Horoscopes

Horoscopes are fascinating. Not for the advise they give, it's all vague meaningless waffle. But they something fascinating and bizarre about this culture. We produce something nobody takes seriously, for no readily apparent reason. What is their appeal? Do some people secretly believe their horoscope? Do some people just like to see them and feel superior to such hypothetical persons? Is it just a tradition so firmly ingrained we just don't question why we do it any more, like birds flying south for the winter? Will we ever move past them? Why do we create pointless things? I suppose there's no answer to these questions, but it's interesting how bizarre a lot of ordinary things are.

Xbox is broken

My Xbox 360 has been broken for several weeks. When we tried to print a label to ship it there was an error with the system and we couldn't get one to print. Mom called the company but they didn't help much. Later it worked but there was something wrong with the label, so we would have had to pay 15$ to ship it. Mom decided that she wasn't going to pay when Microsoft had already messed up previously. She called Microsoft again, and once again they were unhelpful. At this point my mom lost her patience and asked the woman on the other line if she would like " to hear her smash the Xbox with a sledgehammer" and threatened to put a sign on her lawn reporting how poor Xbox service was. I asked her if being shortchanged 15$ was really worth the anger she had worked up. She said that it wasn't the 15$ but "a matter of principle" I wanted to ask her how destroying something worth 250$ that had given me countless hours of enjoyment, to get back at someone who probably couldn't care less, because they took up a lot of her time and shortchanged her 15$ was principled. But I didn't. When she's angry trying to reason with my mother is like trying to give a back rub to a porcupine.

Poetry

Two poems I wrote, nothing outstanding, but I think they are worth posting.


"Sometimes I manage to forget that I am lonely
but then I forget to not remember
and then I remember why I forgot"



"The judge was the prisoner,
So as punishment
he locked himself,
in his own head,
almost drowning in sour memory,
and threw away the key."

Omegle

I really like Omegle. It's a very simple website really, and it has a big problem with trolls, but for all that it's still the best place to have a conversation with someone who you may have very little in common with. That's something we really don't do much. Most people we talk to and socialise with live in the same area, are the same age, have a similar lifestyle, have similar social economic standing, belong to the same cultural back round, ect. Omegle gives an opportunity to talk with those who may be very different, and whom we would not have an opportunity to meet otherwise. President Obama says "what holds us together is stronger than what pulls us apart" and that's probably true, but it's worth remembering that what hold us apart is what makes other people interesting.

Well I've created a Blog

Let's see how this goes, hopefully I have enough to say to justify this blog. I guess for my first post I'll recite a little rant, I had earlier about internet newspeak.

I just hate talking in internet shorthand, It feels wrong to talk in a way that really has no purpose other than to be exclusionary to anyone other than the primarily, Caucasian, upper class, American, people who created most of that newspeak language. It's obnoxious, elitist, and most significantly of all, makes us all sound much more similar, masking our individuality by predestining what terms we would use to describe things. I'd like to think I have enough intellect to not need linguistic crutches to communicate.

Not a bad start.