Archive for 2009

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Support Corporate Fascism – Buy A CD

[ 5 Comments ]Posted on June 19, 2009 by admin in Music

Friday, June 19th, 2009

Shared any music with your friends lately? You may owe the RIAA $80,000 per song.

If you’ve shared any music with your friends in a digital format recently, you might want to wipe your hard drive. That rascally RIAA is at it again, winning an absolutely psychotic copyright infringement case against a single consumer, to the tune of $1.92 million. Who knows how they expect Jammie Thomas to pay the nearly two million dollars she owes for the 24 songs she “pirated”….wait. Did I just say 24 songs for $1.92 million dollars? Yes. I did. That’s why I’m reviving the CopyReich Shop I created a while back. If this isn’t fascist behavior on the part of the recording industry, I don’t know what is. The stupid consumer won’t buy your crappy overpriced products? Destroy their life by suing the f*ck out of them! We just talked about the CopyFight last week; frankly I thought it was kind of a dead movement. Maybe it’s time we revitalized it. If you find the Nazi-esque images of the CopyReich Shop offensive, we also have the Copyfight Shop, which pokes fun at the Creative Commons license. And which is also perhaps due for a revival; it seems Instructables.com may be perverting it’s purpose to screw their content creators. By the way, here’s a nice flowchart if you’ve ever wondered how the RIAA decides to pursue these cases.

Top Ten Disappointing Technologies, Part I

[ 2 Comments ]Posted on June 18, 2009 by admin in Technology

Thursday, June 18th, 2009

Arthur C. Clarke said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. I’m not feeling the magic.

Anti Gravity

Stephen Hawking Understands
The Gravity of the Situation

This, for some reason, remains my single greatest disappointment regarding technology. Usually, when scientists develop detailed mathematical descriptions of natural phenomena, they’re able to – in at least some small way – demonstrate the truth of them. Although I once had to explain to an otherwise intelligent friend that the Vomit Comet was not in fact an example of anti-gravity, most of us know that anti-gravity remains a technological chimera. The closest science comes to demonstrating an understanding of anti gravity is to describe its opposite, by saying things like “See that thing that’s falling? I have some amazing math that will tell you how fast it will do so”.

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Muphry’s Law Strikes Again

[ Comments Off ]Posted on June 17, 2009 by admin in Editorial & Opinion

Wednesday, June 17th, 2009

The Peter Principle’s Penetrating Insights Into Incompetance

Is your boss an incompetent lout? Maybe it’s not their fault. They may simply be a victim of the Peter Principle. If you’re not familiar with the concept, or simply need a refresher (as I did today), The Peter Principle (or PP, as some refer to it) states that “In a Hierarchy Every Employee Tends to Rise to His Level of Incompetence.” A classic example would be Michael Brown, the catastrophically incompetent director of FEMA during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, who was promoted by George W. Bush because of his outstanding performance as stewards and judges commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association, and whose famous last words (as Katrina pounded New Orleans) were: “Can I quit now?” Okay, maybe this is more a reflection of George Bush’s incompetence, but GW himself might also serve as an example of the PP. The Peter Principle differs slightly from The Dilbert Principle, which states that “the most ineffective workers are systematically moved to the place where they can do the least damage: management” or, more succinctly: “leadership is nature’s way of removing morons from the productive flow.” Given that there’s no hierarchy here at Dissociated Press, we’re most likely to fall prey to Parkinson’s Law, which suggests that “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion“, though in the comments, we often see people fall prey to Muphry’s Law.

Is Urban Planning An Oxymoron?

[ 1 Comment ]Posted on June 16, 2009 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture

Tuesday, June 16th, 2009

Does your town seem like it occurred by accident? Maybe you should try living in an Intentional Community


Does this look intentional to you?

Are you living in an accidental community? In spite of that mysterious field of study known as urban planning, most cities I’ve lived in have felt like a brilliantly averted catastrophe, plagued by things like congested freeways, war-zone-like crime areas, extortionist parking management, and excessive taxes that don’t seem to benefit anyone but government employees and contractors. Maybe it’s time to revisit the idea of intentional communities. Although historically these are often assembled by extremest fringe Christians or new age nutjobs, the idea – at least in the abstract – isn’t a bad one. We wrote a while back about an interesting project in Detroit that had this kind of potential. Perhaps there could be a new kind of homesteading in which the government supports citizens who develop urban renewal and reclamation projects. Am I just another ignorant utopian, or does this actually sound like a sane idea?

Avoid Food While Waiting For Sperm Rider To Load

[ Comments Off ]Posted on June 15, 2009 by admin in Editorial & Opinion

Monday, June 15th, 2009

If thumb wrestling is your idea of a workout, we have some fun things lined up to help derail your Monday morning.


Is this your idea of exercise?

I’ll probably never have a legitimate reason to say that again in this lifetime, but as a headline for this week’s Monday Demotivators, there’s absolutely nothing gratuitous in the phrase. So let’s get (ahem) rolling. Here’s a game a lot of us fat Americans should try (don’t think you’re fat? Check the NIH Body Mass Calculator first, you might be surprised). Anyway, the object of Sprinster is simply to avoid food. ‘nough said. To help you avoid food, pretty much for the rest of the day, try 5 Fingers Fillet. I think the name is warning enough. Not for the faint-hearted. Who dreams this crap up, anyway, and why, in the name of God, do I link to it? Oh yeah. Revenue. So, moving along. Sperm Rider takes forever to load (did I really just type that?) but there’s something entrancing about piloting a cowboy stick figure who’s riding a huge sperm through an urban landscape to a stripped-down cowpunk soundtrack. I didn’t even care what my score was. Much like in Super Lava Jumper, which tells you “Oops you died. No worries though” when you fail. This, while a boinky late 90′s house soundtrack plays at 120 decibels. If you like pixelated games with crappy soundtracks, you might also want to try Heavy Metal Girl, which is a little less relaxed about your death, and much more intent on providing it. And if love is more your thing, try Romeo, in which (much like life) you round up volumes of Shakespeare that you will never read, while you search for true love. Want my opinion? Go to the cafe. The odds of meeting someone are a lot better there than if you sit here playing dumb Flash games all day. And get some exercise while you’re at it. Maybe start with something easy, like Thumb Wrestling

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