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Posts Tagged ‘random’

What’s Wrong: the internet 15 years later

3/2/10 by Cyle Gage

So this guy in 1995 wrote about why the internet will suck. This article was reprinted and reblogged and is going around the web right now and a lot of assholes are feeling pretty smug about “how wrong this guy was” and how the internet is actually quite awesome now. Hold the fuck on for a second, and read the article, and think about it. This guy definitely was not wrong on most of his ideas, and no one should feel good about that. The internet does still suck in pretty much all the ways he describes.

The author immediately refers to the internet (the 1995 internet, mind you) as “trendy and oversold”. It still fucking is. Trendy? See: Twitter. Oversold? See: Google. A lot of what he says the futurists predicted have not happened presently, and what small steps we made (like internet video conferencing and Second Life) are relegated only to either academics (whose careers rely on them) or the most cutting-edge corporations (who don’t mind dumping money on trendy things to appeal to their employees).

What’s Wrong #921: A Capella Metal

2/1/10 by Cyle Gage

I don’t think I need to say anything more. I think the “breakdown” at 2:50 especially exemplifies what’s wrong here.

Special thanks to Zach Maxell for bringing this to my attention. I was going to write a long-winded rant about this, akin to the crabcore article, but I don’t want to waste any more words on this right now.

Tags: humanity is doomed, random, what's wrong

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Tumblr Rules, or Be Random, i.e. Castle Nail Fuck

12/29/09 by Cyle Gage

A little while ago I wrote about how much Twitter sucks, and someone asked me what the solution to it is. My response: tumblr. Tumblr is for winners. Twitter is for losers. This argument goes in a couple directions: firstly, what tumblr is and why it’s awesome. Second, why being random is the way to be. Third, why reference is dead (or, why hypertextuality is dead; or, stop reblogging). I stumbled onto tumblr about a year ago and quickly dismissed it as just another shitty microblogging platform. I signed up earlier this year with the intention of posting tons of random thoughts, but I quickly gave that up because I felt like rolling my own solution. My own solution worked, but I didn’t have the time to dump things on it all the time, and it was too focused. I realized the beauty of tumblr and how it was different and better than twitter. People say twitter is simple, but I very much disagree, especially while tumblr exists. Twitter, as I wrote about earlier, is all about self-importance and meaningless autofelatio. Tumblr is primarily about nothing in particular. It doesn’t say “what are you doing right now?” or “post something about yourself,” it just says POST SOMETHING. It even gives you an array of options beyond just text, and it doesn’t really constrain you. This mentality offers creativity as a foundation, which has lead to tons of awesome tumblogs. (I follow This Isn’t Happiness constantly.) My brother-in-arms Sam and I decided one night that it would be funny to start our own tumblog of random shit, which is what we did. (I offer it as a link to the right not because I believe it belongs among the time-honored sages like /b/ and ytmnd, but merely because it’s an alternate source of information besides this blog.)

The basic formula for our blog was simple, and leads to the two things I said I’d dive into: be random and don’t reference (if you can help it).