Nonesubscribe

Time is short. Actually, that isn't quite how time works. I should say instead we can tend to be short on time. And in that time I don't wish to have to sign up, in, and for everything I am ever to be presented with on the Internet (capital I, because it's muh-I internet).

If a website won't let me read content without signing up, even if sign-up is free, I don't want to read it.

If an e-commerce shop requires me to create an account in order to checkout and make a purchase, I won't be making a purchase from there.

You get the idea.

It's easy enough to get all of my information. I shouldn't have to take the time to enter it so you can send me emails I never signed up for and I can endlessly unsubscribe from them and then you can ask a question as to why I'm unsubscribing that you'd be able to answer without my help if you filled out a corresponding checkbox when adding me to the email list in question and the checkbox would say something to the effect of, "this poor sod just wanted to buy a pair of novelty socks for a friend and now he will be forever bombarded with emails suggesting purchases."

Once you unsubscribe, I'm fairly certain they then keep a reject bin list that they let sit idle for perhaps a few months before re-subscribing you. I might be annoyed to get that email after unsubscribing, but they're banking on enticing me with a catchy headline, or maybe tricking me into opening it, merely so that I can unsubscribe. And mostly they just don't care because they can set it and forget it and I'll be on and off that list without any effort on their part.

Then of course there is the email confirming your unsubscribe. It's all a true delight. And if enough time's not wasted deleting, unsubscribing, and/or setting as spam, well, you could always blog about it. Something tells me I've even done it before but I refuse to waste even more time with a quick search. I can only imagine how you might feel reading this far.

On an uplifting note, here's a tale of a high school girl persevering through the puzzling illness that is MS.

Thankssieving

This is the holiday you get when you drop it through a filter and get only what you need. For me, it's family. I don't get round to seeing them enough so anything that essentially forces me to see them is a plus in my book. Why don't I see them more? Life, distance, choices, money, excuses. Not everyone likes their family, and so while I think of this holiday as a great gathering of family and food, feel free to substitute family with friends, friends who really end up being your family anyway.

Now sure the original tale of Thanksgiving that's taught, well at least in my day, is one rife with fiction, but that doesn't mean that good can't be squeezed out in modern execution. And when I say this, I'm not referencing Black Friday sales. It's a touch disturbing to me to look back and see how these same thoughts came to mind in the past. But there's also nothing wrong with a little consistency. Or a lot. Perhaps even a real whole lot (author's note: this last link contains an embedded image linked from a Lycos-hosted site. How about Lycos for a shout-out to the pre-Google days).

It seems there are plenty of those who dislike the homecoming nature of Thanksgiving and it's understandable. Being around your hometown and all that it entails can manage to be worse and/or more depressing than simply returning to see family and answer a lot of questions, and usually you're looking at all of these together. That I don't go to my hometown may have a softening effect for me. And let's face it, as much as people love to bloviate on the internet (what's that pot? oh hello kettle...), non-digital confrontation with honesty about ourselves is not a lot of fun. Knowing we should get our shit together is a little different than knowing we should get our shit together.

After that brief and cursory treatment of some of the struggles and intricacies of the fragile psyche, I'm going to leave with a link to a cartoonist I had the pleasure of meeting the other night, one Alex Nall. There was a time I read comics far more, from the Sunday offerings, to Calvin & Hobbes and The Far Side compendiums, right on up to your X-Men and so on. Though I've strayed, I'm glad to have been brought back by someone like Alex, to see there are still those holding the torch, that there's still a beautiful honesty accompanied by nice art, and that the fundamental problems and struggles we have are age-old, in spite of shifts in outward appearance.

This all runs the risk of sending me off on a bloviant tangent, but I'll stop here since several sentences back I said I'd leave you. Sometimes I'm bad at goodbye.

At any rate, tally it up as one more thing I'm thankful for.

Disruption

There are words that rise and fall in popularity in our world. Several years back with the beginnings of the Google book project you could search in one of the offerings of Labs to see a word's popularity graphed by year. I am certain I once posted about this and that you can still do this but as I compose this (I'm trying to set a record for saying "this") post from my hi-jacked and out-of-date Firefox browser that presents much content in Japanese, I'm going to forgo looking for a proper link out of, well, laziness.

If you're a reader of this here blog from time-to-time, you'll note that, from time-to-time, I get incredibly (and probably unreasonably) frustrated by such excessive use. In the past that word has been "awkward" and oh how I'm aware that this is one half of the title of this blog. In the past that word has also been "sexy." Neither has completely disappeared, but hey once you vent to your blog I mean where do you really go from there? Seriously, if the entire world hasn't taken notice based on the 30-50 hits I tend to get, then I just don't understand. Maybe I need to learn a way to be more...disruptive?

Okay nail, I'm going to hit you over the head here. Disruption, disruptive, and any other use of this word —I'm so disrupted I can't even think what all of the forms are and I'm deciding not to Google on my predominantly Japanese browser —have got to stop being used. Now it's true, it's a function of what news you focus on, who your friends are in social media and, once you've seen a word, how much you choose to focus on it (there's a scientific term for this phenomenon that I also won't Google — go brain!), but I promise you, DISRUPTION is everywhere. It's the buzz word for how to be entrepreneurial and innovative and attract attention to change or, um, disrupt, the status quo. But most of these things do no more to disrupt the status quo than but to place disruptive, disruptor, and so on more firmly in the ether. Because hell, as I'm sure I've said, and at any rate I'm sure you just know anyway, when you use a word over and over its emphasis, its power, is diminished.

If I wanted to distract from disruption I could cite the prevalence of overly-enthusiastic language storming through the web in the form of sites like Upworthy that contend that everything happens to simultaneously be the most mind-blowing, earth-shattering, life-changing shit in history. The only thing there might be more of than canned enthusiasm on that site is share buttons. It's the other side of the Epic Fail coin, a movement that was nice and eponymous. Ordered regular, got decaf! Not epic fail. And look, I get it, we're about click-throughs on this Internet — which I know well from not getting a lot — but holy hell, how about a little gradation? Think if every day I took the biggest shit of my life? Well shouldn't I realistically start to worry about my colon, my diet, and perhaps the size of my asshole?

I apologize for the use of profane language in the preceding paragraph, but should it not be expected in a place where griping is listed near the top of the list? So hey, let's disrupt things. Let's stop calling everything disruptive. Let's look at a thesaurus. Bollix? Upset the apple cart? These are excellent. You can even abbreviate that last one as UTAC. I can't wait for that to be the name of some new agency! UTAC that one right to the bank...

I'm From Nowhere

As good old Facebook seeks to expand how much information it has about you, it's been desperate to know my hometown for a little while now. It does a good job of assessing where I'm probably from based on how many of my friends claim a certain place as their hometown. But what is really excellent is the last option: I have no hometown. As it is, even my hometown had a hometown. Well I suppose you can say it still does. At any rate I'll continue "suffering" through my incomplete profile.

I'm not a good Facebook user. Too many people send too many requests. The problem of course, is that sometimes I want people to see messages or notifications I send them on there, but I'm likely lost in the same world of mass they are on my end. Ah the social media vortex. Instead I stand at the edge from time-to-time and do my best to not let gravity pull me fully in.

Speaking of gravity, the gravity of language is something I consider probably far too often. It ties into what I was just getting at all too well. When there's so much presented to us so easily, how can we boil down to what matters? Well nevermind that since I'm not going to come to some grand epiphany at the time being. Instead I'll just have fun reading apartment listings that say things like "Heat, Water, and Garbage included!" Now you might think that an apartment full of garbage wouldn't appeal to anyone but Oscar, but remember the old adage: "one man's trash is another man's treasure." I wonder what the implication of that adage is for women...