XBone

May 24, 2013 / / No Comments

Look, Microsoft dum-dums, it’s super simple. You think this is complicated. That is not the case. It is not complicated.

TV: Do not want.
SPORTS: Do not want.
CALL OF DUTY: Do not want.
INFRARED LIVINGROOM PORNOSCAN: Do not want.
DIGITAL CLOUD PHANTOM SUPERSTRUCTURE IDENTITY GREASE: Do not want.
CANINE HOMINY RETROACTIVE ZYGOTE AMBERGRIS ROCKET MOUSTACHE: Do not want.

A minute and a half of predictable but amusing cluelessness:

Single Serving Site Alert

May 21, 2009 / / No Comments

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

June 22, 2007 / / 2 Comments

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

January 1, 2007 / / 5 Comments

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
Google%20Trends%20coke%2C%20pepsi%2C%20anal.png

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.

Google%20Trends%20fork%2C%20spoon%2C%20saddam.png

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

Share and enjoy.

Rumours of My Demise

December 25, 2006 / / 5 Comments

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

August 21, 2006 / / 28 Comments

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

February 26, 2006 / / 3 Comments

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.

Sarah Pelmas, a dean at University High School in San Francisco and one of the original Compacters, said she’s amazed at the extreme responses the Compact has provoked. “People seem very threatened by it,” she said. “But people all over the world live this way all the time. It’s not like it’s some revolutionary, or even consistent, thing we’re doing. But I have been furiously questioned by some people about it — one person said, ‘I bet you still buy gas.’ ”
That sort of response is exactly why the Compact is needed, Perry said.
“If it’s national news when a small group of professionals decide not to buy anything new, and it bothers people so much, it really speaks to how deep we are into consumerism in this country,” he said.

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.

Completely Idiotic

February 10, 2006 / / 4 Comments

I said the other day that the daily news is my number one source of the Big Laughs. The Big Laughs are the therapeutic ones, the ones that blow out the cobwebs and release those endorphins, that make you fart uncontrollably, which in turn starts you (well, me) laughing even harder. For this reason alone, I enjoy watching and reading the news these days.
To expand my endorphin and flatulence release program, I have invented a new game. My wife believes me to be moderately deranged as a result, but that’s not really anything new. You can play along at home, too, dear reader, and I guarantee it’ll be even better for your mental health and general well-being than constricting your anus 100 times a day. Malarkey? Or effective way? You get to decide.
It’s simple, really, and in its simplicity resides its demonic cleverness. Merely add the phrase ‘…which is, of course, completely idiotic’ to all news items, preferably political, that hove into your view. Fun for the whole family!
Here are some examples that I’ve prepared earlier in the clean and well-lit kitchens of wonderchicken Industries™:

  • Mr. Gonzales claimed that the warrantless surveillance program is consistent with protection of civil liberties, which is, of course, completely idiotic.
  • Iran’s best-selling newspaper has launched a competition to find the best cartoon about the Holocaust in retaliation for the publication in many European countries of caricatures of the Prophet Mohammad, which is, of course, completely idiotic.
  • President Bush explained that the new budget, which cuts funding to health care, environmental protection and education while increasing defense and homeland security spending, will help to protect the American people, which is, of course, completely idiotic.
  • Telecom companies, “including AT&T, MCI and Sprint,” are allowing the NSA to spy on calls, “on the basis of oral requests from senior government officials” which is, of course, completely idiotic.
  • ‘Merkel likens Iranian president to Hitler’ and ‘Chavez says Bush worse than Hitler,’ after ‘Rumsfeld compares Venezuela’s Chavez to Hitler’ and ‘Likens bin Laden to Hitler’ which is, of course, completely idiotic.
  • Most state and local health departments reportedly “expect to be unprepared” for a bird flu epidemic “for at least a year,” during which time, says one expert, social distancing “is likely to be all we’re going to have as a strategy” which is, of course, completely idiotic.
  • The president reportedly “didn’t mean it literally,” when he vowed to cut Middle East oil imports by 75 percent: “This was purely an example,” explained Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman, formerly known as ‘One of Texas’ Top Five Worst Polluters‘ which is, of course, completely idiotic.
  • The Big Bang is “not proven fact; it is opinion,” Mr. Deutsch wrote, adding, “It is not NASA’s place, nor should it be to make a declaration such as this about the existence of the universe that discounts intelligent design by a creator” which is, of course, completely idiotic.

(some items lifted from Cursor.org, because I’m exhausted from all the farting)
Share and enjoy.

Web Two, Wonderchicken Zero

January 11, 2006 / / 3 Comments

The Web 2.0 horse is pretty much dead already from all the flogging it’s been taking, I know, and it’s probably just cruel to take another swing at the poor bugger.
Nonetheless, I had an irresistable brainfart and an urge to play, so I put together the Web 2.0 Bullshit Generator, a ripoff of homage to the legendary dack.com Web Economy Bullshit Generator.
Share and enjoy, tag and remix, monetarize and sell out to Yahoo†!
† selling out to Yahoo! is not compulsory.

A Political Dream

July 9, 2004 / / 6 Comments

I had a dream last night. A glorious technicolour dream. A political dream.
In my dream, Candidates Kerry and Edwards realized that Dim George and Snarling Dick were going to pull Osama Bin Laden out of their asses at some opportune moment before the election, and crucify him on the White House lawn. Plant the cross in a pool of scented oil to keep the saudi cooties from spreading, invite the bloodclan and Fox News and Dad, and rouse the tribes to a tumescent, frantic headline-crawl apogee of Republican vote-lust. But in a tasteful way, with very little mention of anyone having to go and f–k themselves.
My dream-representation of the light dawning in the Johns’ minds was a tableau of them making cute anime ‘O’s with their mouths while rolling their eyes upwards toward a shared thought balloon in which Dick Cheney was holding the severed head of Osama up by its hair, letting the blood drip onto a Diebold voting machine. It was way cool.
So Franken-John and Pretty-John decided to go proactive. Winning, Kerry declared in his endearingly halting, tone-deaf way, is as much about kicking… some… mother…f–king ass as it is about proactively leveraging mission-critical paradigms in a time-sensitive fashion. Edwards popped up in front of him to declare that the only way to make America strong, to unite America again, and to preempt an October Suprise that would make America unstrong and disunited, was if the two of them were to hunt down that bastard OBL themselves, and beat the chickenhawks at their own game.
Yeah! said the crowd. Woo!
And so, enlisting the aid of a bionic monkey named Limbaugh (because robots and monkeys are funny, and a robot monkey wins by default (until the bionic monkey pirate shows up, at least)), the two boarded a Black Hawk helicopter and departed from an undisclosed location into the free and democratic mountains of America’s Newest Ally, Afghanistan. This wasn’t just any helicopter, mind you. This was way better than the Campaign Bus they figured on using off the get-go. Yes, this was a stealth chopper, and its shiny new Kerry/Edwards vinyl appliqués were replaced with other shiny new ones, ones shouting stuff like ‘Death To America!’ and ‘Jihad or Bust!’ (but with barely-legible disclaimers underneath in tiny little print, just in case somebody got the wrong idea). These guys were clever, canny combatants, and they had good media advisors!
With Lurch resplendant in Ramboriffic headband and shiny plastic nippleless muscley-torso, and co-John working his best assets and looking simply stunning in his floor-length silk gown, they combed the arid hills of the Afghan-Pakistan border in their OsamaChopper, setting down each evening as Allah’s sun sank into the dusty haze to lay traps for the Bad Guys. Candidate Breck Girl strutted his silky stuff while bandolero-strapped Candidate Kerry lurked in the shadows with Limbaugh and waited, guns akimbo, frowning for the film-school interns with the digital video cameras. Waiting for their quarry to strike the bait.
Waiting, and drinking whiskey, because that’s what men do when they’re hunting outlaws with a bionic monkey at their side.
That’s when I woke up with a start, all sweaty and disoriented. I hope I never have to see that look on my wife’s face again.

Fahrenheit 452

June 21, 2004 / / 3 Comments

So, I’m writing this post. It is called Fahrenheit 452.
It is mostly about itself, although it’s about this too. And it’s about Ray, who has given me some of the most peaceful, pellucid, connected moments I’ve ever had while holding a book in my hands.
I read my first Bradbury in perhaps 1973, and revisited some of my favorites just in this past year and found their lustre undiminished. As middle age approaches, the kind of nostalgia for a time that never was is stronger than ever, and there are greater pleasures to be found in some of those stories than the ones a younger me was able to fathom.
But he’s still being a tool. In the spirit of…well, of sh-t-disturbing, I guess, I offer this humble suggestion: that anyone who feels similarly post something silly — even better, something silly in the Style of Ray — and title it ‘Fahrenheit 452’ or ‘Fahrenheit 911’ or whatever. Now that’d be some big blog hijinks!
Like Cory said

Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451, so we know he loved the First Amendment. I just wish he loved the First Amendment enough to share it with the rest of us.

Peace.

sh1t Happens

June 4, 2004 / / 4 Comments

I really was going to tell a story of Terror on The High Seas, as promised, but I fell down and a couple of litres of beer somehow splashed into my mouth, and well, it all went to hell, basically, and all I could recall of my past while listening to AC/DC’s High Voltage was the unseemly enthusiasm with which my first girlfriend performed fellatio on me those several decades ago, thereby ruining me (in at least one sense) for most of the other women with whom I had sexual relationships in later years.
But you don’t wanna hear about that stuff.
Or maybe you do, I guess, but that’s not the story I wanted to tell tonight, so here’s an amusing image that I’ve stolen from one of the talented goons at the SA Forums, to make you forgive me for the notable lack of blowjob and/or saltydog stories this evening, instead.
here.

Type, Type Everywhere

March 23, 2004 / / 4 Comments

Although I’m not really too exercised about it one way or the other, I tend to think more along the lines of Mark than Shelley on this whole TypeKey furor. I must admit TypeKey seems a little like using a hammer to turn a screw to me, but we shall see.
In the meantime, though, I have taken it upon myself offer some more superterrific BumpyCase product enhancements for Six Apart to continue building out their weblogging product line. It is with great pleasure that I submit these modest proposals to leverage the brand, exploit synergies, capture market share and monetarize conversation. TypePad and TypeKey are only the beginning! We have nothing to lose but our privacy!

  • TypeVote – More accurate than Diebold (MS Access backend optional), and totally free from hanging chads! If you’re a voter, get yourself a TypeVote weblog, and really make an Emergent Democracy©™ difference! One blog, one vote!
  • TypeShop – Route all your monetary transactions through your blog! Blog about that sandwich you had for lunch, and ask your grocery store to subscribe to your RSS (Really Simple Shopping) feed, and leave that shopping list at home. Get people to buy diapers for you! The possibilities are limitless!
  • TypeONegative – Cluetrain Item #3172: Healthcare providers are conversations! Or goth metal bands, maybe.

    • Still fleshing this one out.

  • TypePod – You’re not an A-lister until you have an iPod, and what better way to build brand synergy and leverage the design-fetishizing metrosexual music pirate demographic?
  • TyppelGanger – Buy out the drunkmenworkhere autogenerated weblogging technology and let the code write you into existence. No need to do it yourself anymore! That’s so 2001!
  • TypeFire – Hit a button, generate a comments-thread flame. Why waste valuable mental CPU cycles trying to come up with another way to say ‘You’re a donkey-raping sh-tweasel’ in yet another post that includes political commentary with which you disagree? TypeFire will reduce your fifteen-minute-nemesis to charcoal at the click of a button, and get those valuable clickthroughs happening too!
  • TypeAzon – Plug your weblog and yourself straight into the bookflogging mainline! Webloggers read books, right? Well, Google is already useless for finding anything other than Amazon-affiliate clicksinks when you’re looking for information on books, and shifting units is what it’s all about, kids, so why not jump into the moneypool?
  • PadThaipe – Damn, that Thai food is yummy.
  • TypeUp – Want to hold a pomo-moblog-emergent-market-journospam-osphere conference and maybe soak the blogrubes for a few simoleons while you’re at it? A TypePad/MeetUp mashup is the ticket for inviting people who are guaranteed to breathlessly validate your wildest techo-utopian blather!
  • TypeZilla – Serving no other purpose than to piss off IP Lawyers Who Don’t Get It yet. Lessig-approved and somehow licensed under Creative Commons, so it’s got that street-cred every hip weblogger so craves.
  • TypePoint – Taking a page from Microsoft, throw together some leftover code and half-baked ideas and call it a Knowledge Management system. Or portal. Or workgroup document storage. Or something. Hell, we don’t quite know what it does, but it stresses the server something fierce, so it must be good, right?
  • TypeSpam – Hey kids! You know those other webloggers got them some dollars, right? The internet’s awash with disposable income! Use TypeSpam to generate targeted-demographic, GeoURL-enabled, realtime book-sales monitoring, results-oriented weblog comment-thread advertisements for your online drugstore! It’s viral, it’s centrally managed, it’s smartly styled, and it’ll get your Googlejuice flowing!

Kombinat is just the beginning, my friends. This is not your father’s blogosphere.
Now put me on the payroll, already.