Posts from Tirades (14)

I said it two years ago, and now that it's getting massive media/bandwagon attention, and now that some of the few sites I really love are proudly announcing that they're lame followers, I feel the need to say it again: Twitter and its users can go fuck themselves... in 140 characters or less.

What a bunch of mindless bullshit gibberish. If you like Twitter, I suggest you just skip this article, because I'm probably just going to personally offend you at some point. Spare yourself. This is classified as a Tirade and as such it contains unwavering, opinionated sureness about something I care very little about. But who knows, maybe you care about it a lot. Just sayin'.

Last year I wrote a short story called "The Market" (for HEY! Consumers) in which three major corporate/regional groups controlled the world and used terrorism as a marketing tool. It was fun.

Then a few weeks ago I read Jennifer Government, a novel by Max Barry that is set in a similar world (and published in 2003... I can't believe it took me so long to read it) where business and marketing have usurped world power and commercialized everything, including the police. It's the free market run wild.

Yesterday Chicago's aldermen approved Mayor Daly's proposal to lease all Chicago parking meters to an investment group. The city will be getting 1.2 billion dollars and Morgan Stanley will essentially own parking meters for THE NEXT 75 YEARS.

Suddenly these sci-fi tales don't seem so fi to me... allow me to explain.

We all choose, in various ways, people to speak for us. Some of these mouthpieces are general and vague. Others are closer to us, and others still are indistinguishable from our selves.

How do we choose who represents us, and how do we make sure they are doing so properly?

Time to take a look back to the early days of Sidedown. This one is especially interesting to me, as much has changed over the last 6 years... though so much hasn't. Do you know what I mean? No? Then read this old piece of prose from 2002:

Did anyone watch the Emmy's last night? If not, you dodged a bullet... a slow, agonizingly disorganized bullet. But amongst some really bad stuff was a true terd-gem... Josh Groban— Lip Synching.

LIP SYNCHING? Tsk tsk... how dishonorable!

I've decided that for the next month plus, I'm avoiding all "design blogs", with two exceptions. I am unfortunately the owner of a very jaded view of design right now, and these sites are not helping me move past it.

Time for another gem from the Wayback Machine. At my old apartment, the nearest coffee shop was, of course, Starbucks. Since then I have moved to a place with an actual coffee shop nearby. I prefer it.

Anyhow, this one's an amusing bit of prose... snippets of conversations blended together.

The issue that really matters: the mainstream entertainment media has been saying that Britney Spears looked a lot better at this year's VMAs compared to last year. What were they looking at? And better than what? A pile of rancid Hardee's garbage? Because I think that the garbage might still take the lead.

We've been talking a lot about business around Sidedown HQ as of late. Summer always feels a touch stagnant. Maybe it's the heat, the humidity, the longer days, but in general people always tend to have a little less time for attention, civility, and productivity. But more than that, even outside of business, people are just being huge dicks.

Isn't it though? During my trip home, we wandered through a "neighborhood" that I considered to be quite hellish, not because it was run down, or dangerous, or located miles beneath Earth's crust. Quite the opposite.