Ink’s Awakening

You know what’s weird? I never got used to symmetrical nose piercings. See, as a kid in the seventies and eighties, piercings never strayed from the earlobe, unless you wanted to completely leave society behind. Then in the nineties, people started piercing the side of the nose. That was pretty unprecedented in western society, but I thought it looked good. Some time around the turn of the century they moved to piercing the middle part of the nose, and I never could get used to it. I’d like to think that there’s some aesthetic principle at work here, but more likely, it’s just the old fact that adults aren't able to accept new ideas that the kids come up with. If that is the case, it’s a strange example, since middle-nose-piercing became common only a few years after nose-side-piercing, which would imply that I went from open-minded free-thinking youngster to grumpy and intolerant adult in the short space between the two trends.

To be clear, this is just the gut reaction I have. I realize there’s no good reason that one type of piercing is acceptable and the other isn’t. I don't look down on people because of piercings, I'm just being honest about my emotional reaction, and hoping young people will understand that it's a nonsensical habit cast years ago, now continued unconsciously and with some regret. Same with putting two spaces between sentences. I know it makes no sense; but I had to learn to do it to pass typing in grade nine and now I can’t stop.

Tattoos had a similar story. In the nineties, tattoos started getting wider acceptance, but people were just getting small tattoos. Again, this was something I found easy to accept. And then tattooing went from a minor accent on the body to something you turn your entire body over to. Again, this came after I became an adult.

So there're still some aspects of tattoos that I  struggle with. First, tattoos don’t fit the person. I mean, the stereotype of the person. You know, everyone has a picture of what the heavily tattooed person looks like. And yet, so often it’s their polar opposite who has the full-back skull tattoo peaking over their neckline. I’m used to seeing large tattoos, but less-so when they’re peaking over the neckline of a conservative sweater, rather than a Slipknot T-shirt.

And this leads us to the odd fact that the need to conceal hasn’t gone away. In my previous post about tattoos, I referred to the nineties trend of small, easily-concealed tattoos to let people feel badass without anyone actually seeing that you have a tattoo. What’s weird is that people still place a value on the idea of tattoos you can cover up. The difference is that we’ve gone from a tiny tattoo on the ankle that can be covered with a boot or a sock, to a full-body tattoo up to the neck that can be covered by a full set of clothes. But the principle remains bizarrely the same. That's a commentary on today's society: we want to stick it to the man, as long as the man doesn't find out.

Of course, there are people who bravely cross that threshold and get a tattoo on the side of the neck or back of the neck, or maybe behind the ear. But  there’s still an aversion to tattoos around the face and front of the neck. Yes, there are a few who cross that line, but they're rare compared to the total number of people who have tattoos. Mostly, the parts of a person we interact with are off-limits. I’m sure there’s some cognitive scientists who could explain that because we see faces in a different way than we see others objects, we prefer to avoid artificial changes to that area. Or it could be that the face is the ultimate uncoverable place. If it's on your arm, a long sleeve will cover any embarrassing testament to an ex, or The Bloodhound Gang, or the Sega Saturn or something. But the face is the ultimate commitment.

And the fact is that people aren't really committed to anything that much. Another thing that hasn't changed is that people want a tattoo, not a tattoo of something. In another old post, I mentioned that a big reason I have no tattoos is that there is nothing I’m so dedicated to that I would want it permanently on my body. But that clearly doesn’t stop most people. There are so many tattoos of generic things that it’s clear that they want a tattoo, and the subject matter is less important to them. I suppose that's a strange commentary on our society too: people want to make a public, life-long commitment to something, but they aren't sure what.

Through Rose-Coloured Camera Phones

I'm getting tired of the demonizing of phones and mobile devices in public places. I mean, like any technology, it deserves skepticism and analysis rather than naive acceptance. But a lot of the critiques of phones' effect on society is just scattershot complaining from the memory-challenged.

I'm guessing that young people are dismissing these attacks as just a bit more ageism. But in case any of them are falling for it and believing that the mobiles are the downfall of civilization, I'd like to offer some reassurance. As someone who was there for the pre-mobile era let me clear some things up.

People weren't very social before mobiles.

Listening to Boomers, X-er's and older Millennials, you'd think that the old world was a marvelously social place where public places were full of conversation, and where complete strangers regularly reached out to one another.

Actually, it was an awkward bore, where entertainment was limited to old magazines. Yeah, that's right: the pile of old magazines in every waiting room? You probably thought the reason they're so old is that no one bothers replacing them now that we have phones to entertain us. Nope! They've always been years out of date, but it used to be that people would actually read them, because there was nothing better to do. That's why most people resorted to starting off into space instead. They would have killed for a convenient portable entertainment device. And you would have killed for the person across the room starting at you to have his own entertainment device to divert his gaze.

People weren't more caring

It's not like they were completely cold-hearted, but they weren't any nicer. Perhaps you've heard some of the old shocking stories about bystanders not helping victims? Well those all happened without phones.

People have always been reluctant to get involved with strangers around them. Now, at least they may be using their phones to connect with strangers on the net. Even I'm writing this while sitting in a waiting room. That may be odd, but it's still better than the old way of living in a shell.

Kids weren't very active

Looking at memes on facebook, you'd think that kids once spent all their time doing healthy and wholesome activities outside, then someone gave them phones and it all ended.

I don't know, maybe there was once a golden age of kids' activities, but it would have been decades ago. Keep in mind that TV - and vacuous programming on it - has been widespread since the 60's. Video games were commonplace by the 80's.

Tinder et al have destroyed dating

Look up the "personals ad" concept. People used to look for love using twenty words at the back of a newspaper, right above the ads for escort services. Does that sound better than modern dating apps? And don't even ask about 90's singles phone lines.

Things The Teenage Me Would Never Have Believed About Life In The Future, #39

You'll see Moe Berg of The Pursuit of Happiness perform "I'm an Adult Now" on TV at age 58.

Ghost Of The Machine

Apple is running a TV commercial showing a child doing all sorts of things with her iPad, ending with a neighbour asking what she's doing with her computer.  The child responds by asking "What's a computer?" I suppose the message is that the iPad is so unlike a conventional computer as to be unrecognizable. But I'm thinking that it's still pretty inconceivable that a kid would not have encountered a computer at that age, so the message I'm getting from it is that if you give your kid an iPad, your kid will be an idiot. I can't be the only one thinking that the child-actor's line delivery is particularly wooden, presumably because it's so unbelievable. She's probably wondering to herself why these adults find it so important that they see a distinction between computers with keyboards and computers without.

I don't really get it either. But it seems that adults have a big fascination with kids not knowing what obsolete technology is. Although the trend has subsided a bit, I can't count how many links I've seen passed around Facebook of videos of children perplexed by VCR's, Walkmans, phone dials, etc. First of all, I don't really know what the attraction is. I try to avoid seeing evidence of my age, but apparently some people can't get enough, like being unable to avoid picking at a scab or something.

But I also wonder about some of these kids. Just because you've never used something personally, you still get introduced to things a number of other ways. Usually that would be your parents and the media. I never had to place a call through an operator at a switchboard, but I saw them in movies. I never bought any records, but my parents had them. At some point it did occur to me to ask my parents why they had all these flat boxes with pictures of Elvis on them, as well as who this "Elvis" person was.

The fact is that we're all subjected to old-fashioned technology throughout society. Many people have noted the oddness that the 3.5" floppy is the universal symbol of saving a file, even though they haven't been used for years. And as I was thinking about this post, I came across this comic on that very idea. Old fashioned ideas often become symbols. I'm typing this entry on a web page that uses a picture of a bell to represent "notifications" even though bells have just been Christmas ornaments during my lifetime.

And also, you might be surprised how many things that are still in used in society that kids don't understand. I remember as a young child thinking that it was turning the steering wheel back and forth that made a car move. That wasn't because cars were obsolete, it was because this is a complicated world, and it takes a while to learn all about it. I was too distracted by learning grammatical structures and object permanence to learn the details of current technology. 

We all end up learning about a lot of the culture that came before us. You'll probably find that even kids have learned a lot about what came before them, eventually. Some kids are faster at picking it up, and some are slower. I've always assumed that they single out the latter for those "today's kids don't know what a flip-phone is" videos. Those kids are easy to find; they're the ones with iPads.

I May Need Glastonbury

The big music festivals have posters that list all the bands playing, and they usually follow the same form:

The biggest acts are at the top, and they get the biggest print.  As you go down, the performers are harder to recognize, and their names are harder to read.  It occurred to me that this format is not unlike another famous poster:

Both posters seem harmless enough to young people. But for older people, they cause some trouble the further down the poster you go.  The eye chart reminds you that your sight isn't what it once was, and the festival poster reminds you that you aren't as cool as you once were.

But the good news is that for many people, their eyesight and coolness deteriorate at the same rate. you haven't heard of the musicians named at the bottom of the lineup, but that's okay, because you can't read that far down anyway. Who's playing Coachella this year? Radiohead, Lady Gaga, Kendrick Lamar... um, some other people, I'm sure I'm familiar with as well.

Oh Lord, Won't You Iron Me A Mercedes Benz?

Mercedes Benz' head of design Gorden Wagener has announced that the time of creases is over. No, this wasn't some executive acid trip, it actually meant something. You see ceases in all kinds of cars these days: they're the sudden, superfluous angles in otherwise smooth metal. Creases can have all sorts of aesthetic purposes: making flat surfaces more interesting, making things seem shorter or narrower (which is great on humongous SUV's.)

But it's really gotten excessive. Combined with other unnecessary styling additions like fake vents and chrome accents, we're in an era of ornamentation. It may not be as noticeable because they aren't as ostentatious as tailfins, but it's similar levels excess.

I mentioned before about how much of the radiator grille on a modern cars is often fake. But it's really reached a new level in which cars have fake vents that don't even really look like vents any more. They may have a square of patterned black plastic, but there's obviously no opening, and it's in a place where you wouldn't expect a vent to be, like in front of the wheel. Essentially, they just wanted to break up some plain area of the body, so they just stuck some random shape there.

I'm not some modernist hardliner demanding that everything on a car have a reason. I'm just saying that we've pushed the pendulum too far. With all the chrome and angles on today's cars, we might as well drop the pretense of maturity and go back to putting firebird decals on the hood. So I'll applaud anyone who will push the trends the other way.

But as some have pointed out, the concept car being revealed by Mercedes does still have creases. But it doesn't rely on them nearly as much as other cars. It has a nice rounded, relatively-minimal look. And that brings up something I've worried about in recent years. I used to find Mercedes car designs pretty boring, like they were aiming for the Platonic ideal for sedans. But lately I find like their designs a lot more. What worries me is: I have no idea whether they've improved their designs, or this is just part of the natural aging process for me.

Behind Plastic Eye-Holes

For this Halloween,  I thought I'd complain about the costumes available when I was a kid. Pre-made Halloween costumes from the seventies and eighties were crap.  For a start,  they were just a cheap plastic mask, and a sort of tunic body covering that was obviously just a colourful garbage bag.

But the thing that bugged me most about these things is their complete failure at being costumes.  There'd be, say, a Bugs Bunny costume with a Bugs Bunny mask, but then the plastic garment would have a picture of Bugs Bunny on it, possibly with the words,  "Bugs Bunny" on it.  For one thing, it's a bad costume if you have to tell everyone what you are. But more to the point,  Bugs Bunny doesn't have a picture of himself on his chest. So you aren't dressing up as Bugs Bunny so much as you're dressing up as an obsessed fan of Bugs Bunny, which is no fun.

Even to my developing mind which was still figuring the way the universe works,  I could tell something was wrong with this arrangement.  I couldn't really articulate it,  because it's kind of an existential mobius strip: things don't usually have pictures of themselves on themselves.  So I just had to accept this and not criticize my classmates when they dressed up as Darth Vaders with pictures of Darth Vaders on their chests.

Since then,  I've found that others had the same problem with these costumes.  Apparently they were like Scrappy-Doo: we all hated it,  but didn't say anything at the time.  Anyway,  I bring this up because I'm amazed at how far costumes have come.  Even pretty cheap Value Village costumes are much better than those old plastic monstrosities,  and probably cost the same,  adjusted for inflation. And they at least take a stab at looking like things,  not referring to them.  So that's something kids today can take pleasure in: better Halloween costumes,  and better cartoons.

Will You Still Click Me, When I'm 64

I keep seeing clickbait ads that say something like, "You Won't Believe What The Cast of Major Dad Looks Like Now!" Sure, I will admit a little curiosity (probably not for Major Dad, but say, for a show or movie I actually watched.) But generally, it's easy to resist the urge to click, since I can guess the answer: they look twenty years older. In addition, since they're in the entertainment business, they started off better looking than most, and they probably have better than average knowledge of make-up and clothing, so they'll look significantly better than others the same age. But still, they'll just look good, but older.

I know this, because I have particular insight into how people's appearances change as they age. That is to say, I'm on Facebook. So I constantly have the experience of seeing what people look like after a couple of decades. It's a little intriguing, but in the end it's a pretty mundane part of life.

I suppose my generation is the first to see this as commonplace. It used to be that you either lost contact with people, or you stayed close enough to them that you weren't conscious of their aging, since you saw it one day at a time. Your only opportunity to get a real perspective on aging was at a reunion. But now I get a reminder of the aging process quite often. I have to say, I think my generation has actually aged fairly well. You'd think Generation-X would have developed more Worry Lines.

So I really don't want to see what such-and-such celebrity looks like now. I'm sure that years ago, this sort of clickbait would have made sense, If clickbait had existed back then. You're looking at the cover of the Entertainment section of the paper, and you see the page-turn-bait headline, "You Won't Believe What The Cast of My Mother The Car Looks Like Now!" You'd probably turn right to page C6.

The Force Sleeps In

One of the advantages of being a geek is that you don’t feel your age as harshly. For most people, there is a time when you realize that you are no longer cool. It could be the time you overhear some teenagers talking and realize that you don’t understand anything they’re saying - and worse, you don’t care. Or it could be when you hear a hit song on the radio and don’t recognize it, or you haven't heard of whoever is playing it.

But if you’re a geek, that never happens. Or more precisely, it has always happened. You aren’t embarrassed when you don’t understand teenagers because you didn’t really get them even when you were one, and you didn’t much care what they said then, either. In fact, an ageing geek may even feel younger: By the time you reach adulthood, you’ve spent so much time dealing with mainstream culture that you’re starting to understand it, if only by repetition. Those teenagers may actually seem less alien now, even if you are observing them like an anthropologist.

Lately though, I have been feeling old, even in my geekiness. The problem is, I'm just not excited over the new Star Wars movie. Yes, it looks promising. Yes, I would like to see it. But the fact is, I can wait.

I don't know if it's cynicism after the last trilogy, or if I don't yet trust JJ Abrams and Disney to run the franchise. Maybe it's because I've now spent most of my life with vague promises of more Star Wars eventually.

What's weird is that most of my fellow geeks do seem excited, and very much so. And that enthusiasm is coming from a wide age range. They were stretching the Internet to its limits to see the trailer for the new movie as soon as it came out. But I didn't bother until a week later. Others spent October looking for two ideally-sized pumpkins to make a jack-o-lantern that looks like that little rolling droid; I can't even remember the name of that little rolling droid.

So I feel a bit left out. I don't feel like I fit in with the outcasts any more.  I guess I could consider myself a non-geek.  But I still can't fit in with them.  Or I could just look at it the other way and become a geek-among-geeks, a nerd-squared.  Yes, you can keep your Star Wars; while you're camped out for tickets, I'll be in the sci-fi section of my local independent bookstore.

Clinch-22

The Blue Jays have clinched a playoff spot.  This will be the first time they've been in the post season since their last World Series win in 1993 How long ago was 1993?

Here’s what happened:

• Czechoslovakia broke up
• Deep Space Nine debuted (Next Generation was in season six)
• Bill Clinton was inaugurated
• Brian Mulroney is succeeded by Kim Campbell, who later lost the election to Jean Chretien
• The first Pentium chips went on sale
• R.A. Dickey was drafted
• Magic: The Gathering first goes on sale
• The Maastricht Treaty establishes the European Union
• Doom is released
• LaTroy Hawkins completes his second season in the minors
• NAFTA passes
• The original Jurassic Park was released
• Trainspotting and The Virgin Suicides were released.  The books, not the movies.

People born in 1993:

• Anthony Davis
• Ryan Nugent-Hopkins
• Miranda Cosgrove
• Ariana Grande
• Meghan Trainor
• 60% of One Direction's original line-up

Not yet born:

• Roberto Osuna

Not yet built:

• Two-thirds of current Major League ballparks, including Turner Field in Atlanta, whose replacement is already under construction.

50-50 Relationships

There's been ads on TV for a dating site aimed at older people, called OurTime.  I was worried at first that I might be old enough for the service. The people on the ad all looked a little older than me, but then I remembered that people always see themselves as younger than they are, so they must be the same age as me.

But no reason to worry: it turns out they aim at 50+.  So I can continue to think of myself as young, while I strike out on mainstream dating sites.

I was also worried about how these people were talking about it:

• It's nice to be on a site where gentlemen are looking for someone my age.  Of course, referring to them as "men" or "guys" might help.
• You're matched with someone with the same likes and values.  Is there really a big cultural gap at age 50? Sure, there's a declining value placed on alcohol, but that happens fairly early in adulthood. On most issues, young people make more sense to me.
• I feel like I'm back in high school.  That was the real headscratcher.  Do they know how few people really liked high school?  Or did it occur to them that being lonely in adulthood may correlate with not doing well socially in high school. They then show a good-looking well-groomed man say that he got a "flirt" within minutes of joining, thus confirming that it is, in fact, just like high school. 

So it's a relief to know that I don't have to worry about the shortcomings of mature dating sites for a few more years, by which time I'm sure they will have fixed everything.

Driving Into The Light

Opel, the German car company, is working on a new feature where a car's headlights will point wherever the driver is looking.  That is, a small camera in the interior tracks the driver's eyes, and then turns the headlights to point in the same direction, lighting whatever the driver is looking at.  Is it just me, or is that an awful lot of work for little benefit?

I am, of course, trying not to be one of those people who thinks that everything in the world was just perfect at the time of his birth, and anything new is unnecessary.  "If headlights that pointed forward were good enough for my parents and grandparents, then they're good enough for anyone."  But still, I think there's a threshold before innovations become worth it.

I first started thinking about it when appliance makers started promoting the idea of the Internet-connected refrigerator. That's a concept that is still waiting to take off, even though it was proposed years ago, so I think we can safely say that it was an idea we weren't ready for.

I figured that you can understand it better if you look at another technology attached to fridges: the light inside. I don't know when they first started putting lights inside fridges, but you can bet that when they did, someone questioned its necessity.  And you can understand why: there was (I'm assuming) a time when a lightbulb in a refrigerator would have been prohibitively expensive, however convenient it is. But today, such a feature probably adds an insignificant amount to the price of the appliance, so why not?

At the time they first added Internet connectivity to fridges, it was still a pretty expensive compared to the price of the rest of the fridge.  Today, you could slap the electronic guts of a tablet on a refrigerator door without adding a lot to the price, so maybe it's ready to become an optional feature, but it's still not at the point of being as ubiquitous as the light.

But eye-following headlights?  If we get to the point where cars are so full of electronics that there's a camera on the driver's face anyway, and lots of computing power to recognize the driver's gaze anyway, then you're at fridge light level, and you might as well aim the lights where the driver is looking.  But for now, it's just something they can put on luxury cars so that people will feel like their high price tag is money well-spent.

Selfie Steam

I stumbled across this article about the mystery of an unknown person who has taken pictures of himself at many photo-booths.

That got my attention for a couple of reasons. First, mysterious-photos-of-unknown-person-discarded-at-photo-booths was a subplot of the movie Amelie. No one involved in the publishing of this article seemed to know this, and thus didn't realise many reading the article would already know the answer.

But what's also interesting is the way they refer to photo-booth photos as "selfies." That just doesn't seem right. Yes, they are photos of one's self, but they were before the age of selfies. That would be like calling telegrams "e-mails" or Oscar Wilde's witticisms as "Tweets."

But I suppose that's what photo-booths are in the eyes of young people today. They would look on them and think that in the old days before mobile phones, people had to use these giant machines to take selfies.

They have a point. These were, in essence, steampunk selfie machines.  The lesson is that you never know how long technologies will stick around, or how they'll look in the long run.  For instance, future generations may look back on the era of broadcast television as a weird prelude to centuries of culture dominated by on-demand video. Things like bulletin boards and classified ads could be seen as crude attempts to move information around in a pre-digital age.  The next time the world changes in a way that's strange to you, remember that it could just be moving in a way that will ultimately make more sense.

Best WWWishes

You may have seen that today was the twenty-fifth birthday of the World Wide Web.  That's quite an anniversary.  And I've been using it for twenty-one of those years.  Wait, that means I've lived longer with the Internet than without.  Wow, I think that makes me one of those digital natives who can't imagine a world without being connected 24/7.

And speaking of old people trying to look comfortable with technology, I've spent all day listening to news readers misstating that the Internet is twenty-five today.  I'd like to write a long diatribe about how incorrect that is, except that, well, I can't be bothered.  I tired of correcting people's misconceptions about the Internet around the seventh of my years on the web.  And it would kind of defeat the purpose of the web.  Instead I'll just link to someone else's explanation of what the difference is.  I'll just add that the way technology is developing, some people are saying that the web is dead.  I don't really buy it: a universal flexible way of presenting information is too useful to disappear just because there's an app for everything.

Ack! Knee!

I've heard older people make this complaint before, and now I have to admit I'm experiencing it too. It's the overlap between young-people health problems and old-people health problems.  One would think that there would be some interval in between when your body finally works properly and you can focus your worry on finding jobs and relationships.

But no, it doesn't work that way.  My knee has started hurting. I don't participate in any sports, so unless my St. Louis Rams fandom has caused Sam Bradford sympathy pain, I can only blame it on the suddenly cold and wet weather.  It doesn't get any older than joint pain and weather-predicting pain.

And yet, at the same time I'm experiencing that, I have acne. It still happens from time to time.  Most recently it became notable because of the location: on my nose, approximately one drinking glass width above my lips.  But finally I can say, at least it will distract people from my limp.

Knees Of Fire

I was relatively late in going from a desktop computer to a laptop.  So even as the world moves on to tablets and smartphones, I'm still getting used to the laptop.

For one thing, the heat this thing generates is really noticeable this time of year.  It takes away from my heating needs in winter, but if you actually want to use it on a lap, it can get uncomfortable this time of year.  I notice that fashionable lengths for shorts have increased with the popularity of laptops.  Coincidence?

And then there is the seating position.  If you're going to sit with it on your lap, you're limited to sitting there, legs together, facing forward.  No crossing the legs or slouching.  At least we'll be promoting a generation of good posture.  Though one of these days I'm going to dislocate my thumb reaching for the touchpad.

So how will tablets affect us?  Aside from a return to 70's short shorts, we'll be able to tolerate much more heat in our fingers.  And they'll discover a new form of wrist injury caused by trying to reach for the middle keys of the virtual keyboard without dropping the tablet.  Maybe they'll name that after me.

Hasta La (Alta) Vista

As you may have seen on the net or on the last page of the business section, Yahoo! is shutting down some of their less-popular services, one of which is the Alta Vista search engine.  Yes kids, there was a time before Google, and in that time there were a number of competing search engines, and Alta Vista was one of the most popular.

Alta Vista was started by Digital Equipment to show of some of their new technology.  Back then, Digital was still a major player in the computer biz, while Yahoo was a brash new upstart.  So at the time I worried that this was another example of an established company throwing money at a project to run a new competitor out of business (this was around the same time Microsoft was going after Netscape) and it seemed there was no hope for new tech firms.

With hindsight, all parts of that worry seem quite silly.  Yahoo stayed in in business, Digital faded away, Yahoo and Alta Vista were both eclipsed by an even younger contender, and Microsoft found they couldn't muscle every contender out of business.  So let that be a lesson on how the mighty fall, and how fast they fall in technology.

And if you're wondering about other search engines...

• Lycos - still around; bonus marks for having a link to Tripod
• Excite - still going, though the site throws a hissyfit if you don't have cookies enabled.
• Webcrawler - still there
• Hotbot - still there, with a robot character based on the original logo
• Infoseek - just sends you to Disney's go.com

Midlife Crisis

Pretty much the only place I listen to the radio is in the car.  Lately the station I've listened to the most is CJIQ, the station on Conestoga College.  You might think I'd be intimidated by the young people's music.  But actually, these kids really like their heavy metal. So it's not that different from my own high school experience.  And now that Black Sabbath has a new album out, I have the odd experience of hearing people twenty years younger than me tell me about music made by people twenty years older than me.

I also get the experience of looking at music with a new context.  During the first wave of 60's nostalgia in the 80's, I remember my parents struggling to explain to me why they found it odd to see Herman's Hermits playing on the same bill as The Who.  Well, now I understand where they were coming from.  Today I heard them play Faith No More's "Epic," followed by Linkin Park's "Faint."

At first, that shocked me.  First, you have a song from my high school days, by an innovative and influential band with a cult following.  Then you've got a song from almost a decade later, from a massively popular band in the leading style of the day.

But when you look at it from the student-DJ's perspective, free of the context, it makes sense.  You see that it's two songs mixing hard rock with hip hop, also incorporating some classical keyboards.  So now I'll just have to wait a few more years for their inevitable joint concert tour.

Generation One-After-That

I've learned that there are some things in life that never change. One of them is Pepsi.  Every generation they try to position themselves as the edgy soft drink, and they always do it by aligning themselves with pop stars that are already household names.

Take this new Beyonce ad.  Yes, I know it's been on for a few weeks; but given how long they'll be playing an ad that expensive, it's still near the beginning of its lifetime.

Really, I don't think the ad works.  And not just because of the blank stare she gives that's supposed to convey surprise at seeing past versions of herself in the mirror.  It's supposed to be some great act of personal courage to embrace these spectres of her past career.  But they don't really seem that far in the past.  Yes, I know, I'm not their target market, and to the people that ad is aimed at - young people who still find Beyonce edgy - something from a couple of years ago seems ancient. 

But in today's post-Madonna pop world, a constantly morphing look is pretty much the minimum for a female pop star.  I mean, they are expected to change their look several times in a concert, never mind a career.  So embracing your look of three wardrobe changes ago doesn't mean much.  Now if Alanis Morrisette had done an ad like this circa 1995, that would have been impressive.

Still Afraid of the Dark

I have an old TV.  Yes, the heavy-as-hell, not-completely-flat kind.  It's held up pretty well, but the one problem is that the picture is getting rather dark.  I find that's not a big problem when it comes to watching TV - it's pretty rare that the plot depends on the viewer noticing one detail in an unlit room.

Where it does become a problem is in video games.  That's where you might miss something important in the dark.  You never know what baddies may be waiting for you in that pitch black hallway, so stick to the brighter rooms.  In racing games I've learned to keep to the lighter side of the street.  Or just remember where the guardrails are hidden.

All of this reminds me of the computer game Zork, in which you couldn't stay in any dark room for more than one turn, or you'd be eaten by a creature called a Grue.  Thirty years and countless technological innovations later, and I'm still trying to avoid virtual darkness.

So that's what an esoteric geek I am.  The situation didn't remind me of that one Vin Diesel movie.  It didn't even remind me of that Doctor Who episode with the carnivorous microbes in the shadows.  No, it reminded me of a text adventure written in the seventies.  Consider that the next time you wonder if you've become nerdy because you saw The Avengers .