Cat and Girl You’re going to see a lot of this posted here over time.  It’s utterly brilliant.  Deal with it.

Nuit Blanche The Making Of is also highly recommended.

How to Not Fail at Life Terribly pessimistic.  Terribly accurate.  Many of you can probably think of someone you want to have read this.

Um, Yeah. This artwork is…special.  Recommended for desktop use, makes for great conversation….  Some of this might not be safe for work.  Ish.  My personal favorite.

Photography Ridiculously good photography, some of it is Not Safe For Work.

Handcuffs Not Safe For Work.

I had the pleasure of going to a singer/songwriter thing put on the Ark to give a stage to new local artists (it was aaaawesome) last night and afterward a friend of Diane’s mentioned how she was trying to learn to give honest critique on things.  If a person shows her a photograph they took, and they’re really proud, but you think it sucks, it’s hard to just tell them that it sucks.  She was learning how to stop censoring herself.

We self-censor to avoid a perceived negative impact of not censoring.  In the case above she didn’t want to either hurt the person’s pride/drive/feelings or didn’t want to seem like a jerk.  Both are well meaning but they have a chilling effect.  The photographer doesn’t get to learn about other peoples’ view honestly which can impact their work or its viability to express, and she as the critic stops expressing how she actually feels on a subject.  In a “perfect” environment honesty won’t ever hurt the recipient’s feelings, they’ll nod, accept it as the giver’s opinion, and put it in whatever internal context they find most useful.  But people aren’t so perfect–we take things very personally.

One of the [many] reasons I haven’t written as much here lately is because of a repetitive urge to self-censor.  Now that various branches of my family have “discovered” this blog-thing it makes expressing some things more challenging.  Yes, my family will accept me however I am (not having a choice on that is one of the great/best/horrifying parts of being related to someone), but acceptance doesn’t make that silence at the dinner table any less uncomfortable.  Adding to that is the growing trend of researching people we meet or want to hire on the Internet.  I can’t say it’s polite to do, but it’s there and it’s done.  The amount of information about ourselves on the Internet is downright scary these days, and the fact that it is never forgotten even moreso.  Ask your parents about the really really stupid things they did as teenagers.  They likely won’t fess up to half of them or have quite simply forgotten them (our memory protects us like that).  The same won’t be said of today’s teenagers when they grow up–the Internet remembers.  This article makes the point pretty succinctly for me, and I’ll reproduce one part below for the lazy among you:

{
Feldmar is a Canadian psychotherapist who crossed into the US to pick up a friend at the Seattle airport in 2006. At the crossing, a border guard decided to Google Feldmar’s name for some reason. He came across a 2001 article written by Feldmar in which the man referenced his own use of LSD—back in the 1960s. Feldmar was then denied entry to the US.

“Do we want a future that is forever unforgiving because it is unforgetting?” asks Mayer-Schönberger. “If we had to worry that any information about us would be remembered for longer than we live, would we still express our views on matters of trivial gossip, share personal experiences, make various political comments, or would we self-censor? The chilling effect of perfect memory alters our behavior.”
}

We self-censor to an extent in front of people because otherwise they’ll hit us in the face.  Given “perfect” (or rather reasonably-optimal) situations we can speak with little to no censorship at all.  But speaking openly requires that situation, or shall we say context.  And we all know what happens when things are taken out of context.  Thanks to the Internet these little pieces of ourselves can float about free of their contexts of time, place, and who we were while being available for casual inspection by others decades from now.

George Orwell thought we would be monitored so closely by the government we would censor even our thoughts to escape persecution.  I think we’re going to do it to ourselves.

{
“There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.”
}

There are “online communities” on the Internet be they forums, chat servers, online games, or otherwise.  Regardless of the tribal structure nearly all of these communities share a common characteristic: anonymity.  This can have good or bad effects but it changes how we act and who we are (in the perceived sense) in these communities.  In general though the process can be explained by John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory.  As the Internet (and computer stuff in general) left the realm of the “dork” or “geek” and became “cool” large swaths of our society began interacting with each other using the Internet.  Most of these newer cool people fell into two groups: those looking for tail, and “your mom” (because the Internet has games and most moms tend to follow “cool” trends in our society; don’t ask me why, I’m trying to figure that out).  Both of these groups of people aren’t particularly interested in anonymity or it actively hinders the reason they’re there.  So was born “Social Networking” which bridged the borders between the online communities and the real world communities.

So why the paragraph of explanation?  The first one to really take off the US was MySpace, and its model makes more sense when you get a little historical context of who was using it, why, and what their expectations of interaction and anonymity were.  MySpace allows a middle-ground of sorts, somewhere between anonymous and not anonymous, that the users can control.  This created a situation in which the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory was tempered by an equally powerful rule which governs real-world interactions: If You’re a Jerk They’ll Hit You in the Face.  This created some sort of Drama-Nexus in MySpace in which people said things they would never say to a person’s face (’cause they’d get hit) but feel the need to regardless (normal person + audience).

Facebook was originally geared towards those attended colleges and strongly encouraged the use of your real name.  It was aimed at a slice of our population which is literate and liked to include your major, location and name.  This swiftly attracted the professional crowd as well.  To top it off, the adolescents using MySpace grew up and moved to a more adult site.  This is sort of the natural evolution of “social networking” sites: to continue to become less anonymous.  It was new and brave back in the day to give up your anonymity, but with Facebook it has become expected.  And it has pushed us further away from the Fuckwad forces and toward something more adult.  It helps that everyone’s family has joined Facebook too, because they usually don’t have to hit you to keep you in line.  The downside to “less anonymous” is that Facebook arguably takes to too far, to the point that your grandma knows every time you toke up.  Dealing with privacy instead of anonymity is growing to be the next major issue we’ll all have to tackle.

The other reason I find Facebook much more interesting than MySpace is that I’m a technically inclined person with a streak of OCD about 2.3″ wide when it comes to computer/network stuff.  I found MySpace’s technology abhorrent.  Their HTML made me cry.  Their site layouts made my face break into spasms.  The designs people put on their pages made my web browser cough up blood.  It just…ugh.  Ew.  Yuck.  No.

Facebook though leverages a lot of technology very well, including nice use of AJAX, clean and simple CSS, and well written PHP in the backend.  They’ve tapped a lot of open-source projects to achieve this, and what I really appreciated is they’ve given back as well, both in small ways and large.  I’m a big open-source geek so it really tickles me to see a company interact well with open-source and contribute to its advancement.  And now they’re allowing me to use their site the way I want to.  Namely by not visiting it =)  That’s covered in the next post.

First off, I can’t recommend using TurboTax’s online filing.  They got all the numbers right but they charge a lot more for filing your state taxes compared to others ($27.95 compared to H&R’s $9.95 for example) and they wanted to e-file my Fed return despite the fact that I know I’m not eligible for it–I would have had to file it again after the Fed rejected it.  And they tend to oppose tax reform that might cut into their profits.

Second, I’m more than happy to sit down with any of you and help you file your taxes if you aren’t sure what you’re doing.  I’m far from a tax expert but I can probably prevent most mistakes.  Feeding me during the process makes for more than adequate compensation if you’re one of those people that don’t like asking for favors.

Lastly, tax credits are awesome.  I had about $250 withheld from my paychecks for all of 2009 and my refund is still over $1900.  This home ownership thing is working out pretty well.

Can’t get this song out of my head.

When a person tells you a story you’re left to decide between two truths: what you’ve been told, and what your gut tells you.  I’m a coward, and rather than choose between two truths I will find a compromise between them.  I will find a point and say my piece in such a way that compromises neither my ethics nor questions the veracity of what I was told.  But I will not forget my suspicions unless they are laid to rest.

I am not a “Knight in Shining Armor”.  I will not try and save you from yourself…unless you ask me to.  I will give you every opportunity to make the decision you feel is right, but I will not stop you from making the decision I feel is wrong.  I regret this at times, but I feel it is the only way I can come to terms with the independent existence of those around me.  I will support others in their decisions, but they must make that choice and accept the consequences it shall bear.

At least, I try to.  I am only as human as those that sit across me.

Some days I think I’m turning into Holden Caulfield.  The prospect doesn’t phase me in the least.

{
I find myself to be a different person at 3am than I am at 3pm.  This bothers am and doesn’t bother pm, but each are the better person for it.  “I’m not really an asshole, I just play one on TV.”
}