What I been doing

I've been busy failing at life and neglecting you, the dear IS blog, so here's some shit I've been doing:

1. Reading Comic Books
2. Boning
3. Drinking
4. BBQing
5. Being steezy
6. Listening to the Adam Carolla Podcast
7. Working On My Portfolio
8. Writing a Little
9. Raging
10. Avoiding Phonecalls
    
11. Thinking Unbreakable was awesome
    
12. Not studying
13. Not working
14. Not getting jobs
15. Not getting calls or e-mails returned
16. Feeling Insulted
17. Getting tired of advertising
18. Wallowing
19. Appreciating all the help I can get
20. Being terrified of graduating
    

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)

I Love Wikipedia Lists

I love wikipedia. Not as much as love ED, but I love it a lot. One of the best parts of Wikipedia, is that it's full of crazy shit-- for example their many lists. The follow is a selection of my favorite Wikipedia Lists:

List of Common Misconceptions
List of Gay Animals
List of Bowtie Wearers --
List of People Who Said They Were Jesus
List of Hoaxes
List of Ways to Accidentally Upset the Chinese
List of Weird Units of Measurement
List of Breastfeeding Activists
List of Japanese Words That Sound Like Some Other Japanese Word
List of Things Named After Einstein
List of Unusual Deaths
List of Drag Queens
List of Murdered Popes

Of course, this won't really be complete until we have access to the ultimate list.

Please note that this is not a top 10 list, which-- as I have previously noted-- are stupid as shit. This is instead, just a bunch of things I think are rad. I spared you my opinions and meaningless rankings.

Sorry for no posts lately, I've been working pretty hard on the financial site.

The Infinite Steez Media Network is Expanding

It occurred to me recently-- why should I just have one blog that nobody reads, when I could have dozens? Clearly this shit works for Gawker (except for the part about nobody reading it-- I love me some Gawker) so why not for me. So, I have kicked off my first side project: The Steezonomist. TS will be the center for all financial news. It's sort of different from IS, and the acronym is a little bit better too. Also I use acronyms now. Anyway, The Steezonomist will be taking up some more of my time now, so we'll probably drop down to like one article a month. On the other hand, by definiton, TS requires about 20 articles a month, so that's cool.

Keep your eyes peeled for future growth to the infinite steez media network, and check out The Steezonomist for the real inside view on today's turbulent financial world.

Ace Out!

Foot Candy

I am in the midst of a recession, working as an unpaid intern, and as such I have been doing a lot of browser-window shopping. I haven't owned a pair of Nikes in a grip of years, but I'm thinking about changing that as soon as I come into some paper. Further intensifying this desire are the epic fucking user-designs you can put together in nike's customizing shop. As I suck at basketball, I opted for the Action Sports section, but you can do this shit to anything you want. Epic.


In honor of my Trojans kicking ass in the NCAA tourney:




















And in honor of me being a steezy motherfucker:







































Holy shit. Still, things could be worse, at least I'm not lusting after the Louis Vuitton Kanye West Sneaks (thanks Black Raibow):

















Or else, the fucking dominating new Chinese Air Force 1s, which admittedly I mainly want for the box: PS, HighSnobiety is my new fave:

















Oh god... Sorry, I'm kind of having a little fauxmosexual freak out here. Anyway, if you're broke like I am, a nice cheap compromise can be checking out this shit.

This dude Ian has assembled a ton of lacing techniques, which was something I didn't even give a shit about until I realized it was an effective way of taking my mind of my shit being in ruins. Some highlights:

This, I couldn't actually make work:














But this was pretty easy:














The Line method, coupled with some nice new red laces, have helped me to fall in love with my chucks all over again. Anyway, I'm currently twitter following a number of steez based blogs and site sand shit so I'm hoping to be blogging some more steez myself in the future.

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.

Shit is SO cash

I never got into this game when I was little, not having much in the way of musical talent, but I can still appreciate this shit:








and my favorite:




alright, don't worry, I got like 10 more blog posts in the works, that was just the easiest. Love you.