Single Serving Site Alert

Just a quick note for those few, those brave, those patient who haven’t completely migrated to Facef*ck or ThighSpace or Twatter or whatever social disease network is the flavour of the moment, and still stop by or RSSize the ‘bottle to get an occasional taste of Grandpa Wonderchicken’s Old-Style Longform Bullshit.
A while back, one morning, when I heard that Kevin Rose (of Digg and the late, not terribly lamented Pownce) had a new Twitter-parasite site called WeFollow, I lost my shit (“You might follow, you tiny-dreamed weasel farts!” said I to myself, or something of the sort.) and bought a domain, threw up a WordPress site, wrote a screed and did a couple of photoshops, all before lunch. If I was that productive all the time, I’d be… well, I wouldn’t have the time for insane vanity mini-projects like that, I guess.
Still: here it is, the lastest addition to the burgeoning Wonderchicken Industries™ Network. Share and enjoy.

Weird and Fractured

It’s all weird and fractured. It’s all electrical and chemical. It’s all bump and grind. It’s all cheese and mustard. It’s all time to drink and go to work. It’s all fuck you buddy and love your neighbour. It’s all speak truth to power and hunker down. It’s all shitstorm and cherry blossom. It’s all shits and giggles. It’s all 2.0 and it’s all in beta. It’s all primal scream and raised eyebrow. It’s all therapy and meds. It’s all beer and skittles. It’s all anger and love. It’s all young things and old farts. It’s all permalinks and permagrins. It’s all disappointment and hope. It’s all pimples and slipped discs. It’s all be, it’s all do. It’s all epistemology and metaphysics. It’s all cigarettes and beer. It’s all desire and it’s all thirst and hunger, it’s all middle way and eight-fold path, and it’s all a sacrament. It’s all beginnings and endings, and ends of beginnings, and beginnings of ends. It’s all dying young and cheating death. It’s all cancer wards and Pringles. It’s all rock and roll. It’s all good fun.
It’s all Cheap Trick at the Budokan. It’s all strungout sunrise, it’s all smell of night air. It’s all champagne Caribbean surf and acid artifacts. It’s better than the alternative. It’s all guitar and drum. It’s all night and all day. It’s all that you touch, it’s all that you see, all you taste, all you feel, it’s all that you buy, beg, borrow or steal. It’s failing flesh and willing spirit.
It’s all too hard, it’s all too goddamn easy. It’s all better than the alternative.
It’s just a kiss away, it’s just a kiss away.

Coke, Pepsi, Anal, Fork, Spoon, Saddam

Google, despite the fact that they are clearly the evolutionary precursor of the Borg or Skynet or the Matrix or whatever Evil Tech Hive Mind your dystopian leanings favour, can be instructive and educational as well as entertaining and terrifying.
From the inquiry into the global zeitgeist below

we learn, for example, that

• Bermuda goes positively apeshit over Coke, but has no interest in Pepsi
• New Zealand is also a Coke Nation, but hasn’t yet completed the Pepsi drinker genocide
• Canadians don’t care much about the minute differences between sugar water brands, but are fond of bum
• …but not nearly as fond of it as the Kiwis
• Suprisingly, perhaps, Commonwealth nations are keener on the buttsecks than Americans

In today’s globalized economy, borders become transparent to markets, and death is once again a spectator sport, with images shot ’round the globe in realtime to Feed The Need™. Civilization is sooo cool, man! It’s mashup time, and you get to choose whether you want to eat that mash with fork or spoon, because the Customer Is Always Right.

Of course, it is entirely possible that there is no Spoon, and we’re all Forked.
Share and enjoy.

Rumours of My Demise

Rumours of my demise have been much exaggerated. I haven’t been eaten by the hogs, I haven’t sold out to the Man. I haven’t quaffed the hemlock, I haven’t screwed the pooch, I haven’t jumped the shark. OK, maybe those last two, but that’s it, officer.

What has happened, apparently, is that I’ve been killed, cooked, and incorporated into a delicious sandwich.
Kids, let this be a lesson. Live right, or it could happen to you too. [via]
Update: Apparently the marketing team that made the ad had never heard of my nom de blog, but thought it was pretty funny once they had. Cool.

Bullshit, Dugg

Well, it only took 7 months, but my Web 2.0 Bullshit Generator™ toy from January got dugg (3300 times or so), and seemed to inspire much jocularity.
It’s been interesting, because the page has been one of the most-linked bits of the site for the last 6 months, almost exclusively amongst weblogs in Europe and Asia, for some reason. Then, a few days ago, (near as I can trace it), after I dropped it into a comments thread at Metafilter, it was picked up by milov.nl, then automatically showed up on Hot Links, then Daring Fireball (kablooie went the visits), then Reddit and Digg almost simultaneously.

Happily, the server shows absolutely no signs of melting down (er, so far). Like I said recently, Dreamhost has treated me well.
Share and enjoy.
Update: Whoops, now Techcrunch and de.licio.us and Blue’s News and Dvorak and O’Reilly Radar, too. Memetastic! Now it just needs posting on the front page of Metafilter, and the circle of life will be complete.
[Note: should not be posted to the front page of Metafilter]

The Stavrossian Accord

Whiskey, cocaine and hookers! Announcing the Stavrossian Accord™, an alternative to the SFcompact. The SFcompact made a small but measurable ripple in the text torrent recently. Compacters vow to eschew purchasing anything new other than food, health products and underwear for a year. Secondhand, though, that’s OK. Poor folks are going to suffer for their ideals, aren’t they?
Accordians, on the other hand, are expected not only to stop wearing underwear entirely, but to spend money on nothing other than whiskey, cocaine and hookers for a year. New or used, it’s all good. And to do it, wherever possible, with stolen money.
It may seem a bit mean to make fun of a group of people whose hearts are, when it comes down to it, in the right place. Making an ‘accord’ and announcing it to the world, though, seems a little ripe for mockery. Particularly when some of the participants are marketers themselves.

Penetrating insight. I’d venture that people aren’t bothered (or, god knows, threatened) by a cadre of self-absorbed assclowns forming a support-group tribe because they’re watery-bowelled at the daunting prospect of not actually buying all that unnecessary crap (or *shudder* buying it secondhand), so much as they’re amused. It doesn’t ‘speak to how deep [Americans] are into consumerism’, it tells us that there are at least some folks left who know shit from shinola.
Me, I haven’t bought any underwear for 5 years.
Join the Stavrossian Accord™. It might not save the world, but not buying a new iPod every six months wasn’t going to do that anyway.