9 posts tagged Tech

By Andy Sandford

People should not be getting this excited about the 4th sequel to anything. Some other famous 5ths:

• 5th Rocky: huge let down. 
• 5th wheel: means unnecessary/worst dating show. 
• 5th of May: never that fun/other language. 
• Henry the 5th: Shakespeare’s most hated play (I assume). 
• 5th amendment: most overused ammendment in movies. 
• 5th Element: …ok 5th Element was pretty awesome, but it gave us false hope for flying cars. 
• 5th wonder of the world: hanging gardens of Babylon? Get the fuck outta here.
• The 5th Beatle: oh, what’s that? The greatest rock band ever didn’t have a 5th member. Exactly
• 5th of Whiskey: leading cause of child abuse
• 5th President: Who was the 5th president?…Madison? Well either way, it was the worst president
• 5th grade: worst grade ever…confusion and unwanted boners.
• 5th inning: most boring part of the most boring game.
• 5th Star Wars: not The Empire Strikes Back. The 5th movie to come out: Attack of the Clones…yeah, that one.
• 5th Apostle: I dunno who he is or if the Apostles are numbered, but he’s the worst.
• 5th Dimension: The 5th dimension is the Twilight Zone, and that never ends well.
• Saks 5th Avenue: Yuppie asshole store.

By Danny April & Bill Dixon

-Mark Zuckerberg dines exclusively on a diet of flamingo meat, bald eagle heads, coral from the Great Barrier Reef, and Boo Berry Cereal.

-While living in his Harvard dorm, compiling the code that would eventually become Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg regularly used a Fleshlight steeped in cocoa butter to relieve stress. Zuckerberg donated the device to the Samsonian Institute in 2009.

- During sex, Mark Zuckerberg acts as a targeted ad: “So I understand you’re sexually active. Did you know that Yaz is an exciting new way to experience birth control?”

- Mark Zuckerberg named his infamous creation “Facebook” after being informed that “Wango Tango” was the intellectual property of Ted Nugent.

- Mark Zuckerberg fancies himself the Billy Dee Williams of social networking.

- Inspired by his days getting high and watching Wheel of Fortune, Mark Zuckerberg now owns three out of the five vowels.

- Mark Zuckerberg surgically implanted a second bladder into his body strictly to process Mountain Dew.

-In 2006, Mark Zuckerberg became obsessed with streamlining photo scrolling on Facebook. He claimed if users couldn’t masturbate, as they seamlessly scrolled through photos of high school acquaintance’s wedding photos, all would be lost.

-After Edurado Saverin fled the U.S. for Singapore, Mark Zuckerberg chose John Leguizamo to fill the vacant “Latino sidekick” role at Facebook.

-When initially pitching The Facebook to venture capital firms in 2004, Mark Zuckerberg told potential investors he wanted to build a Myspace for whites. He called his Facebook idea, the “Boston of the internet.”

-Under fire from investors for failing to disclose his company’s stalled growth before Facebook’s initial public offering, Mark Zuckerberg insisted that the blame lies solely with Facebook’s creator - The Winklevoss Twins. 

- In his attempt to dominate another industry, Mark Zuckerberg is making an epic film about the sinking of the Lusitania entitled: “Fuck You, James Cameron: The Best Sunken Boat Story Ever Told.”

More: Probably Facts

By Bill Dixon

Defending contemporary assholes is unforgiving drudgery. Try starting a civil dialogue about Steve Jobs or John Mayer and you’ll pick up what I’m putting down. Making a statement about either of these two gentlemen will inevitably deteriorate into a well-documented moral inventory of the defendant’s personal exploits.

 “I like that new John Mayer song! I can’t-“

“Fuck that fucker! Can you believe what he did to Jennifer Aniston? I mean does he honestly think he’s going to do better than her? She is royalty and he is the fucking tapeworm in the lower intestine of popular culture just feeding off the shit. He is –ugh- I hate so hard! I think talking about this just- yeah. I just got my period.”

And that’s my Uncle Roger. I don’t know how he’s privy to this salacious Hollywood stuff when he’s captaining a crabbing ship in Alaska nine months out of the year.

 I’ve found this same formula can be applied to Steve Jobs.

“I just read that Walter Isaacson biography on Steve Jobs. He was such a talented-“

“Fuck that fucker! Can you believe what he did to Jennifer Aniston? I mean does he honestly think he’s going to do better than her? She is royalty and he is the fucking tapeworm in the lower intestine of popular culture just feeding off the shit. He is –ugh- I hate so hard! I think talking about this just- yeah. I just got my period.”

My Uncle Roger has been at sea for a long, long time.

If Steve Jobs is the topic of conversation, someone will almost certainly qualify any positive statement about their iPad with “…but he was an asshole to the people at Apple and he abandoned his kid. Total scumbag. Oh, do you have Angry Birds?”

This is the moment I climb atop my soapbox with my bullhorn to rally the troops for my Occupy Asshole protest. I make a fevered defense claiming Steve Jobs was a genius and John Mayer is a phenomenal guitar player. But I don’t say it like that, you see. I first affirm my sterling qualifications as an expert in the subject, “As a guitar player myself, I think John Mayer is the best guitar player since Eric Clapton.” I’m a mediocre guitar player at best and I don’t think he is the best since Eric Clapton. So why do I say it? Because it’s an artistic bidding war and my hope is that saying something so mind-bogglingly audacious might force the person I am arguing with to take the middle ground. I just want them to compromise, “Fine, he’s talented but he’s a fuck up.”

This is similar with Steve Jobs; however, since I am an avid Apple user I can’t employ the “As an Apple user myself…” tactic as it marks me as bias, which I am. I have to say something outrageous like, “I love Android devices! That Galaxy S phone is the bee’s knees!” Then, make a compelling price-of-genius case for my defendant.

“Guys, he was brilliant! Most geniuses are socially inept. I didn’t see Oppenheimer winning any popularity contests. They aren’t like regular people. It comes down to this: He facilitated the creation of things. Really wonderful things. At his best, he created things that felt like magic. There is nothing more beautiful than that kind of creation.”

That is usually followed by confused stares from people who either think I am an evangelical Apple employee or Steve Job’s former jogging partner.

But I’m not concerned if my defendants are assholes. That’s obvious by my baseless defensive strategies. No, I am protective of these people because they are seriously flawed individuals. I feel I need to defend their character defects as they reflect my own. I need to justify their behavior so I might justify my own. I want them to be okay. They are broken toys; I’m a broken toy. I want them to change because that means I can change too.

The similarities between John Mayer, Steve Jobs, and myself are – in the most liberal use of the word- limited. I’m not a genius nor am I a musician. But the next time I engage my wayward defense, I should more accurately define my area of expertise to the jury of my peers, “As an asshole myself, I think John and Steve are or were maybe a little lost in their own version of the world.”

I can relate to that.

By Bill DIxon

As I scroll through the deceased’s Facebook page, this is what I find:

“We missed you in social studies today ;) Luv u always!”

“smokn phat blunts in heven im sur :)”

“what about prom lol! awww were goin to miss you”

It was a car accident. She wasn’t wearing a seatbelt or maybe she was. It doesn’t really matter. The universe spun the giant globe and brought its finger down with a thud over the Ventura Boulevard exit on the 405. Then, zap.

The universe doesn’t flinch before giving the globe another spin.

Now I’m scrolling through a dead person’s Facebook feed, paging through hundreds of comments. Some are nice. Some are thoughtful. Some googled “good quotes about friend dying,” copying and pasting their greeting card sentiments onto the improvised digital memorial.

But most were written as if she wasn’t even gone. A profusion of “see you later :)” and “LOL you’re going to miss homecoming! c u soon!”, completely detached from the reality of the situation. Maybe the relationship they had with the girl stemmed from a place of total detachment. Maybe the totality of their relationship resided in the text messages, tweets and status updates. Maybe they would have been just as surprised to see her on their doorstep yesterday as they would if they saw her on their doorstep today.

To me this would be like going to a funeral, walking to up to the casket and knocking on it, “Steve, I know you’re in there. You owe me 40 bucks, asshole, and I’m not letting them bury you until I get that…Father O’Connell, get your hands off me, I know he’s in there.” 

I’m not interested in writing an “in my day” critique of contemporary American youth culture because, ultimately, I think they’ll be fine and I’m not removed enough to feel nostalgic about something that happened less than a decade ago.

But this does raise the question, what is going to happen to me when I die?

I don’t mean an afterlife, who cares about that.

I’m talking about my Facebook page, Twitter account and my writing. What if my last status update is something like “No seriously, who let the fucking dogs out?” or some snarky quasi-intellectual remark like, “In conclusion, i’m avoiding cliches like the plague.” What if that’s the last thing on my internet headstone, carelessly carved into digital granite at the top of an online presence I spent so many years so carefully curating.

I also have concerns as a comedy writer. What if my family decided to read some of my work at the church service as posthumous tribute to my illustrious comedy writing career? What if their favorite work I did was some horrible celebrity hit piece for a college humor website?

I cringe imagining my grandmother speaking to a crowded church with mascara running down her face, her voice reverberating through the chapel, “Lindsey Lohan is looking for a personal assistant. Really?” Choking back tears she turns the page in her hand, “Lindsey Lohan doesn’t need a personal assistant, she needs a fucking AA sponsor…now I would like to read a verse from the book of Romans…” 

I scroll back to the top of her Facebook page and click the box to write a comment. I watch the cursor blink in the box for a moment. I click out of the box. Now, grey text appears:

“Write something…”

I open a word document on my desktop and begin typing.

“As I scroll through the deceased’s Facebook page, this is what I find…”

By Bill Dixon

Apple CEO Tim Cook has been posting low-res cell phone pictures of himself on facebook, shirtless in front of a mirror, holding a fanned out wad of money. The caption reads: “Young Cook Swag!!! 100 billion in tha bank son!!!!11”

At least that’s how investors feel. Apple has been sitting on one of the largest fortunes on the planet, $100 billion. And instead of making large acquisitions like buying BlackBerry manufacturer Research In Motion or Netflix or Canada, Apple has been resting on its gilded laurels, telling the world just how much cash-money it has while not spending any of it.

Until today.

Try not to pass out from boredom during this sentence: Apple will pay out quarterly stock dividends of $2.65 to stockholders and Apple’s board has authorized a $10 billion share buyback.

This is the news equivalent of getting TurboTax software for Christmas…hooray…numbers.

A hot sweaty wad of cash and the coolest thing they could think to do is share some of their corporation with people who own the corporation and buy back some of the corporation they already own.  

There is a lot of cool shit to be done in this world. At least…7 or 8 things, and Apple should be doing all of them. This is how Apple should allocate their near limitless resources:

Build A Playground at FoxConn Factory - Since iPads are for children/by children, the least Apple could do is give the kids who work at their factories in China a ball pit and some plastic tubes to crawl around in. You’ve got to give these kids something to do during their smoke break.

iPad Porn Hold Button- It is nearly impossible to masturbate while holding an iPad. Due to the vigorous nature of masturbation, the movement makes the view erratically shift from portrait to landscape.

That is unless you have perfected the art of samurai masturbation (see: The Art of Porn). The type of masturbation you master when you share a dorm room or a bunk bed with a roommate. Nevertheless, silent and stable masturbation is a skill set that waved bye-bye to me a long time ago and I have been an Apple loyalist since before there were iPods so you owe me, Apple.

It won’t be easy and I know the appeal of the iPad is its minimalist industrial design but Apple can afford to remove one of the less essential buttons to make way for the far more necessary porn button. Just remove the on/off switch or something.

On a related note, what do I have to do to get a glare-free display? There is nothing more horrifying than masturbating with an iPad and having the screen go black momentarily to reveal your own pre-orgasmic reflection in the glass. It’s a gruesome life altering experience. With the money Apple has, it is well within their means to prevent me from living that nightmare ever again. It’s a fucking horror show. 

If something isn’t done, I’m going to have to switch brands and start masturbating with the glare-free Kindle Fire. It’s not something I want to do, I’ve seen the Kindle commercials and I can’t imagine how long it will take for me to climax holding a cup of hot chocolate, curled up in a hammock, reading the e-book version of A Tale of Two Cities.

How About Hiring Some Employees Without Facial Hair - Walking into an Apple store is like walking into a Texas saloon in 1871.  I feel like I could go to the genius bar and order a whiskey. You can almost hear the spurs rattle on the white marble floors. 

Refund My MobileMe Account- I actually bought that bullshit. I want my money back…but work on the porn button first, please. I can wait.

By Bill Dixon

I have no idea how spam works in the year 2012..

By “works” I don’t mean how it is produced, this I know. Somewhere, in some Second World Russian satellite country, Ivan sits in a smoke filled room with a half dozen soviet era laptops, pulling photos of overdeveloped 17-year-old girls from public Myspace profiles and using them to start provocative social networking accounts in the hopes of coaxing lonely 40-year-old men to give up their credit card numbers in exchange for sex via cumbersome Russian-to-English translations.

“Hello, I am Clare. Just all American girl who is kind and cares of all things that are good. I also sometimes wish for boyfriend would call me but instead I am on internets looking for one true love mate for fun and anal for joy.”

How have the lonely, horny and befuddled not gotten wise to this scheme? And if they have, why is Ivan still using the same tactics?

For some reason, I have seen the same shit in my spam folder since the days when modems squealed. The only explanation for this continued assault of playfully illiterate blonde bombshells coaxing me to click on their website is that it must work. People must be clicking; rolling the dice in hopes that www.virus-install.info leads to the punani promised land.

“Sex—how you say in your country—sells?” Nailed it on the head, Ivan.

I’ve found that people’s feeling towards spam follows the same emotional trajectory as people’s feelings towards crazy homeless people.

The first time you see spam or a man with a beard screaming into a mailbox can be a jarring experience. It’s your first time to the city and you say to yourself, “This city (or internet) is dangerous. I need to be careful. These people are crazy!” Then, after a couple years of living in the urban sprawl of Chicago or Google, your feelings towards it change from fear to an oscillation between ambivalence and aggravation. As long as you don’t engage the insanity, you’re usually okay.

It’s only when your parents come to visit that you remember the lunacy of it. They want to see the big city or they watched something on 60 Minutes about Twitter and now they want in.

All of a sudden you’re getting distressed phone calls, “What is this?! Why is this person talking to me? Can they see what I am doing? Are they going to hack me? This city (or internet) is dangerous. I need to be careful. These people are crazy!”

It’s then you realize, “Oh right, people get freaked out by this stuff” and then you realize, “Oh shit, this means my parents are going to talk to me on Facebook. My mother is going to tell me all about my father’s colonoscopy on a status update I wrote about the Emmys because she thinks it’s like email. My father is going to tweet things like ‘Hello, Bill.’ and ‘Testing.’ This city (or internet) is dangerous. I need to be careful. These people are crazy!”

 Below is my favorite spam tweet of the week.:

I find the spammer’s choice of a transvestite to be truly ambitious. “You know, we might be able to tap into the male and female market share if we use a tranny!” A maverick of the spam world, Julianna Grey will be the Jackie Robinson of computer junk, tearing down barriers for a new generation of tranny spam. And judging by her strong jaw line and athletic look, maybe one day she’ll be the Jackie Robinson of baseball as well!

The website “i-swallow-cum6.info” is amazing. What a get in terms of domain names. First it means there are six other sites that were taken and instead of getting a little creative with the cum swallowing, they figured “ehh, just throw the next available number at the end.”

Also, the “.info” domain gives it an air of collegiate sophistication. You visit “i swallow cum6 .info” and you are going to acquire valuable information. Not only does she swallow cum…six times but you may also find an intriguing article on the migration patterns of monarch butterflies. Share Juliana Grey on your Pinterest board!

By Bill Dixon

Defending contemporary assholes is unforgiving drudgery. Try starting a civil dialogue about Steve Jobs or John Mayer and you’ll pick up what I’m putting down. Making a statement about either of these two gentlemen will inevitably deteriorate into a well-documented moral inventory of the defendant’s personal exploits.

 “I like that new John Mayer song! I can’t-“

“Fuck that fucker! Can you believe what he did to Jennifer Aniston? I mean does he honestly think he’s going to do better than her? She is royalty and he is the fucking tapeworm in the lower intestine of popular culture just feeding off the shit. He is –ugh- I hate so hard! I think talking about this just- yeah. I just got my period.”

And that’s my Uncle Roger. I don’t know how he’s privy to this salacious Hollywood stuff when he’s captaining a crabbing ship in Alaska nine months out of the year.

 I’ve found this same formula can be applied to Steve Jobs.

“I just read that Walter Isaacson biography on Steve Jobs. He was such a talented-“

“Fuck that fucker! Can you believe what he did to Jennifer Aniston? I mean does he honestly think he’s going to do better than her? She is royalty and he is the fucking tapeworm in the lower intestine of popular culture just feeding off the shit. He is –ugh- I hate so hard! I think talking about this just- yeah. I just got my period.”

My Uncle Roger has been at sea for a long, long time.

If Steve Jobs is the topic of conversation, someone will almost certainly qualify any positive statement about their iPad with “…but he was an asshole to the people at Apple and he abandoned his kid. Total scumbag. Oh, do you have Angry Birds?”

This is the moment I climb atop my soapbox with my bullhorn to rally the troops for my Occupy Asshole protest. I make a fevered defense claiming Steve Jobs was a genius and John Mayer is a phenomenal guitar player. But I don’t say it like that, you see. I first affirm my sterling qualifications as an expert in the subject, “As a guitar player myself, I think John Mayer is the best guitar player since Eric Clapton.” I’m a mediocre guitar player at best and I don’t think he is the best since Eric Clapton. So why do I say it? Because it’s an artistic bidding war and my hope is that saying something so mind-bogglingly audacious might force the person I am arguing with to take the middle ground. I just want them to compromise, “Fine, he’s talented but he’s a fuck up.”

This is similar with Steve Jobs; however, since I am an avid Apple user I can’t employ the “As an Apple user myself…” tactic as it marks me as bias, which I am. I have to say something outrageous like, “I love Android devices! That Galaxy S phone is the bee’s knees!” Then, make a compelling price-of-genius case for my defendant.

“Guys, he was brilliant! Most geniuses are socially inept. I didn’t see Oppenheimer winning any popularity contests. They aren’t like regular people. It comes down to this: He facilitated the creation of things. Really wonderful things. At his best, he created things that felt like magic. There is nothing more beautiful than that kind of creation.”

That is usually followed by confused stares from people who either think I am an evangelical Apple employee or Steve Job’s former jogging partner.

But I’m not concerned if my defendants are assholes. That’s obvious by my baseless defensive strategies. No, I am protective of these people because they are seriously flawed individuals. I feel I need to defend their character defects as they reflect my own. I need to justify their behavior so I might justify my own. I want them to be okay. They are broken toys; I’m a broken toy. I want them to change because that means I can change too.

The similarities between John Mayer, Steve Jobs, and myself are – in the most liberal use of the word- limited. I’m not a genius nor am I a musician. But the next time I engage my wayward defense, I should more accurately define my area of expertise to the jury of my peers, “As an asshole myself, I think John and Steve are or were maybe a little lost in their own version of the world.”

I can relate to that.

As some of you may or may not know, Netflix has had a tumultuous month. First, they decided to hike prices. Then they decided that they would split Netflix into two different websites, a dedicated site for DVD rentals called Qwikster and the existing Netflix site exclusively for streaming video content. If you kept both services, it was to appear on your bank statement as two separate charges from two separate companies.

This overhaul was explained to Netflix customers in a fairly lengthy email from Reed Hastings, Netflix CEO. The email was about four pages long, feverishly apologetic, and heavy-handed. I received my email with a dozen roses in my high school locker and I could have sworn I smelled traces of Abercrombie & Fitch’s Fierce. Netflix must have slipped it in there during study hall. OMG, Becky, in second period, is going to be sooo jealous lol.

Then, I received this today:

Dear William,

It is clear that for many of our members two websites would make things more difficult, so we are going to keep Netflix as one place to go for streaming and DVDs.

This means no change: one website, one account, one password…in other words, no Qwikster.

While the July price change was necessary, we are now done with price changes.

We’re constantly improving our streaming selection. We’ve recently added hundreds of movies from Paramount, Sony, Universal, Fox, Warner Bros., Lionsgate, MGM and Miramax. Plus, in the last couple of weeks alone, we’ve added over 3,500 TV episodes from ABC, NBC, FOX, CBS, USA, E!, Nickelodeon, Disney Channel, ABC Family, Discovery Channel, TLC, SyFy, A&E, History, and PBS.

We value you as a member, and we are committed to making Netflix the best place to get your movies & TV shows.

Respectfully,

The Netflix Team 

There goes Netflix again, changing his mind. I am seriously just going to ask Becky to go to the Homecoming Dance. I’m not going to chance sitting alone in the back of that limo drinking Smirnoff and powdered Kool-Aid out of a Gatorade bottle, totally dateless like some loser.

If that wasn’t a shocker, I received this email a few hours later:

Dear William,

It is clear to us that many of our members have become frustrated with our weekly policy changes and we apologize for any inconvenience or confusion caused by recent policy & term adjustments.

That being said, I’ve been thinking a lot recently and I don’t think I want to be an entertainment distribution website anymore. This is so hard to say but I really think I want to go back to school to do something in graphic design or advertising or something. I love to stream Mad Men and I think I have a really great eye for logos and stuff. Remember the “Got Milk?” ad campaign? I came up with that! Well I mean, I asked if we had milk once and everyone laughed because of that commercial, you know? But I hadn’t even seen the commercial at that point, so I came up with the idea totally independently!

Anyway, I’m filling out the student loan stuff next week so I’ll continue sending DVD rentals and streaming digital content until I get my ducks in a row.

Sincerest Regards,

Netflix

Followed by this a few hours after that:

Yo Bill,

I was just streaming Too Fast Too Furious and I was thinking, if Luda can do it, so can I! So starting ASAP, I will no longer be providing video content or going back to art school to study graphic design. Instead, I will be a street racer, burning rubber with a small foreign car, racing for pinks. (FYI “racing for pinks” is street slang for “racing for pink slips.” Pink slips are like your car’s registration…or insurance…or some shit. Sorry if I just got too real with you but it’s the only way I know how to be.)

I’m on Craigslist right now looking for a car to fix up so I can take this street racing shit by storm. Oh shit, a 1990 Chevy Lumina Minivan for only $750! It says it needs some engine work but I was going to do that shit anyway. I’m gonna hang streamers from the roof rack so when I’m smokin’ some Asian, he’ll have something nice to look at when he’s behind me.

Anyway, once this shit starts poppin’ off, I won’t be able to provide you with the same high definition capacity you have become accustomed to. For this, I am deeply sorry.

Living Hard & Dying Fast,

NetFlix (AKA MonsterVan)

P.S. I saw those guys in the movie drinking Corona with some sort of fruit in it. Do you know if that’s a lime or an avocado?