Who am I kidding?  No one reads this crap…

Oooh, twist-cross!

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As humans, we develop predictions based on past happenings; so, the older we get, the more things we see fail miserably. We have smaller dreams because we wish to actually accomplish those dreams.

The kid who dreamed of being the president did not whittle his dream down, he just learned what a shit job he would then have, and what that job actually means. Our dreams as kids were big, but they were superfluous. Our dreams now (at least, my own) are infinitely smaller but that much more meaningful and precise.

My dream of being a dinosaur was dreaming for the status (?) of dinosaur, my dream of owning a coffee shop and writing a book are dreams of content. Now, I still want to be a dinosaur, but only because dinosaurs are awesome, not because I am specifically excited about what I would then be doing as a dinosaur.

(this post first appeared in reply to a thread on SoulPancake, it talked about dinosaurs, so I just had to post it here)

I am hardly one to go and defend Starbucks.  I know their coffee is not that good but, to be honest, I am not enough of a coffee aficionado to state any reason other than the fact that their coffee is burned as all heck.  What makes me introduction sound even more like that of this NigelAstydameia character is that, although I do not store my brewed coffee in the fridge (I am pretentious enough to know otherwise) I buy my coffee from a The Real Canadian Superstore; a Safeway/ Costco hybrid.

I live my life with two year-numbering systems; Anno Domino (AD) and After Package (AP).  Where AD counts the years after the theoretical death of Jesus Christ, AP counts the years after David Bowie co-starred in the film Labyrinth with his package.  I forgot how this was related.

The longest running conversation I can remember having is the one with the bestie of mine that, just the other night, let me crash on her couch because I left my apartment keys on a till at a local Save-on-foods; after my former employer as Boston Pizza (the only place in my farm town to stay up past 9:00pm) was shut down, we were stuck meeting at the local Starbucks (this was before we had two Starbucks only (roughly) 84 Roman cubits from each other.  We found ourselves, often, being pushed out by the staffers and had to drive, roughly, 20, 200 Roman cubits to the next Boston Pizza.  And so began our idea of the worlds greatest café ever, and so also began our common fandom of the comic Questionable Content.

(In our latest revision of the café, we decided on the theme of horned creatures; specifically unicorns and narwhals, but we did not rule out the possibility of triceratops, rhinoceroses, goats, minotaurs and Hellboys.)

Push came to shove, and so I realized  how fond  I am of the idea of a coffee culture.  And bringing this back on topic, coffee culture is what Starbucks revived and commercialized.  Besides the few coffee shops that will, in the wake of a new Starbucks, inevitably shut down, reports have shown that Starbucks does miracles for local shops, ”They’ll do all of your marketing for you, and your sales will soar.”  And besides doing your marketing (someone has got to catch the customer overflow) it got people used to paying more than a few pence for a cup of consciousness and it gave, as dubious a claim as you may find this, a higher standard than there was before.

What bothers me is how, relatively, small a percentage of the drinks they sell are coffee.  What does not bother me is that, no matter how many Cinnamon Dolce Lattes they sell, their coffee is still standing behind the register and still comes in mislabelled  sizes.

Where I live right now, I have two Starbucks in the strip-mall across my street, if I take a 5 minute bus ride down No. 3 Road (where the SkyTrain system built for the 2010 winter Olympics heads from) there is one inside the mall, one inside the nearby Chapters store and one on the opposite corner of that strip-mall.  If their usurpation was half as true as is often blamed, the brand new Blenz would not be as busy as it always is.

Starbucks is, in many ways, like Apple Computers.  More specifically, like the iPod, iPhone or iPad; no one gave much a crap about any of these respective categories of devices until there was an obvious competition for companies to deal with.  Before Starbucks; however, the coffee industry was much like the American health care system – no competition, no reason to try hard and so terrible that many people never bothered to deal with it.  The quote below is from Gawker’s similarly titled Comment of the Day article;

I’m probably not the guy to defend Starbucks, hell, I usually make a pot of Safeway coffee and keep it in the fridge, and I find myself in a Starbucks just a few times a year, but here goes:

I get tired of the trendy, hipster attitude of putting down Starbucks, as if pre-Starbucks America was filled with lovely, independent, caring coffee shops that were forced out by this evil, corporate titan. It was not. In fact, “coffee shop” was a synonym for an awful, greasy spoon that you wouldn’t go near, relic diners that were far from charming (but of course now we miss them).

Really, before Starbucks there were few places you would actually go to just sit. You met people for lunch or a drink, but “meeting for coffee” was something that happened in old movies and Europe. In many ways, Starbucks trained Americans to think differently, to care more (and yes, pay more) for that black tonic you were tossing down your throat each day, often made in a crusty, petrie dish of a pot surrounded by sugar packets and non-dairy creamer in a crummy break room.

Starbucks encouraged people to sit, taste and enjoy. They didn’t chase you away once your drink was empty. They put chairs outside, and people slowly began using them (even in winter, like those crazy Europeans!). Because of Starbucks (not in spite of) America became a coffee culture. People started demanding better coffee at home and the office and learned a little more about brewing. New, alternative coffee shops opened up, attracting people allergic to the word “chain.” Restaurants and bookstores (some also chains) let people linger longer, and added more year-round outdoor seating. People started to think more about how they lived, what they were eating and drinking, and America became more of a food culture as well.

Is Starbucks corporate and whitewashed? A silly, plasticky American version of a European lifestyle that’s been around forever? Definitely. This is America, if quaint makes money we mass produce quaint. But really, Starbucks is responsible for making this country—our beautiful America with its huge TVs, NASCAR t-shirts and shoot first attitude—a little more sophisticated.

 

He is so awesome.

http://www.youtube.com/p/7D87FD2772C40234?hl=en_US&fs=1

Batman, Conan, Wonder Woman and more are in the link there in the bottom.  Okay fine, you can click here. Or  here.

Or  here, here, there or…  here… or down there (in between the square brackets, because that is where I always link to crap).

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EDIT: Or  here.

Princess Zelda (and her Legend) will forever be ingrained in my heart.  Ocarina of Time was the first game I remember being passionate for, it is the game with which I learned of the malleability of video game release dates.

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After first getting into Doctor Who with Matt Smith, I finally decided to grab the few preceding seasons after the 1996 movie.

I am not sure how common this feeling is (there is always that chance that I am a sap), but I seriously doubted my wanting to start the third season.  I seriously doubted how much I wanted to see the Doctor being the glisten in some new companions eye.

But then this show started to impress me even more.  What I genuinely feared most in this third season (I am now onto the fourth one) was that he would forget Rose, that he would forget the two-seasons-in-two-days relationship with Rose.  I do not think myself qualified enough to write some ranting review of the wondrousness that is the Doctor, but what I will say is that, yes, Rose Tyler was handled very well in the third season.

My heart was still left broken, but it was handled well.  And now Rose has become the title for a type of person that I shall forever yearn for, in ways similar to a Shakespearean protagonist.

EDIT: Also, Billie Piper shagged Matt Smith.  Before Matt Smith was a doctor.  Madness!

Right?  Fuck that noise.

With the idea of an OpenID came everyone trying to become everyones central hub for anything.  After the initial OpenID hosts came out, so did Google, Twitter and Facebook.  And while each have their own communities of people who would proudly tout their identity under their domain, and each are large enough to be thought of as a standard.  But different standards, and multiple different standards only work when they work together.  And that is why they do not, at least, not often.

Lifehacker.com (one of my very favorite websites) was founded by @ginatrapani (one of my very favorite people) and is currently under the umbrella of Gawker Media Inc., and thusly, its new layout.  I like to believe that the team at Lifehacker would know how to work this more effectively, but either way, it leaves me with this crap, one username, three logons, three passwords – no ability to merge them;

So here I am left, instead of having to remember what username I used for a website, I have to remember what username, under what service I used for what website.  And I still have to remember that password crap.

The Dork Forest

At the same time, Jackie Kashian (the host of this here show) and both stolen and broken my heart.  But does so every week, so logic goes to say that sometimes during that following week she returns it to me in my sleep.  Every show that comes out staples a grin onto my face and makes me think of the good ol’ days; a recent episode had guests go on about zombies, Green Rangers, Dungeons, Dragons, comic books and more.  She is just a lovely woman with an awesome set of friends.  In essence, I want to marry this woman.

The Nerdist

I am not sure what their current roles are, as I left my satellite TV (and, there within, channel 514, aka G4), but the general statement that I have thought has rung true for a while is this: Chris Hardwick is tenfold the nerd that Olivia Munn pretends to be.  Chris is a very handsome man, a very intelligent man and a fellow Doctor Who fan.  Also, he is friends with Craig Fergusen, and Craig Fergusen is hilarious and British and hilariously British.   The hosts at Nerdist have interviewed characters such as (as per what is most highest rated in iTunes) Zach Galifanakis, Colin Hanks, Drew Carey and (roughly) 57 more.

And by Doctor Who fan, I mean that he will always throw in a few references to Daleks, Time Lords or Silurians.

Stop Podcasting Yourself

I include this here because I am hilarious and I am thinking of putting these guys as a running joke in all of my lists.  Original post here.  Also, I am not actually very funny.

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