Beret

“The thing to remember is that nobody cares if you’re doing something by yourself, looking pathetic. 9 out of 10 of them won’t really notice you and 99 out of 100 of the ones who do won’t remember you tomorrow. Life isn’t high school where you see the same people every day. Unless you’re in high school, of course. Then you’re fucked.”

anon

Facebook creepiness sent to me by a friend. They said that in this case, Facebook was checking that a stated minor was actually under 18.

It's fun to laugh at climate change deniers, but then you meet them IRL; and cry.

complete_tool: ...and it's snowed more in the past few years, that's why I don't believe that stuff about global warming.
holier_than_thou: It's actually called climate change, it's been scientifically proven.
complete_tool: No it hasn't.
***holier_than_thou facepalms

Yesterday I listened to Where The Wild Things Are on vinyl from '85.

I hope some hipsters explode with synthetic nostalgia.

An aspiring social media marketer.

friend: do you have a large connection of internet people, by any chance?
me: um, what do you mean by internet people?
friend: people you know online who dont mind the occasial quick spam message =)
friend: and by spam, i mean please help me win a contest by upvoting
me: not those kind of people, sorry

This image presented without comment.

Soybeans in MD, August ‘09

“Another name commonly used for this garment is the “bro”. This appears to be a play on words that draws on its roots in romance languages, where the suffix “a” refers to a feminine object and “o” to a male object. It’s also possible that the nickname “bro” came from the word used to refer to other males in camaraderie (or in reference to one’s brother).”

Male bra - Wikipedia

Progression of Halloween costume ideas

For Halloween I don’t want to be a generic pirate or ghoul, I want to be a bit more meaningful.

I considered being a societal villain. Maybe a CEO with an actual parachute painted gold. But alas, my favorite parachute supplier didn’t have any.

A biking freak in the requisite spandex? A hipster or other pretentious person? Nah, both took too much work; and I really didn’t feel like shaving my legs.

Then my thoughts became obtuse; a dull suit or entirely blank white wardrobe symbolizing America’s lack of creativity. (a crude reflection of how uncreative I was feeling then)

The horrors continued as thoughts of an experimental or concept costume were entertained. Would I create a powerful costume while using only X elements of disguise?

No.

All my lofty ideas were either awful or unattainable. So I regressed.

I might be Cyrano de Bergerac with a 2 foot piece of ornamental grass as a feather; or a wizard whose staff carries a microwaved Beatles CD I found in the street this week.

Or I could just be a ghost; ironically.

Upon reading that Tumblr will soon have an easy backup feature.

me: that makes me so happy, I want to hug Marco right now
sadtomato: sort of like bengold?

Welcome to the wonderful world of firefox, where everything is held together with javascript and hope.

“It should be common and legal to change your name at twenty-one and say, “That wasn’t me. It was a different person. Kind of looks like me but I’ve changed a lot.”

Google CEO Eric Schmidt on handling online identity.

Note: changing your name still wont save you from the google cookie.

Speechless.

langer: A weekend bombshell from Philip Greenspun:

Wall Street banks have had profitable quarters. JPMorgan Chase reported $3.6 billion in profit (more than $1 billion per month). Goldman Sachs was only slightly behind, at $3.2 billion. These profits supposedly came from “trading.” I asked a friend who has worked in the money business how this was possible. “For someone to make money trading, there has to be someone on the other side of every trade who is losing money. Where does each bank find someone who can lose $1 billion every month?”

He explained that “carry trade” would be a more accurate description of what they’re doing. Because of the Collapse of 2008 financial reforms, the big investment banks are able to borrow money from the U.S. government at 0 percent interest. Then they can turn around and buy short-term bonds that pay 2 or 3 percent annual interest. Now they’re making 2 percent on whatever they borrowed. They can use leverage to increase this number, by pledging some of the bonds that they’ve already bought as collateral on additional bonds.

I asked if they were taking any risk in order to earn this return. “If interest rates went up to 20 percent, even though the bonds are short-term, the price of the bond could fall enough to make the trade a money-loser.” (Though since the banks are too big to fail, they would simply be bailed out with additional taxpayer funds.)

What kind of bonds are they buying? Are they investing the money in American business? “No, they are mostly buying Treasuries.” So the money is just being shuffled from one Federal bank account to another, with each Wall Street bank skimming off $1 billion per month for itself? “Pretty much.”

(via Jason Kottke)

“Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrong-doing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.”

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World - Perennial ed. Foreword

I broke a window today.