Info

I'm just a guy who happens to be awesome. This is my website.

You know that statistic you hear every so often about how most people fear speaking in front of large groups more than they’re afraid to die? I don’t have that problem. In fact, I actually find the idea of getting my gab on in front of a large group to be super-exciting, both because people tell me that I’m pretty good at it and because I’m a giant attention-slut. In my job, I have to talk to all sorts of people all the time: people who want stuff from me, people who are mad at me, people who are screaming at me, and people who don’t want to listen to me at all. My job is to win them over, make them trust and/or like me, and get them to do what I want and, I say this with quite a large bit of bragging, I’m very good at my job. In fact, should I ever decide to start a cult, I think it’ll be as successful as any other cult you can name, and I’d probably make tons of easy money. (Someone make a note that I should start a cult, okay?)

I’m only telling you all this to illustrate a key point of my current problem: I have no problem talking to anyone at anytime or anywhere. Which is why I am baffled about how much of a drooling, cross-eyed idiot I become when I hear someone say, “Hey, I can’t come to the phone right now, leave a message after the beep”.

When I hear that beep, my mind goes blank. I start to stutter, and I have never stuttered in my life in any other circumstance. The inflection in my tone makes it sound like I’m asking a series of questions, even when I’m saying something like “Hi, my name is eD! Thomas”. I say things like “um” and “yeah”, which most people use as place-markers to give themselves time to think, but I use because my mind very literally will not come up with anything to say at all. And immediately after I hang up? I question if that person will even want to consider thinking about speaking to me again since I sound like I had my brain removed and replaced with a Twinkie. And then I get all panic stricken, because that is exactly the sort of thing my head would decide I should be panicking about instead of panicking about something important, like if I set the DVR to record The Soup this week.

I guess the point here is this: the way that people are afraid of talking in front of large groups, I’m afraid of leaving voicemail. So the next time I ask you to just send me a text instead of starting a game of phone tag, don’t give me that scornful glare, like I’m saying you’re not important enough for me to focus on, and instead just text me, okay? Or so help me God I will drag you to an open mic night and make you go in front of a crowd so quick it will make your head spin.

Here’s the deal – I was stuck at work yesterday in a never-ending (yet shockingly productive!) meeting, and the last thing I wanted to do by the time I got home was anything that wasn’t easily classified as “fall asleep watching season one of Community because you wasted your goddamn life for the past three years watching things that were not Community you freakin’ toolbag”. (In case you can’t tell, I am now a fan of Community. NBC. Thursdays. 8/7c. Do it, people. You can send me thank-you muffin gift baskets later.) So, instead of getting home and writing anything, I went home, fired up my Apple TV, and watched the hell out of Community while I fell asleep. Mission thoroughly accomplished!

But that also means that I didn’t write anything yesterday, which means I now need to catch up. I won’t let something like a 47-hour work day (I’m pretty sure time slows down the longer you’re in a meeting. That’s how science works, right?) totally throw me off my game, so now I’m gonna try to double up on the postings over the next day or so. Because if I can’t supply you with the thoughts in my brain, they will sit there, eating away at my soul and driving me into a panic-attack frenzy, and nobody who is me wants that.

From The Scintilla Project: Talk about an experience with faith, your own or someone else’s.

Oh, good, I’m glad we didn’t go for anything heavy like “politics” or “cancer”. No one gets into a tizzy about faith-based things, right? The comments here should be so super-civil that it’ll regress into people just posting pictures of kittens and things from My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. (I’m kidding, of course. Polite discourse is welcome, but blatant jackassery will be carefully considered and then deleted anyway because you’re in my house, foo’!.)

As I mentioned way back in a post two days ago, I grew up your standard Irish Catholic: I tried to do the right thing in my day-to-day life, going to Church every Sunday, being a sexual-abuse-free altar boy for several years, and feeling terribly guilty every time something good happened in my life. You know, the usual. Also, and this is an important side-note for the other people who have the guilt complexes I do, no longer going to Church every Sunday doesn’t make that sense of “the other shoe is gonna drop any minute now” dread go away. I hear drinking helps dull it for some people, but it just made it super-worse for me, so your self-medication mileage may vary. (Not that I recommend self-medicating your problems away… Not anymore, anyway. And anyway, isn’t it super-easy nowadays to get someone to legally prescribe you Xanax? And your insurance will pay for part of it, probably! Win for everyone!)

After the whole “priests abusing altar boys” cover-up in 2001, I became fairly disenchanted with the whole notion of formal religion. Naturally, it helped that I was going away to school, so there was no pressure from anyone else to do anything other than sleep in on weekends. It was also during this time that I started questioning the logic of the whole “higher power” concept, or believing that “everything happens for a reason”, which totally doesn’t work with the whole “free will” thing, and I became jaded. I spent a really long time questioning what I thought about a lot of things, but all with the cynicism that wouldn’t be more prevalent until everyone had a high-speed internet connection. Mind you, I didn’t (and still don’t) judge other people for whatever they believed in – that’s your deal, and as long as you don’t try super-hard to get me to convert, no big either way.

At some point along the way, though, I heard an interview with Matt Stone and Trey Parker, the guys who started South Park and basically two of my favorite people on the planet. Parker was asked to explain his stance on religion, and he said that while it would take a long time to get through, it boiled down to basically this:

“Basically, out of all the ridiculous religion stories which are greatly, wonderfully ridiculous — the silliest one I’ve ever heard is, ‘Yeah … there’s this big giant universe and it’s expanding, it’s all gonna collapse on itself and we’re all just here just ’cause … just ‘cause’. That, to me, is the most ridiculous explanation ever.”

That, you guys, spoke to me. It’s presumptuous to think that we have all the answers to everything all the time, especially since we keep on discovering new stuff all the time. Maybe a giant spaghetti monster in the sky can exist in the same world as science, and that’s kinda okay to me. Rambling on further about the topic would only serve to confuse the matter (since I go back and forth on this all the freakin’ time in my head), so I’m just gonna end the ramble here, grab a delicious drink, and fall asleep watching Community again, just as things are supposed to be.

Well, day four of Scintilla was a bit of a hiccup for me – I really didn’t connect with either of the prompts, so I kinda half-assed it, I guess. But, on the plus side, at least for me, I am still going at it. Which is fairly encouraging to me, at least, since this is the most I’ve written without it being “Oh my gawd deadlines and due dates and blaargh” – sorry if I just got too technical for you – and I tend to think that’s a good thing. Perhaps Stella is getting her groove back, except this time, Stella is me? Minds = Blown, people!

From The Scintilla Project: Show a part of your nature that you feel you’ve lost. Can you get it back? Would it be worth it?

This kinda ties into the “When did you realize you were a grown-up?” post from last week for me… Tangentially, at least. When I was growing up, there were a few things that I did that made me the kid I was, but chief among them was that I didn’t swear for any reason. When I cut my foot on a motor-boat engine in a lake one summer and had to have various things done to keep the insanely-deep gash from getting infected, all of which hurt quite a bit might I add, I think the strongest word that came out of my mouth was “shoot”. I was that dedicated to staying PG-friendly.

This came to be both because my dad, who I still look up to even now, refuses to swear, and because “Weird Al”, who we have already gone over as a pretty big influence on me, doesn’t swear in any of his music… or just about any time he’s “on”, as far as I can recall. This ban doesn’t extend to most of the “safe for network TV” swears, but still, it’s a level of control that I used to have over myself.

Granted, there were some times I would swear – usually in my room, in secret, where no one could hear me. For the “nice kid”, it was a secret thrill. For the “Irish Catholic”, it was a guilt-inducing burden, keeping that secret for as long as I did. And we’re not even talking the heavy words here; “damn” would put me in a state of hidden euphoria and shame akin to setting up a secret kitten knife-fight ring. Eventually, the guilt became so much that I just stopped doing it altogether, and again I was fine.

I don’t really remember when I started using the occasional swear, although it had to be sometime in high school. I do remember the situation, though: there was a very easy, low-hanging joke that I wanted to make, but I couldn’t think of a way to do it without vulgarity. So I did it, and the laugh I got was enough to drag me into a habit that I had avoided for as long as I knew about it. It only got worse when I started working retail, when cursing would be an easy shorthand to let people know what was happening without actually having to explain yourself.

Sometimes, I think that the shorthand that we use to express ourselves has gone a long way to dulling creativity as a whole – granted, there are exceptions to the rule, people like Chris Rock and George Carlin who can use swearing to great effect, but by in large, I think it’s hurt things. Of course, what I really mean to say is that I think the shorthand I use to express myself has screwed up my creativity in the long run, but what good is the internet if I can’t make blanket statements about the world? Seriously, if I wanted to be introspective and thoughtful about my own situation, I’d start a Livejournal. (Is Livejournal even still around? If not, substitute wherever the depressed kids go to write about their awful lives while listening to whatever today’s version of Hawthorne Heights is. Side note: God, I’m old.)

Could I go back to it? I don’t know. I’ve gotten pretty lazy, linguistically speaking, so I don’t know that the part of my brain that controls the nonsense that comes out of my mouth would be able to be on 24/7. I mean, I work at a PG-13 level on the things I post online, so I suppose I could do it, but the amount of time I have to edit myself when writing is way longer than the time I have to edit myself when I’m speaking. Then again, I never thought I’d be able to break my Mountain Dew habit, and I’ve been soda-free for almost 2 months now, so maybe I can get back to that level. I don’t know that it would be worth it, but it’d be an interesting experiment none the less.

From The Scintilla Project: What did your childhood bedroom look like?

Until I was a junior in high school, my parents and I lived in the first floor of a house we rented. My room, which was all the way in the back of the house, was painted a hideous shade of yellow with white trim, and had this weird yellow, green, and brown shag carpet on it that no one in their right mind would ever put down outside of the disco era. Thanks to the restrictions of renting, we were not allowed to paint the room or take up the carpet at all, so that lasted for far longer than it really should have. There was a ceiling light in my room, too, which is something I miss terribly now that I exist in a room that is completely devoid of easily accessible lighting.

My door didn’t close. At all. If you tried, it would just spring back open, screaming at you that privacy will not be had by the likes of you. My bedroom window had a lovely view of the top of the garage next to our house that we didn’t use – I always wondered if I could climb onto it from my room, but I never gathered the nerve to do so. I had a fish tank sitting on my dresser that usually didn’t have any form of fish in it; I’m not all that great at remembering to feed things that don’t make noise, so plants and goldfish die in my care. Keep that in mind for pet-sitting, internet!

I wasn’t much for having friends in my room – I didn’t have a TV, and I really liked the idea of my room being my personal Fortress of Solitude. In fact, I don’t think I’ve had anyone in my room, at all, ever. That probably says something deep and meaningful about my inability to connect to people and my desire to be alone, but I like to think that’s just crazy-talk. I had a twin bed against the wall, the foot of which kept me from being able to open my closet door all the way, which made hanging up clothes a bit of a nightmare.

Other than that? I really don’t remember much else of my room, which isn’t all that surprising given that I barely remember what I had for dinner tonight. So that’s that.

Day three, still writin’. I proclaim myself the new master of all the of words!

From The Scintilla Project: Talk about a memory triggered by a particular song

For me, it’s less about the memories triggered by one song, and more about the memory that is triggered by one musician. The memory:

I just finished playing a baseball game. Even though I wasn’t one of those super-awesome sports kids, I was still disappointed that we lost by one run after a long, hard-fought game. I slink into my dad’s candy-apple red Ford Escort hatchback, and he tells me there’s a song he wants me to hear. He pops in a cassette tape, and, after a few minutes of rewinding, he hits play, and I’m greeted by the wheezing of an accordion, the sort of sound I had, to that point, never heard. It was playing something up-tempo and insanely catchy, and I could feel my face lighting up from the absurdity of what I was hearing. After a few bars of set-up, a slightly-nasal singer begins to croon:

I hear those ice-cream bells and I start to drool.
Keep a couple pints in my locker at school.
Yeah, but chocolate’s getting old,
Vanilla just leaves me cold.

The only sort of novelty music that I can remember hearing until that point was stuff from cartoons or Muppet based – hearing “Weird Al” Yankovic‘s I Love Rocky Road was my first taste of stand-alone silly, and I was instantly hooked. I begged my father to take the slightly longer way home, so that we could hear the song at least a half-dozen times. He happily obliged, and I had learned the lyrics by the end of the second go-round, and sang along at the top of my lungs the rest of the way home. I have been addicted to “Weird Al” since then, and until high school, most of my knowledge of popular music came from his polkas and parodies. While there have been a few people who have heard that and told me that they felt sorry for me, that I missed out on some form of personal growth and all-important rebellion by listening to music that my parents actually approved of, but I still don’t feel that way – between my crediting my love of “Weird Al” (and by extension other novelty acts like Tom Lehrer) for my sense of humor, and the amount of bleak bouts of depression that his music has gotten me through, I can’t imagine who I’d be today, or if I’d even be today, if not for him and the memories of “things’ll turn out alright” that his music evokes in me.

So, yeah. “Weird Al”, kids. That’s where I’m at. And if you found that boring, be thankful I didn’t do the other prompt offered for today, “What was the biggest hurdle you’ve had to overcome in a relationship”. ‘Cause boy howdy is that a road you don’t want me going down right now.

It’s day two of the writing-prompt thing. And look, I’m still writing. Could this be… a good thing?

From The Scintilla Project: “When Did You Realize You Were A Grown Up?”

I suppose there’s different measures for when someone considers themselves grown up – for some, it’s when you start partaking in an “adult” vice like smoking, drinking, or robbing liquor stores to get money to fund your horrible addiction to crystal meth. For others, it’s when you realize you can literally do whatever you want and answer to no one but yourself and/or significant other. Others still see being grown up linked to a number, as in “I’m 18 now! I’m a grown up! I can buy lotto tickets and cigarettes and pornography! Hooray!”

For me, though, the measure of when you grow up has always been linked to when you become boring. As a kid, I always saw grow-ups as stagnant, never taking time out of their lives to have fun or unwind. This, however, was not to say that was the case for all adults, which is a fairly important distinction in my mind: adults can still have fun, while grown-ups are lame. Adult is a legal term and is easy to quantify: if you’re over a certain age, based on the state or country you live in, you’re an adult. Adults can have 9 to 5 jobs, hang out with their friends at night and on weekends, eat too much bacon, decide that they want to play laser tag, pay bills, make stupid impulse purchases, and go on adventures. Grown ups eat high-fiber cereals, are asleep after watching Jay’s monologue on The Tonight Show, and avoid anything seen as “juvenile”, no matter how much they’d enjoy whatever they’re trying to avoid. Grown-ups suck. Adults can suck, too, but they have a better chance of being awesome.

I suppose, then, that the answer to when I became a grown-up would be “I haven’t, and I hope to God I never will”. I may have been an adult for far longer than I’m comfortable admitting, but grown up? That’s not me.

From The Scintilla Project: “Who are you?”

Well, there’s a loaded question. I’m sure for people who are much better adjusted than I am, it seems like a fairly innocuous phrase, but it turns me into the horrified meat on a existential crisis sandwich, with a side of delicious self-loathing salad. Granted, if this had been asked of me six months ago, it would have still been a difficult question to answer, but I would have probably been able to go in circles enough that it would seem like the question was answered. Now, though? I don’t even know where the circle starts, let alone if it’s even on the same planet as I am.

But let’s give it a shot anyway, huh? Ramblomatic: on!

I’m eD!. Yes, that’s actually how I write my name. I live in New York, both because I absolutely love being able to go into Manhattan, and because my stuff is here. I’d probably rather live in a warmer climate, but I’m too lazy to move. I’m a dog person by nature, but the last girl I dated had a few cats that I eventually grew really fond of, so I’m now much more pet-agnostic than I used to be. The other nice part about where I live is I’m only a few hours away from Philadelphia, Boston, and everywhere else on the east coast that is awesome, so when I get bummed out and need an adventure, it’s pretty easy to find one.

I am far more familiar with musical theater and pop-music than any heterosexual man should be. I obsess over technology, pop-culture, and wearing ties. I’m a huge fan of How I Met Your Mother, and the parallels I can draw from that show to my life freaks me out a lot sometimes. For a tech-nerd, it took me far too long to get a high-def TV, and until January I had been rocking out with a 13″ tube TV with a VCR on it. It was lame.

My favorite food is either fried chicken or steak. When I’m sad, I eat McDonald’s – #4, only cheese, large, 4-piece chicken nugget, and an apple pie. I gained far too much weight, and I’m now losing it by eating salad and not eating McDonald’s no matter how sad I am. I recently gave up soda, and began drinking $60 worth of Honest Ade Superfruit Punch basically every week. That stuff is like crack, and if you haven’t had it, you should get on that right now. If it was legal to marry bacon, I would.

My favorite word is “awesome”. My favorite curse word often makes ladies uncomfortable, but is totally acceptable in England. Some people say I’m a living cartoon character, but I prefer to think of myself as a Muppet of a man. I’m either insanely easy to get along with, or the most difficult person to get along with – it really depends on the day. My favorite color is blue. My favorite mainstream super-hero is Superman. No, he’s not too powerful, you’re just not imaginative enough to figure out how to beat him. Batman is also awesome, but I tend to think he’d work with Superman out of a place of mutual respect rather than being a surly jackhole all the time. I love the idea of comic books more than I enjoy reading comic books now – if I want to pay $4.00 for a few minutes of entertainment, I’ll just go gamble.

That’s about it, I guess. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I gotta go find something to shove in my face so I stop being hungry.

For the past few months, I’ve been waiting for “the event” – something so monumential that I just had to write about it, something important enough to kick off my shiny new blogstuffs. At first, it was going to be the SOPA blackout day, because I found something hysterical about launching a new website on the day that a bunch of websites went offline to protest something, but I couldn’t think of anything worthwhile to say about it that hadn’t been said a million times before. Then, I was going to jump in with the Apple event in Manhattan from a few weeks ago, but I was in a meeting at work and didn’t feel like playing catch-up and writing about the thing, mainly due to laziness. So I sat in wait, hoping for a new “ah-hah!” moment that would work as my launch party for Unbelievably Awesome.

Full disclosure: I have a very hard time typing “Unbelievably”, because my brain screams that I’m missing an ‘e’. I know I’m not, but the spelling-centers of my brain have never been all that sharp, so it’s tough for me. (Before you try to tell me that I seem to be an okay spellist (Unnecessary New Word Alert!), I would like to point out that a. everything I write goes through a pretty horrible spell-check before I even think about posting it anywhere and b. it took me forever to decipher the difference between “does” and “dose”, so I have hystorical proof that my spell-fu is not strong.)

That said, what sort of crazy, life-changing event could have occured on a random Wednesday that would make me come back out of my nerd-cave to start senselessly ramble on? Did we just find God’s body? Did Apple announce that they gave up on OS X and decided to run Windows ME? Is Abe Vigoda no longer with us?

The answer is, of course, “nothing”. There is absolutely nothing absolutely Earth-shattering going on today. Sure, it’s the birthday of Dr. Seuss, but that would be a pretty niche thing to get all “Everyone lookie here, I have a blog again!” about.

The fact of the matter is, if I keep waiting for an event to bring me back out of hiding, then I will never start writing again. And if I don’t start writing again, I will probably go crazy. (Or “crazier”, as my friends and family would likely correct me.) I am terribly bad at getting started doing things, but once I start doing them, I keep at it. It’s like that physics-thing that I can’t think of the name of where an object in motion always stays in motion… That was from the guy who made Fig Newtons, right? Don’t answer that, I really don’t care.

So, here we are, internet. I am laid bare before you, ready to lay out my worthless opinions on things out for the world to see. Because what’s the good of having an opinion if you can’t shove it down someone’s throat online, amirite?

You remember when the Zune came out in 2006? It was heralded by many as the most viable option to be an “iPod Killer”, what could be a death-blow to Apple’s dominance in the portable music player field. As you may have noticed, that didn’t exactly happen. In 2009, Microsoft released the Zune HD to combat the iPod Touch, and that was also made out to be the harbinger of doom for the iPod line. Again, didn’t happen.

Guess what? It’s happening again, except this time it’s with the iPad.

"Hello, Windows 8? This is iPad. You win."
September 13, 2011 2:21 pm via MetroTwitReplyRetweetFavorite
@thurrott
Paul Thurrott

That’s a tweet from Paul Thurrott after yesterday’s demonstration of Windows 8 running on a Samsung tablet at Microsoft BUILD. Now, I will admit that I do like what I’ve seen of Windows 8 so far (except for that hideous Explorer menu), and I look forward to playing with the developer build on whatever hardware I can muster together over the weekend. That said, I think Thurrott’s snark about Windows 8 “beating” the iPad, or Boy Genius Report’s screed on why Microsoft beat Apple to the Post-PC era punch are a bit premature, considering that the OS is still a year away from reaching consumers, and who knows what the technological landscape will look like by then?

There’s two things I’ve found that bother me about the coverage Windows 8 is getting. For those of you who know me as an Apple Slut, no, it’s not the fact that Windows 8 is getting any coverage at all. I will say this again: I think Windows 8 looks awesome, and I look forward to playing with it. So I won’t have any of that nonsense, thank you very much.

1. The One OS To Rule Them All

One of the things that a lot of the reporting I’ve read has focused on is how novel the idea is that Windows 8 will run your tablet and XBOX with its slick MetroUI interface and your computer with a standard-looking Windows interface. While I suppose it’s novel that it’s all packaged together in the code, they seem to skip over the idea that iOS (which is OS X with a touch interface) runs iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch and AppleTV, while the standard-looking OS X interface runs Apple’s laptops. This isn’t new ground, really, just a different distribution methodology, which makes sense: Microsoft needs to easily send out its wares to the companies that make the hardware that runs their software, while Apple controls the process from start-to-finish, so there’s no need for both OS situations in one build.

2. A “Real” OS On A Tablet! Oh, Happy Day!

The theme I keep running into that really annoys me is how happy the Technorati are about being able to run full desktop-class software on a touchscreen. “Imagine it,” they say, “working in Photoshop using nothing more than your fingers!” How magical! How wonderful! How inefficient and tedious!

Let’s look at this from a design perspective: desktop apps were not made with someone’s chubby sausage fingers in mind. When I’m working in Photoshop, I’m looking for precision, not the wonder of manipulating my photos with my hands. And if I need to use a stylus, that just means I have some other little piece I’m likely to lose, so that doesn’t work very well for me.

“Hey, eD!,” you respond in my head, “that’s no big deal! You can develop apps to be used for a touchscreen interface! You’re such a moron!” And you’re right, that could be done. But let’s dig deeper into the tablet situation.

At BUILD, Microsoft showed off Windows 8 running on a Samsung tablet with a Core i5 processor, hardware that is usually reserved for a laptop. In fact, the tablet had a cooling fan on the top of it, which This Is My Next mentioned didn’t ever seem to stop running. This sort of tablet is a machine that I don’t really see catching on with anyone who isn’t a total nerd, and that’s the sort of machine you’d need to run Photoshop.

Why would this sort of hardware build stay in the hands of nerds? Because “normal” people don’t do their day-to-day computing on their tablets, they use tablets to check their Twitter feed, browse the web on the toilet, or go on Facebook from the couch. For these people, a machine that could go from tablet to laptop-esque device, while convenient, will either be too expensive, too cumbersome, or run too hot to use for the rest of their needs, like poop-surfing.

The logic of tablets is not to use them as your primary machine, but to use them as a secondary, “fun” device. Are more and more people using iPads as their only machine? Sure. Are these people that follow tech news religiously or do intense work from home? Probably not. For a great deal of the population, checking email and looking at recently leaked photos of Scarlett Johansson’s boobs are the extent of what they do on their computer at home, and that can be done just as easily on a $500 iPad as it can be done on a $500 laptop, and there is less of a concern about viruses, crashing, and lack of Angry Birds on the iPad.

Will there be a market for high-powered tablets? Of course. Do I think it will be as vast as the market for iPads is at the current time? Probably not, but I’m willing to admit I could be wrong.

+ high-res version

The cover for the re-launch of TEEN TITANS after DC Comic’s big ol’ reboot. A few thoughts:

  1. Did I wake up in an alternate version of 1994 where Image Comics bought DC Comics and made everything look awful?
  2. Tim Drake/Red Robin looks like an idiot with those wing things.
  3. How does one tattoo Superboy? And what is with the idiotic masking tape cape?
  4. Can we just relaunch this again in 6 months when maybe someone with a clue is running things at DC?

Seriously, I want to be excited by this, and I’ve said for a long time that they should really do a real relaunch of the DC Universe. Just things like having Wonder Girl be a “belligerent powerhouse thief” sounds like the sort of anti-hero crap that made comics completely no fun to read in the 90’s, and also sounds insanely stupid.

Okay, end of nerd rant. Back to videos of Muppets and awkward times on Words With Friends.