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AlphaSteve
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Name: Steve
Country: United States
State: New Jersey
Birthday: 6/28/1984
Gender: Male
Interests: Movie-making, reading, writing, going to movies, computer/console games, and of course, hanging out with my friends.
a/s/l:
height: 6'1 and 1/2"
weight: ~170 lbs
eyes: brown
hair: dark brown
Interesting fact people may or may not know: I can make awesome pancakes.
Occupation: Student
Industry: Other
Message: message me
Website: visit my website
Member Since:
5/14/2003
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| Somebody comment with more six-word short stories!
Masturbation, procrastination, panic, perform, relief, repeat.
Open apartment implies pungent death inside. (This was based on a possibly-true story that happened today)
"Bad news: the rec center's closing." (Sequel: "We pulled together and still failed.")
Novelty is the stealer of girlfriends. (A,IYRT,TII)
Hit an artery. Kill a rat. (Based on a true story)
"Er" as erection euphemism: terrible, unnecessary. (What's with my juvenile jokes today? This and the first one)
"I'm Jesus, who the fuck're you?" (That's hey-Zeus everybody)
The snow fell like a glissando.
"--a zero-beer queer," describing himself. (Not based on a true story)
I have it here on video.
"At least you don't feel guilty?"
"Don't use a condom." "Why not?"
Waste your life, wait for e-mails. (This is a self-help book)
Sadness crests, so walk along that shore. (This one was written by the Universe and also lameness)
Wow them in the end. Wow! (This is descending into kitsch)
"You ruin memories being in them!"
Classically trained, beautifully unrestrained, child molester.
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| Dear iPhone and iPod touch users:
Please help my brother combat an aggressive smear campaign and give his app a good review. Like, a five-star review.
Some of the recent reviews have been so obnoxiously idiotic that they almost have to be based on a personal vendetta.
A few examples:
"Look again at the screen capture. Potatoes with flesh? Who wrote this app, Hannibal Lector?" (2/5 stars) That was the entire review.
"This app is ridiculous. Don't get me wrong the calorie info is in there." (1/5 stars) (boldface added by Steve)
"ok, the name says calorie check, and that's all it does." (1/5 stars) (boldface added by Steve) To this one and the one immediately above it: Are you completely retarded?
"Doesn't have raw food like avacado [sic], tomato, etc...Poorly excuted [sic] with no orginizirio [sic]...Not recommended ad [sic] would like a refund!" (1/5 stars)
My brother got the data from the USDA, which does happen to list potatoes with flesh, so no, he's not the guy on that bus in Canada who Jeffrey Dahmer-ed someone and cut off his head. The most annoying-but-true thing in those reviews, though, is that it "doesn't have raw food like avacado [sic], tomato, etc..."
OH WAIT:
Maybe if you learned how to spell it would work "right".
If you like me, if you like my brother, please go HERE and bring his average up with a 5/5 review.
The result of these totally baseless reviews has been several knocks down the top list, which he was, until this point, in solidly.
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| A few months ago I made a concession to my anti-frugal instincts and bought myself an iPhone. It's a cool phone, but I think that it's really gotten much better because of the recent addition of the app store. It was probably the smartest move Apple could have made, since it 1) makes a lot of developers focus on Apple exclusively and 2) renews the phone's usefulness indefinitely. Think about how rarely a product will stave off rather than plan its obsolescence. Not that Apple hasn't and doesn't do that, but in this case, things are good.
The last couple of weeks we've been brainstorming ideas about what types of apps would be good. My brother's idea (which I think was the best any of us came up with, and one of the few which he actually wrote and put up on iTunes [it's called PicVault]) is a password-protected folder for private pictures.
It was also the most simple idea any of us came up with--if I asked you to give me your phone right now, so that I could browse through all of your pictures, would you? My guess is that most of you would not. I wouldn't. But you wouldn't necessarily want to delete the pictures you wouldn't want me seeing. So you'd be stuck.
However, a hilarious side-effect of this new option of hiding pictures seems to be rearing its head. The reviews that are being left for it are asking about/requesting two things that are just loaded with vice.
The first: Are pictures actually encoded or are they just moved into a password-protected folder?
The answer is that it's a password protected folder but it isn't encoded. Because the only type of people who would actually want their pictures encoded are people whose pictures are not simply damning to their character in a personal sense (unless their trusted friends and relatives and acquaintances are also master hackers), but are damning in a more global sense. That is, the pictures they want privatized are probably illegal.
So pictures of drug stashes, questionably illegal sexual pictures, and sensitive government or legal photographs are the encoded picture requesters' most likely subjects. Fortunately, John's app does not cater to these crowds, and it remains simply a password-protected folder.
I, personally, have to take pictures of rat brain sections for work. I wouldn't want the casual user to stumble on these, and I don't want to explain them all the time, so they're now in PicVault. However, there are other people with slightly more aggressively insidious intentions.
The second: Can you make a version with a different title and icon, so if my girlfriend/wife picks up my phone, they won't notice that I even have pictures to hide? (This is an actual paraphrased review. Look it up if you don't believe me.)
I don't think John specifically had spousal cuckoldry in mind when he wrote the app, but there you go.
So, I had my hair buzzed down to about a half inch. It was a good buzz, but I just don't think that my face/head shape supports a buzz cut really well. I think the top of my head isn't dome-like enough. And my cheeks puff out too much. However, I am enjoying the extraordinarily efficient way of keeping cool and the absolute lack of need to style it. | | |
| Last night we took one of our cats, Pancake, to The Cat Clinic near where I live, because we suspected some ominous causes for the extreme swollen-ness of his elbow and shoulder.
The visit was less elucidative than I would have liked, but I was struck by 1) how much the doctor seemed to care about the cat (I probably should have realized this if a vet decided to open a practice catering to one animal) and 2) how much the nursing staff also seemed to care about the cat.
Is it because, unlike in hospitals for people, pets seem to us less a burden and more something prized?
No cat leaves an inheritance. There are no reprisals for cat health neglect, unless it is conspicuous or on a very large scale. The patients, when they come in with a specific problem, are in the vast majority coming in because of unconditioned emotional investment. And I can see how the fear of losing them can give rise to terrible exploitations.
I was, am, and will always remain staunch in my refusal to trivialize pet worries and especially pet death grief. There is a hierarchy to be expected in the grief, sure, but it's there. I'm sure there are people completely willing to pounce on that.
I will not forget the doctor's readiness (actually, mild exuberance) to write a script so we could get medication from another (fractionally, unridiculously priced) vendor.
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| I had a very nice long weekend with some old friends.
When I was a little kid I could project to the future how I thought I would look, act, and think (all of which have been proven wrong) until just after finishing college. After college, I thought, I would become the same type of person my parents were at that time, so it was easy to simply classify my behavior thereafter as mom or dad-like.
Obviously that isn't the case but for some reason, turning 24 is making me feel more old than all the other years did.
Is it because now I'm lumped into the group now that points to itself and says "I'm in my mid-twenties"?
The thing that this weekend illustrated to me is how much life doesn't turn out like you thought it would, and this is definitely not necessarily in a bad way. It also is making me wonder what exactly I want and why I want it, professionally, personally, all that stuff. The why I want it is making me especially dubious of all of my aspirations.
Since I've mentioned dubiousness, I should mention that I think I have identified a really intense source of unease for me personally, and that is uncertainty. I am now more loath than ever to trust a claim made with confidence (especially with confidence) and to take the claim at face value.
Because for me, that certainty was lost the first time I was proven wrong. Think of this--when were you absolutely, positively sure of something--anything (even where your socks were, or the answer to a math problem)--that turned out to be wrong? Could you ever really, totally, completely trust your own certainty again once you were shown an example of how mistaken you could be? The answer, for me, is absolutely not.
And so I take it as a matter of course that I may be wrong about anything, at any time. This also coincides with another source of unease for me, and it's often just joked about: if you were brain damaged, or mentally challenged, would you ever really know it? I mean, I am relatively sure that I've got a brain that works pretty okay since I have a job and a degree and responsibility but suppose my brain suddenly went through a physically or chemically damaging event.
Then would I know that I wasn't what I once was? Can I really be sure now? Can I really be sure of anything? Sometimes, when asked why she'd do something particularly senseless, my younger sister will often reply "I born with it." Heartbreaking as this retort may be to you the outsiders at the "tragedy" of the situation, believe me, you get used to it. But she raises an interesting bit of evidence favoring self-awareness there, which is comforting, I guess.
This is sub-philosophy-101 stuff, I know, but that doesn't make it dense, facile, or not worth thinking about. It just illustrates its universality.
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