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Year In Review 2015 and Week In Review 2016
I am a dad and have no time for non-dad-related things anymore. So my year in review, which I produce purely for my own leisure and amusement, is several weeks later than usual (see previous years). As such, it includes one week from 2016, which will then be excluded from next year’s review, if I remember.[1]
From what I heard of the outside world, 2015 was mostly a shitshow. But Dad Land has been good to me. So in the spirit of Chris Lacy’s …Of The Year posts, I present 2015 Of The Year.
Spoiler Of The Year
There is a new Star War. All the #brands are talking about it! The review that most reflected my reactions is here.
Depressing Summary Of Social Issues Of The Year
America Has Lost The War Against Guns, by Greg Howard
Donald Trump Of The Year
In a surprising upset, it is John Legere, CEO of T-Mobile.
Shithead Of The Year
This is a nod to the consolation prize on Doug Loves Movies, where Doug calls who/whatever the audience member wants “a shithead.” The winner here is bats. Runner up is, again, Donald Trump.
Crippling Realization Of The Year
Having a child in a hospital NICU costs more than fully-loaded late-model Honda CR-V.[2] There is probably a joke there about having one implying getting the other, but it makes me too depressed.[3]
Resolution Of The (New) Year
Always check your privilege.
Repeat after me: “The loss of a privilege to which I have become accustomed is not discrimination.”
— Saoilí (@saoili) November 10, 2015Also, visit Clickhole more often, for insightful social commentary and Hodor information.
2016 Week In Review
I was locked out of my work laptop for the first 3 days and the biggest news story is these Oregon jamokes. Also, my son needed surgery to remove a dermoid cyst (he is fine). At this point I’ll take 2015.
The Names On The FIFA Ballot Sound Made-Up
Wish I would have seen “Jerome Champagne” before picking our baby’s name
I quote these shows to people around me constantly. They did something right http://grantland.com/hollywood-prospectus/the-phantom-fame-space-ghost-coast-to-coast-secretly-tvs-most-influential-show/
Year-Listicle In Review 2014
http://ift.tt/1E0psMdLots of pretty terrible things happened this year. It wasn’t all bad though. Here were the bright spots. (And here is the review of last year.) Enjoy the verbose headers.
A reminder on how to make listicles:
MUSIC I ENJOYED THIS YEAR THAT MAY OR MAY NOT HAVE BEEN RELEASED DURING THIS CALENDAR YEAR
PHOTOGRAPHS TAKEN BY ME (OR SOMEONE ELSE) THIS YEAR WHICH WOULD CAUSE ME SADNESS IF THEY WERE DELETED OR OTHERWISE LOST
Or: In Case You Can’t Tell, We Have A Dog
MOVIES I WATCHED THIS YEAR AND WILL LIKELY PURCHASE ON DIGITAL VIDEO DISC (OR OTHER FORMAT) BECAUSE I ENJOYED THEM
Interstellar
St. Vincent1
Birdman
The Grand Budapest Hotel
The Lego Movie2
ARTICLES I READ THIS YEAR AND THEN BOOKMARKED AND PROBABLY SHARED SO OTHERS WOULD READ THEM AS WELL
The Future Of Culture Wars Is Here, And It’s Gamergate – Deadspin
In many ways, Gamergate is an almost perfect closed-bottle ecosystem of bad internet tics and shoddy debating tactics. Bringing together the grievances of video game fans, self-appointed specialists in journalism ethics, and dedicated misogynists, it’s captured an especially broad phylum of trolls and built the sort of structure you’d expect to see if, say, you’d asked the old Fires of Heaven message boards to swing a Senate seat. It’s a fascinating glimpse of the future of grievance politics as they will be carried out by people who grew up online.
Playing With My Son – Medium
If you have a kid, why not run experiments on them? It’s like running experiments on a little clone of yourself! And almost always probably legal.
It’s disappointing how many people have children and miss this golden opportunity, usually waiting until they’re in their teens to start playing mindgames with them.
My 14-Hour Search for the End of TGI Friday’s Endless Appetizers – Gawker
The day after “Endless Appetizers” was announced, I went to TGI Friday’s in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Sheepshead Bay. I wanted to challenge the hubris of a company co-opting the infinite for a marketing gimmick. I wanted to demand accountability from copywriters.
I wanted to call their bluff and eat appetizers until they kicked me out, to seek the limit of this supposedly limitless publicity stunt.
I soon learned the limit does not exist.
Squirtle, I (Should) Choose You! Settling a Great Pokémon Debate with Science – Scientific American
But no matter what my relationship to Pokémon is now, I can’t deny that it was one of the driving forces in my nerdy life. And like any fanboy or girl who has ever played the original games, Pokémon was singular in that it provided me the first life-altering choice in my young life: Which of the starting Pokémon—Squirtle, Charmander, or Bulbasaur—should I pick? It felt like a digital “Sophie’s Choice,” with any decision rendering two Pokémon forever un-catchable, destined to be used against me by my rival.
THE SEVEN HABITS OF HIGHLY EFFECTIVE MEDIOCRE PEOPLE – The Rumpus
…We can’t all be grand visionaries. We can’t all be Picassos. We want to make our business, make our art, sell it, make some money, raise a family, and try to be happy. My feeling, based on my own experience, is that aiming for grandiosity is the fastest route to failure. For every Mark Zuckerberg, there are 1000 Jack Zuckermans. Who is Jack Zuckerman? I have no idea. That’s my point. If you’re Jack Zuckerman and you’re reading this, I apologize. You aimed for the stars and missed. Your reentry into the atmosphere involved a broken heat shield, and you burned to a crisp by the time you hit the ocean. Now we have no idea who you are.
Programming Sucks – Peter Welch
You can’t restart the internet. Trillions of dollars depend on a rickety cobweb of unofficial agreements and “good enough for now” code with comments like “TODO: FIX THIS IT’S A REALLY DANGEROUS HACK BUT I DON’T KNOW WHAT’S WRONG” that were written ten years ago. I haven’t even mentioned the legions of people attacking various parts of the internet for espionage and profit or because they’re bored. Ever heard of 4chan? 4chan might destroy your life and business because they decided they didn’t like you for an afternoon, and we don’t even worry about 4chan because another nuke doesn’t make that much difference in a nuclear winter.
BEST NEWS OF THE YEAR THAT CANNOT BE TOPPED, EVEN IF I WAS AWARDED THE POWERBALL JACKPOT BY A RECENTLY-RESURRECTED J. H. CHRIST
A healthy baby Pilch is on the way. It’s a boy.
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(After I wrote that last fairy tale…)
I noticed I check my phone when I feel any amount of doubt or insecurity, and wanted to short-circuit this process, so I made my home screen the message I need to hear so I won’t feel the need to thoughtlessly check junk on my phone.
I made some other ones for friends too. Feel free to steal and use them.
Or, tell me what message you need, and I’ll make you a home screen hack too!
So: What do you secretly need to hear whenever you look at your phone?
The givers and the takers
Michael Lewis on a new book about billionaires, the increasing economic inequality in America, and the impact of the behavior of the very rich is having on politics and happiness. The camp breakfast anecdote at the beginning of the article is gold.
You all live in important places surrounded…
(via jkottke)
The Internet as a Megaphone
http://ift.tt/eA8V8JWe live in exciting, sometimes terrifying times. It has become fashionable to carry a device on your person at all times with more computing power than NASA’s Apollo command center. Products raise millions of dollars to essentially communicate with that smart device from several feet away. The most popular uses of of these mobile devices are to shoot round birds with a slingshot at makeshift towers built by pigs, and to broadcast any minute detail that pops up in the ol’ brain bucket. Broad new horizons.
However, users of these devices (and the services they enable) bring with them horizons that are neither broad nor new. Certain subcultures, previously ignored and subsequently rendered powerless, now have the means to broadcast globally and connect like-minded individuals regardless of geographic location. This message amplification has the ability to force society to progress with great strides, as with the LGBT community. But for some reason, the net-positive effect does not happen with everyone. The most recent instance of this is Gamergate.
In years past, I might have identified myself as a gamer. In the sense that “I enjoy and often play video games in my free time”, it is an accurate descriptor to this day. After the past few months, I would be reluctant to identify myself this way. If you have successfully avoided any Gamergate news up to this point, good on you. Keep it up. If you feel like being sad about life, read this summary from Newsweek with actual Twitter statistics, or this in-depth summary about the implications of this type of movement.
Upon further research, this seems like a deeper cultural issue, unrelated to gaming. I would say it is an American issue, but it is likely present elsewhere too. Kathy Sierra, a prominent tech figure, has now had to essentially leave the internet for the second time in less than 10 years. Before that, several private personal pictures of celebrities were leaked, of which there was a single male (and he was collateral damage, as he was dating one of the targeted female celebrities). Even before that, dumb old white guys were talking (seemingly sincerely) about “legitimate rape” in congressional election coverage. The megaphone created by our newly-connected society seems to have pretty terrible opinions about women on an alarmingly consistent basis.
TL;DR The only way I know how to help is to write about it. I will be a parent soon. It scares me to think that the difficulty of that kid’s life will be so greatly affected by a single genetic coin-toss.
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musings from IRL
