UnMotivationalPosters

Sometimes in this world, it’s necessary to convey a harsh lesson to the masses.  It’s tough to be the bearer of this sort of news, especially when dealing with a dingaling who believes that there’s some kind of rainbow blooming out of every pot of shit.  Nobody wants to be the guy who cracked some idiot’s delicate bubble of illusion.  Or maybe somebody does.  Hell if I know.

Stupids exist. Here’s how it works:

You get someone who doesn’t know nuthin about nuthin. He or she opens his or her mouth to speak and what comes out is the equivalent of a mathematician solving for N in X/0=N. That’s right, you get yourself a

Where you feel like it's been forever but it's just been a minute

As they drone on you realize they have no fucking idea what’s coming out of their mouths. It could be about anything: politics, sports, literature, stupid people, software. It’s a whole lotta nothing and it drags everything else down. Why do they do it? My theory is they want to be impressive. The trick here is not to be impressed. If you are in fact a stupid person try what I do: I try to be as unimpressive as possible. That way if I say something brilliant people think I have some sort of hidden reservoir of wisdom.

Lots of times these stupid people can masquerade as people with a clue (*raises hand*). The trick is to ask them a question they must answer in just a moment. If they hem and haw, you’ve got ‘em! Tip #2, stupids, have something prepared for every occasion, even if it’s just “Let me gather my thoughts” and then think back to the most recent news headline and half-a blurb you saw on the Google news page and extrapolate from there whilst keeping your opinion neutral on the topic. Regardless of your true feelings, if you’re short a fact or several you need to appear sanguine and unruffled. “Of course I feel the mandatory tagging of Martian citizens is questionable, but before I can cast judgment I need to go back farther than to cut to the cultural heart of the situation.” Well said, you sly fox you!

My final tip, for stupids and nonstupids alike is remember, if you find someone intolerable keep it light. There’s no need to rail against people who can’t stand your insipid inability to think for yourself, because if you felt so strongly about it you would do it. On the other hand, there’s no reason to rage against those who hardly do any thinking because nothing you’re saying will have ultimate meaning to them anyway. That’s about all I have to say on this topic. Now, if you will excuse me I have to to render a neutral opinion on some hot-button issues…

(NOTE: yes, this post was inspired)

Once upon a time, a long long time ago, I was a computer nerd. I was a kid then, but I could program my ass off in BASIC (and oh lordy how I wish I could program so I could get rid of it now). My dad was/is a huge computer geek so when I was little, he was teaching me how to do stuff. Right down to what’s on the inside of the box. I took to it, and I became so intense (and he required such fancy efforts) that I would often put my line numbers much farther apart than just 10, 20, etc. Hey it taught me the value of a flowchart and while I don’t use them to this day I feel I would be a lot more productive or something if I did. I learned IF and THEN and my personal favorite GOTO. I was awesome!

Some years passed during which I was not near a computer very often at all. By some I mean around a decade. When I was in contact with computers again it was for school. I needed Word to write something or Excel to make some bogus chart. Sometimes I played Gabriel Knight or Blade Runner or The 7th Guest which I have never finished and won’t even bother touching to this day, damn puzzle games. I was in my mid-twenties before I knew that Linux was not the way the Fronch spell the name of that blanket-boy. When I learned what Linux is, however, it was like magic.

“Wow, this is so pretty! Think of all the things I can do with it! Wow Windows doesn’t have programs like this! I have to try it!” And so off I went, a girl who used Hotmail and Lycos HTML chat, into the wilds of the internets to find some Linux. They might not even have had Google yet at the time. I was new to online. I didn’t know anything. Once at work several years before, I got onto some search engine and searched for “snuff” referring, of course, to chewing tobacco. The results I got kept me away from using search engines for years. I only went to websites with direct links. This is just to show you how unfamiliar I was with online and how to find things.

My job at the time required me to deal with several things using the letters “iso”: Isotonic sport drinks, the ISO standard, and Isolated Somethings which I no longer recall. With this in mind, perhaps you will understand my confusion when I downloaded me some Linux which was recommended by someone and got some .iso files. I tried to run them, I tried to extract them, I tried everything and by the time I was done trying I was so frustrated! By chance I found myself on Freenode IRC and someone there told me “Oh they can help you in the Linux chat room.” Linux chat room? Wow a chat room just for Linux? Right ON!

No.

Welcome to #Debian, you pathetic MS whore

When all was said and done, when I closed IRC with a red face and a burning feeling inside that said I was clearly a moron I reflected on the words of the last person to speak to me, which were basically that if I was so stupid I couldn’t figure out something easy like how to mount an .iso or how to use it then I should just stick with Windows. Believe me I totally did.

Fortunately, in the end I learned about search engines, and how to find things (especially instructions and explanations). Three of my currently operating computers run Windows, but one dual-boots into Linux Mint and another runs it in a vm. On still another machine Windows won’t run at all. I have to command-line it with Linux to make any use of it. And Debian? Still never used it. How’d I learn? A kind person helped me out without making me feel smaller than an elitist’s junk and I managed to learn a good deal on my own afterward.

Moral of the story? You can’t trust the system. The other moral is stop being such an elitist motherfucker who can’t believe that sometimes what comes so easily to you might be confusing or intimidating to someone who’s new at it. You were a noob once too. And don’t give me that shit how you did it all yourself. Boo-wah. Some of you did but a good deal of you had some sort of human assistance. Remember that.

Tonight we will dine with A1!

Not a whole helluva lot actually. I’ve got a lot going on! Working on stuff, getting ready for National Novel Writing Month, and as always, pretending to work out. I’ve got a movie night scheduled with my pal so that we may then discuss the important finer points of black people dying first in the movies. I can then bring it to you! I have been enacting my anti-procrastination plan and it seems like I keep getting shit done. Backlog’s moving right along!

I’m a little short of time but I thought that perhaps the sexy looks of that guy from 300 would keep you satisfied until I return to bring you more of my sticky rambles.

Peace out kids! <3

This is me. The Procrastinatrix extraordinaire, the girl with so much in her brain and so much time to do it, yet so little motivation. This post is a propos here, no?

I dawdle. I’m a dawdler. It’s not because I don’t care or don’t want to do things. I feel a lot like that secretary in this poster: a little thing slips by here, another one there, and before you know it before I can conquer a tiny memo I first have to tackle the enormous backlog sneaking around behind me hoping to become a priority. If you procrastinate you know the deal. It’s sort of like the cycle of abuse, but it’s self-abuse. When you procrastinate it doesn’t matter if you have the world’s biggest dream, a wealth of resources at your fingertips, or the cure for cancer. Standing still won’t get you any closer to the finish line. A procrastinator is a living memorial to things which could-have-been.

One might think it’s easy to just get up and do what you have to do. This is actually true. It’s the mound of guilt dogging the procrastinator which seems to create drag. We are not workodynamic people. We want to do things but we feel all shamed because the bunch of stuff we were supposed to already be doing seems hopelessly far behind, and by the same token there’s the feeling that it’s just not worth it to take on something new. Frankly, it isn’t unless one likes heavy baggage.

Being the person on top of putting things off (there you goooooo…*plink*), I have some advices which I am going to test out and see if they can work.

- Baby steps. Seriously. Lao-Tzu said “The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” This is absolutely true. Look at hoarders. There’s an entire career path devoted to helping hoarders clean out their lives. These professionals don’t go into Aunt Lucy’s one day and clean out the whole joint. Our junk, physical or emotional, means something to us. It’s junk that keeps us from moving forward, and excuses are junk. We hold on to them, though, for whatever reasons. The professional hoard-fixer must confront not only Aunt Lucy’s rotting newspaper collection dating from 1903, but also must confront why Aunt Lucy is so afraid to let go of it. Those things are scary but can be slowly and gently teased out. You elicit your reasons for stalling, and while you’re doing that, you move about carefully, not knocking over your stacks of overdue work. At the same time you work on what you can going forward.

- Courage. You needs it! This is important because ass-kicking is not for the weak and you need to kick ass to bring yourself up to speed. Ass-kicking, in this sense, is 50/50. You need to kick your own ass into gear and you need to kick the ass of all that stuff you’ve been letting pile up. It seems intimidating but don’t despair. Most people are pretty kind when they can tell you’re making an effort. If they’re not, then take that as a lesson learned and keep going without pausing to hate on the people who gave you lots of chances, or beating up on yourself. That feeds into the loop and will keep you stalled even more.

- Determination. This one’s tricky. It’s easy to be down in the dumps but life is a lot shorter than you think when you’re in there and you will discover that you’ll miss a lot while you’re looking at yourself in the ugly-mirror. Think of determination as a fact. The world will go on whether you participate or not, so throw your hat into the ring and keep that towel out. Your feelings will change from day to day but if you make a fact of your determination, then it won’t fade. Once you start your tiny little project, see it through to the end, however long that takes. You will feel loads better for it.

- Consistency. It’s a hard one. I’ve had many many many false starts in my day and ended up, once again, failing. Baby Steps is key to this. If you do a tiny thing every day you will feel empowered to do bigger things. If you make a habit of doing something it becomes part of your routine, and no longer has to depend on how you feel. Once something becomes a habit then in turn you find it’s easier to consume larger chunks of the big badness you’re dragging around on the end of your leg-shackle. One day you will find you have consumed it all, and on that day, bully for you!

- Time management. This is, in my unprofessional opinion, one of the leading causes of the laze. It’s easy to say “I will write for an hour every day, minimum” but it’s a lot harder to actually do that if there’s not a block of time I have set aside during which to write. Most people spend a lot of their days with precious minutes and even hours of free time waiting to be claimed. Those hours get whiled away doing this thing or that, and not at all what we should be doing, because once you make a schedule of any sort, even a loose one, you’ve made a commitment to yourself. If, like me, you have commitment-phobia because you’re afraid you will miss something while you’re cleaning out the refrigerator for an hour and a half, just think of how great it would be, an hour and a half from now, not only to be finished cleaning out the fridge, but not to have to think about it again.

It can take a long while. I’ve got projects from back in the day coming out of my ears. There’s no rest for the wicked, however, because like neglected babies they are crying for attention. They want to be loved the way I loved them when I first conceived of them. They look on with pitiful envy each time I do complete something, because I didn’t complete one of them. My ball and chain are heavy and I am tired of dragging them around so my only solution is to stumble on and grab the things that are lurching behind me so that I can get them done and set them free.

A cigarette isn't as fulfilling afterward, either

Now, to the fridge!

(Note: Regarding the Race and the Movies series, I haven’t forgotten it. Keep an eye out for the next installment. I dawdled on getting movies.)

The genesis of every horror video game, movie, or story is this:

Welcome, Caucasians

This post isn’t to foment any racial tensions. I happen to love horror, and I always notice that in mainstream horror there is something terribly wrong with all the people. Let’s go down the list.

The Asshole Jock: He’s the guy who is hot-headed dickish and doesn’t listen to anyone, but who will, in the final moments of his life when he realizes that it will make him more popular, sacrifice himself bravely to save the Final Girl.

Smoochy and Moopsy aka The Lovers: These guys reek of one another’s saliva and will die gloriously, leaving people to hope that their final agonies were at least ameliorated a little bit by a really big O.

The Nerd: This guy (or gal, of late) has a body of knowledge which is really downright eerily specific to the situation at hand. The Nerd will die either shrieking in horror or reaching impotently for the one way to alert the others to the coming danger.

The Final Girl: She will live because when the chips are down and after she’s watched all her friends die one by one, in agony and terror, she finds within herself a wellspring of strength and resourcefulness that she can only now tap into to defeat her heretofore indefatigable opponent. Why she wasn’t this strong and resourceful when she could have helped organize the others and mount a better defense or GTFO if they could have, she never explains and naturally, everyone considers it rude to ask.

The Negro: Your standard-issue garden-variety black character. They may be funny (male or female), best friends/bitter enemies with The Asshole Jock (male), an ex of any of the characters except The Final Girl (female), or a sassy redshirt (female). For some reason I rarely see gay black men in horror films and if they are they’re never directly involved. This would be awesome and I want a sex change if it means I get to still like boys AND sip drinks/listen to jazz while 7 teenagers get slaughtered in a warehouse 3 blocks away without my knowledge. NOTE: The Negro may be changed, in fact, to any nonwhite ethnicity. There have been many accounts of Asians, Latinos, and even Greeks taking The Negro’s place.

What I want to know is: why is it that the black guy dies first 9 times out of 10? I know in Night of the Living Dead the black guy lived until the very end (which was AWESOME) but for the most part by the time a horror movie has reached its climax the only people left are the ones who just went tanning yesterday. I’m not accusing movies of being racist. It’s just that there are certain roles that certain types of people play. The black girl never falls down, but the white girl does. It’s also always a white girl who goes to see what that noise is late at night, in her nightgown, never stopping for a moment to ask herself what it might be if the person’s name she’s calling would clearly have answered her by now. At the same time, The Final Girl is almost always white though very rarely is The Killer black (or, indeed, any sort of “ethnic.”)

It never seems to be the ethnic friend that starts the trouble. I’m going to show my color here and say that at no time have I or any other black person I know said “Hey guys, let’s take this old book I found at a dead lady’s house and go to this crypt and try to recite this poem on this, the night of a highly coincidental full moon.” It’s not as if it’s never happened, but finding a case of that is as rare as the black chick surviving to the end of AvP.

I’m always asking myself “how did this get started?” and I still have yet to have any idea. You got any ideas, you let me know, k?

Stay tuned for Part 2 of my hard-hitting expose regarding race and the movies!