Unsolicited Advice

I don't often buy CDs anymore. With media I'm generally only interested in the main content, and the hard drive stays the same size no matter how much I load onto it, so digital services are easier. It's rare that I want some part of the packaging enough to store it, and pack it, and move it from house to house when I am eventually forced to be itinerant again. Placebo released a 20th anniversary retrospective, and I paid to have them mail me one. I like them enough to give them money, and their website asks a very reasonable $11 for a 2-CD set, in a hardcover gatefold. I wanted the pictures. More accurately, I wanted to know which pictures the two of them thought were relevant. Knowing what people want to remember is sometimes more interesting than the events themselves. There is a brief introduction to the album by Brian Molko in the front of the book. I have seen very little prose from him, but it all has the same curious quality of standing by itself, hanging over t...

Someone on reddit recently posted the question, "What was the thing that made you realize you were living in the future ?" I'm not sure if I had an exact moment  for that, but the other day I had to dig through my room to find where I had put down the phone that was actively streaming music to the earbuds I was wearing at the time , so 'the future' is probably here. I expect it's going to involve me misplacing a lot of things that are no longer physically tethered to my body and/or the wall. Detangling headphone cords is a pain in the ass, but at least I always knew where the wire led. The turning point where tech became truly impressive and magical, rather than just a new and improved version of a thing I already knew about, was sometime around when everything suddenly went wireless. I'm not entirely sure why. My family had cordless telephones so early that I don't remember the main house phone ever being any other kind. Television and AM/FM/short...

I recently applied for something that required me to pony up some written samples, showcasing my analytical abilities. The person who tipped me off to the opportunity is a reader here, and seemed to think quite highly of things like linguistic and profiling essays. This all looks much more impressive on your end than on mine. You only see the things that hang together well enough to write about. The world is full of scattershot gibberish that deserves, at best, a two-line post on /r/ShowerThoughts. Those don't get 1500-word essays. I once turned in all fifty pages of a twenty page research assignment to one of my college professors, and even I can only pad so much. There are two main reasons I look like I am some kind of mad genius with a crazy-awesome hit rate: Confirmation bias, and an overblown sense of drama. The confirmation bias is down to the reader. Human brains -- mine, yours, everyone's -- are built to ping whenever two ideas connect, especially if that connecti...