Maybe I should blog again.

I started up a twitter account, and it's okay for posting the shitty little puns that pop up in my head all day long, but something about it is.. wrong. I suppose there isn't anything worth saying that takes more than 140 characters, but there isn't any way to have fun saying it with less than that.

After seven nerve-wracking years, I'm finally graduating college. With a degree I no longer want. Oops. Not the point. The point, is that I've now got the paper that tricks people into thinking I'm mildly competent.

As much as I hate it, I do need to give school credit for keeping me mentally engaged. Even though it, at its worst, feels like mindless memorization, taking the time to stop and realize that requires some level of cognizance. Regardless of whether or not I'm always learning, I want to keep my brain active. Not to say that one ever stops thinking, but I'm rather afraid of complacency. I hope I never accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed. I guess that's where the writing comes in. Keep the dissatisfaction lively and verbose to cultivate the mind, or some such bollocks. If three years from now my fulltime job is writing half assed code in a cubicle, I'll have failed at that cultivating thing. So don't be afraid to call me on that if you catch it.

Plan is to go to China. Learn some more Chinese, approach fluency. I'd love to translate books and movies and the like, but that seems like more of a pasttime than a profession. Would be tempted to come back stateside and return to school so as to become a foreign language teacher. See if I can impart to others whatever the hell it is that makes it so easy for me. Who knows.

おひさしぶり。。。i had to write a critique over the summer of a place i dislike. I felt it imperative that I express the importance of not letting me write a negative piece.

Best Buy is huge. A set of large glass doors welcome you inside by sliding open automatically when prompted with your presence. A man in yellow shirt temporarily halts his activity to distractedly greet you. The back wall is placed some hundreds of feet from where you entered – the middle ground decorated with aisles full of CDs, shelves full of DVDs, towering overstocked computer equipment on the side, and a veritable newsroom’s worth of giant televisions at the rear. The store is bustling with activity. People stop to casually study something that has caught their eye, picking it up and examining it from all angles; others moving hurriedly with their shopping carts, hoping to make it to the last item on their shopping list before they’re distracted by another shiny new gadget. Everywhere you look it seems like there’s another person donning a tucked in blue polo shirt and a pair of khakis, answering someone’s questions or hurriedly moving from one point to another, personifying “busy.” Beneath a mammoth ceiling and extensive walls, you’re overwhelmed with a sense of your insignificance. The underlying accuracy in this structure is dreadfully poetic.

“But consumers drive the economy!” the starry-eyed idealist replies. “People are the reason a store can thrive! The customer is always right!” It’s not unreasonable to feel this way, just inaccurate. To properly explain the relationships people hold within a store, I need to draw on an example given to me by my manager, and present it in the same terms in which it was given to me. Crude and inappropriate and scatological and as honest as anything can be. Retail is a pyramid of shit. The elite few up top, the corporate division, see something they don’t like (Not selling enough Service Plans? Accessory attachment rate too low? Too many returns?), and yell at the store’s manager. He calls a meeting, and yells at department managers. They do the same, and threaten the lowly sales representatives with their jobs. It all trickles down, and we pass the shit onto you, the consumer. Some faint semblance of sanity prevented me from ever climbing the wretched corporate structure beyond the level of sales grunt, so that’s where our story begins.

“You’re replaceable. There are tons of kids out there who want to work for Best Buy, we get applications every day. If you don’t want to do things our way, we won’t have any trouble finding someone else,” to paraphrase my orientation. Their bargaining piece. A job in high demand means you’re extra disposable. At a department meeting, we brought to the attention of an assistant manager our disapproval of a particular store policy (Do we really need to ask every customer their name?) “If you don’t like the path Best Buy is taking, maybe you should reevaluate your involvement in the company.” No matter how heavily caked in sugar it is, you know when someone is shitting on you. If you don’t like it, leave it. No “Talk to the General Manager”, not even a less committal and equally useless “E-mail corporate headquarters.” Love it or Leave it. Practice or Perish. Best Buy knows how to sell; just shut up and do it. You’re the bottom of the Pyramid. If you’re not too careful you fade into the merchandise. If you’re not bringing in enough money, you get phased out, without so much as a farewell tour on the clearance rack. And just like products, they stock themselves to the ceiling, filled with you for the Christmas season, several months in advance. As the overstock shelves try not to suffocate themselves with surplus, employees gasp for air between abysmal hours. Four hours this week. None the next. A breath of fresh air when everyone works fulltime (without benefits) for the Christmas season, and then its back to short, labored breaths. Sit back and watch someone who really needs the money finally asphyxiate, collapse, and quit, so you can breathe easy again. Without enough oxygen, the brain begins to die, piece by piece. Your empathy was the first thing to go. Now you’re truly ready to work retail.

You get sucked into the beast. You push subscriptions, service plans and overpriced accessories, not because you’re on commission, but because you’re trying to not get fired. Survival of the fittest. You adapt so as to not die. Corporate policies are dominant, and they devour anything else in the gene pool. You profile customers to exploit their weaknesses. “Barrys” are high-income men who like action movies and cameras. “Jills” are suburban moms who are busy, but still eager to please their family. “Buzzes” are Tech-geeks who have to have the latest technology to show off to their friends. They’re all easy targets. Target. Interrogate. Identify. Sell. Sell. Sell. Watch out for “Devil Customers”. Sometimes they’ll buy a product with a refund, mail it in, and then return the product. Equally bad, in Best Buy’s eyes, is when they come in and ask you questions about an item, and don’t buy it from you. They don’t bring in a profit, don’t bother helping them. Now you can’t even lie to yourself about how you’re at least helping people out of some altruistic desire to share the knowledge Best Buy certainly didn’t impart upon you. The only reason you’re taking your own time to learn more about the products you sell is so you can sell them faster. See if Barry wants a new HDTV for the Big Game. Jill’s family memories will be captured forever with a video camera. Money isn’t a problem, we have a store credit card. Six months no interest. You’ll have the money then, right? You can have the gratification now. Since you’re not spending real money anyway, why not get a service plan?

The Best Buy product service plan and product replacement plan provide “Maintenance, protection, reliability and more”. More, in this case, refers to perfectly bridging the gap between the disposables at the bottom of the retail pyramid, and the consumers they shovel onto. The beauty of a service plan, from a retail standpoint, is that it’s free money. It’s anywhere from $5 to $500 of sweet, untouched profit. For the consumer, it’s a game of chance. The electronics store becomes a casino. Your salesman is the dealer, stacking the chips in front of you higher and higher. This is a big investment. The Manufacturer’s warranty is only one year long. This purchase might even be to replace a broken counterpart. With any luck, we’ve got a broken display model – oh no, it’s well made, but bad things happen to good products. If you bring it in once, it pays for itself. The ante towers toward the ceiling, it’s hard not to cave. You crack, and go all in. If only casinos could make you feel so “protected” for blowing $100 on a game of blackjack. Best Buy smiles to itself and posts profits. That is, until the stuff actually breaks. Then those pesky consumers start eating away at our profits, and someone wins a hand once in a while. Fortunately our tech squad is well trained, and instead of identifying a problem or coming up with a solution, their first step is to see if there’s any way we can weasel out of it. There are four pages of tiny print in that pamphlet; you didn’t really read them, did you? We probably don’t cover whatever happened. Sometimes, we do cover it. In rare cases we’ll fix them, and in more common cases, we’ll just replace them entirely (a fun trick with laptops, and anything that has any sort of user specific storage.) But the prices for these plans are set very carefully by the Corporate. Market research has been done, profits have been analyzed. How comfortable are you betting against the House? A good casino doesn’t go out of business. You sacrifice a few patrons in the process, but it’s not really your problem. People keep coming back, and you keep selling them chances and possibilities. False peace of mind.

And the continual returns, the persistence, and the gluttony for punishment are what make the institution so strong. The businesses have always been like this, it’s what makes them get here. You can’t fight it from the inside without being so absorbed by it that you lose sight – and realistically, you’ll never make it to the top without fully accepting the basic principles of capitalism that make the whole operation so appalling. You could fight it from the outside. You could stop buying service plans, you could stop buying accessories, you could stop going entirely. But why? There’s a great sale on TVs this weekend. I’d hate to miss out.

I try not to write or read movie reviews because they're boring and generally flawed. But god dammit Snakes on a Plane was amazing. You could easily write two review for this movie-- One is the review of a man who had only heard of the movie when he saw it at the theater, walked in expecting a simple action/thriller, and leaving appaled at the lack of anything resembling a coherent movie. This man gives Snakes on a plane a 2 out of 10, and makes a clever "Snakes on a Plain, as in vanilla and boring" joke in an attempt to justify why you should read his movie review over anyone else's -- after all, nothing says 'you can trust my opinion' than a smartassed quip. The other review is from a man who heard about this movie months ago, that it would be called 'Snakes on a Plane' and that a large portion of its existence is owed to Samuel L Jackson saying "Holy shit i want to be in a movie with that title". He went with a group of friends who knew exactly what to expect: A movie whose title is "Snakes on a Plane." An exercise in creating a cult classic B-movie entirely on purpose, with a big name star as your backup plan for this. The result is infathomable. I've honestly never laughed as long and as hard as I did at this movie than I have at ANY movie in YEARS. You just have to watch the directing, the lines, and the plot, and realize that this movie was genuinely created like this -- Someone had these ideas, and they made it onto the bigscreen in theatres nationwide. It's tacky and campy and absurd and it's entirely on purpose. The hilarity that ensues from this film is unparalleled in even modern comedy. Laughing at bad films is nothing new, but Snakes on a Plane creates an amazing target for it. Anybody can make a laughably bad movie-- I want to believe there was a committee of people created to make sure this movie revolutionzed that genre. The man who writes this review gives snakes on a plane a 9 out of 10.
Go see this movie with a group of friends who know what's going down and won't be afraid to laugh at the movie, people who understand what going to a movie called 'snakes on a plane' entails. If you go alone and aren't comfortable laughing solo at a tacky masterpiece, you will hate this movie.

So, I've heard a lot about this 'blogosphere' thing. It occurs to me that you have to type the word 'blog' to get to this collection of whining, so I must be part of the blogosphere. With that said, I heard a rumour that there was a brazilian steakhouse coming to the norfolk/virginia beach area. Crazy places where men in cowboy hats bring an endless stream of meat, for an acceptable fee. I read this rumour on another blog somewhere, so I thought that i would spread it here. If my understanding of this 'blogosphere' is correct, I'll be dining in one of these restaurants next week. DO NOT FAIL ME INTERNET.

God dammit Anthony.



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Take THAT pop culture!

I've always enjoyed this phrase for use in describing worst case scenarios, but I was never sure what the actual phrase was. According to the internet, it's most likely the boring one.
"Worse comes to Worse" - 100,000 results
"Worst comes to Worst" - 90,000 results (May be skewed because it is a song title)
"Worse comes to Worst" - 42,800 results
"Worst comes to Worse" - 3,400 results (This is my favorite incarnation personally. Go figure.)
(Results from Google searches for exact phrases)

I want a bumper sticker that reads
"It is my greatest aspiration to alter your opinion on this controversial topic by simply stating my own opinion about it, as represented by a mass-produced sticker on the back of this vehicle."

Hahah, this is a very specialized joke (as usual, really). I feel kind of like a jerk posting images and making my page so very unfriendly to slower connections/computers
still.
This is the saga of Demir, the samurai seduced by the power of being a ranger, who then got royally boned by a fateful FFXI patch. (Though to be fair, they had it coming)

Bears are becoming increasingly popular in the offbeat humour industry. They've always been something of a comedic ace-in-the-whole (The Clerks animation comes to mind), but now they're getting really big. Williams Street has always had a humorous relationship with bears (harvey birdman being the most current incarnation), and now with Stephen Colbert's at least once a week bear references, bears are going to enjoy a comedic high. This also means they're going to be overused, abused, and they're going to stop being funny in a few months. That's right -- Bears are getting too mainstream. What?

but seriously. Appreciate the bear comedy while you can. There's something special about it.

edit: I jacked an ascii bear, but it came out looking crappy when i was done.
boo.

omgomgomgomg

seiken densetsu ds..
children of mana..
players: 1player-?players
dude. rock.