actres in bikini

Anyone who knows me will tell you I'm a nice guy to everyone I meet.  Guys, girls, aliens, republicans, anyone.  I have many friends,  a lot of them hot chicks.  Let me say right now that I would have sex with 98% of them, readily.  This article on the Friend Zone is my life in a nutshell.  The friend zone doesn't bother me much.  Maybe I have just gotten used to it (which is awful, you don't have to tell me).  A lot of girls might read this and say "I have a lot of guy friends, a girl needs them.  More guys should be like that."  This is total bull.  Girls need friends like that. Guys don't.  I have guy friends to talk about my problems with.  When a dude ends up with 5 girls that are friends and no girlfriends he is bound to snap and you don't want to be around when it happens.  Seriously this is a huge lesson I wish someone would have told me a LONG time ago.  Pass it along to an unsuspecting guy hoping that one day, one beautiful day he just might be able to tap that ass.  Tell him it's only going to happen in his dreams.

Apparently I am a neopliliac, I like that it has the word Neo in it.  Makes me feel closer to the matrix...

Sweet Village Voice article on how Parkour is hitting the streets of NYC and America in general.  Those of you who are loyal readers will remember that I too am part of a Parkour group named the Rainbow Traceurs.  I haven't been practicing the art as much as I should, my last experience being when I tried some Parkour moves in my house and ended up breaking my staircase banister.  At least I was yelling out Parkour! while doing it which is good for something. 

BTW, Does anyone know how to blur out someone's face in a digital video (format is .mov).  Not that I want to or need to blur out someone's face, but just in case I ever do I would like to know how to do it.

Taking mushrooms will mess you up and may be one of the most significant experiences of your life?!  And here I thought they were just fun on a sunny day...

WSJ.com - Go Ask Alice: Mushroom Drug Is Studied Anew

Week long hiatus in Massachusetts and NYC was awesome.  I realize that I really do like a slightly slower life.  Then again maybe is was the never at home feeling I had as I stayed at a different place almost every night I was there.  For the first time I wanted to go back to Rochester sooner than I had planned.  After I had a horrendous back pull/spasm (not sure what it was) I was pretty down for not doing anything at all. I recovered thanks to the awesome powers of Excedrin (that isht is awesome) and felt pretty good for the next few days. I spent sometime with my parents. Oddly, I felt like it wasn't enough after I left.  It was really strange, most of the time I stay there I feel like I want out, when I only spent a little time there I felt like I got jipped.  Weird.  Also once the high speed internet was working I was pretty fine with not going anywhere. I did and had some pretty cool times with old old friends and some new friends.  I was back in Rocha Friday where my weekend was filled with exhaustion, fustration, and a little depression to complete the trifecta.  All in all it wasn't bad.  I returned to work in a generally relaxed state (which is the point of any vacation) which will probably wear off by weeks end.  More stories to come, and maybe some pictures after I develope this film (you read right, develope film).

I encountered the reference to this Village Voice piece in an article on Slate's website during their 10 year anniversary.  It's a fairly long tale of a virtual rape which intrigued me enough to read to the end.  Reading this now in 2006, I can only think of the type of reaction that it had at the time versus the type of reaction it will receive today as you read it from the future of computing and social networking sites.  I implore you to read it as any significant technophile will find it a decent read if not extremely more pertinant in our now decidely information age.  Check it.  If the link does not work type in the seach string "a rape in cyberspace"  (sans quotes) and you should be able to find it.  Tell me what you think.

Two little bits here that seem unrelated although some abstract thought in my head that is pretty hard to put my finger on tells me somehow they are.

In this piece about the loss of close inter-personal relationships as a by product of the internet, I think the last paragraph states the problem with this type of study correctly.  The study used was done from 1985-2004.  Much has changed in this 20 year span, not least of which are our popular and understood definitions of roles in society.  What was then considered to  be close friends may no longer have a place in our modern society, this does not mean that the role of the close friend has been erased from our society.  The safety net described by a network of close personal friends may simply have morphed past the understanding of this survey.  Topics that used to be discussed between a person and their peers that were considered by the affected party as "a serious personal matter" may now be handed off to a web of friends on a favorite social networking site (composed argueably of close personal peers) or on a site that caters to that particular area of personal concern.  A problem that used to seem so dire to a high school student (sexual/physical initiation with a partner, a family problem, or a matter affecting peformance in school) now seem to find their ways onto chat forums with hundreds if not thousands of people willing to give mostly honest opinions as to the best roads to take for a resolution.  The right question here is which method is better.  A few close social friends act as a good group to talk to because they know you and you trust their opinion, hence close friend.  Now we live past the time when Arkanoid was the bomb and our social net was not even imagined to be as large as many people's are today.  Maybe the closeness and feelings we used to use to solve these problems has been moved to a different domain and a time when sharing problems with perfect strangers doesn't seem so far fetched. 

This article about Adult Immaturity really does help explain the socio-political climate that exists in our world today.  It's hard to explain the kinds of news stories and arguements we here between today's supposedly enlightened and advanced minds another way.  I hate to turn this into a administration bashing piece, but the way the American system of Government runs today does seem to mimic what a government would look like if it were run by children trying to give the appearance of logic and order.  Some of the time it would look like the left did not know what the right was doing nor did it care, and the rest of the time it would seem like idiotic bickering and unwilligness to yield/compromise were the norms, both things that adolescents are well known for.