Real-World DC

make room, bitches

I thought there was nothing left to blog about, but I was most definitely wrong. I found out last week that the Real World was coming to DC into a house on 20th & S. I was moderately excited until I found out where they are hanging out and found that these places overlapped with where I like to hang out: http://dcfab.thefabempire.com/2009/06/22/where-to-catch-an-mtv-real-worlder/

I found the following blogs on the subject:

http://prorealworlddc.blogspot.com/

http://antirealworlddc.blogspot.com/

I am currently looking for names and photographs of each cast member. When I acquire said information, I will post it here (post will be updated as information comes in) and use it to unambiguously propel myself onto the show through a cast member. If you think I’m above pretending to be gay to get on this show, you’ve never read this blog before.

5 Most Influential Albums of My Lifetime

A lot of music lists try to list the “best” or “favorite” albums in a particular genre or era. Why? Nobody gives a fuck about your disguised opinion in the form of some kind of fabricated expert consensus. Now this shit here is different. It’s not my opinion, it’s a factual list of the most influential albums in my life. In other words, this was the shit playing in the background when I made the best and worst decisions of my life.

I’ll try to say something interesting or racially demeaning for each album so it’s entertaining reading.

1. Red Hot Chili Peppers – Californication

This album, while not as critically/personally acclaimed as their other shit, was so unbelievably huge it was almost rediculous. For me, it combined rock and rap. What that really means is you could listen to it when on the drugs associated with rock or the drugs associated with rap. Let me just state the obvious here in a rhetorical question: How can you understand music that was made by people on drugs if you don’t know what it’s like to be on those drugs? You know that Hendrix album Are You Experienced? What do you think that means?

• Most Memorable Track: Californication

2. Dr Dre – 2001

A lot of rappers talk about “changing the game” and “reinventing rap”. As far as I know, Dr Dre was the only one to ever do this, and he did it twice. Also, I’m listening to songs from this right now and I’m getting vivid flashbacks of events that happened in the past. I saw this thing once where if you study listening to a song, you’ll remember that information if you play that same song when you need to remember it. It’s true. I think it’s the main and possibly only reason why people like music from their formative years. It brings back those memorable “firsts”. Good times, good times.

• Most Memorable Track: Xxplosive

3. Jay-Z – Black Album

While Dr Dre reinvented rap, this album defined it. The only things bigger than this album were:

1. The hype surrounding it’s release
2. The post-hype praise from people who listened to the Grey Album first

Like, everybody says how his first album was the biggest “hustler” album he did but that’s bullshit. He took a page from Michael Jordan and “retired” to build the hype and legend surrounding himself, then he “came back, wearing the 4-5” just like he said he would. That’s hustling last I checked. Anyway, I saw more bad things being done/chopped on this album than on any other album. This was likely due to this album’s all-black case, top-surface, and bottom-surface. It probably set a forever-unofficial record in that respect.

• Most Memorable Track: Public Service Announcement

4. Third Eye Blind – Self-Titled/Blue

First of all, both albums are pretty much the same. It might as well be a double CD. Second of all, they’ve been touring for 12 years (continuously I think) performing the same songs from these 2 albums. And they still sell out. And Stephen Jenkins still bangs college girls. I’m not sure what all of that means, but it is a rarely unique pop sound they have. If you don’t know what to play when you bring a girl back to your place, you should probably play this.

• Most Memorable Track: Losing a Whole Year

5. UGK – Underground Kingz I thought I knew everything about music until I heard this album. All I have to say is Pimp-C’s death was so far under the radar it was kind of outrageous. Where would Jay-Z be without Big Pimpin or 99 Problems?

• Most Memorable Track: Two Types of Bitches

Captain Planet Theory

 

you'll pay for this captain planet!!!

 

 

Growing up, kids are taught that everybody is good at something at the expense of being good at something else. This was best exemplified by the 5 Planeteers (who were later shamelessly copied by the Power Rangers). As a more specific example, Wheeler was a bumbling fool (note his untied shoelace in the picture) who knew next to nothing about saving the planet, but somehow his good heart and fighting spirit redeemed him as a powerful ranger. While this is certainly ridiculous and borderline outrageous, it’s perfectly acceptable for a children’s TV show to tell every kid they can be the best at something.

What bothers me is how people grow up and still believe this. You hear it all the time:

1. He might be rich, but he doesn’t enjoy life as much as I do.
2. He might be good-looking, but he’s not as funny as  I am.
3. He might be a great cook, it’s but only because his parents taught him how to cook, I never had that opportunity
4. He might have gone to a great school, but I’m smarter than he is
5. Tom Brady might have millions of dollars, a supermodel wife, and fingers filled with Superbowl rings, but I bet he’d trade it all for the freedom I have in public.

The list literally goes on forever and gets more and more outrageous. Basically, the formula is:

 

• _____ has X but Y

 

When X has no correlation at all to Y. Take #2 as an example. Why does being funny have anything to do with being good-looking? “Oh well, if you’re ugly you have to be funny to get by”. No, fuck that, that isn’t true. If Jerry Seinfeld was a fat, balding Jew he would not have been funnier as a result. In fact, the opposite is probably true. Creating observational comedy about real-life situations (generally perceived as the funniest comedy) requires actual experiences. These are experiences that ugly people don’t have. 

Ugly people don’t have experiences, they make them up. They sit in a room by themselves and create all kinds of “possible scenarios” that they think are funny because, to them, it’s just as possible that these scenarios and real-life scenarios will happen. Here’s a comic from a strangely popular website (XKCD) that illustrates my point here:

 

I'm not laughing because I don't get it, I'm not laughing because it isn't funny

Oh wow, it’s observational comedy on a ridiculous contrived situation that requires Wikipedia-first-paragraph knowledge of Fibonacci Numbers to understand. ISN’T THAT FUNNY? FUCK NO!

 

95% of the people who laugh at this will never come close to getting married. The other 5%: Battle Trolls

Conclusion: there are more “Captain Planets” out there than Planeteers. Most of the time, the people who are better than you at something are better than you at mostly everything. The guy who is better than you at X is probably smarter than you, funnier than you, enjoys life more than you, and (with some practice) could kick your ass at whatever it is you’re best at. 

Also, that person is not ugly or fat. Did Gaia give those rings to any ugly fat kids? Fuck no.

Hypothetically

 

oh shit

 

 

Any mathematically inclined person or fifth grader either likes hypotheticals or loves hypotheticals. It examines the extreme cases of something: the limits and the boundary conditions that distinctly describe a broad situation when expressed appropriately. I’ve found that the people who don’t like them tend not to understand that the beauty in the hypothetical is in the question. The answer is, in most cases, purely academic and contributes no real value. Let’s do a few:

 

• If you were the smartest man in the world, capable of deriving and understanding even the most difficult problems with ease, how would you spend your life? Essentially, your achievements are limited only by desire.

 

I’d venture to say most people would make a lot of money early in life, then spend the rest of life spending it (or giving it away). Fools. I would spend my youth improving my interpersonal skills while being labeled an underachiever before pursing a career in academia in my mid 30s. Chasing money is for people who don’t have any. Think about that for a second. And “making money to give it away” is only a good intention waiting to go wrong. There’s omething very ACORN about it. For the record, I love ACORN and I don’t want to wake up quartered in a dumpster. Those statements are unrelated. 

Other common hypothetical questions center around impossible scenarios involving an unlimited supply of money, super powers, time travel, or (my personal favorite) Ancient World domination. Of course ,AWD involves some kind of time travel. Also, it’s clear that toppling the Romans by creating unprecedented havoc as a Gladiator in a futuristic war suit before vowing return in a spaceship to return power to almighty Jupiter is the only way to go there. 

• With great talent, great hair, Kanye West, and great timing, you become a music sensation/sex-symbol and women are thowing themselves and each-other at you in efforts to get some high-dollar spunk. After 3 years this starts to get old, what do you do?

There’s 4 and only 4 ways to go here and I have an example for each:

1. Of course, it’s not just women who are after you. Gay men are also targeting your ever move. You choose to avoid both and choose to molest little kids instead. Michael Jackson is the obvious example, but I bet this happens relatively often.
2. With men and women on your ass, you decide to take in a little of both columns. Anthony Kiedis took that route.
3. After banging an untold number of hot girls, you tire of it and show it publically by making outrageous fashion and political statements. Also, you decide you don’t care what anybody thinks because you don’t want anything from anyone anymore and put out music that embarrasses even your biggest fans. This is Andre 3000 territory.
4. After banging an untold number of hot girls, you mysteriously don’t tire of it and show it publically by performing the same 15 songs on tour for 13 years and counting and continue to bang replicas of the college girls you banged in the late 90s.  You wanted time to stand still and, amazingly, you’ve made it do just that. This is the Stephen Jenkins zone.

Honestly, I’d follow Andre 3000 here.

A Perfect Storm for Genius

Facts and misconceptions are taught together. It’s one of the most basic tenets of knowledge in any field that is worth studying since there are obviously gaps and unanswered questions in… well, pretty much everything. 

Few would argue that the “genius” tag is not overused or, at the least, that it isn’t misused. But, to paraphrase Richard Price: the path of theory is, in the beginning, pointed down a reasonable path. Along the way, well-intentioned yet misguided minds guide the theory down the only path they can see, making assumptions along the way that lead the theory into a “wall”: a contradiction. Eventually, the pressure builds as evidence is proved on both sides of the contradiction.

A great historical example was the pre-Copernican astronomical assumption that the Earth was at the center of the Solar System. The astronomers developed extraordinarily complex sets of equations to describe the motion of the Sun and the planets around the Earth to massage the theory into the illusion of working. However, as measurements became more precise, the contradictions started to arise. Then, of course, a genius in the truest sense in Nicolaus Copernicus disproved a fundamental and widely accepted assumption to reveal a simple and (non-relativistically) perfect theory of planetary motion: the Earth orbits the Sun. 

The knowledgeable reader may point out that Copernicus had predecessors or that he mistakenly thought the Sun was the center of the Universe, but the wiser reader will see that the point still stands. Of course, raw genius was much more clearly exhibited 3 centuries later when a Swiss patent clerk proved that Maxwell’s equations held and the Lorentz transformation was not a result of electromagnetic instrument distortion, but a result of a relative rate of time. That’s another story.

In both instances, a genius was caught at the right place at the right time. Simply put, they were among a handful to tens of people who could have deduced what they did under the circumstances. It’s a combination of luck and genius.

Today’s information rich environment is nearly optimal for genius. As a breeding ground for misinformation, contradiction, and (sometimes) fact, the Internet is the collective well-intentioned misguided mind of humanity pushing their hopeless contradictions into a neatly wrapped package for a genius to tear open and disprove foolish assumptions. 

Simply put, the “right place, right time” element has almost been removed from the list of roadblocks that could prevent a genius from solving a contradiction. This seems like the right time to point out that a great list of unanswered questions has been compiled by Science and can be found here. 

I have made a decision today. I will no longer be angered or bothered by the foolish and seemingly destructive inaccuracies of the talking heads on the Internet and in the media. While it may seem that they are powerfully misguiding humanity into oblivion, I recognize that they are only doing the prerequisite work for a true act of genius by parading a contradiction as the conclusion of a set of facts. The most relevant non-scientific example of this is Barack Obama succeeding George W Bush.

Agnostic: Synonym for Pussy

well golly gee, i just can't decide

“You know what, I know billions of people in the world believe in a god and millions of others have decided, after long periods of introspection, that they’re atheists, but I think I’m just going to sit on the fence on this one. Does God exist? Well Marty, I don’t think I could say if he does or doesn’t exist. Guess I’ll just wait and see.”

–Millions of Spineless Agnostics intensifying the pussification of America

So let me get this straight. In by far the most polarizing argument known to mankind, there is a growing contingent of people who can’t decide? I guess they figure all those philosophers throughout history were just wasting their time.

To paraphrase David Hume: ‘All rational statements that assert a factual claim about the universe that begin “I believe that ….” are simply shorthand for, “Based on my knowledge, understanding, and interpretation of the prevailing evidence, I tentatively believe that….”‘

What kind of spineless, bullshit, ball-shrinking nonsense is that? What the fuck is the point? I mean, isn’t it obvious that nobody can ever be 100% sure about any factual claim about the universe? Fucking of course it is. Does that mean you can’t make ridiculous assertive claims about the universe that you are not 100% sure about? No, of course you fucking can.

Nobody in the history of the universe was ever 100% sure about anything. All great men in history pretended to know more than they did, got a little bit of luck, then took credit for the luck. It’s really that simple. Does anybody really think Barack Obama “knows we’re going to pull together and get through this tough time”? Only fools. Obviously, he doesn’t “know” anything. He makes a judgement call based on incomplete information, relies on some luck, then takes credit for the luck. It’s the oldest trick in the book.

These “agnostics” are popping up nowadays because we don’t have enough wars to kill them off. You know what happened to agnostics in any of the real wars in history? Them, their wives, and their children were slaughtered by whichever side won the war because the agnostics didn’t join the winning side. Not picking a side is the same as picking the losing side in all life or death scenarios. No exceptions.

Simply put, human beings are naturally polarized because it was the most polarized individuals in ethnic/religious groups who killed off the less polarized (pussier and less organized) agnostics.

The moral of the story is to pick the winning side after you study all the information. Because being agnostic (picking no side) is the equivalent to picking the losing side.

Even God Wouldn’t Believe in God

god never existed

When I was a kid, there were four supernatural beings I believed in that roughly equated to each other: Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, and God. Very quickly, I figured out the Easter Bunny wasn’t real. Besides, a giant bunny hiding eggs in my house in the middle of the night scared me far more than it excited me. Then I figured out the true identity of the Tooth Fairy when he used an envelope that exactly matched the other watermark-stained envelopes in the paper/pencil drawer. Finally, say it ain’t so, I figured out Santa Claus wasn’t real. Logically, or so I thought, God would be the next entity to be revealed as nothing more than one of my own parents.

To my surprise, this didn’t happen. The people in church weren’t just showing up every Sunday to make a convincing display for the kids. They actually believed in this thing. This fucking thing that not only created everything, but watched over all of these things to… well I’m not exactly sure why. If it created them, then why not make them perfect enough to not need to be watched over? Oh, he apparently made us in his own imperfect image, I guess that’s comforting. I learned that this was also because there was a Devil, an entity almost as powerful as God who was a fallen angel that hated everything God created… but he was only allowed to do bad things to these creations if God let him do them. Apparently God needed to make things more challenging for himself from time to time. Of course, this would be a ridiculous challenge for him to take on, but “everyone knows” that you can’t question the all-powerful, all-knowing being even though he is, by definition, imperfect and quite plausably open to question…

That’s when the truth started to come to me. Quickly.

As I got older, I wondered how anyone could possibly believe in this stuff.

It’s just so blatantly obvious. Whenever common people are presented with things as incredible and literally unbelievable as life, the stars, the Universe, or a dove appearing out of a top hat, they immediately gravitate towards the most likely reasoning: Magic. And God is the unseen and unheard magician of the cosmos. I really believe that if someone had a magic trick that nobody (scientists and all types of cameras included) could figure out, they would be anointed as a human manifestation of God: the next coming of Jesus. Wait, isn’t that what miracles are, essentially? Magic tricks?

I know nowadays (since 1983) the Catholic Church has modified the magic tricks needed to become a Saint. Now, you only need to perform one magic trick (as opposed to three), which comes in the form (almost always) of “curing the incurable”. In other words a doctor (in a 3rd world country with little to no clinical experience) needs to declare a patient terminally ill. Then the patient needs to be cured for a reason said doctor can not explain… Wow!!!

My biggest problem is God’s absolute refusal to even acknowledge his existence. I mean, give me a fucking break. The cult/church (legitimately indistinguishable here) faithful will tell you this is because God is “testing the faith of humanity”. Well then why did he, out of the blue for no apparent reason at all 2000/1300 years ago, decide to manifest himself in Jesus/Mohammad (unless you’re the Jews and believe God only spoke to your people directly)? Because people were losing faith? Shouldn’t that be the time not to throw the humans a bone and suddenly manifest yourself in someone? If you created a Universe, would you control it quietly enough for honest, moral people to (even only privately) question your existence? For what purpose? What is the reason to effectively seduce people into believing in you?

I can understand how women believe in God, I really can. Being the vain, self-centered creatures that they are, why wouldn’t they be attracted to eternity for themselves? And what women can resist the fairy tale of being loved by an Alpha-Male? Especially one who lives outside of the Universe and controls the fate of all who have ever existed. But any man who buys into the fact that he is subservient to an omnipotent, omnipresent being is a weak, manipulable fool who deserves to be at the mercy of the powers in the world who will play on this subservience for their own personal gain.

Oh, and one last thing. A lot of smart-ass atheists out there write ‘god’ instead of ‘God’ under the false assumption that you only capitalize it if you believe in God. Wrong. You capitalize it if you are talking about the monotheistic Christian/Islamic/Jewish God. Since this is often used as a way to slight the theists, I think it’s pretty funny that it’s quite literally self-defeating.

Atheism is for Fifth Graders

so why are you wasting my time with this again?

 It’s time for me to slay my own Laplacian Demon (go look it up, I’ll wait). It goes something like this:

How can Atheists make the claim that God doesn’t exist when it’s blatantly obvious to everyone with a Middle School education that their claim that the Universe came from nothing is equally ridiculous?

Seriously, you hear it all the time. Some smug fuck says some shit like “it’s only a matter of time before everyone else figures out God doesn’t exist” or “God is just a natural progression of worship away from the stars and towards a more human-like character of the heavens, didn’t you see [insert Internet documentary here]?” Then they say something about the Big Bang, do some hand-waving saying ‘scientists are still working out the details’, and never realize how retarded their argument is because there is no Atheist theory on how the Universe came to be.

The way I see it is pretty clear. The ‘Big Bang’ was initiated by some entity external to the Universe and external to the Universe’s laws of space and time. That entity, whatever it is, is what all the World’s religions refer to as God or gods. Everyone, especially the Agnostics, should agree with this basic idea. The matter of if this entity still exists and guards over the Universe is another matter entirely.

But seriously, I have no intellectual respect for anyone who is a non-Agnostic Atheist who can not even acknowledge the statement in the previous paragraph. Atheism is a childish view harbored by individuals who are not intelligent enough to recognize the inherent contradiction in their view. It’s like the goth kids who don’t realize they’re only goth because they’re ugly. Or really, more like those kids who support “anarchy” only because nobody else supports it even though they don’t know what it means. Then these kids grow up to be “Libertarians”, not realizing that their political vision would only benefit the “good old boys networks” and other rich, powerful, old money peoples at the expense of larger society, including them. 

The larger view is quite simple: a little knowledge is dangerous. It empowers fools in the same way Religion empowers fools. Hm. This idiom becomes more and more relevant by the day as information, much of it unreliable, spreads quickly to an ungodly number of people before any subject expert can publicly dispute it or any individual taking in that information can put it in perspective. A great example of this, which I expect more of with far more disastrous consequences, is the “Steve Jobs had a heart attack” rumor that (very) temporarily shocked Apple’s stock price that was started by a bunch of 4chan fags. No I’m not gay bashing, 4chan is… well, if you’ve never been, you have to go. It’s like the Disneyworld of the Internet. Anyway, it’s amazing how powerful the control of information flow across the Internet is. Any shitfuck idea  or rumor, when funneled through the right data portals, can wield an incredible and immediate power. A question: what would Information Terrorism be?

So yeah, all the Atheists who casually drop their beliefs in the middle of a conversation to look cool just sound like the kid in History class who thinks Communism is superior to Capitalism to draw attention to himself. At least to me.

The Anniversary

 

some emo anniversary shit

 

 

Anniversaries don’t exist unless you’re a total bitch and completely crumble during a DTR. For real though, when one of your buddies’ girlfriend is outwardly celebrating the 1 month, 3 month, 6 month, 1 year anniversary, call his bitch ass out on it. Be merciless, it’s for his own good. The first sign you’re in a bad relationship is the 1 month anniversary celebration. It shows you’re completely at her mercy, don’t let it happen to you.

Besides, if you’re playing it right she should be hesitant to celebrate an anniversary outwardly because it will just shove a reminder into your face of how long you’ve been together. Presumably this will make her afraid that this will cause you to break up with her. Ideally, the anniversary goes relatively unnoticed with the only sign of it being a subtle hinting at it on the girl’s part.

Remember, she doesn’t like you, she likes “us” (her and you), so an anniversary is a big deal. And, obviously, holidays aren’t anything but anniversaries shared between couples. So on both counts, it’s best to brush them off professionally like the shit tests they are. And if you can’t pass those shit tests, it’s time to take it back to the mattresses.

Relationships, A Guy’s Perspective: Entering Relationships

 

*why define something that's pefect as it is?*

 

 

They say that women think about marriage and men think about sex. But that’s bullshit. Successful women think about marriage and successful men think about sex. And there’s plenty of unsuccessful failures out there.

Depending on how you see it, relationships have gone light-years forward or backward in the last century. It used to be that men and women brought real skills to the table and married each other if those skills combined to achieve a survival rate of >75% for their offspring. You can see it in the American History Museum. Skills women brought to the table, like cooking, cleaning, and care-taking were actually skills that could mean the difference between life and death. Food poisoning, disease-ridden cloths, and deathly-ill children were all pitfalls of the man who chose beauty above a woman’s practical abilities. 

Of course, all of these responsibilities have been replaced, or at least diminished, by modern conveniences. First  slaves, then indentured servants, then machines came within the common man’s financial reach to offset the inabilities of his trophy wife so he didn’t have to play the mistress game that nobody wants to play. This led to a drastic reduction in a woman’s responsibilities which directly led to them having enough time to parade for suffrage, equal-rights, and equal-pay. It was great, in a sense, for women to become near-equals with men. But wait a second, if all of their responsibilities have been replaced by machines (add the Internet to that list) in the modern relationship, then we shouldn’t expect many men to line up at the chance to throw half of their earnings at them. 

Of course, this is exactly what we see. Women bring little to nothing (compared to what they used to bring) to a relationship outside of their wide degrees of sensuality (emotional and physical). So should a man get into a relationship? Or should he stop the car and unlock the doors when she asks for too much commitment? 

This decision is a complicated one that I consistently see being made incorrectly.Guys get into relationships they shouldn’t and guys stay out of relationships that would be good to them. At the root of each of these bad decisions is this ridiculous idea that marriage at the end of the relationship tunnel. Guys get into bad relationships because they see this as an opportunity at marriage they will not otherwise get. Guys stay out of good relationships because they see themselves as having many more moonlit adventures before they stand at the cold end of the aisle, watching their buddies sip whisky in the pews, and listening to their groomsmen plan their sexual conquests with the bridesmaids. 

This, as I will show, is a fundamental miscalculation. The “marriage factor” should not be taken into account when entering a relationship, whether that factor is positive or negative. In a modern relationship, you can leave to upgrade at literally any time. In fact, the modern man should view his “being in a relationship” as having little to no effect on his life. If there is any advantage gained by being in a relationship, he should take that immediate advantage and disregard any of the subsequent consequences of this new status that will immediately fill his thoughts. Likewise, if there is no immediate advantage to entering a relationship (these are the relationships guys should not be in), there is no reason to enter it (since opportunity of a single shot at marriage is not a valid reason). Let me clarify with some examples.

Example 1:

John has been sleeping around with the same 3 girls who don’t know each other for the last 4 months. All of them have been casually suggesting at “defining the relationship”, but John has expertly dodged these requests. As a result, the girls are becoming more lukewarm to him than they were before. One way to play this would be to fear the marriage factor and keep dodging relationship requests until it all fell apart and all 3 girls got tired of his shit. A better way to play this would be to get into a relationship with one of them, tell the other two, add in new recruits as they come, and break up with the first girl at the most opportune moment to leave the 2 girls left on the other side of the fence to throw themselves at him. The best part about this is how the first girl, the one you’re in a relationship with, doesn’t even have to exist. A relationship is the most powerful weapon in a man’s arsenal if he can use it effectively.

Example 2:

Joe has not had much luck with girls. He recently met a girl who’s OK, and immediately entered a relationship with her. In the back of his mind, he figures this if he ends up marrying her, it’s not so bad. She’d be a decent wife, so he’ll just move on towards marrying her unless something better comes along. But by taking the marriage factor into account when entering into the relationship, Joe has effectively removed any possibility of anything better coming along. Because now, breaking up with her without a fallback plan is not an option since that will remove his “worst case marriage scenario” from his playbook. She will instinctively sense this laziness and desperation, and push Joe into a deep, dark hole that he will never climb out of. All the while,  Joe is powerless to play the one card he should always be able to play: threatening to break up with her. The marriage factor has trapped him.

This is some new territory for this blog and it’s fun to write about. I’m going to keep writing some relationship topics like “The Anniversary”, “Meeting the Parents”, … there are a considerable number of topics on this. I have a good feeling about this.