Part 1: A Modest Proposal Arguing For A YouTube Genocide...

Well much the the disappointment of everyone - I'm sure, I've opted to place my "Heartfelt & Meaningful, Discussions With Siri" on the back burner since I cannot seem to figure out how in the hell to take screenshots of Siri's responses with multiple lines.  Every website I've seen shows that Siri's not a one-liner, but for me, that's all she's worth.  So apologies to all of you three people that were expecting to see what happens between Siri and I behind closed doors, or in my car, or where ever I might feel it okay to bark orders at a cellphone.  As I said before I have to place that on the back burner.  Speaking of stoves, ovens, or other things that are capable of burning things, on to the newest thing on my mind - it's a burning question really:

Should there be a YouTube Genocide?

Now I know that the word 'Genocide' carries some baggage with it; and unless used in strictly historical context, it's a term that must be exercised with the utmost discretion unless you're in trusted company that has a sense of dark humor on a level equivalent to yours, or if said company just knows that you are the type of person to say that.  But really it's the only word that describes my feelings as to the pollution that now lurks on YouTube.  Nine times out of Ten, when I search for something on YouTube I end up with either irrelevant garbage, or a video whose title is spot on but it's just a video montage or slideshow with some shitty music dubbed over it.  Music that I don't want to hear anyway, in an any situation.  I blame part of this on the now owner of YouTube - Google, Inc.

One thing you should know is that I'm very pro-business, except when it comes to these internet companies that I hear of providing a semi-competent service that gets bought for hundreds of millions of dollars just so some greater internet entity can then pervert the originally semi-competent service into an almost-sort-of-occasionally-competent service that now funnels ads directly into my eyeballs like those horrific videos driven into Malcolm McDowell's head in the film "A Clockwork Orange" - run-on sentence?  YES.  I just can't wait for all the Instagram use to plummet now that it's been bought out by the Man, and Hipsters turn the cold shoulder on it so as to shun it's new mainstream identity.  What I'm getting at with this rant about the internet business strategy of 'Conquer and Devour' seems to always have the ending outcome of the victor driving their hand Mortal Kombat style into the brain stems of their vanquished foes only to convert them in to ventriloquist puppets telling everyone to 'buy Tide!' or, switch to AT&T!, or 'Clog Your Arteries with KFC During the SuperBowl!'  The point of this whole diversion is that YouTube is clogged to the point where unless you know of the exact title of the video that you think exists, you'll end up with a video listing that spans probably 5 years of shitty content with titles that only have one word related to your search, but all the advertisements are fucking spot on.  Sigh - I'll stop now and get back to my point.

My point is that while the internet is the penultimate (first use of that word EVER!) of human knowledge, thoughts, and ultimately a barometer of our collective consciousness, it seems to be turning more and more into a wasteland of vacant thoughts where everyone shares everything that even becomes a thought in their head.  Could you imaging for a second if The Internet got to such a depraved point where people could upload pictures of their own bowel movements for others to observe and the place ratings on??  Oh, wait - we're already there:  RateMyPoo.com

It's not just YouTube, it's the whole Internet, but YouTube is a prime example for what I'm getting at.  Have you ever woken up in the morning only to scratch your head in absolute perplexity about the dreams you had during the night?  I do, and it feels the same way as when I try to do either a Google search or a YouTube search.  Let's explore...  I already regret this.

As you may know, I like guns and I enjoy The Second Amendment, so let's try a search about something, shall we?  Hmm, among things on my wish list is to get my lil' mitts on a Remington 700 Sniper Rifle, because let's face it - if Zombies only die from head shots, what better way to deliver the pain from afar?  Here goes:



Now this is a very specific search, I know the Make, Model, and Modifications that I'm looking for.  Let's see what I get:

 
Now if I were to give each of these links the ol' Spanish Inquisition with a fine toothed comb, I might find a few items irrelevance, those are mainly in blogs and message boards, but they at least contain somewhere within a story about what I was looking for. A search engine shines when you tell it exactly what you're seeking among it's endless shelves of content, but the greatest Sin of Search is when people improperly tag content.  Let's try that same subject search, but this time from an image perspective.

My God... page after beautiful page of long range firepower; for those of you who appreciate things of this nature I'll attach the link so you can enjoy a lineup of rifles so awesome they could change a government: Remington 700's Lot's of them.

Now that was pretty basic, I gave a specific name and model and I got just what I wanted; but more often than not we don't know the exact title of the content for which we search, in these moments we find gibberish, in these moments we find other things:

Here's the Image Search question:

And here's what I got:

Here is where the precision begins to unravel, I asked for Remington and I got everything from the Man, knives, shavers, rifles, shotguns, handguns, ammunition, and people using Remington products.  I essentially got what I asked for, but I asked for a specific thing, Remington is a brand focused on a certain number of things, so it's obvious that I'm not going to get a full load of shit; but let's take this to YouTube and see what happens...

Now this is a desperate attempt at letting you see what I see, but the suggestions and recommendations are absurd.  Here's the link: YouTube Results

I feel like I'm losing some of you all now so I'll add this case and point article:
8 Least Necessary YouTube Tributes

This is a critique of the shit that's on YouTube in case you thought otherwise; now I understand that the value of content can only be determined by the audience for which it was made, but tribute YouTube videos are as offensive to me on a level equivalent to you seeing me go into a video store and take all the copies "Schindler's List" and put them in the comedy section.  Also, what's with those 'Still Shot with Muzac' videos that people put on YouTube, What The Fuck?  PEOPLE!!  It's a video sharing sight!  Not a PowerPoint Slideshow Sharing Sight!  Christ on Crutches what the Hell?!  The State of the Internet is becoming closer and closer to a digital embodiment of Mike Judge's "Idiocracy" than anyone ever thought, because there's no barrier to entry.  I suppose the term 'viral' is appropriate because the effects of Rebecca Black's "Friday" or that Korean Guy's "Gangnam Style" are just that.  I shouldn't be surprised though, being a Gen X child of the '80's I regularly watched America's Funniest Home Videos with Bob Saget.  I'm not criticizing Mr. Saget, but I'm condemning his audiences.  Those of you that know what I'm speaking of can hopefully recall something equivalent to the rage I felt every Sunday evening when a shitty video about a baby or a toddler doing something cute would devastate a video about a guy juggling six flaming bottles of Bacardi 151 on a skateboard only to fuck up and drop three and the subsequent fire results in the torching of a homeless shelter full of hippies on trust funds.  

Let's actually get to the shit on YouTube that I'm complaining about shall we?  My issue with the useless shit on YouTube is that I'm pretty sure that the people posting their works probably opted to have every single word in their video marked so that a search engine will catch it and display it in your search results.  At the same time I hate all those content contributors for their shitty submissions that both 1) waste space on the internet; 2) gain views because people accidentally clicked on them; 3) became popular because of accidental clicks and then turned into... 4) shitty videos that turn up in my Facebook feed.

Let's see what I get from a search on "Dexter":
I did a YouTube search on Dexter and got a bunch of clips in no particular order, amongst them are a few clips of video interviews with Jennifer Carpenter who plays Dexter's sister on the show.  I'll post that because I think that's gonna be the only role she can ever do, I can delve more into how I want my actors but I think I need to stick to the point on this, here's the search results on Dexter:

And just for fun I'm adding the Jennifer carpenter interview that show's she's the same in real life...
Jennifer Carpenter = Deb Morgan. ALWAYS

This is a really hard blog post to write by the way...  I thought I was gonna rail through some shitty YouTube posts but that was hours ago....  I suppose it's because of my desire to have people know what I'm talking about by writing my thoughts. 

That said I'm using the remainder of my Sunday so as to serve my own purposes.  A sequel will follow. but know this:

I am a proponent of a YouTube Content Cleanse with Extreme Prejudice.

Now go log some frags Nerds!

More Stuff that I think About When I Should Be Thinking About Chicken...

One thing I've never quiet managed to understand is popular culture.  I just don't understand how it ticks. Somehow, someway, we collectively attach to things and they take on a life and pretense of their own. They rise to assume meanings that transcend that of their original intent and audience.  I suppose I just described internet memes, but I would think that this goes even further than just LoL Cats and their cheezebergers; you can even see it take root in such things as television, books, celebrities, whatever.  Although ultimately I have to say that the internet is the birthplace of so much of our culture these days that I guess it's only fair to attribute the birth of all memes to the world wide web.  Which then begs the question of who's populating the web with all this amazing content that eventually becomes annoying to the point of inciting ire on message boards and nothing more than meaningless clutter on your Facebook page?  Could this also be a realm built by nerds and then appropriated by the masses?  Or is it a collection of people from many different walks of life with way too much time on their hands?

This post is a sampling of the things that I think about while on the way to and from work.  Living near and working in San Francisco, I take the regional mass transit of choice for the area, which is of course the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART). This reveals why Fresno, CA will never be a major metropolitan region because, lets face it, who's gonna ride FART to work?  Which leads me to the next thought: the conversation of commute.  Person 1: "How do you get to work?"  Person 2: "Oh, I take FART".  This of course leads me to the question about the difference between 'fart' and 'shit'.  When you think about it, 'fart' is both a noun and a verb.  The same goes for 'shit' although not as much as 'fart'.  For some reason 'shit' must be taken in most cases.  "I have to take a shit", "I won't take your shit", and there's always the pessimistic question of charity "Who gives a shit?”  For some reason 'shit' has a give and take element surrounding it, while 'fart' is its own thing.  "Did you fart?”  “Who farted?”  Yet 'shit' is a medium of exchange, but in a negative sense, imagine for a moment:  Money that you don't want...  That would certainly change the banking industry.

Back to the give and take. Why don't we leave shits instead of take them?  Frankly, I figure the only places on Earth where the actual taking of shits occurs are Germany and Japan--mainly Japan.  And I'm pretty sure they'd turn that into some Japanime super hero whose ability is to clear ones colon by telekinesis, which would be a rather interesting power when you really think about it.  You could alter a person's waistline in an instant: Forget that Oprah Winfrey endorsed "Master-Cleanse" program, it's all about "Mister PoopGone" from now on.

Shits and farts, fits and starts; this is how I think. Where was I?  Oh yeah, memes.  My current favorite at the moment is Grumpy Cat. It is a meme that is the distilled nature of my personality but in the form of a cat; and cats, I recently learned, kill on a level that put both Hitler and Communism in general to shame.  But it's not all cats and cheezebergers out there--look around...  The religious philosopher Houston Smith once said:  "If we take the world's enduring religions at their best, we discover the distilled wisdom of the human race."  The same goes for the ’ol Interwebs, except that it's more geared toward being a reflection of our collective consciousness. Where do you think the Web Bot Project gets its ideas?  Come to think of it, I need to figure how to use that for sports betting. I like to think that I willed the San Francisco 49er's to lose today's Super Bowl. Then again it was a 50/50 outcome, but it really makes you think about the concept of a universe with infinite possibilities.

I know I’m just rambling into a wall at this point, but this is just how I think.  My whole train of thought is nothing but a stream of debris flowing aimlessly like all that junk you saw on the TV footage about the 2011 Japanese Tsunami footage [Yeah, I went there.] and I'm sure that there's some underlying message behind this but I'm thinking about steak at the moment.  I figure it's important for the audience to get acquainted with my style as this is the madness that will come tumbling from out of my noggin, so strap in kids.  Daddy's gonna rock this minivan way past 88 miles an hour and jack that Flux Capacitor to a level that will blow your minds....

Sandwiches made of cookies paired with chicken soup and armed Koalas.

As of late it seems as though our great cultural struggle is a matter of our own identity as individuals.  As time goes forward humanity has consistently divided itself into smaller and smaller subsets; first it was species, Cro-Magnons vs Neanderthals; then race (I'll forgo any specific example for fear of derailing the theme of my blog), then tribes, then nations, states, cities neighborhoods, ideas, sexual preference, etcetera, etcetera, ad nauseaum, ad infinitum.  My point is that humanity has consistently and constantly divided itself throughout its existence, but where can it end?  Everything breaks down to a base level ultimately; just like the Greek philosopher Democritus posited, if you cut a loaf of bread into smaller and smaller pieces, you will eventually in time encounter a piece that will be uncuttable and the ultimate base unit of 'breadness', thus the birth of the idea of the atom, the fundamental building block of all things.  Now for those of you who want to bring up quarks and string theory and then call me stupid, I humbly bask in the radiant light of your intellectual superiority.  So now that's out of the way, please go back to being smarter than I am and dedicate all you efforts toward building a Time Machine, I promise you that I will be the first in line to buy one so I can travel back in time so as to locate your pregnant mother and deliver a swift and righteous kick to her stomach so as to eradicate your existence.  An for anyone even thinks to bring up the whole loop of time idea and that my eliminating the creator of the time machine would prevent me from ever traveling back in time, you're missing the point: Which is "Please Shut Up and Kill Yourself".

Now I know that my ramblings sound like that of a mental patient after five belts of Scotch, but stay with me you little pumpkins and eventually my patchwork quilt of Shakespearean prose will make sense and you will understand the perspective from which I rant.  Where was I?  I'm pretty sure I have a point to make....

Oh Yes!! (many a lady has thought that of me by the way); the point that I was trying to make before my crazy Norman Bates tirade was that we are a culture that has consistently divided itself and it seems that we've finally arrived at a point where certain sub groups have become desirable and the existing members have launched their own internal witch hunt to keep the group pure, clean, and devoid of the influence of anyone who might stray from the established doctrine.  Case in point - Nerds; somehow a group that was once pariah has become prime social real estate and a position that was once equivalent to exile has now become a gated community reserved only for those who have paid their way.  But as Hollywood has taught us (and yes I did just begin a sentence with the word 'but', but that was the only way possible), even a fool with the right arsenal can vault the fences and plant their flag in lands once unattainable; in other words we now live in an age where someone who has no characteristics of Nerdness can suddenly don on some thick framed glasses, or a button up shirt, play video games, and God forbid.... engage in some sultry cosplay action and BAM! they're a nerd.  

This site is a collaborative effort between myself (obviously) and my friend Vindi Birch to discuss, explore, and discover, word of Nerdish things.  The reason for this is that I identify myself as pretty nerdy, but my counterpart Vindi is far more into all things Nerd and thus has figuratively shown up many a time outside my residence in the middle of the night with a torch, a hangman's noose, and the ominous message of "get the fuck out of Nerd-Town".  Well maybe not to that extent, but the point is that I think I'm a nerd, and she doesn't.  So I asked the question "What makes a nerd?"  And that, you little muffins, is what this is all about, because I have no goddamn idea as to what makes a nerd a nerd.  Vindi, has already identified three traits, but each one can be countered, just like in swordplay for every thrust there is a parry, and thus the invincible warrior is vulnerable for there is a chink (not being racist) in every suit of armor.

Unlike my pal Vindi, I cannot lay out an itemized  grocery list of nerd traits.  I really don't fit into any of the traditional Nerd traits, but I'm pretty sure nobody really fits them to a T - and where did that phrase come from?  Yet the question is still deafening: "What makes you a Nerd?"  These days, you can adopt a few accessories, or proclaim an interest in something and you've got a guest pass into Nerdville, and the residents of Nerville will be quick to enact proceedings to have you removed.  I know for a fact that if I said "I'm a nerd" in the presence of another friend, I would suffer a napalm-like barrage of verbal nerd fury, which would only to be countered with a quick punch to the throat which is a very non-nerd response.  That being said however, I can still address Vindi's points from my own perspective; wow, after all that rant I finally get to talking about the stuff this site is all about.  Talk about an intro....

And now I shall address Vindi's points from the position of Shelby's Couch of Awesomeness:

1) Intellect - Confucious says "To know that you do not know is the best", but a reliance upon intelligence alone is arrogance on a level without equivalent.  You can be smart, but without the combination of intelligence and philosophy is a crime capable of mechanized horror beyond measure.  I was never really good in school, I was essentially average, but like Teddy Rooselvelt said "The C students rule the world" and that guy was a badass.  Still, smarts is a valid trait of being a nerd, much like glasses for some reason...  I would argue that smarts became a trait of Nerdness due mainly to the fact that those who indulge in intellectual pursuits tend to rely upon those in order to compensate for other flaws, but also a tendency to glom onto things that one is passionate about.  Thus I agree with Vindi.

2) Physical Appearance - This one pisses me off.  It basically confines people to certain groups solely based on what they look like, granted, I will give you that I don't think Ann Hathaway is a nerd because she likes Scrabble or Natalie Portman is a nerd because she went to Harvard, or that cosplay girls are not nerds just because they are smoking hot - Jessica Nigri, Francesca Dani, I'm talking to you, you're nerds and you're both perfect in every way.....   The same goes for you Kari Byron (I can't believe she's that hot AND 38).  Where was I?  Yes, appearance as a trait of nerdness, I suppose my resistance to this originates from my hatred of Hipsters, case and point, I can't wear plaid anymore because of hipsters.  Anyway...  As your mother taught you, "Don't judge a book by it's cover".  Anyway I could beat this dead horse some more but I've got laundry to do and another point to address.

3) Fanboy Cutlure/Obsession/Nerd Cred - I would say that this is the ultimate mark of a nerd, but where is the boundary of that obsession?  I for one, am a nerd about gun stuff to a degree, I also love theoretical physics while sporting a healthy hatred for math.  I just love science stuff from a recreational perspective, not because it makes awesome fodder for drunk/stoner talk but it gives you perspective on the world we live in.  I'm a fan of many things that most Nerds would say "that's not Nerd", and yet again, the question of "what is a nerd?" rises again.  For example a ton of book nerds are fans of writers like Hemingway, Chuck Pahlaniuk, Jack Kerouac (who totally looks like Will Arrnet), J.D. Sallinger, Ayn Rand, and I for one love Tom Robbins and NONE of those guys fit the bill for 'Nerd'.  

All of the above ramblings and nonsensical arrangements of letters to form otherwise incoherent sentences that make up ideas that don't make any sense whatsoever are focused on one central theme.

So I ask you all:  "What the fuck is a Nerd?"

Staring into the fridge, just looking at stuff.

Greetings!  Letters arranged into a format that convey sentient thoughts and ideas will be appearing in due time.