in a resounding defeat for the Raiders.

Growing up in So Cal, not giving a soupy green shit about sports, I don't have fond memories of watching the Raider game with my pops, or anything like that. All I remember, and all I have seen about the Raiders is a bunch of trashy fans who are pretty far down the totem poll, even for NFL fans. The team used to be epic, but now sucks. It's soft of defense, soft on offense, and plays in Oakland. In fact, in Monday's game, their pitiful stadium still had a dirty baseball diamond in the middle of the field. PA-THETIC.

Anyway, apparently the Raiders used to be good, way back when they were coached by John "Frank Caliendo is a hack" Madden. They were renowned in the NFL for punishing, dirty play. I think that, in order for the chargers to return to glory, they need to return to their roots. Now, admittedly, my plan will take some time to enact, but bear with me.

1. Draft every troubled player in the NFL:
A great start would have been making a generous offer to Michael Vick, one of the most maligned figures in the Modern NFL, and T.O, a guy who is out of his damn mind, but can still move the football better than anyone. Go ahead and google "Raiders Fans" and tell me if you think these people could give two shits about animal cruelty. When Plaxico Burress gets out of jail, give him a place to go. Every time a player is involved in a crime, let it be known that he can find a home with the Raiders. Vick and T.O are both likely to have good seasons, and the owners and coaches of teams who banned them will be kicking themselves come playoff time.

2. Send scouts to prisons looking for players:
Okay, this is MOSTLY a PR move, but imagine the buzz, "Raiders Looking for a Few Good Murderers." It's kind of like the inverse of the premise of that crappy Mark Wahlberg movie about the Eagles QB. So anyway, pick up like 5 players, on the cheap, and only play the best couple, but put them right on your O and D lines. Again, this is for buzz, but when the other guys hear that they are facing convicted murderers, its likely to have some effect.

3. Go for every fourth down inside the 40:
This is a simple one, and one that will play to the strengths of your punishing new quasi-lunatic linemen. I honestly think, from having watch USC go for so many 4ths, that it sets the other team's defense off balance, and by forcing them to play one more set of downs it will wear them down. I know the safe move is to go for the safe three, but it's not like the Raiders have been losing a lot of games by 3 points, is it?

4. Free beer to the loudest section:
At home games, let it be known that you will reward the loudest and rowdiest section with free beer. If you didn't google 'Raiders Fans' last time, go ahead and do it now to see why this is a great idea.

5. Don't worry so much about the fouls:
Budget about 50 yards of penalties into your defensive game plan and then just let them wail on the offense. This goes to my point #3 as well. The Raiders don't usually play in close games, so if your goal is to shake up and injure the other team rather than to win, then it becomes easier to accept getting a couple penalties per game for late hits. The point is, the Raiders should be content to ride out a season or two nearish the bottom, if it means establishing an identity as the scariest team to play against.

The Raiders were, I believe, second from the bottom in 2008. That means they beat the Detroit Lions, who managed to lose every game they played. When you think about the Lions you think about a bunch of sad sacks, but when you think about the Raiders, you will, if my plan goes correct, think about a bunch of savages who would rather hurt the other guy than score. If everything goes according to plan, the Raiders will either get some respect back, or be kicked out of the league, thus opening up the chance of a Pro Team coming to LA, or better yet, the NFL just bumping the USC trojans from the NCAA to pro status like they should have done years ago.

Twitter is overexposed and useless.

Every article about twitter starts the same.

"If you don't know what twitter is, it's a microblogging site, in which users (including me, har har har) are asked one simple question-- what are you doing right now. They have 140 characters to answer. Sounds simple, right? Well that's the beauty of it, and it's what has made Twitter the fastest growing social networking site of 2009"

I'll add the caveat that I'm on twitter, before I continue. I also have a facebook, two blogs, an account with fark, gamespot, opentable, Stumbleupon, and a half dozen other sites.. Sometimes I comment on 4chan too. Most of the other sites I belong to have a unique funtion, but twitter doesn't. I also only actually know about 5 or 6 of my twitter buddies in real life, so the status update is not really much of an ego-feeder for me. Roger Ebert recently wrote an article about twitter that is a mix of brilliant insight and "hey you kids, stop playin' grab ass and get off my lawn" stupidity, so you can read that and hear all about how Twitter is kind of vain and stupid and mindnumbing. That's not my beef. My real problem with twitter is that it doesn't really work for what it's supposed to do.

Facebook, by keeping wallposts, and pictures, and videos, and a hundred other things, allows you to stay in touch with people. It's a weak association, but I can still have a vague idea of what the guy I used to sit next to in algebra class is up to these days. In our increasingly fragmented society, this is I guess what passes for friendship. Twitter doesn't help with that really.

What am I doing?
sitting on my ass, getting my portfolio together, wasting time.

Same as a lot of people. A lot of the time, what I'm doing is just song lyrics. Right now I'm plugging this blog. The snapshots twitter gives you are so small as to be unrecognizable. It's like facebook for dummies, and facebook is already for dummies. It kind of reminds me of those jitterbug phones they have for seniors. That's what twitter is for social networking.

Twitter does work very well as an RSS feed, allowing you to keep up with a number of blogs in one place. The sites I follow aren't generally my favorites, just ones I tend to forget to follow up on. That way, I am alerted when lovely package or high snobiety have something new and cool.

Twitter is useless for keeping up with people, and I'm sure that if I looked into it I could find a better RSS feed compiler.

Fine, there are lots of uselss sites. Lots of them. No, like a lot.

The difference? Those sites aren't being rammed down our throats. The media, is so enamored with twitter that, if it ever was cool, it sure as shit isn't now. The problem is that they completely missed the boat on social networking, jumping on the bandwagon after the story was about three years old. They didn't want to be Ric Romero again, so when Twitter came along they reported the hell out of it. Everyday, a twitter story appears on the news, on fark, on digg. It's forced and it's false. In my marketing classes, we hear all about it, how it's the next big thing. If it were the next big thing, more than two people in a class of fifty would be on it.

Twitter kind of sucks, and it's kind of okay, and it annoys me that I have to write about it, contributing to the phenomenon that I am so irritated by. Twitter itself is not worth talking about. The yellow journalism that created it, is.

TL;DR-- fuck twitter.

(image credit: Banksy)

Everyone on the internet hates you

Schadenfreude, it's a synonym for lulz. It means taking joy in the pain and suffering of others. Encyclopedia Dramatica defines lulz thusly:

"Lulz is laughter at someone else's expense (from the German concept of "Schadenfreude".) This makes it inherently superior to lesser forms of humor. Just as the element of surprise transforms the physical act of love into something beautiful, the anguish of a laughed-at victim transforms lol into lulz, making it longer, girthier, and more pleasurable. Lulz is engaged in by Internet users who have witnessed one major economic/environmental/political disaster too many, and who thus view a state of voluntary, gleeful sociopathy over the world's current apocalyptic state, as superior to being continually emo." - Encyclopedia Dramatica

Anyway, even you have probably heard of Fmylife.com, which is one of the few contemporary examples of something that the mainstream (read, people I am frenemies with on facebook) enjoy, that is not complete crap. Fmylife (named that because the owner is a pussy, afraid of saying fuck? Needs verification) basically has people post a short story about something shitty that has happened to them, and then the rest of the world votes whether or not it was their fault.


Here are some gems:




















The best part about this site, though, is the fact that no matter what has happened to you, somebody thinks it's your fault:









Or maybe even 2,000 people. Nice.