Although my friends are probably tired of hearing it by now, I always talk about how Twitter has changed the way I use the Web and the way I consume information; it allows you to feel directly connected to people and organizations in ways you never really thought possible before. Sometimes, though, things can get a little scary for my tastes.

A tweet I posted yesterday:

16:26 [@rogerclark:35] one thing i love: philadelphia chive and onion cream cheese

Today, I received a reply:

12:35 [@LoveMyPhilly:1] @rogerclark Sounds like our chive and onion may be your favorite flavor! What do you like to eat it with?

(LoveMyPhilly, of course, being the Twitter account that Philadelphia uses.)

Maybe it's not really all that weird, but it definitely speaks volumes about how close (and creepy) these interactions can get.

Every subculture has its representative or identifying ideas, items or works of art. Sometimes these subcultures are simply created within the fanbase around these works, such was the case with the hipster subculture created around terrible indie rock bands. The fans started wearing vintage clothing and drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon or RC Cola, and boom: instant subculture. Other times, an existing subculture, built around a number of existing things, begets its very own, brand new representative works of art.

The second case is the one of interest here, and it is the case of a specific example of a specific work that has managed, in my mind, to describe and represent an entire subculture I still struggle to effectively name: the bad kind of nerd -- the annoying, half-informed know-it-all with "smart person" interests in everything but no notable proficiency in anything.

In fact, "smart people" (with the quotes stressed as hard as you can stress them) describes them both succinctly and accurately. You know these people -- they're the guys who think ICANHASCHEEZBURGER is funny and talk about how people who play Guitar Hero would be better off learning to play the real guitar, but they suck at Guitar Hero and they don't know how to play the real guitar, either. They like to talk about Internet memes and why Apple products aren't as cool as everyone thinks they are. In fact, there tends to be a lot of population overlap between this subculture and the hipsters I mentioned before...

But I digress. The particular body work of which I speak is the web comic xkcd -- and one comic in particular, in fact, that sums up everything I hate about the people that read it: #676 - Abstraction. This comic is a steaming pile of horse shit on a number of excruciatingly idiotic levels. I will attempt to enumerate the ways in which it fucking sucks. While it's not a new thing to hate on xkcd and the people that read it, I felt like I had to express my own brand of frustration.

The comic's copy is a fantastically varied shit soup of simple factual inaccuracies, oversimplifications and gross displays of its author's lack of real understanding of the concepts mentioned. Clearly, though the person who wrote this maintains a webcomic and blog ("BLAG" LOL) about "science" and technology, he must not actually know anything about computers. There is no "x64 processor;" though the "x64" moniker is a generic term for Intel x86-compatible CPUs with the EMT64 or AMD64 extensions, it does not refer to any real processor (or even a brand of processors), and the author's misuse of the term only serves to make him look like a retard. He mentions the processor "screaming along at billions of cycles," which, while not incorrect, simply acts as a whiz-bang "big number" to pronounce the ridiculousness of the punchline. For some reason he describes the "xnu kernel" doing something he calls "frantically working through all the POSIX-specified abstraction to create the Darwin system underlying OS X." What exactly is "frantic" about the kernel, and why is the joke funnier because of it? Is he saying the kernel's agitated or doesn't know what it's doing? Since when do operating system kernels "work through abstractions" (whatever the hell that's supposed to mean) or "create systems?" Kernels don't "create" systems... that's like saying your car's engine "creates" your car. Why is OS X "straining itself" to run Firefox? Nevermind. I can understand that one; Firefox is a slow piece of shit.

It sounds like I'm nitpicking, but with so many nits to pick, how can I resist?

To be fair, none of these things are really so bad on their own. I can understand wanting to generalize and oversimplify for the sake of comedic effect, but the simplification is one of the worst (and most confusing) parts. I thought his audience was supposed to be a bunch of smart people? Shouldn't the audience know enough about computers to know the name of a real CPU? Is the audience supposed to know just enough about computers to know that all of these terms are technical, but not be smart enough to know the terms are meaningless? Why would the author think using a bogus name for the CPU would be better than using a real one (like "Athlon64"), or even a more accurate generalization (such as "quad-core CPU")? If you don't have a good grasp of the concepts underlying your joke (or you don't think your readers do), why not just make a different joke? Why not use less retarded terminology and make the same joke (but better)? "I am a god?" How lame is this guy? Ugh.

The stupid joke itself isn't even funny. Obviously, the idea is this: the subject is using an incredibly complex piece of equipment to achieve an inane goal. Watching a video of a cat in a box is an unworthy use of his powerful computer and disgraces the names of the countless brilliant engineers who put their hearts and souls into its hardware and software. Funny, right? No. It's almost as if the entire point of the joke is to acknowledge that both the author and all of its readers have reached the same conclusion. Good work, guys. Not exactly what I would call comedy gold.

This is the essence of xkcd:

Douchebag A: "Hey, did you see today's xkcd comic? They mentioned wormholes, Anime, the Fibonacci sequence, and sexual intercourse!"
Douchebag B: "Indeed I did see it, and like you, I do know what all of those things are."

(And no, that wasn't supposed to be funny. It was supposed to be a perfect example of a boring conversation about a boring web comic between two people who read xkcd, which means they're boring too.)

Nothing on xkcd is comedy gold, but somehow its readership thinks the exact opposite. It's supposed to be clever, it's supposed to be insightful, it's supposed to be intelligent, and I guess reading it is supposed to make you cool in the "smart people" subculture. A subculture full of people who think they like science, but don't know anything except what they've seen in sci-fi; people who think they're computer nerds, but don't know anything except what "recursion" means; people who think they're smart but aren't smart enough to realize that reading xkcd is for lame pretentious assholes.

And don't get me started on what a serious lameass you have to be to enjoy stupid videos like that in the first place.

12:47 < reppie> why are so few people interested in operating system development
12:49 < TaPiOn> because you control your computer
12:49 < TaPiOn> like the movie "hacker"

This week I started work at Manta, where I'll be doing some web development with Perl. It's interesting so far; most places in the Columbus, OH area are Microsoft/.NET shops, and while there's nothing wrong with that, it's nice to have a change of pace.

Fortunately, the office is really close to my apartment -- with the car in the shop, sometimes walking is the only option. This, however, has made it very apparent that the entire Polaris area is completely unsuitable for pedestrian travel; there are absolutely no sidewalks in the 1.5 mile stretch of modern, developed urban sprawl between work and home. I wonder how practical it would be to sue the city of Columbus for not accommodating my mode of transportation and posing the risk of my death on a daily basis.

I've started working on my 5-year-old Screenie project again, trying to bring it into the modern age; there have been a number of screen capture and/or screencast applications popping up recently, so I figured I might bring my own stuff back into the realm of competition. Expect fancy features like customizable workflows and Twitter integration, since, you know, everything has to have Twitter integration now.

Hopefully, I'll start updating this blog a bit more now that I'm working in the web field again.

I've been busy with work at a consulting opportunity, so I haven't really had much time to work on my new site. I plan on starting to blog about some of the projects I've been working on, but it's difficult enough to get around to actually working on them... much less posting about it afterward.

This is pretty much the story of your average blog - left neglected for months at a time, only to be revisited periodically for apologetic entries about not updating often enough, not having real content, and pledging to post more in the future.

Yeah, that about sums it up.

Since my personal website at drano.org was getting a little stagnant, I decided to start over and teach myself a few new things along the way. I finally built myself a hybrid blog-wiki CMS like I always wanted, using the amazing Python-based Django framework. It only took me a few hours to create the publishing platform I'd started to write in PHP a few dozen times. That's definitely a testament to the power of the platform.