Slack o' Rama

Issue 3: August 10, 2005

Today's Theme: Anti-Establishment

Also Known as "Damn the Man"

Today's post has a rough theme to start out with that really almost borders on a rant. Don't worry though I still will be telling it mostly with other people's words by linking them.

First off let me tell you what spawns this torrent of links about the suckitude of conformity. I have two jobs. One job is great. I teach Inventor at a Vocational college. The pay is awesome, but the hours and the stability are not. You see I work in the business division, and if there aren't any businesses interested in learning the software I can teach at any given time I am out of luck. Then on a good week I might be paid for 8 hours, but usually close to 4-6. Then I have a second job. Pay sucks. It's retail. Nearly every day day I come home I feel like some small piece of me didn't make it out alive. So what the hell makes me keep my life-sucking crap job?

Most likely fear of instability. Of course when you embrace stability, you end up living a life of averages. True you likely won't be dirt poor, but your chances of being wealthy are pretty slim also. In fact if you have the drive and the guts playing outside the establishment can be pretty damn nice. Paul Grahamm is the guy that worte that article and he has a few others that are pertinent to the discussion as well. They discuss the the intelligent among us and what makes them different. Both of those essays are pretty focused on programmers and this one is even more so, but they are worth reading anyway because they make some great points. After you have read those you may start asking whether intelligent people are sane. Good Question - Plausible Answers Here.

For those of you that would like some laughs with your counter-culture, be sure to check out some Bill Hick's stuff. In case you are one of the people that think that his accusations of the American people being brain washed by main stream media are paranoid and far-fetched, I direct your attention to one of the more obvous examples from our recent history.

Of course the advent of mass technology that continues to get both more powerful and smaller every year has made certain forms of rebellion easier than they once were. The first thing people think of when you mention anti-authority technology is of course the wonderful MP3. Okay people wake up! MP3s are old news. Napster is long dead and replaced with ever more advanced and genuinly useful technology. There is a point where I stop caring how small the players get, or how large the storage capacity is. I mean come on 100GB of MP3s whee! Even with the ability to play videos and store pictures I can't get too excited about that. Apparently I'm not the only one that thinks that portable music players need new features.

No, storage capacity and saving things you aren't supposed to have is very drole. Really, it has been being done ever since the first blank cassette tape was sold. It is just more efficient now. The reason it is more efficient is where the real revolution begins. It is not the large portable HDDs that make copyright tyrrants scared, it is the network that distributes them. Widespread interfacing networks make for many, many fun possibilities.

Why hack hardware after all when you can be your own network instead. Actually, no. Even better, hack the air itself. Even if you don't rebel you can be a mindless consumer instead and get something that can remind you of your shallow materialism.

These are random crazy things I came across while putting together this article, but I couldn't fit them anywhere so here you go:

And now... GAMES

Kill the Zombies!

And now for something a little less visceral.

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PSSST! check out this link if you haven't already.