INTELLECTUALISM

let's read a blog written by a guy who fancies himself as really fucking clever and let's be put to sleep by it--
Oh boy.
Like I could write about my misadventures on the internet and make it more compelling than this. It's not that more interesting stuff happens to me it's just I can express it in a better way.
What I'm trying to say is your life isn't boring. You're boring.

I’ve blogged before about the decline of radio as a channel for breaking new music, which is due to both online competition from the likes of Spotify and the effect of consolidation on radio programming (i.e. there’s a reason you hear the same “classic” hits over and over and over again).

So you feel the need to revisit this already boring topic.
Good.
In other words, the medium people rely on most to discover new music is playing less and less of it.
>rely on the radio
>2014
turn up the radio.

This seems inevitable [via Engadget]: A guy was ejected from an AMC movie theatre and questioned by the police for wearing Google Glass.

[…] the unnamed individual stopped by the AMC Easton 30 in Columbus to watch Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, wearing Google Glass attached to his prescription lenses, something he says he'd done before without any trouble.

Where the story takes a twist however, is when officers moved in an hour into the movie, yanked the Glass from his face, and brought the man and his wife to separate interrogation rooms for over three hours.

They eventually let him go after plugging the Glass into a computer, checking it for pirate material and finding none.

I think if you're caught wearing Google Glass in public you should be shot in the eyes.

The MPAA has since claimed that it's official stance on Google Glass is “it’s not a threat”. Which doesn’t explain why the guy was yanked out of the theatre and interrogated for three and a half hours in the first place.

Because the police are fucking thugs. I don't understand why this is a mystery for anyone.

ITEM: A new study published in the Yale Law Journal has found that tracking a cell phone’s location costs somewhere between 1.9% and .015 % of the price of tailing someone the old fashioned way.

The number depends on the method yr talking about, but essentially it’s the difference between spending hundreds of dollars an hour and just pennies. 

Incidentally he does this annoying thing where "your" becomes "yr".
Considering he bothers with commas and apostrophes the only reason I can conclude for him doing this is to piss specifically me off.
Well it's working so good job.
Also good I hope Google is monitoring me.
Fuck it prepare for boredom.

And that’s about all I have to say about pot legalization in the state.

Well, one other thing, maybe – I don’t remember ever bringing up the War On Drugs™ here.

As you might guess, I am in favor of legalization for a simple reason: criminalization makes no sense whatsoever in a land where binge drinking is either an acceptable rite of passage or an average Friday night. It’s a double standard, and even the people who actively oppose legalization know it is. They just live in this bizarre fear that America will turn into a nation of hippie stoners and then the Communists will take over the world. Or something. 

>Or something
>implying the alcohol industry didn't lobby intensely for the criminalization of marijuana
 The only reason it's swinging the other way must be because the US government reckons there's more money to reap legalizing it than there is from the alcohol industry buying them off.

FULL DISCLOSURE: I have inhaled.

Having said that, I’ve never really been into drugs of any kind, and I’ve especially never cared for recreational marijuana for a few reasons:

1. It’s a long-term ticket to lung cancer.

2. It smells like someone pissing on a hot frying pan full of okra.

3. Most people who smoke it regularly tend to be very boring, boring people.

Ah so I guess that makes you a regular user, then.

Obviously I don’t watch A&E. Or reality shows in general. And based on what little I now know about it (Phil Robertson’s worldview aside), Duck Dynasty doesn’t sound like something that would interest me in any case.

Anyway, of course I have nothing to say about Robertson’s opinions that I haven’t already said a million times before on this blog and elsewhere.

As for the inevitable social media trainwreck, the whole thing is silly on multiple levels. It’s silly that people get lathered up into indignant outrage every time some D-level public figure says something offensive – especially some reality-TV person whose producers benefit from all the publicity. I get that people are offended by Phil’s comments, but yr really just feeding the machine by filling yr Facebook feed with anti-Phil memes. 

OH MY GOD DUDE COME THE FUCK ON.
Do you have any emotions?
Come on. Get angry.
Get indignant.
Get happy.
Get something.
Fuck.
And I don't mean about Duck Dynasty. I mean about anything. You clearly don't give a shit one way or another about Duck Dynasty so why the fuck are you even talking about it? Do you feel required to post about timely shit?
Who cares?
Here's my timely comment: Justin Bieber is a twat.
There.
How hard is that?
Move on.

Needless to say, the lead story in Hong Kong for the past couple of days over the weekend (until the MTR broke down for five hours today) has been China’s Chang'e-3 lander arriving on the moon, and deploying the Yutu (“Jade Rabbit”) rover. 

I hope China lands on the moon.
I swear to fuck I hope it becomes a reality.
This country needs to get its act together and I hope losing the greatest thing it ever did to China sends some kind of message.

Peter O’Toole is gone. As you know.

I can’t add much to what’s already being said about him,

SO WHY ARE YOU POSTING YOU BORING SHIT

So.

What have we learned from watching the Twilight Saga?

They're movies for dumb teenage girls who gives a shit?
Are you incapable of picking an interesting topic?

“When yr in love, stick by yr decisions, and don’t let anyone tell you how stupid yr acting because love will never steer you wrong, so what do they know?”

YR YR YR YR
Go piss up a tree, shit for dicks.

This pretty much sums up why I look back on my teenage years with horror and revulsion. Every Friday and Saturday night, all the cool kids would cruise the local mall and hang out.

I hated mall culture. I thought it was superficial bullshit for people who cared more about being popular and fashionable and trendy – and more importantly, being seen doing it – than they did about anything important.

This was, of course, because I was unpopular, unfashionable and the polar opposite of cool. Also, I had no car and no money, so I couldn’t really get to the mall to hang out even if I wanted to. 

>live through the 80s
>80s were gay
DUDE WHAT THE MOTHERFUCK IS THE MATTER WITH YOUR FUCK
SHIT
GOD

I’ve long since gotten over my aversion to shopping malls, mainly out of necessity – Hong Kong is lousy with them, as is pretty much every major city in Asia that I travel to, but they do usually serve as giant multilevel convenience stores. They’re also usually where the CD stores and good English-language bookstores are.

You live
in Hong Kong
and the most you can manage is to bitch about shopping malls in the 80s?
So if I'm understanding this entire situation correctly
you came of age in the golden age that is the 1980s and then you went to Asia and you're this boring?
How are you not the most interesting man alive?
What have you done with all this wasted opportunity?
Whew I just need to sit back a moment and catch my fucking breath because this is doing me in and not in a good way.

The film version of Ender’s Game is now playing at a cinema near you – unless yr in Hong Kong like me, in which case it will be at a cinema near me later this week.

And as you may know, there is controversy – mainly because Orson Scott Card, the author of the classic SF novel the film is based on, has expressed fairly silly and noxious opinions about gays and lesbians (though not in the novel).

how is your post not
WOW
I'M IN FUCKING HONG KONG
ONE OF THE MOST COSMOPOLITAN CITIES ON EARTH FILLED WITH ASIAN WOMEN

ITEM: The Daily Beast has an interesting TL;DR story on the Men’s Rights Movement (MRM).

You know, the movement where oppressed dudebros fight against the evil domineering feminist matriarchy that enslaves us.

Yes. The same movement that comes up with ad campaigns like this.  

Where are your balls?
I mean goddamn I cannot believe
with the awesome gift you've been given
the only thing you can think to talk about on October 24, 2013 was to manufacture how pissed off you are at some assholes for being pissed at some cunts.
I mean are you fucking joking?
What, life wasn't good enough for you?
You had to find something to pitch a bitch about?
If I had come of age in the 80s and now lived in Hong Kong and you said "hey men's rights activists are pissed at feminists" here would be my reaction:
"what the fuck is a men's rights activist?"
followed closely by:
"what the fuck is a feminist?"

Despite being a man, I’m not that sympathetic to the dudebro cause. (Which, I understand, makes me a “pussy” – a term that’s been pretty much applied to me since junior high school, which tells you a lot about the mentality involved here.)

You are a pussy.
I mean god
fuck me.
No I can't be mad.
If I get any angrier I'm going to have an issue on my hands.

I don’t do many posts about Obamacare, for a couple of reasons:

1. I know very little about how the healthcare system works. 

Oh yeah?
If I were in your exact situation here would be my one and only post on the subject of Obamacare:
Now all I gotta say to you
Wannabe, gonnabe, pussy-eatin' cocksuckin' prankstas
When the shit jumps off what the fuck you gonna do
Damn it feels good to be a gangsta

2. The attempts by most politicians, pundits and Facebook memes to explain to me how Obamacare is a good or a bad thing tend to be overblown and/or apocryphal. While this is generally a bipartisan issue, it’s a much bigger problem on the Republican side of the equation. 

Oh yeah dude just tell me all about it.
MMMM YEAH GET ME HARD WITH THAT TALK OF BIPARTISAN BULLSHIT GOD I LOVE IT

Anyway, I am now back from Singapore, and I go straight back there next Tuesday (hence the headline of this post). So you can expect some random Singapore-related posts – most of them pictures of buildings and food – for the foreseeable future.

Lucky you. 

COOL.
VACATION FROM HONG KONG TO SINGAPORE.
I get it, though. You needed a break from that 70 degree, full sun beach day.
So instead you went to--
A PLACE WHERE IT'S 85 AND SUNNY.
God fucking damn. 
Oh no good glad there are 5 videos that play automatically when loading this page.
No I'm glad you did that.
Fucking cocksucking asshole.
You know of all the Victor Greywolfs of the world
and the Meanest Moms
this motherfucker has made me angriest.
Good job, dude.

Pacific Rim

Guillermo del Toro’s love letter to giant-monster/giant robot films, in which giant monsters start emerging from a portal in the ocean floor and attacking coastal cities. Humanity fights back with giant robots. Said fights are epic.

There’s so much wrong about this film – technological silliness, bad decision making, and acting ranging from standard to hammy – and yet it works so wonderfully.  

Pacific Rim was good?
What the fuck world are you from--
A kid asked me last week why Hector was such a pussy in The Iliad and my response was "probably because an enraged, nearly invincible demi-god wanted to murder him with a sharpened stick"
I'm suddenly getting that feeling again. Like are we from two different worlds where Hector's motivations are unclear?
Are you from a world where Pacific Rim wasn't shit?

I am back from Tokyo.

I was there for a conference. I got bored. So my note-taking got a little sidetracked. 

UHHH BORING OLD JAPAN
BEEN THERE SO MANY TIMES.

 I used to travel here pretty regularly. I had a lot of fun. Of course, my idea of “fun” is spending a few hours in Tower Records Shinjuku looking for new Japanese bands.

Fun in quotes because you had it once and it was awful.
Well fuck.
You could piss up my leg and I wouldn't be any angrier.
Ok if I go any longer I'm going to stroke out. The rage engine beaten into my brain has finally started scratching into my cortex so I'm outta.
Song of the now from the glorious 1990s.