This is one week's harvest from my two backyard zuchhini plants.
Way too much zucchini
Jul 20
Whereas: We’ve been independent of the UK for over 200 years
And whereas: we have celebrated the fuck out of that fact every year for over 200 years
And whereas: the Chinese control all our debt
And whereas: the Arabs control all our oil
And whereas: the US economy is dependent on people buying our crap
And whereas: while we have freedom, we are independent of no one
I hereby propose: that we celebrate our Interdependence on July 4th rather than our Independence
Zer0 d4y bl0g
Jun 30
Long ago, in the before times, the internet was a very different place. Back when I put up my first website in 1996, at age 15, the word blog hadn’t yet been coined. Mine was just a personal website. I put up drawings, short stories and poems I wrote, photos, humorous links, and original journalism pieces. The site was called fishdot.org (a play on the popular tech news website slashdot.org) and was my main creative and emotional outlet in my mid teens.
My most popular feature was “The Furby Hooker Network,” a parody site where I photoshopped lingerie, gaudy jewelry, and makeup onto Furby toys and advertised them for rent as companions. The site was popular enough not only to be featured in Entertainment Weekly and on E!’s Talk Soup, but also to garner a cease and desist letter from the Tiger Toys corporation.
The second most popular feature was an autobiographical story about my failed attempts at a love life called “A Fool’s Tale.” I didn’t have much luck with women as a teenager, being an undersocialized only child with a significantly nonstandard upbringing who was overweight and funny-looking to boot. The way I dealt with my soul crushing depression was to laugh at it, so I wrote an ongoing series of tongue-in-cheek summaries of my attempts to find a sane girl who liked me as more than a friend. The results triggered just the right combination of sympathy and schadenfreude in the audience, and I received many comments from people all over the country with similar stories thanking me for sharing mine.
Shortly after I turned 18 and moved away from home (because the dot-com startup I worked for got purchased by a company in Seattle) I decided to stop “blogging” which was then a proper term for what I did. I had said what I wanted to say, and for the most part I have maintained radio silence since then. For a while, I kept a blog on livejournal.com which I updated regularly, but it was always to stay in touch with close friends I have in the area rather than broadcast to the public.
But now I think I’m ready to have another public blog. I’ve been through a lot in the past few years that has solidified my opinions on a lot of things, including fiercely expressing my opinions when I feel them to be significantly better than the predominant ones. I’m also engaged in a lot of activities that I think people are interested in, such as alternative transportation, iPhone development, urban farming, songwriting, recording, performing, political activism, and plenty of armchair philosophy and theoretical physics.
So, I’m going to ramble about those things and much more. If you like my rambling, stick around and say hi. If you think I’m a moron, try to find a really engaging and interesting way of politely (or at least coherently) expressing that fact. Critiques that can lead to good discussion will be happily welcomed. Flamers, trolls, dick-wavers, spammers, scammers, creationists, and despots will be given the bum’s rush.