I met my girlfriend 5 months ago today. In this period we have exchanged 3960 text-based messages (via PM, SMS, iMessage, Facebook and email). A grand total of 265083 words or 1422108 characters. That’s about 21.8 messages or about 1460 words per day.
For comparison that’s roughly equal to the collected tragedies or the collected comedies of Shakespeare. (283k words and 289k words). It’s about a third of the King James Bible (33.63%). It’s 15 copies of “Trist som faen” by Ari Behn or a little over ten thousand tweets.
We’ve also talked on the phone three times for an estimated total of 1.5 minutes.
Not everyone prefers a phone call.
Browsing Reddit I found this story about a curious bug in OSX – Mountain Lion. Apparently there’s a simple string of letters that’ll crash a lot of Apps simply by typing it in. You can try it for yourself. Open TextEdit and type in this string.
File:///
That’s with a capital F and three forward slashes, and this will only work on OSX 10.8 Mountain Lion. If you got all the prereqs right TextEdit should crash.
It seems this is an issue with the system spellchecker so it’ll affect any app on Mountain Lion that uses that functionality. Like… Safari.
I put together a simple HTML-page with an input textfield pre-populated with the nefarious string, and sure enough; Safari crashes if you visit the page. Here’s a link, but be warned: Safari –And possibly other browsers. Chrome seems to do fine.– WILL crash. Nothing else creepy will happen though.
Reading up on this bug on OpenRadar reveals that you could even send someone an iMessage and crash Messages.app with this string. Certainly one for the books.
We’ve all got them in our life. The people we generally appreciate, bless their heart, but who we get a bit weary of. Your buddy who cryptically posts *sigh* on Facebook and then refuses to elaborate. The girl who just can’t stop talking about animal rights no matter what the conversation originally was about. The elderly relative who seems to have missed out on how we all got fed up with chain letters 30 years ago and will share every. single. life-affirming jpg with dolphins against a sunset and a Paulo Coelho quote she finds.
People who we love, but who get on our nerves. There’s even a good chance you are that girl or that guy in someone elses life. How many per cent of your last Facebook updates are about football? Were your personal anecdotes at the new year party really that riveting or did you jump at a chance to tell “that story” again? Does the world really hang on your every instagrammed snapshot of your lunch?
But maybe you aren’t that guy. Or girl. If so, that’s awesome and I’m happy for you. That’s not really what I wanted to talk about. I wanted to talk about me. In fact I wanted to talk about me talking about me, because why make it simple. My point is that I am that guy and I wanted to tell you that I know.
I am that guy who keeps oversharing stuff. I am that guy who –in the words of a friend– “talks a lot about feelings”. I am that guy who will tell you that I’m feeling down and that I find life hard to cope with when that happens to be the case. In real life and online. Yep. You were enjoying your buddys new ridiculous Movember-stache profile picture and then I get all up in your feed with my gloomy shit. You’d be forgiven for reaching for your “Hide updates…”-button, and in fact you totally are. Hide that shit if it bothers you. I won’t take offense.
Because I know that it’s tiring. It’s tiring to see my eyes light up when the conversation turns to mental illness or depression and it’s tiring to hear me go on about feelings and the hows and whys and whences of them.
You’d be forgiven for thinking “man up”, “get a helmet”, “Hemingway that shit”.
But I won’t. Because I used to and it nearly killed me. And since there is an expectation of men that we “man up” and don’t talk about feelings I’ve made a very conscious decision to do the exact opposite. I’m being “that guy” very loudly so that maybe, just maybe someone else will manage to be that guy very quietly and very privately. People seem to forget – Hemingway shot himself. He ended his own life violently because he was clinically depressed.
So when I felt like crying the other day because I’d gotten some very disheartening news I said so. On Facebook. And I know it probably made some of my friends uncomfortable. And I’m sorry about that, because it’s not for their benefit that I post stuff like that. It’s not that I have some agenda to drag my friends “kicking and screaming” out of their comfort zone and make them talk about feelings. It’s not even for my own benefit. I feel a right sop when I post shit like that and I feel like an asshole every time I realize I’ve once again regaled my friends –who’ve heard it all before– with stories about my own bouts with depression for the better part of an evening.
I have people I talk to for my own benefit. Well. Talk at, mostly. People I know are able and willing to listen.
But I strongly believe that many, many men (and of course women as well but there is a clear expectation of men to not express their feelings and this is where I feel I might do some good) die by their own hands who did not have to.
I strongly believe that “The Black Dog” –Sir Winston Churchills nick name for his own depression– can only be killed with words. I strongly believe that it’s important to tell men to NOT “man up” and NOT “get a fucking helmet”. Get a fucking bonnet! It might save your life. What you get from “manning up” are the fates of the Hemingways and the Cobains and very very nearly the Stephen Frys of this world. You get the thousands of mostly young and mostly male corpses who –in one way or another– do violence to their own bodies until life is extinguished.
So I’ll be oversharing. I’ll treat my friends to my “insights” about depression again every time some hapless newcomer steers into my area of obsession.
I just wanted you to know that I know I’m that guy. So hit that hide button. It’s cool. We’re cool. **fist bump**
Caution: Enormous ego ahead Most of what I write is pretty navel-gazing stuff, but this is a whole freaking post dedicated to my tattoo. It’s only meant as an anecdote from my life and an observation that you never know what people will get a kick out of, but I wouldn’t blame you for being a little sick in your mouth upon reading. Proceed at your own risk.
Six years ago on my birthday I was working on my portfolio site and wanted to add some nifty illustrative graphics. From somewhere I got the idea that it would be fun and in the spirit of my wannabe “rock star internet guy”-bravado to have a picture of a guy facing away to reveal that he had </head><body> tattooed on his neck. I didn’t really have any good pictures of my own neck, so I actually used Poser to model a fairly decent (if slightly more chisel jawed) likeness of me and Photoshopped the tattoo on.
This photo of Ashley from the Chicago Slutwalk 2012 protest was posted on STFU, Conservatives Tumblr page last night. While it’s not a bad pic of her (we like the next one better), the comment exchange that followed was pretty awesome.
One person wrote, “…its kind like putting a meat suit on and telling a shark not to eat you”.
STFU responded:
“We (men) are not fucking sharks! We are not rabid animals living off of pure instinct. We are capable of rational thinking and understanding.
Just because someone is cooking food doesn’t mean you’re entitled to eat it.
Just because a banker is counting money doesn’t mean you’re being given free money.
Just because a person is naked doesn’t mean you’re entitled to fuck them.
You are not entitled to someone else’s body just because it’s exposed. What is so fucking difficult about this concept?”
There are no words that will accurately convey how much I hate winter, but I’m going to give it a shot anyway.
I believe there is a fair chance that before I’ve dragged my kid to day care through oceans of sludge many more times my seething, burning hatred will cause the nature of reality to break down. My intense, focused dislike imposing its paradigm on the universe will force into being anthropomorphic manifestations of King Winter, Jehova, Satan and all sorts of lesser gods, sprites, elemental beings and all that humanity have imagined throughout its short lifespan.
As soon as this happens I will steer a burning bus filled with orphans and kittens off a cliff, thus ending my mortal toil and condemning my black, poisonous hate-filled soul to damnation in one fell swoop. When I arrive in hell I will spend a thousand years hunting down and murdering every last demon, hellspawn and imp in that dark and evil pantheon. I will feast upon their twisted and horrific cadavers and feed on their diabolic essence as I grow in dark and arcane powers fueled by my never ending rage and loathing. The Dukes of hell will know true fear and terror and they will despair as I relentlessly torment and plague their dwindling numbers. And after millennia spent in a depraved orgy of murder, torture and terror I will cast down Satan from his dark throne and crown myself the prince of darkness and warlord in the oncoming onslaught against Yahweh and his celestial host.
The battlefield shall be soaked in the blood of seraphs and the sky over the silver citadel will burn bright with the charred remains of cherubs. The once so terrific and mighty arch-angels will cry tears of blood and howl against the awesome and horrific hate radiating from my now black and poisonous heart.
And at the end, aeons and aeons from now, I will defeat God himself and cast his lifeless remains down. I will have become the destroyer of reality, having extinguished that life-giving spark from the universe. The twin forces of entropy and extropy forever frozen in a timeless and infernal multiverse etched in blood and fire by my primal quintessensial hatred.
And I will look upon my work –my devastation and corruption of all reality into a twisted, charred hellscape– and I will say that it is good. Because now I’ll never run out of time in which to punch King Winter in the balls, over and over and over again…
So… I guess you could say It’s not my favorite time of the year.
