Fucking Kanye

It took a special and important moment to get me out of my self-imposed exile. It wasn't MJ's death, the dow passing 9000, Clinton nabbing some Chinese babes from China, or even USC's victory over Ohio State. What brought me out of my slumber was a special moment.

I felt a great disturbance in the lulz....
























You know what happened. I know that my blog is far enough down the internet food chain that I can't possibly be breaking this story twelve hours after it happened. I know you know because everyone on my facebook changed their status, without having the self awareness to know that watching the VMA's is for fourteen year olds. I was off playing Madden 08 because I'm broke, but I felt the aforementioned phenomena, and knew something was afoot.

When my douche sense is tingling, I follow it, so I dropped my wiimote and I ran to the nearest internet and watched the video. I received a call during the video and as we were talking-- me keeping one eye on the action-- she suddenly says, "hang on, my roommate wants to show me something." I knew what was up, so we both watched as Kanye West, charged the stage like a heroic knight charging the castle, ready to save the princess.

George Bush didn't care about black people, and Kanye West doesn't care about white chicks. He acted like he didn't know who Taylor Swift was, which is how I would act, because I don't know who she was. I thought she may have been the high school musical chicks, but not the one who was naked twice, but that's not the case. Apparently she's just some chick. Anyway, Kanye grabs the mic and heroically starts yapping away. He probably knew it was an incredibly rude and childish thing to do, or maybe he didn't because since his mom got pwned by a bad stomach staple, he's reverted even deeper into a child. Either way, it didn't matter. Some things are bigger than manners. Kanye saw a tragedy about to happen, and he couldn't let it go on undeterred. You wouldn't think it was rude if the passengers on your flight stormed the terrorists attempting to hijack it-- would you?

Kanye saw that the entire world-- even just for a few seconds-- was being deprived of his opinion, and he couldn't let that shit go.

This is basically the idiot's version of another epic douche moment from earlier this week:



Basically, it looks like other assholes of the world are out there stepping their game up, being impossible assholes, and they've pretty much just taken the rock to the hole, and said look, Infinite Steez, it's your move. Alright internet, I got this. Hail Satan.

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)

Infinite Steez's Top 5 Websites that depend entirely on Top 10 Lists

Like most of you in the unwashed rabble, I have a love/hate relationship with top-10 lists. They can be fun to read, but on the other hand they're completely subjective and usually bullshit. On the other other hand, as a blogger I can see the appeal in boiling your writing down to a few bullet points. Apart from anything else, I suppose it gives your work an air of finality. It sounds better to say "Top 5 Crazy Cat Pictures" than it does to say "Here Are Some Pictures of Crazy Cats That I Found." Therefore, I'm going to give it a shot and provide you, the loyal Infinite Steez reader, with my top 5 list of sites that would be nowhere without their top 10 lists.

#5 Time Magazine.com





Time Magazine, which apparently used to engage in journalism, now relies solely on lists. This used to be the province of late night host David Letterman but Time Magazine figured it made more sense to save it's dumb as dildos readers the trouble of sifting through pages and pages of writing and instead disseminate everything into bullet points. I actually just remembered that I have already ragged on Time Magazine for this shit in a previous blog post, but whatever, here we go again.

With Time, it usually starts out something like this,

"Tom Hanks isn't the first celebrity to activate a particle collider, in honor of the famous actor being tapped to switch on the Large Hadron Collider, we take a look the top 10 ten Celebrity Particle Collider Moments."

This prevents them from providing much in the way of opinion or commentary, they just have to say that whatever it is has happened before. It's kind of like when you're watching football and the commentator says, "This is the first time a Quarterback has run in more than three touchdowns since 1965, when..." You get it, right? Time Magazine is kind of like the dipshit who passes a card with the fact on it to John Madden.

Right now, they'd be happy to tell you about Letterman's Top 10 Awkward Guests, Top 10 Celebrity Twitter Feeds (+10 pts for Celebrity inclusion), and Top 10 Pregnant Performers (+25 points for the always rewarding baby, vagina, celebrity trifecta. Fuck you, Time.

#4 AskMen.com





I actually have no real beef with AskMen.com. My original number four was College Humor.com, but that site depends entirely on videos developed by others, drawing only a small amount of it's readership from lists. Ask Men, on the other hand, is largely lists. I do have a book by them entitled, 'From the Bar to the Bedroom' which one of my roommates found out by the trash and gave to me, but other than that I've had little interaction over the years.

You see, this is the part of list formation that presents something of a challenge. You can think of three examples of something, but 'Top Three' doesn't quite have the same ring to it. Therefore, you have to spin it out and pick some subpar examples. Fortunately for me, however, Ask Men is ripe for pwnage.

Here is a list of some of there current top lists:










They also offer a list of top ten long construction projects (sounds riveting-- see what I did there? If you didn't it was a great fucking pun), top ten female spies, and a top ten list of myths about Canadians. Good work AskMen.com. The only thing worse than the inane subject matter of these lists is the staggeringly irritating format in which they proceed. You begin with a splash screen, suggesting that, before reading the article, you buzz it up, or put it on digg, then you start a tedious slideshow, and when you press the button taking you to the number one, you get some shit ad in your way. God I hate advertising... Fuck You Askmen.com. I have proved, yet again, that I can spend 5 minutes thinking about any subject and manage to get really annoyed about it.


#3 Spike.com








Spike is another one of those websites that men should feel embarrassed about. It's sort of like Ask Men except stupider, and more proudly ignorant. Spike drinks Budweiser. Spike goes to stripclubs. Spike votes Republican. Spike is dumb as shit. I don't really have time to get into the abysmal programming the network has to offer, as this article has already taken me literally minutes to write, instead I will focus on the terrible top tens.

Case in point, the article that inspired this whole blog post, a top ten list of deaths caused by video games. While I enjoy schadenfreude (lulz) as much as any other asshole, I have some serious qualms about any article that has a top ten list where two of the answers are about babies being beaten to death.

Still, I don't want to impose my prudish sense of good taste on you, so it's fortunately that in addition to finding Spike to be morally questionable, I also find to be trite and unfunny. Their Top 10 Valentine's Day Tips was peppered with the predictable included (Spend a Ton of Money, Surprise Her) as well as stupid shit (Give her a Nickname, Don't Groom). In addition to this, the topics they choose aren't even really especially interesting. They tend to favor the Ask Men formula of _______ that will get you laid, and that's pretty much the height of their creativity. Having said that, this blog has a 'Shit that will get you fucked' tag, so maybe I should hold my tongue...

Anyway, Spike would be nowhere without these lists, and the lists fucking suck. Maybe that's why Spike.com is fucking nowhere. Next.

#2 GamesRadar.com







You've got to love Games Radar, because they make no fucking effort whatsoever to make their lists coherent. It's kind of like they just sit down and go, "Alright, let's think of something bizarrely specific and then get a bunch of examples. As they say themselves, they have Top 7 lists of " everything from girl-on-girl kisses to Mario Party drinking games." The lists on Games Radar are always full of bizarre shit, and like all good lists, the order pretty much doesn't matter. Unlike the previous two entries, I dig this site because there's some creativity involved in what they do. The kind of creativity it takes to find 7 Gory Deaths in Cutesy Games, 7 Shower Scenes, 7 Enemies You Didn't Want to Kill.

Better than this, however, are the lists that aren't simply weird, but are also interesting.The 7 Worst Parts of Best Games is pretty interesting, as is their compendium of 7 worst release dates. They sort of lose it with their crazy long lists such as the top 101 best moments in gaming (part one) but on the other hand, who the fuck cares.

Now, while I dig the lists on GR, I totally hate the shit out of everything else they do. The reviews are terrible, the features are weak. All this site has is lists. Still, unlike many other sites, their lists are pretty much okay.



#1 Cracked.com







My whole life I had always considered Cracked Magazine to be a runner up to the already fairly lackluster Mad Magazine. A Pepsi to their Coke, a Penthouse to their Playboy. You get the idea. Anyway, over the summer, when I first began getting all of my news from the always intermittently funny news media compiler, Fark, I started reading Cracked Magazine's Top # List of Whatever. These were pretty good, as you can skim them for the gist of what they're talking about, and get your lols that way. They are pretty varied and sometimes interesting, though never particularly funny. Still, I kept reading away for a few months before I started to reflect on what bullshit this is.

I probably go to Cracked two or three times a month and I can confidently say I have never looked at anything but a list. Somehow, their lists manage to pop up on Fark every week, and people are getting a little sick of it, with "Still no Cure for Cracked lists" being a common headline ammendment. Anyway, good or bad, there's little doubt that without it's lists, Cracked.com would be a fucking ghost town.

Don't believe me? Here's their homepage-- Can you spot any lists?













Runner Up:

Digg

Prove me wrong.

Media Pro-Tip: Being Passive Aggressive is the Path to Success

I was reading some article about some asshole from Las Vegas, which I was about to blog about because I figured if there's anything my blog needs it's more bullshit posts about politics that ramble on and on, possibly with extended run-on sentences but then I changed my mind.

Basically, Obama came out and said:

“We’re going to do something to strengthen the banking system. You are not going to be able to give out these big bonuses until you pay taxpayers back. You can't get corporate jets. You can't go take a trip to Las Vegas or go down to the Super Bowl on the taxpayers' dime. There's got to be some accountability and some responsibility.” (emphasis added, because no one can speak in italics)

Well the crabby mayor of Vegas came out swinging, by which I mean he started crying and demanded an apology:

“That's outrageous. He owes us an apology. He owes us a retraction. What is a better place, I say, for them to come here. For them to change their mind and go someplace else and to cancel at the suggestion of the president of the United States, that is outrageous.”

I will address the issue of pretending to be offended for fun and profit in a later article, but the real genius here comes from the end of the article.

"Goodman last made national news for defending an earmark he wanted put in the stimulus package, a $50 million museum dedicated to the history of organized crime."

Boom! Headshot! Article authors Sunlen Miller and Jake Tapper aren't writing an opinion piece here, they're writing journalism. Journalism is different from the opinioneering practiced by Bill O'Reilly, Keith Olberman (what an asskicker) and myself. The difference is that 1. Journalism takes actual work, usually in the form of difficult research (as opposed to just yelling) and 2. Journalism generally requires you to feign neutrality Miller and Tapper manage to maintain their journalistic impartiality while still defending Obama. They do it by including an anectdote about Goodman, the mayor, that makes him look ridiculous and frivolous. If I were them, I would've referenced another incident I read about in which the Mayor told a room of 4th Graders all about how much he loves gin. Me too, Mayor Goodman, me too.

Good work abc, there's nothing like being passive aggressive to make others look ridiculous while still appearing reasonable yourself.

Know What I Don't Care About? Other People's Kids.

Now Missing White Girl Syndrome is a well documented phenomenon, as is the MSM's fascination with shit nobody oughta care about. In the past week there have been stories alternating on the news--- The Stimulus Package, That Caylee Girl, and The Octuplets. Can you guess which one of these will have an effect on your life? Only one. It's totally sad that some crazy broad killed her adorable little girl, but tons of sad shit is happening all the time. Just because something is unpleasant doesn't make it news. The Nooz runs shit like this all the time, and then, they feel like they need to run human interest pieces to make us feel better, so we get stories about children writing letters to soldiers in Iraq, which I also don't give a shit about. Oh, and that chick who had like a hundred babies-- I don't even know how that qualifies as news. What the fuck.


Oh, I also don't care about hotel fires in China, particularly if the hotel isn't built yet and nobody was fucking hurt.