Shorthand for Nothing

Summer always reminds me that I prefer the winter. Of course, I prefer the springtime and the autumn even more, each for its own reasons, but I never feel as if I get used to the heat so much as I feel that it just goes away eventually. The humidity over here does not make things easier.

That said, this summer continues the long tradition of Seattle being afflicted with freakish weather while I am away. Heatocalypse ‘09! Who knew? You see, I bear a good weather curse. Everywhere I go the weather is tamer than usual, nicer than usual, not as bad as expected. Meanwhile, wherever I used to be is plagued with storms and death from the skies. I am being spared the possibility of a freakish death in the weather, no doubt for some other grim fate.

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Following is a partial transcription of a full-page ad on the back of the November 1982 edition of IEEE Micro.

Feature For Feature We Out-perform Everyone

And With a Pricing Structure That Will Pleasantly Surprise You.

We at Falco Data Products are seriously committed to offer the DP profession the absolute best in emulations with emphasis on quality and end-user benefits as well as real price/performance. All terminals come with standard P31 Green screen. Call NOW for full information regarding any of these Brilliant(tm) terminals.

TS-2624

• HP 2624A* Emulation
• Software Controlled Setup
• 4 Pages of Screen Memory
• 64 Character Line Drawing Set
• 8 Preprogrammed or User Definable Screen Laeled Function Keys
• Local Printer Port
• Modified Data tags

…

*Hewlett-Packard

Good times. I actually kind of wish computer advertising were more like this and less like this these days.

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One of the things I really miss about the weather in Seattle is that it was generally pretty consistent. If it was raining, it would rain all day, or all week, or whatever. Even when the weather changed, it changed gradually. You could see the clouds sweeping in, and it started raining lightly before it got steady. When the rain was intermittent it was constantly intermittent. It meant the weather was unlikely to surprise you, but it also meant that once you’d found something you liked, it stuck around.

In Boston, there are a lot more storms, and they last a lot less time. Just tonight there was a pretty nasty thunderstorm that lasted all of fifteen minutes. It came up suddenly, heralded by a bit of lightning and a sudden downpour, and suddenly the wind was blowing and the temperature dropped and it was suitably awesome. Then, just as suddenly, the rain let up and the lightning stopped and the wind died down and the temperature came back up. That’s not weather. That’s a random interlude to the hot and the muggy.

I’m sure it would be nice if I were feeling hindered by the storms, but when it’s not in the way I always feel like it’s over too quickly.

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You guys, I am going to make a podcast and it’s going to be awesome. I’m going to probably record this weekend and then find a place to upload it, which will probably be pretty easy, given my expected bandwidth use (very little!). It will be called Rob Mason Tells You What To Think, I will post them here when they happen, and it will be the greatest thing ever. I will basically talk about whatever in a rambling and digressive fashion, because oral storytelling is fun, and sometimes you just need to hear my voice when you’re walking to work or whatever, talking about something useless. It’ll be great, probably!

Or maybe it won’t be, but even if it’s not, it will be awesome, because terrible things are just as awesome as awesome things, in the end.

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So, if you missed it, seeing as I didn’t announce it or anything, I am now the Textfiles.com intern. Right now if you go to ascii.textfiles.com there is a big picture of me. Right now I’m cataloguing old computer magazines, which is actually more fun than it sounds. There’s no time to read through them all, of course, but like with any archive, it’s filled with snapshots of things old and ancient, things that I remember being new at the time, and things that are well before my time. The advertising is also pretty awesome, including at least one which featured the most mid-to-late 90’s “hey, hackers are cool, right?” picture ever.

I will be sure to make note if I happen to uncover any particularly excellent artefacts. One never knows, and this collection I am sifting through is huge.

(Unrelated: the post I wrote called “Oh, Hello” was not, apparently, tagged with the tag “oh hello.” I have failed you all.)

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The absolute worst part about walking to the subway for a mile and a half is you have twenty minutes of your mind going into overdrive and imagining things that, it turns out, are just in your imagination. It’s weird, the scenarios that play out in your head when your mind is left to wander. Most of them have little to do with reality, and only slightly more to do with your thoughts at the time. The weirdest part, though, is how, as you run these scenarios through your head, you come to expect them, however implausible or unrealistic. The whole night ends up being judged based on these weird expectations, however implausible or undesirable they may be. You come home with the weird feeling that, despite having a great time, you didn’t live up to some impossible, bizarre measure you had set for yourself.

Is that so weird? Is it just because I’m a writer, or a romantic, or something? I come up with these involved scenarios in my head, good and bad, and then everything is based on those. They are never accurate predictions. Is that getting in the way? Or am I just paving the way for one of the times all this weird imaginative preparation pays off?

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Today at Davis Square, there was a girl with a Pocky handbag. This sort of thing is legitimately awesome, and there ought to be more of it. Without, you know, it becoming all the same thing all of everywhere. It, and the Awesome Foundation mixer this evening, have had me contemplating what the function of awesome is. Specifically, for some reason, when it comes to fashion.

I’ve got a collection of t-shirts that I happen to think are pretty great. People occasionally comment on them and it makes for good conversation; I’ve also had at least one random street person approach me and actually buy me a cup of coffee because of one of them. It’s easy to say I wear them because I like them, but there’s always a little something there. I want people to see these shirts and appreciate that they are awesome, and in many ways it has nothing to do with me. I just picked it out. It means I’ve got an eye for awesome.

Pocky handbags, for instance. I bet there’s a fair amount of them out there. (Maybe she designed it, I don’t know. In which case, awesome?) Nevertheless, there’s something awesome about that. It’s the sort of thing you want to acknowledge. “You have an awesome handbag. Can I give you a high five?” Maybe that’s weird. But I think that’s the point. We want to share what we think is awesome with other people, and it’s always nice when we get someone else who thinks it’s great, too. It’s a cryptocompliment! You are vicariously saying “oh man, you have good taste.” Positivity!

(Once, I walked up to someone and told him he had an excellent shirt. He was not awesome about it. I think he does not deserve to wear excellent clothing if he cannot be awesome about it.)

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Oh, Twitter. While you have your detractors, and those who are under the delusion that the content you generate ought to be in some way useful, there are still those who understand that you are beautiful. Even if Chuck Norris is a trending topic right now. It’s not your fault humanity needs to be taken out back and shot.

I used to get a little annoyed by the trending topics and the idiotic Twitter memes. That so many people were typing the hashtag #liesgirlstell or whatever, was occasionally disheartening. But I have persevered, because in the end, Twitter is about nothing. You will see many loathsome social media people try to tell you how to use Twitter, or how it is intended to be used, but it is precisely its uselessness that makes it so useful. It’s not about link-farming. I seldom click Twitter-links, and judging from several other people I’m following, neither do they. It’s not about breaking news. My favorite Twitter accounts provide me with very little  actual information at all, but say something in a way which is amusing or clever or witty or whatever. They amuse me. They’re brilliantly crafted.

I am following a few of the loathsome social media people, the ones who “know how Twitter works,” and generally speaking I only care if I feel like talking about Twitter, in which case they are a great source of bad information. They apparently do not know how to engage me, and I’m pretty easy to please.

Twitter in its base state is idle and passive. You are not investing anything by sharing your thoughts. It’s background noise, rather like birds chirping outside. Occasionally a conversation flows out of it–but its power is ultimately in its emptiness, in the lack of any prescription or purpose. It is the most human of social media for just that reason.

By the way, this is apparently the hundredth post at rsmason.net. I expect you all to buy me drinks.

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Am I alone in this?

I enjoy reading bad reviews of my favorite restaurants online. Places like Yelp, Citysearch, and now, apparently, Facebook, are ripe with them. They are usually pretty hilarious! When a star rating is available it’s almost invariably one star (though occasionally they give it two stars), with the frequent rider that they would give it zero if they could. (We get it, you want to give it the lowest rating possible. Get over yourself.) They tell angry stories about how horrible the service was, often mentioning how everyone else in the restaurant got better service, which really doesn’t help their case in the least.

The story is generally pretty incomplete-sounding. That is, they never detail the exchanges; they just broadly state that they requested something and got an unfavorable reaction. Given the types of people who leave these reviews, this is pretty significant! Politely asking “excuse me, could we move to another table?” is rather different from snapping, “My friends are freezing at this table. Seat us somewhere else.” Both would be summarized “when I asked the hostess if she would re-seat us . . . .”

Anyway, I just read one of these on Facebook of the Friendly Toast. I am going to go through it, for laughs, after the jump. All errors of spelling and punctuation are hers; I may unconsciously correct some. I may see if I can find some other bad restaurant reviews in the future, so stay tuned, unless you think this sucks in which case tell me to stop! (more…)

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Because so little else was:

I was at the Friendly Toast this evening, and after a while I noticed that the waitress (who seemed to be rather busy despite the crowd being in something of a lull) was wearing a dress patterned with monopoly money. (I tried to do a Google image search for it and only managed to find one that was apparently made with Monopoly money; it was not that one. It was decidedly more fun-looking and casual and less sexy. Also, it was not made with Monopoly money, it just had a fabric print.) It was awesome in a way that wasn’t contrived or obvious. It is a surprisingly subtle thing!

That is reall all I have.

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