i keep my knife sharp

when i hear you speak

shit me like o' the day:

the word demonym - it's so satisfactory. the nym of naming, the demos of demo, of populace, the knowledge that you have a word that describes a specific class of other words, nomnomnom. especially because, well, fuck. how do you explain why it's dentonite and not dentonian, unless you want to turn it into interpretive dance with a mstrkrft remix soundtrack, and just elide that with an um-ah-just-because-that-how-it-be? naw. no 'splainin'. demonym is like english mouth-bling: bish, dentonite be the demonym for it. that just how the language roll. deal, yo. you don't want to sound all ignorant, huh?

a rant, with lots and lots of all caps. fair warning.

so. the decline and fall of old media. the grasping at of blog-shaped straws, etc. the slackening of ad revenue. maybe - there are certain kinds of content that they aren't taking advantage of. like NOT FILLING THE GODDAMN THING WITH WIRE ARTICLES AND ADS. oh, in-house content? *shudders* well, for one, it's not spelled "high jacking" a bus. LIKE I COULD EVEN ARTICULATE WHAT I COULD PRETEND WHAT THAT MEANS, THOUGH I HAVE SOME PRETTY CRAZY IDEAS WHERE THAT'S CONCERNED. please, continue to ignore my request. i realize i don't really want to see what i'm asking for.

why is it, that with all the hullabaloo over the brave new world of looking at the same old shit, just faster and online, the olds are still not getting with the program? or, doing it in the most irritating way possible?

beijing olympics - oh my god. can one find a more useless, less navigable site? fuck your schedule! the runners ought to suffer, and you should redirect all the smog-reduction monies to the goddamn website. hello, global traffic? no? okay, well, how about the usatf? i know you have a lot of content that must needs be organized, but since you obviously have the organization down, fucking fill it in! don't send me to a 404 "why did you try to change something? you have no rights" when i FUCKING put in a term in the search box and hit enter. don't leave filler in the style sheet when i'm trying to look at something and all it tells me is "About me text". are you serious? what, is there one harried, overworked gnome in a broom closet writing all this shit for you? on the original Lisa? do you hate all your amateur athletes that much? US olympic site! yeah, i'm looking at you! HOW ABOUT YOU FUCKING JUST MAKE LISTS? all our stupid teams are lists! why do i have to open a pdf OF HATE just to see who's on what goddamn sport team and who the goddamn coaches are? FUCK A BUNCH OF SPORTS. this is why fucking pro wrestling wins: because i can fucking find the info i'm looking for. DUMMY.

how about a different topic? guess what? an adobe license to make pdfs searchable is not that fucking expensive. if you don't want to take one lobbyist's single night in a hotel room out of the budget for it, don't make the damned info a pdf. copy and paste is FREE, but i can't find shit in your 987-page report unless i have all fucking day and perfect eyesight. this goes for all your damn court judgments too. all of them. FUCK a bunch of pdfs. *heart palpitates*

that's provided i can find the damn thing. have you never heard of accessibility standards? what if i was blind? could there possibly be worse web design out there? are you that unable to organize a web site or make it properly searchable that i start to have major doubts about your agency's activities and forthright behavior? what is wrong with all of you? judicial system, i'm looking at you. county government, i'm looking at you. city government, i'm looking at you. AND I HATE ALL OF YOU.

and YOU! for the last goddamn time, a myspace profile is NOT a proper band page! especially if it doesn't finish loading EVER because you dumped so much crap into it! damn you thomas and your stupid myspace editor! do you think it looks good when you have forty videos and some horrible animated wallpaper and music samples that all start playing at once and NO USEFUL INFORMATION whatsoever on the page? no band member listing, no discography, no upcoming shows? who let you on the goddamn internets! you ALL GO DOWN THE insinkerator of the series of tubes! why with the giant font where i literally have to scroll horizontally to see that YES THIS IS ACTUAL TEXT AND THAT WAS A WORD, NOT JUST GIANT PIXELS OF WHITE SPACE. you are an author. an AUTHOR. your livelihood is words. just because you make words GIANT does not make me respect your GIANT words as GIANT thoughts. OH MY GOD.

and YOU! no, i do NOT want your page to open four hundred other windows. NO, i do not want to take the goddamned survey whenever i try to look something up on allmusic. NO, i do not GIVE A SHIT-ON-FIRE about the movie you are promoting today on imdb, damn interfering-baggage ad that fucking floats down on top of whatever i'm trying to see. NO, i don't want to wait for your fucking intro to load that you paid ENTIRELY TOO MUCH to have made, because i'm going to LOOK AT SOMETHING ELSE while i wait for it to load, and it may very well be how much toe jam i have created today or my disgusting gray boogers that i wish i could wipe on your website. no, i do NOT WANT you to switch my browser to your page when i open it, that's why i fucking opened it in another tab. no, i WON'T fucking register to continue looking at your stupid-ass site, i am going to clear my cookies and just iesumirabile look at what i fucking intended to before you so presumptuously interrupted me. douche.

did you want more about how i hate the internet denizens? because i have to go breathe into a paper grocery bag for a while before i can continue.

GOOSED BY CONTENT

[sorry, this is old and i meant to finish it that day, before i got distracted.]
29.07.08:

sheesh. earthquake? *sneeze* legal notice shenaniganery? *covers self in filth*

i mayhap have subjected you to a shrill, possibly drunken diatribe at one point in the past couple years concerning one author of whom i might rather disapprove. like any good Christian conservative, she is completely fucking insane and a proper hypocrite.

well, maybe she has a point, but not in the way she intended.

back in the hoary old days of 2006, i worked for *nameless and soulless digital content company*, and they had a contract to scan, OCR, and upload *publishing company*'s books. a proofreader's job at this company was to check the OCR-produced text file against the scanned page image. not terribly demanding, as evidenced by the intellectual prowess of my co-workers. YA-oriented celebrity-twin horse fiction took up rather too much of my day, or at least the bits that weren't filled with the interminable drivel put out by paulo coelho or the disturbing discovery that isabel allende (GIWLF) passionately believes a cheese log rolled in fucking diced prunes is conducive to, ah, fucking. *wipes self uncontrollably, swears to never eat any food listed in the aphrodisial cookbook ever again*

once we started in on one of the *publishing company*'s imprints (namely the jeebus one), however, the remnants of my bleeding-heart baby-killing pro-civil-liberties homophilic hackles were raised, for i discovered the "life-changing fiction" of a latently racist, closed-minded hateful harridan with skin the color of a carotene-heavy diet's shit.

imagine, if you will: not one, but two novels blatantly exploitative of 9/11, down to their titles; plot twists that include an amnesiac who can pass for a woman's dead WTC-fire-fighting husband TO HER AND THEIR DAUGHTER, for months; claiming marijuana use promotes, nay, instigates violent gang rape on the part of the partakers; mise en scene creation that hangs on killing off (in a fiery mid-ocean plane crash in the first two pages, no less) an innocent flight attendant (pacific islander) because, though saved by jeebus, she had a child out of wedlock with an airline pilot (not saved by jeebus yet - later, natch); all nonwhite characters are painfully of the Magical Black Man sort, even when they are neither black nor men; physical attraction loosely disguised as growing faith in the evangelical flavor of jeebus, heightening at a first chaste kiss more than a hundred pages in; and so forth, all couched in grating, breathless prose that cannot attain the height of craft acheived by the Left Behind series. (i'm not joking here. i read the first six of those.)

so the gall of filing a cease-and-desist order against a blogger who dare use the phrase "life-changing fiction" is near-appalling, save for the fact that she did change my life.

FOR THE WORSE.

fuck you, karen kingsbury.

link

content, the lack thereof

poo.

i've made a decision. i think it's something i can live with for the next year or so, hopefully. maybe not the best choice, but i think as most of my life is not terribly fraught with good choices, this is the best i can expect, and will certainly make me much happier than i've been in that sense for the past months.

things are looking better-ish financially too. i suppose there's something to be said for having hoarded gobs of vinyl for twelve years. i sort of feel bad betraying my record-collector scum self - no giant indie-rock time capsule for YOUR beneficiaries, sucka! - but as it perpetuates the sloughing-off of material goods that was thoughtfully precipitated by the Triangle development and the shoddy wastewater planning courtesy of the city of Austin, i'm not going to get terribly anxious about it. i figure if you're willing to pay that much for the damn sea and cake record i found for four dollars at the houston sound exchange in 1996, you're probably going to give it a good home and maybe some sweet, sweet aural lovin' in the bargain.

there's more, but i don't really feel like talking about it at the moment.

if you don't give a damn, we don't give a fuck ...

however, i do like the way you work it.

*sigh*

i'm depressed. cheering, prease?

you'd think that the new girl talk would make me sufficiently happy.

And yes, i know.

Neighbor kitty!

i forgot

that this existed. how on earth can clicking on topsy taylor not make you feel better about the world's brief shortage of new LOLCATs?

the weather, and assorted scintillation

the wind is right and i can smell donuts in my carport. the air is a gravid weight, full of mosquitoes and yellowjackets and moisture refusing to precipitate, miniscule plant matter and maybe even a bit of california fire. my laptop is still insistent in its belief it is merely a typewriter, spontaneously opening the cd drive as an inappropriate carriage return. it's not as though it's requesting something new to listen to, like a demanding pre-internet teenager who has discovered college radio and zines all at once. it had better not be, at any rate. i would think it wouldn't have much to write about in its journal, but i could be wrong.

my right shoulder has reconfigured its musculature, knotting and protesting against any position deviating from how i move the mouse eight hours a day, cutting and pasting and opening and closing ones and zeroes. i hunch more frequently now, longing for the days of ergonomic government workspaces, while my chin juts forward and my face angles up to a permanent, invisible screen even as i drive.

Can you find my well-dressed neighbor?