I Used To Give A Shit

You know, I used to care about a lot of things. But now I realize how the universe really works. See, it really doesn't matter what you do, say, how you act, what kind of clothes you wear or how you spend your time. Because really you're not effecting anything else out there to any significant degree.
Most people out there like to think that they are important, at least to some degree. Even the most pathetic waste of human resources in the world, a man with no life, goals, or ambition, who works at a shitty job, picks his nose habitually, and masturbates to naked pictures of total strangers on the Internet (me for example,) even a sorry sack of rodent urine like that has somewhere, locked in the back of the loser subconscious, the idea that in some way he is an important person and that his life has some meaning, some reason, that somehow he might be part of some grander scheme in the mechanical workings of the universe, like maybe he's got some important task to accomplish before he dies, and that he wouldn't be here if that wasn't so. Well I'm sorry to break it to you people (actually, I'm not sorry) but that's total bullshit.

Here, let me put your existence into perspective:

What you are looking at is a picture of a Galaxy, one very similar to our own. We do not have pictures of our own galaxy because it is very big, and it would take a long time to get a camera out far enough to get everyone into the picture. Anyway, most people look at this picture and say "It's a galaxy. Big deal." You have no idea what you are looking at. This thing in this picture is so immensely huge, so incredibly large, so unbelievably mind boggelingly gigantic, that you could never, ever, ever even comprehend how big it is. And to get it into a picture means that it is so incredibly super-duper far away that you could never walk there in a bazillion years. You couldn't fly there, you couldn't take a taxi there, you couldn't even make a phone call there. This galaxy is beyond you in every way possible. There are so many stars in it that you could never count them all in your lifetime. This here is a picture of infinity, and you, as a human being, cannot identify with it, cope with it, or understand it, let alone that half of the blurry dots in the background are also galaxies, each as astronomically immense and a billion times further away than this one. Don't even try.

So maybe you noticed the "You are here" sign in the corner. I made it point at that particular spot because in our own galaxy that's where our solar system is supposed to be. But I suppose it really doesn't matter since the whole thing is beyond my comprehension. I truly cannot comprehend that I am a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot in a universe so vast that that to even look at a photograph of one galaxy out of trillions is beyond my feeble mental capacity. So, like everyone else in the world, I just bullshit myself. Take this little quiz to see if you bullshit yourself to keep from feeling insignificant too:

The "I bullshit myself to feel important" test.

Directions: Print this test, then answer yes or no to any of the following questions. Then, smack yourself in the head because it's a bullshit test and you just wasted printer ink. Why the fuck do printer cartridges cost so damn much? Fuck Hewlett Packard.

1) I am an important person because I have a job that's important and affects the lives of other people. I have responsibilities.	YES NO
2) I am important because I have a family to take care of or friends that love me.	YES NO
3) I am important because I am going to do something that is going to alter history.	YES NO
4) I am important because I am an individual and by definition have a unique life and perspective on everything that nobody else has.	YES NO
5) I am important because I have a cause and a message that will make the world a better place.	YES NO
6) I am important because God has a plan for me and I wouldn't have been born otherwise.	YES NO

If you answered "yes" to any of those questions you have just failed the test. Don't feel bad, it was a bullshit test in the first place. It really doesn't matter. Let me explain why you all just failed and are guilty, along with 99% of the rest of the human race, of bullshitting yourselves.

Here is the answer key:

1) I am an important person because I have a job that's important and affects the lives of other people. I have responsibilities. -Bullshit. Your job does not make you important. Unless you truly possess some kind of super secret knowledge that nobody else in the world has (like say how to turn lead into gold or make the "12:00" on a VCR stop blinking) then chances are somebody else with the same kind of training and education could do your job with no problem. There are maybe three people in the world that fall under this category and I know who they are:

1) Some nameless nobody somewhere in the Microsoft corporate hierarchy who actually does all the work.

2) Some asshole in a smoky back room somewhere who controls the world economy.

3) Whatever dickhead locked away in a secret room in the middle of the earth who lives off of doughnuts and fried pork rinds who actually controls world politics from an outdated Macintosh personal computer circa 1985.

I Know the above people exist because without them nothing in the world makes sense. Anyone who is not them (like say, the other 5,999,999,997 people on the Earth, including the seven or so on the international space station) have jobs that are transitory, at best. Some day they will quit or retire and somebody else will take over. This includes heart surgeons, air traffic controllers, and the President of the United States. Your job means two things: Jack and Shit. Get over it already.

2) I am important because I have a family to take care of or friends that love me. -Bullshit. Everybody has a fucking family. Everybody has fucking friends. Even all you people out there who say "I ain't got no friends," yes you too. If you don't have any friends try turning off Diablo II and going outside once in a while. Thus if everybody has them then they cannot make you important. Don't try to argue, you're just lying to yourself.

3) I am important because I am going to do something that is going to alter history. -Bullshit. When was the last time this actually happened? I can't name one person alive today that has done something to alter history. Maybe whoever first put porn up on the internet, but I'm sure whoever that is has died by now. Nothing you do short of inventing a teleportation device, warp drive, or discovering a new source of free, clean, renewable energy is going to change the world. And you're not suddenly going to come up with the secret of life while eating at McDonalds one day. "Yeah, I want a six piece chicken McNuggets, a large fries, and OH SHIT I'VE DISCOVERED THE SECRET OF LIFE!" Just accept that you're worthless, like everybody else. You'll feel much better that way.

4) I am important because I am an individual and by definition have a unique life and perspective on everything that nobody else has. -Bullshit. Nobody gives a shit about your stupid perspective on life. What are you fucking Socrates? Shut the hell up before you say something intelligent. Let me remind you how many people there are in the world: Six billion. That's 6,000,000,000 different unique individuals with unique perspectives on life, compared to your "1." So clamp your fucking shit trap Mr. Touchy-feely-feel-good-to-act-like-a-pussy man. Asshole.

5) I am important because I have a cause and a message that will make the world a better place. -Bullshit. Your cause doesn't matter. In the grand scheme of things nothing that happens on this tiny flea-speck of a planet is going to effect the universe in any significant way. You wanna save the whales? You wanna recycle those cans? You wanna save the rainforest? The rest of the universe could give a shit if the whales live or die, of if the tin cans pile up into an artificial island, or if all the rainforest on Earth were chopped down to make room for Starbucks stores and strip malls. The rest of the universe wouldn't even notice it if suddenly our entire galaxy just exploded for no reason. It wouldn't even register a tic on the cosmic Richter scale.

Maybe you think that your message is somehow special, and that by getting it out you're somehow going to change the world for the betterment of mankind for thousands of years. Yeah, I remember the last person to say that: Adolph Hitler.

6) I am important because God has a plan for me and I wouldn't have been born otherwise. -Bullshit. If you somehow are essential to the cosmic scheme of things then what about the rest of the six billion people in the world? What's their job? How do they figure into this plan that is some overwhelmingly complex yet rests solely on your participation in it? Does that mean that if I were to suddenly throw a live chainsaw through your window and chop you in half while you were taking a shit that suddenly, I, a lowly mortal, have just fucked up God's divine plan? What if you accidentally choke on a chicken bone? Would God be so short sighted to expend the resources of billions of years to to create the universe, spurn the creation of life, and the eventual evolution of man just so YOU could be born, just to have all that immense time and energy go to waste when you die horribly gasping for air as a wishbone from your Tyson TV dinner slowly cuts off your esophagus? What if you're a loser and don't amount to much, and you spend your time watching soap operas and masturbating in Andy Gumps at monster truck rallies? Is that part of the plan too? Bullshit, there is no plan, and if there is it's so overwhelmingly complex that you can't understand it, kind of like that picture of the galaxy back there. Thus the plan is meaningless and should have absolutely no bearing on your decision making process. If it does, then there's a word for people like you: Stupid.
So what the fuck does this all mean? It means I don't give a shit about you anymore. I'm not important, you're not important. Nothing you or I do really matters. The only difference is that when I spank my chicken I call it masturbation, when you do it you call it life.

In case any of you forgot:

Fuck the MPAA - You will never destroy P2P

I am an avid user of Peer to Peer networks, namely Emule. I am a P2P whore. I used to have a ridiculous number of downloads going at once, so much that I had to shut it off while surfing because it sucked too much bandwidth and made my browser too slow. I had access to tons of rare and weird music and movies that I'd never seen in a store before. Life was grand for a while.

So when I heard of the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) and the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) took on this crusade to kill P2P networking I really wasn't too worried. I thought that there might be some legal bickering here and there but in the end everything would turn out fine, with maybe a few new rules to stick to. I couldn't have been more wrong. A little bit of history about the controversy surrounding P2P networking is in order now:

The RIAA killed Napster. They didn't just cripple it, or fine it, or do the smart thing and sign a contract to make money off it, no, they had to utterly destroy it. At the beginning Napster was the embodiment of what the internet was made for, swapping a shitload of files and getting free music that would otherwise be unavailable to you in the privacy of your own home. At the end Napster was a shadow of it's former self, a multimillion dollar company crushed beneath the heel of greedy record producers.

You'll notice that no specific record company sued Napster, instead they all conspired together to get the RIAA to do the dirty work for them. The RIAA is the union that protects all the artists that sign with the major labels. They are there in the first place because the record companies are run by a bunch of crooks that repeatedly ripped off the artists on a regular basis, and so to avoid any poking around by the Government this union was formed to make sure that a little bit of your $20 that you drop on a CD goes to the band once in a while. Just look at Aaron Neville to see how well the Record companies treat the people that make them millions. In the 70's Aaron Neville was at the top of the charts and playing sold out shows with his awesome band The Funky Meters, but at the same time he was working part time as a dock worker to support his family because the fucking record companies swindled his ass out of nearly every penny. Anyone who's ever been in a band that's gotten anywhere near to breaking big knows how much they fuck you over when you sign on the dotted line. The RIAA was created to make sure that if they're gonna anal rank you, there at least has to be some rules to it. But it seems now they've been reduced to a bunch of pansy-assed tools working for the people they were created to police. It just blows my mind.

I remember seeing Metallica on MTV talking to congress about how Napster was solely responsible for them losing $50 million in record sales. Boo-fucking-hoo. They forgot to mention that the particular album in question went multiplatinum (here's a site with a record of Metallica's sales: http://www.allmetallica.com/info/recordsales.php ) Doesn't seem to me that Metallica is suffering for money. So not everybody went out and bought your stupid album. Maybe that had something to do with the fact that your record sucked ass and your fans didn't like it when you cut off your hair, ditched the biker look, and tried to dress like Justin Timberlake instead. Maybe that particular album didn't sell well because to the average Metallica fan it looked like their favorite band sold out and turned into a bunch of pussies. I hope they all get their asses beat by people wearing their own T-shirts. I hope the next concert they play gets burned down by an angry mob of former Napster employees. Fuck Metallica.

So Napster bit the big one and the assholes with the money won yet again. Nothing new there I suppose. But in the wake of Napster sprang new P2P networks who got around the RIAA by making it so that any file could be traded, not just MP3's. Now you can get music, movies, software, free porn, hacker tools, pics of Agent Scully in a threesome with Mulder and Skinner, everything at once in the privacy of your own bedroom. So it's kind of like Napster was sacrificed like Jesus, so that the rest of the P2P networks could be forgiven. And there wasn't a damn thing the RIAA could do about it. Good. Fuck them.

But maybe not. A few years passed as the RIAA watched helplessly as fans did what they always do, that is enjoy the fruits of the artists they enjoy. During this time (1999-2003) music, software, and movie sales did not significantly go down. Movie ticket sales totaled about $9.317 billion in 2002 and fell about 5% in 2003. Why is that? Maybe because some real shitty movies came out in 2003? Honestly though 5% of $9.317 billion is not a big deal. It means that more people decided to rent the previous summer blockbuster and stay home instead of go out to the movies. These things go in cycles that are closely tied in to economic cycles on the whole. Next year it'll probably jump back up again.

What about Record sales? Despite all the bullshit they record companies keep saying about P2P file sharing destroying their sales, after half an hour on the internet I couldn't find one major record company that reported a loss in 2003. In fact most companies reported increases. Maybe this is just bullshit so they don't scare their stockholders. Maybe it's not; maybe their projected sales are down, as in they thought they would make X billion but only made Y billion. Maybe not, who gives a shit? All I know is that these assholes are still making billions upon billions of dollars and are pissed off because people like me don't want to give them money anymore. From the RIAA's very own website I saw that sales are down from $14,584,500,000 in 1999 to $12,614,210,000 in 2003. Oh no, they only made twelve TRILLION dollars last year. I don't see Geffen, Island, or Sony music going out of business any time soon.

Just a thought, it could be that sales are down because all the new music out there SUCKS ASS now?
So last year to add insult to injury the RIAA decided to really booster their public image and began suing P2P users at random. I'm sure everyone reading this heard the stories of 12 year old girls getting sued for downloading music. Of course it didn't help that the chickenshit ISPs (including AOL and Verizon) buckled under like a limp erection and sold out their customers personal information in the first place. So much for your "privacy policy." This didn't stop until one smart guy got the idea to ask his ISP not to give out his info. Nice you have to ask for something they're supposed to do in the first place. So anyway the RIAA lost again (ha ha!) and were sent swimming in their own poop back to the corner to complain to the media about how file sharing "piracy" is destroying their business. I thought it was finally over. I went back to downloading without a second thought.

But not anymore. Now it looks like the MPAA is getting into the act, and have just gotten the German Government to shut down Sharereactor.com, one of the servers on the EDonkey network. So since they can't get rid of P2P networks because they're decentralized, and they can't scare people with threats to sue anymore, now it looks like the powers that be are trying to shut down the servers themselves.

Why should you care about this? Because this is an attack on the internet itself! If we let these people go around and shut down servers they don't like anytime they feel like it, it will set precedent that any private entity (in this case a trade union, but this could also include a corporation, local/federal government, religious organization, etc) could conceivably force a server with content they don't like to disappear. Before you know it evangelical church groups or the local chapter of Concerned Women of America will be suing to shut down porn sites, abortion sites, etc, not by suing the site themselves but by going after whatever company that hosts the site.

This is fundamentally against what the internet stands for. The internet was created for one thing and one thing only: FREEDOM. Freedom to look at what you want, read what you want, say what you want, and download what you want. These motherfuckers want to take away that freedom and turn the internet into a gigantic beer commercial. Imagine having to pay every time you turn on your browser, then hitting an online "toll booth" in which access is restricted until you pay some more, then having to pay to download something before you even get to preview it, then paying again to access your e-mail, all of this on top of what you usually pay for your monthly rate. This is what these people are trying to do to the internet, because if they can't figure out how to make money on their content on the web, then they'll take it from ALL of the web. They will destroy the internet.
So you know what I say? Download all you want. That's the only way we can stop these assholes. We need to show them that we're not afraid to use the internet for what it was intended for. I'm not going to cower like a chickenshit scared to fucking death that some asshole in a suit is going to serve me up a summons for downloading a Dr. Demento song. I say we boycott movies and CDs all together and force them to adapt. The internet is the new technological paradigm the distribution of the media of the future is going to use whether the RIAA and MPAA like it or not. If they can't get their shit together fast enough to cash in on file sharing then too bad for them. You notice Apple with Itunes isn't complaining about file sharing. They sold over a million songs the first day they went on-line. The companies that adapt to the new technology are the ones that are going to make all the money. That's how capitalism works, you assholes. File sharing has been around nearly ten years already, get with the fucking program. Dickheads.

Fuck the MPAA. Fuck the RIAA too. Fuck all of them.

Update 8/5/05:
It's official: downloading is now illegal. The assholes in congress were too chickenshit to stand up to the suits in Hollywood and the record companies and folded like a card table. You can now go to jail for downloading a 50 cent song. Remember that next time you vote.

But more people are downloading files than ever before. The law has been passed but everyone is doing what they should be doing: ignoring it. Good, because it's a bullshit law. Of course now and then we're going to have to suffer the occasional crackdown, but for the most part you're safe to go back to downloading. It's safe becasue too many people are doing it. If there's 50 million P2P users out there, how many can they possibly bust? Not enough of them to make a difference. Filesharing has now become the equivalent of digital marijuana; it's against the law but everybody does it.
Fuck you MPAA. We won.

Ten Things I Fucking Hate Part III

1) Assholes who throw out some useless piece of trivia and think they're smart: You're sitting talking to your friend about something lame like cartoons or whatever and some fool next to you gives you the entire history of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. You are not smart for knowing something like that. You are pathetic.

2) Teenagers: I hate kids. They should all be locked up underground and fed dead rats and fish heads. Fuck them.

3) The "Political Guy": Every klick has one, the guy who goes on the internet and reads some reactionary blog or whatever and always thinks that what's happening right now on CNN in the precursor to America collapsing into a communist police state. Some of you might think this is a little hypocritical coming from a guy who has a page entitled "The Bad Bush list." Well, you're just going to have to figure that out.

4) STONERS: I fucking hate stoners. It's just sad to see someone who's hardly reached the age of adulthood and has already committed himself to a life of mediocrity. You're only 21, not even to of school yet, and already you've totally destroyed your mind by overindulging in what should be a normally harmless pastime. Weed is recreation, a party drug, something people do to have a good time. It is not supposed to be a way of life. When you wake up in the morning and take a deep bong rip even before you take a piss then it's time to lay off the ganja for a bit. You may notice strange things happening to your mind, like maybe you'll be able to remember shit once in a while. If you keep this shit up you're going to be dilevering pizzas at Papa Johns forever. And everybody knows how pathetic old stoners are.

5) Loser Goth fools: The fact is that most "Goth" bozos are in it for the looks. The guys get into it because they want to be "The Crow" and the chicks do it because they have some delusion that all the make-up and Morticia outfits will cover up their otherwise ugly appearance. Here's a hint folks: You're still ugly no matter how much make-up you wear, Your poetry still sucks no matter how many vampires are in it, and you're still lame no matter how much you spend on your wardrobe. Some of you might think this hypocritical coming from a guy who wears the same black clothes everyday. Well, once again, figure it out.

6) Abercrombie and Fich: Did I fall asleep for a few decades and miss something? Since when did this clothing company take over the world? I took a day and counted how many people I saw wearing clothes by A&F, my total: 213 in the space of 8 hours. The clothes aren't anything that special, they look just like every other piece of sweatshop garbage made by indentured slaves out of some third world country. It is time for this company to be destroyed.

7) Sprite comics: Stupid. You might as well cut pictures out of a newspaper. And they're all about the same thing: Megaman kills Super Mario and then bangs the princess or something else only a 14 year old boy cold imagine. Give it up.

8) Getting a zit right between your shoulder blades where you can't reach it: I hate that shit.

9) Hypochondriacs: I have no fucking patience for these people anymore. If you give into their shit and give them sympathy then you're just playing into their game and encouraging them. You are not sick. You are not going to die of the West Nile Virus, or cancer, or fucking SARS. It's all in your head. Shut the hell up already.

10) The Ditech.com Loan Officer: Where the fuck do they find these idiots? I can picture the board meeting: "Let's get a gross ugly bucket of Lard-ass donkey jizz to be our new spokesman." I hate those stupid commercials. "Darn, I lost another loan to Ditech!" Hey, I lost my left foot up your ass you big fat boring loser. Please, get rid of this guy.