Retro Camera

Android now has a free knock-off version of the Hipstermatic app for iPhone. It does not have as many settings, and you can’t do that shaky thing to make it change presets, but it still takes some fun pictures. Observe this mildew or mold or something growing on the plastic bin on my deck.

  

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Wednesday Playlist – Battle Songs

Courtesy of @UnclePilot we have a #wednesdayplaylist for your amusement & potential participation! Give me “Songs for Going Into Battle!”

violentecstasy – @superbadgirl Combichrist “Intruder Alert”; Stromkern “Armageddon” #wednesdayplaylist

cbellers – @superbadgirl David Bowie “Im Afraid of Americans” #wednesdayplaylist

jamietoonart – @superbadgirl DICEGRINDER – DICEGRINDER #wednesdayplaylist

UnclePilot – @superbadgirl Fumblestealth – J. G. Thirlwell http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRBIJU60AL8 #wednesdayplaylist

agingdragqueen – @superbadgirl perhaps too obvious, but Muse’s Knights Of Cydonia always makes me want to kick ass http://youtu.be/G_sBOsh-vyI

superbadgirl – Rage Against the Machine “Killing in the Name Of” #wednesdayplaylist

Grave_Danger – @superbadgirl “Ready To Die” Andrew W.K.; “Dirt Off Your Shoulders” Jay-Z

_bunny_ – @superbadgirl “Freewheel Burning” by Judas Priest. Also, “Sun and Steel” by Iron Maiden. #wednesdayplaylist

jeniburns – @superbadgirl “Caboose” by Snapcase #wednesdayplaylist

cvbarnhart – @superbadgirl Powerglove – Omnislash (We’re Gonna Need A Bigger Sword) http://bit.ly/9LW5Sh #wednesdayplaylist

soupy – Hans Zimmer “He’s a Pirate” for all your swashbuckling needs. Rage against the Machine’s “Killing in the name of” for all else #wedsplaylist also: The Commodores’ “Too Hot to Trot” if you want to disco boogie all over your opponents’ face. #wednesdayplaylist

trmink – @superbadgirl Bloody Hammer – Roky Erickson and the Aliens #wednesdayplaylist

Schweinhundt – I Want to be in the Calvary by Corb Lund #wednesdayplaylist

ZSB3 - An odd dichotomy: “O, Fortuna” by Carl Orff; “Wait and Bleed” by Slipknot. #wednesdayplaylist

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Lately

…I am pondering the amount of time it takes for a cool thing seen on the Internet to go from “Holy shit, that’s the most awesome thing ever!” to “Holy shit, that thing? I’ve had it forwarded to me 327 times and seen it on 17 different blogs. Fuck that thing and every dipshit who promotes it.”

That time seems to shorten continuously. Right now it’s about two days, maybe three. Certainly not as long as a week.

The thing that set off my irritation meter today was that guy who does the teeny-tiny pencil lead carvings. I first saw those a few weeks ago, maybe two, and I was blown away. Jeez they are teeny and tiny and intricate. Impressive.

And then I started to see them in more and more places. It seemed to be some kind of insane crossover that showed up on art and design blogs, living blogs, random cool shit blogs, tech blogs. Everyone seemed to think this fit into their blog genre, and wanted to share. But instead of being initially impressed and then glad that so many people were celebrating this artist, I began to feel… irritated. The work had not changed, but my perception of it shifted as it became less novel to me. I couldn’t even just gloss over the continued mentions, they started to almost enrage me. THAT GUY AGAIN? WTF MORONS!? Was in my head more than it should have been.

And it seems the time it takes for that to happen is shortening. I see a thing three times, maybe four, and the thing and all people associated with the thing earn my immediate scorn.

My brain craves novel amusements, thinks of them as its due. My brain does not want your same old tired shit that it already saw yesterday, that shit should no longer exist! My brain wants fresh fun, god damn it.

Other things that have lately enraged me with their ubiquity: the video of the cat fighting its own reflection in the floor. Posts about how Glenn Beck is hurting America (yeah I know, not news.) Everyone who retweets The Oatmeal. Recaps about the show Mad Men, on many many blogs that had nothing to do with TV shows. (Ditto posts about Lost.) I don’t watch that show, and thus who cares? I already read that blog, why ask me to read it again? Why are you clogging my interwebs with this nonsense?

It’s like the more things become customized to cater to my tastes, the less patience I have for things that are not specifically suited to my desires at that moment. And I do not know how to turn this irritation and lack of patience off.

I do not enjoy spending half the day in enraged contempt at things that enter my overloaded data-stream and are judged irrelevant. But what is the answer? Turn the data stream off? Have less access to less information? How does one learn to gracefully tolerate the same information flying at them nonstop all day? Because that’s the issue. I am already sorting mental wheat from chaff all damn day. It’s hard to process all the information coming in. When the information repeats, it’s like it’s doing it specifically on purpose to clog up my already overburdened neurons. Hence the irritation. And yet, this is not a phenomenon that will go away. If I see a cool thing I want to share it, and my friends will want to share it, and other blogs will want so share it, that’s the way memes work. And with various info streams all feeding in, I am likely to see intricate pencil carvings guy on Twitter (MUST READ!) and Google Reader (analyzed by twenty art and style blogs + Boing Boing) and on Facebook (have you guys seen this guy OMG) and who knows where else. So it’s up to me to manage my irritation at the audacity of a thing existing past the time when I deem it relevant or desired. But how to do that?

So that’s what I have been pondering lately. Tips welcome.

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Wednesday Playlist – Earworms Edition

OK kids, I hate to do this to you, but today’s #wednesdayplaylist is “Earworms!” What songs get stuck in your head? (suggested by @zsb3)

superbadgirl – I don’t know if this is technically an earworm, but if I am not listening to other music, I will automatically start humming the Doris Day version of “Que Sera Sera.” #wednesdayplaylist

cbellers – @superbadgirl humptey dance, digital underground. #wednesdayplaylist

_bunny_ – @cbellers See, and now that’s playing in my head. Could be worse, I suppose. #wednesdayplaylist

cvbarnhart – @superbadgirl Lesley Gore – Sunshine Lollipops and Rainbows; Andy Griffith – The Fishin’ Hole; mc chris – Smackababy. Also, The Turtles – Happy Together #wednesdayplaylist

p_tea - @superbadgirl I heard this song once and it was stuck in my head for days: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwE-SLnLkqY #wednesdayplaylist

Lorizs_tweets – Stopwatch Hearts by Delerium #wednesdayplaylist

stevodarkly – @superbadgirl Lately my earworms are 2 songs by The Urge – “Jump Right In” and “Brainless.” #wednesdayplaylist

Joule - @superbadgirl For the last month or more, I’ve had Elton John’s “Rocket Man” in my head. This morning, Rasputina’s cover of “Barracuda”.

Moondust - @superbadgirl The girl from Iponema,movie themes that involve trumpets (I’m looking @soupy) LET IT BE, #wednesdayplaylist

bengoldman – @superbadgirl The “Looks like a pump, feels like a sneaker” song from that commercial. #wednesdayplaylist

thatcesareguy – @superbadgirl the theme to “Sanford & Son”. “Some Like It Hot.” “Eye of the Tiger.” “Blame it on the Rain”- worst one ever.

cbellers - @superbadgirl Shut Up Woman Get On My Horse still gets stuck in my head for hours. #wednesdayplaylist

k_del – @superbadgirl Thanks to @jamietoonart @CDCyr #wednesdayplaylist

trmink - @superbadgirl “…follows madness and death” Highway to Hell – AC / DC

ZSB3 – @superbadgirl My #wednesdayplaylist:

SgtHotpants – @superbadgirl I was just reminded of this. Now the song is my submission: http://bit.ly/d56zEk

violentecstasy – @superbadgirl Lady Gaga’s Poker Face. The Ramones’ I Wanna Be Sedated. #wednesdayplaylist

Grave_Danger – @superbadgirl “Islands in the Stream”.

ZSB3 – Also for #wednesdayplaylist: Four Leaf Clover by Abra Moore.

soupy – That one song that I can’t remember the name of. Or the lyrics. #wednesdayplaylist

_bunny_ – @superbadgirl Too late? Just remembered, because there it is again, my default earworm: Alley Oop #wednesdayplaylist

Hope I got everyone, I didn’t keep perfect track of this yesterday. If I left you out and you’d like me to post your submission, lemme know!

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Here’s why T-mobile are a bunch of assholes

So, going on one year I’ve had T-mobile as my cellphone provider. I am rather “meh” about them overall. Their voice quality is shitty, but I rarely talk on my phone, so that’s not such a big deal. I am thoroughly sick of my myTouch, and want to hurl it down the toilet, but there’s nothing in T-mobile’s lineup with which I want to replace it, and I do not know that I want to extend my contract with them anyway, so I am stuck with it for another year. Its stupid on-screen keypad and attendant typo-storms= bleh, its tendency to non-responsiveness in times of immediate need= double-bleh. Its stupid non-standard headphone jack that I have to carry an adapter for at all times (replaced on later models) and its dumbass super-old Android OS which T-mobile has made NO attempt to upgrade… its horrible useless camera… did I mention the totally out of date OS they refuse to fucking update, so I do not have access to all the cool Android apps developed in the last year? Well, lets just say I am fucking sick of it.

But that’s not even why they’re assholes. Here’s why they’re assholes. Their asshole website “MY TMOBILE HOLYSHIT OMFG ITS ALL ABOUT ME!” and online payment center. They are such fucking assholes that they refuse to store my payment method from month to month UNLESS I agree to auto-pay. Now, most of my bills are auto-pay and I prefer it that way. Electric, gas, water, sewer, they all just magically deduct from my account each month and I don’t have to think about it, and that’s nice. However some bills, mortgage and telephone bills especially, I want to pay myself. That’s because telecoms have a way of suddenly charging you some weird amount with no warning. My AT&T (home phone and internet) bill is NEVER the same month to month. And my T-Mobile bill has gone up by $.40 every few months since I’ve had the phone. (Bill amounts have been: $90.65, $91.05, $91.55, $91.78 and now $92.01) Why? Who fucking knows, it’s a fucking mystery. Is the extra $1.36 breaking my budget? No it’s not. But it does tell me that I should pay attention to my bills and what’s on them.

SO ANYWAY I pay my bills on time. Actually, another reason that I like to not have auto-pay is that I pay my T-mobile bill really far in advance, because that works out better for me in terms of budgeting. The week that it’s due is the week a lot of other bills are also due, so I tend to pay it two or three weeks in advance of when it’s due. You’d think they’d appreciate a nice, bill-paying customer like me, right? But no, they don’t. Because I will not submit to their auto-pay tyranny, they refuse to store my payment info. Not my bank account number, not my cc info, nothing. They do this to make it awkward for their non-auto-pay customers. Not only do I have to re-enter my info every month (using multiple screens, and typing in a whole bunch of data they could easily store. Like seriously, the system doesn’t even auto-propagate my NAME. Here on MY T-FUCKING-MOBILE they have trouble remembering who the fuck I am, apparently.) I also have to re-accept some kind of “one-time only payment terms and conditions” screen. Every fucking month.

This is a pain in the ass for me, as my credit card is usually in my purse (downstairs) when I am upstairs in my office at bill-paying time. Since I switched to Chrome and lost google toolbar, I can’t even store my CC info there, and something in me cringes at having it just saved as a text file, easy to access on my computer. I guess I could do that. But that’s not the POINT. The point is not that I should be able to come up with some workaround for their assholery. The point is that their practice is unfriendly to their customers, and they’re trying to hassle me enough and make my experience with their company’s website so shitty that I finally give up and give them at-will access to my bank account. Which I will not do.  Hassling your customers into doing things only the way you want them to is NOT the way to engender brand loyalty, you stupid fucks. And every other website I deal with STORES MY PAYMENT INFO IF I WANT THEM TO.

I am sure some genius at T-Mobile is giggling in his coffee cup right now, thinking that he’s really come up with a brilliant plan to make customers sign up for auto-pay, and we’re too dumb to catch on to his clever scheming. But guess what, fucknuts? I am dropping you assholes next year for making my life more irritating than it needs to be.

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The Heavy – What You Want Me to Do

The more I listen to The Heavy, the more I love The Heavy. Fantastic driving music, this. And sounds almost as good live as it does studio.

The Heavy – What You Want Me to Do

I’ve been loved
I don’t feel clever
One mans weakness
Is another man’s pleasure
I got no feelings
I got no heart
Can’t make no sense out of this
But I got to somehow

What you want me to do?
What you want me to say?
How you need me to be?
I can be that way
What you want me to do?
What you want me to say?
How you need me to do?
‘Cause I can do that…

When I feel tender
Like I’ve been lost
Put myself together
‘Cause paid my cost to be the boss
Now I ain’t sleepin’
I aint slept
I see what you see here
But in this life
You give what you get

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