I spent all of today with tissue shoved up my nose at work. Somehow I got myself sick (I think it’s PRACTICING POTTERY (-Ed) with people who are sick that does it, if you want my theory, but no one can really be certain of anything as you know) last week and I was wrong in thinking that a sore throat would be the–would you look at that. Looks like someone needs someone to talk to–blah blah boring life stuff–is there a punch line somewhere?–no, no punch line, I was sick all day, and boring, I just climbed out of bed after lying in it for a while. Still sick. I sneezed four times in a row. If it wasn’t for the spray that makes me smell spit for at least a few minutes, I’d say sneezes are pretty close to what a male orgasm feels like. I mean, I’m sure there are guys out there who are like “Wow! With that spit smell all in the air, it’s like I just orgasmed!” But not me, no sir, I do not agree, I am not one of those men. Perhaps I am evolved, or my overbite is not so pronounced, I don’t know, but sneezes, quibbles aside, are pretty much exactly what male orgasms are like, if you were ever curious. A split second moment of absolute delusion where you forget everything lousy while some feeling you don’t even really understand takes over your whole body.

- Written to this girl on OKCupid.

People who follow my Twitter directly at the Twitter site know this, but I am not dead.

Some day my Twitter column will work again. I don’t know when.

Twitter sidebar is, obviously, working again. No @reply exclusion, but someday.

In reply to this post about a Blue Monster tattoo over at Hugh’s blog:

You can call it the “Purpose-Idea” all you want but what I call it is someone who has no fucking life getting a goddamn tattoo of a goddamn stupid monster face any fifth grader could have drawn but only a aging windbag consultant could draw and create a psychotic following behind.

I mean, I don’t want to be an asshole, but seriously, Hugh’s blog sometimes hurts my head. It’s a guy who has been scribbling shit (literally scribbling) on business cards forever, with little blurbs that are neither deep nor particularly funny most of the time, and somehow he’s managed to amass a cult following and has companies hiring him to do this shit? I’m not saying the guy isn’t smart, obviously persistence has paid off, but this is too far.

If your job is to make people so obsessive about their jobs that they get stupid shit tattooed on their bodies so they “can never forget how much I love this company and all of the great things we do” and the company you’re talking about is Microsoft–again, I wont say they’re evil, or bad, or stupid, but Microsoft is a massive monolithic company and if you think for a second that you are important or valuable within an organization that size, I want to smoke whatever the fuck you’re on for sure–then perhaps you need to reevaluate what you are doing with your life because I think you’re potentially soulless.

It’s one thing to be fanatical about a small company, if there’s four of you and you’re instrumental and you want to go crazy and feel like you’re a part of something important, go for it, but if you’re completely expendable (which mostly all of us are) then, seriously, chill the fuck out, it’s a job.

No offense, Hugh, and honestly if you read this (which I hope you don’t, because it’s really just a meaningless rant and I still subscribe to your blog, etc), pretend I’m talking about someone else.

In short: I kind of seriously hate people who ‘love’ their jobs. I don’t hate my job. I like my job. It’s cool. But you know what: my job is not my life and there is no cartoon or consultant who is going to make me believe otherwise. I’ll never talk ecstatically about what I do at work, no matter what I do (aside from when I was bringing dogs back to life). I have a friend who consistently turns into a cheerleader for whatever place he is working at and it’s probably one of the most annoying things about him, aside from all the other annoying shit. (But the only other thing he has going on for him in his life is his Xbox 360 so I guess it’s understandable to be obsessive about your jobs when it’s all you’ve got.)

I think you should be seriously concerned if, when you clock out for the day, you head home and you think work is something you should still be thinking about. I think you should contemplate suicide if you love your job so much that you get viral bullshit tattooed on your body to remind you for the rest of your life about “the great things you did” while you worked at “huge monolithic company #42″.

This is my Tweitgeist, from March to Yesterday. Not a huge sample size, especially considering the period of my life, but I might periodically post this from time to time because it cracks me up, I mean, how much I say fuck. Who the hell do I think I am? Dennis Fucking Miller?

Journalist Christian Lorentzen argues that “hipsterism fetishizes the authentic” elements of all of the “fringe movements of the postwar era—Beat, hippie, punk, …grunge, [and] white trash chic” and draws on the “cultural stores of every unmelted ethnicity” and “gay style”, and then “regurgitates it with a winking inauthenticity” and a sense of irony. He claims that this group of “18-to-34-year-olds”, who are mostly white, “have defanged, skinned and consumed” all of these influences “into a repertoire of meaninglessness”.

from Hipster (contemporary subculture). Why did I not read this before? So good…

I am hipster scum.

Since they’re not ‘approved’ for SongMeanings yet, here are the lyrics sent to me by Jim Frye of Mass Solo Revolt. Note: There are no Rubber Knife lyrics, dunno why. Read the rest of this entry »

The front page has been revamped. Everything else on the site is in the old ugly style, but at least this shit looks good, finally. Enjoy. Everything should work fine, I hope. Leave a comment, let me know what you think.

Some notes: this was designed on a widescreen monitor (at 1280×800), so it might not look good on anything below 1024×786, if it even looks good on that. I don’t think it does. It should stretch and move around seamlessly. If you find any bugs, let me know.

1.) I’ve set up my site feed to use Feedburner. There’s other reasons for this:

2.) I’ve set up my main site feed to EXCLUDE Twitters. No more 60 unreads a day in Google Reader, have no fear.

It looks like the feed is a little weird, when you initially subscribe it’ll probably end up with the first posts here from January, but it should work fine after that in theory. Oh, the URL for this feed is: http://feeds.feedburner.com/staires

If you want my Twitters in your reader and don’t want them ala Twitter’s feeds, here’s a special Staires Twitter feed.

There’s even a feed for the comments, if you’re so inclined.

P.S. yes, i do like to make it so that people can stalk me as simply as possible. hi!

Since OiNK is gone, I am having a hard time discovering new music. I went from a couple new albums every couple of weeks to absolutely nothing and my general happiness and mood has taken a dive since then. (Fallacy!) I was thinking: how can I possibly discover new music now? I can go to Metacritic and look at their list, but I have to click on each one to see if it’s any good or anything I’d actually like. I can go to Pitchfork, and again, the interface is clumsy and reading their reviews makes me feel like I am dusting my brain with a heat-ray. OiNK was brilliant because I could go and look at something really easily: what the most popular albums for the day were. The internet has nothing else like this. Albums would download in seconds so I could listen, decide if I like it, and then get stuck seeding it forever, but that was the price I paid.

Now I’ve got nothing. So, how about this: a music service, preferably free, that scans your entire music collection and tells you what albums you don’t have, what albums are coming out soon, and maybe what albums you’ll like based on your collection’s similarity. This service would work surprisingly well even without listening data. You tie it into your Last.FM account, or your iTunes database (why doesn’t iTunes do this already! they even have a MUSIC STORE built in!) and your recommendations get even better.

But the important thing is this: if it sees that I like Queens of the Stone Age, but I don’t have Songs for the Deaf, it should say, HEY YOU! You should get Songs for the Deaf! Or if Eels are coming out with a new album in a few weeks, notify me and never stop notifying me! Give me a COUNT-DOWN on the front page of whatever screen I go to. “Two weeks until the new Eels CD comes out!” would be incredible.

Most of all: make it automatic, I don’t want to have to go in and put in all my artist and album names. Make it Web2.0, so I can easily modify what bands should be a part of my collection and what bands shouldn’t be, (in case you download music for your girlfriend). Make the ’scanner’ a small program you download that scans all your ID3 data (or MusicBrainz if that is your bag) and then uploads the data to the server.

Someone make it happen. If this already exists (and not bundled within some bloated software), please let me know that I am stupid.