Rhinocrisy

This song perfectly captures my current mood. In the unlikely case that you’ve never heard it before, I beseech you: if you start, you must keep listening till the halfway point.

I went to drop off my dissertation with the registrar today, the last possible minute finally having arrived. It’s strange hearing the congratulations of strangers. I think to myself that they are praising me out of ignorance, because if they knew what little I have actually done, they would know I didn’t deserve it. This is the same doubt that has haunted me my whole life. My path has simply been navigating a maze that someone else built – there was a solution and a goal at the end that was already set out for me. It only required that I walk to the end. The truly intrepid, the brave and praiseworthy, cut their way through the maze and blaze their own trail, exploring the wide, wild country outside its walls. Now, what do I know about setting my own goals? The ones I imagine are far away, in the most untamed corner of the wilderness. And here I am, unknowing, feeling my lack. Can I navigate that wilderness, or will I be lost in the thicket, trapped by endless rows of snarls and thorns?

Sometimes I lose patience with people assuming what my next course will be – employment, marriage, stability. Should I continue to play my life out by rote? Can others truly bear to live their entire lives that way? Is it possible to never leave the boundaries of the maze, and to follow its familiar, monotonous walls back and forth in perpetuity? Other times I fear their assumption is correct. Only a fool ventures off into the unknown in pursuit of fabled treasures – the sort of romantic idiot who likens life to a fantastic voyage.

This is not how I imagined adulthood – learning to accept that you are a bug, and dreams are false, and heroes do not exist (or at least: you will never be one).

I am riding my bike from the bookbindery, to deliver my two copies of the document, and these dark thoughts cast a veil over the sunlit day. I lift my head to shake it away, to catch a glimpse of blue sky. A light rain strikes my face, just a kiss of descending mist. I’m gladdened by this bit of fairy magic. I look around me for the inevitable rainbow, but it cannot be seen. Its arch descends from directly above me. I am the pot of gold.

Fuck Negroponte, man. My roomie has an OLPC XO. I played with it a bit, recently. It’s a beautiful device. The applications are ingenious, simple, and extremely powerful. They’re the kind of thing that anyone could enjoy using. The few apps I played with seemed designed for growth – you can start off merely fooling around, but if you want to go further, the sky’s the limit. What’s more important is that the XO was FREE. Of course, it cost $150, but it was free in the important sense of that word – free like air and water, free like sunshine and mother’s milk. Now, it’s another brick in the wall. Well, can’t have those emerging markets polluted with non-Microsoft products, I suppose.

graft@deneb:/usr/src/linux-source-2.6.15$ grep -r shit * | wc -l
103
graft@deneb:/usr/src/linux-source-2.6.15$ grep -r fuck * | wc -l
51

I highly recommend this article by Michael Klare on the subject of America’s oil dependence and its effect on our superpower status. The best summary of it is in this calculation:
19 Mbbl/day * $120/bbl * 365 days/year * 0.65 = $540 billion per year spent on oil imports. That’s about on par with the Pentagon’s budget and about 4% of US GDP.

(Via ATR)

Friends, we have in the past expressed concern that our readership might have an overdeveloped sense of morality, and so may be trampled and bruised by the herd in the mad dash towards the pinnacle of crapulence. For your protection, therefore, we present this occasional series on how you, kind reader, may become less kind and more cruel, and thus hopefully further your success.

There are few people as vulnerable and impressionable in this world as children, and as we suggested in previous editions of our Guide to Being Evil, one of the surest paths to unadulterated evil is by exploiting that weakness. As I like to say, there is no sound sweeter than the piteous shrieks of the innocent.

However, it is vital that, in committing your evil deeds, you don’t make too much work for yourself. Not because sloth is an exceptional evil by itself (it’s only a second-rate evil), but because mass productivity is what’s really required to achieve legendary status as a demonic fiend. We’d all like to be able to disembowel and consume the entrails of half a million small toddlers, but who has that kind of time?^* Instead, we can save ourselves considerable effort by piggy-backing on the general tide of evil washing over society.

As a case study, we present the website Miss Bimbo, a “virtual fashion game” created by one Nicolas Jacquart, an evil genius capable of inducing such a towering hatred that you, personally, would relish the act of skewering his body with a couple of meat-hooks. The site is directed at an extremely vulnerable segment of the population: young, pre-teen girls, and its goal may be neatly summed up by the tag: “Are you ready to become Queen of the Bimbos !?!” Herein, the young female may pilot a virtual bimbo, and by controlling her weight, appearance, and social status, may accrue “bimbo dollars” and “bimbo cred”, until she (hopefully) attains the desired rank of ruling monarch of a very sad kingdom.

Now, hold your skepticism. You may, at first, be disinclined to believe that such a website is not a parody, or that it actually has managed to attract half a million young, impressionable girls and inculcated in them a desire to become a vapid, clownish caricature of a human being. This is because you do not have the necessary propensity towards evil! Your failure to imagine such a thing is precisely what we are attempting to correct via this series. Take notes, and learn.

I created a test account to explore the Miss Bimbo virtual world (bimbo nickname: Jenghis Khan). At this beginning stage my goals are modest: secure an apartment, get a job, and “Change your drab hairstyle to become a blonde with cool pigtails!” However, if I were to persevere, I would be able to purchase lingerie, a makeover, a nice tan, and maybe (for the benefit of thousands of points of “Bimbo Attitude”) some plastic surgery: a face lift, or perhaps some breast augmentation surgery! Unfortunately the complaints of outraged parents and health care officials forced M. Jacquart to remove the ability to purchase diet pills for your bimbo, which means that he will no longer be able to directly instruct young girls in how to develop and maintain their eating disorders. However, we can be confident that the remainder of his website will admirably succeed in destroying any sense of self-worth that those girls may have.

Now, take note of what M. Jacquart is doing: his barbarism is hinged on a prototype that is well-familiar within the zeitgeist. Rather than doing the hard work of creating a destructive archetype all by himself and somehow encouraging young girls to adopt it, he has made use of the already-widespread social message that girls need to become as empty-headed and artificial as possible, aspiring only to the acquisition of clothes, money, looks, and social notoriety. Others have already laid the groundwork by creating and maintaining industries devoted to making girls hate their bodies and devalue their minds. Pleasant Nicolas merely provides a conduit for the flow of this filth, directing it more efficiently towards the intended targets. Thus he manages great evil with only slight effort.

We may all learn from his vile example.

^* Not to mention that toddler entrails go straight to the hips.