Blag Post no. 3: More like i-Continue to waste my time with anything that starts with a lower case "i"

i-Dosing? They should call it i-Dozing...Enough of my painful attempts at punnery.

As if I don't have enough chagrin to go around to everything preceded by the ego-centric lower case letter that will stand as a symbol, metaphor, and punchline of our brave new culture for a vast many years to come, let's add i-Dosing to the list.

i-Wasted 8 and a half minutes watching a kaleidescope and listening to trance house music on the highest viewed youtube "i-dose" video. I even held out until the end "to feel the full effect." Fail 1: "Millenium Bug" 453k views on the yoo-toob.

i-Thought surely 453 thousand people could be wrong, as they usually are, so I picked the most amusing looking link regardless of the views. More trance music, excellent. However, the video was a most mesmerizing optical illusion. To my great surprise, after only a minute of watching I had thoroughly distorted vision that made things seem to move in waves. I shut my eyes quickly, in a little bit of panic, however, once I opened them, I was back to normal. But since that optical illusion is readily available elsewhere on the internet, sans trance music, that made this one, Fail 2: "Natural hallucinogen legal high" 63k views on the u-tüb.

i-Googled briefly, hoping to find a wikipedia article, but saw a news article explaining that the idea is based upon binaural audio, which is a scientifically explored audio illusion of sorts with no drug inducing symptoms, but perhaps if you wished them enough, you could make it come true. One last trek to the who-tube looking for these elusive binaural beats gave me fail 3: "Infinite Bliss Unisonic Ascension" 950k views

Which brings me to Fail number 4. This is a special shout out for every damned fool chasing a digital high and the society that's driven them to such ridiculousness. But let's keep things in perspective here, almost a third of this nation thinks Palin has the chops for presidency and Glenn Beck has one of the highest rated radio and TV shows in America. I mean, at least it keeps kids off the streets.

While you're probably bummed out that you'll have to get high like the rest of the proles, with drugs, I find the next best thing to a digital high would be hefty dose of Florence + The Machine because everyone could use a little symphonic positivity. Try "You've got the Love", "Kiss with a Fist", or "Cosmic Love".

Andrew

P.S. I'd like to dedicate this post to Jules Verne. Happy Birthday!

Chatroulette

Chatroulette is a very bizarre yet intriguing concept. I remember last year when someone told me about it, all I could think of was having a face put to all of those terrible comments that are posted on youtube videos daily. Of course like many people in college I checked it out with a bunch of people huddled around my computer, however it didn't last long. It was funny for a little while but that initial interest wore off quickly. Going back to the website this past week, I couldn't help but realize how little had changed. There were still a bunch of creepy people, random bros, and people way too young to be on weird sites like that. It's a concept that at first is interesting but ultimately doesn't stand the test of time. It reminds me of that Dave Chappelle skit in which the internet is a real place and he realizes just how strange the majority of things on there are. I understand the excitement of chatting with a complete stranger, but the pool of people that this website is drawing from is made up of too many strange people.

Blog Post 3: ChatRoulette

I have heard about ChatRoulette but I’ve never actually been on it so I thought it would be interesting to check out. I was a little bit nervous at the idea of being paired up with random people and trying to have a conversation via webcam but knowing that I could leave the chat at any time made me feel more secure. I spoke briefly with a few different people and found it interesting that the majority were single men from the United States.

Knowing that you come across a lot of nudity on ChatRoulette, I tried to log-in during the daytime, assuming that people were less likely to engage in “R-rated” behavior. I read some crazy statistic that about 1 in 8 feeds on ChatRoulette involves nudity or controversial content. Daytime or not, there was still way more naked guys then I wanted to see. Considering this, I was surprised at how easy it was to start chatting with people. All I had to do was click “allow” to access my camera and microphone and then “scan” to initiate a conversation. There weren’t any questions about age so literally anyone with Internet and a webcam can get onto ChatRoulette. It’s scary to think that online or sexual predators could be using this as a forum to talk to underage children.

On a more positive note, if you haven’t seen the amusing YouTube video of that guy on ChatRoulette doing improv on his piano then check it out here!

myspace? no thanks.

If "e-dosing" is just edosing.com, I'm not sure there's much to talk about. And as far as ChatRoulette goes, I was on it once with my friends and I never need to experience that again.

So I've chosen to view 15 myspace profiles.

I haven't been to the myspace homepage in years and didn't even recognize it when I logged into my account (from around 2006 - don't judge me). What a huge mess the entire website is. You know how they sometimes say that two attractive parents make an ugly child? I think myspace is the ugly offspring of facebook and twitter.

Myspace is older than both of those sites but from what myspace used to be to what it is now, it has blatantly changed itself to be more like them. What I remember was purely people having "pages" of themselves where they could have a blog, friends list, posts, and obnoxious backgrounds. Now there is all of that plus things they've ripped off from other successful social networking sites. The "live highlights" and "status & mood" are sloppy versions of facebook's live feed and status updates, and on the bottom of the page there is a "what's trending" section reminiscent of twitter's trends.

It gets worse. They should force myspace users to undergo a tutorial with a quiz they must pass before allowing them to create their own pages. Blinking graphics, autoplaying rap songs, over exposed side angled photographs, lOtS oF tYpInG lIkE tHiS, and 'flyers' for bands I've never heard of seem to be the norm on each page. The whole website is one giant headache.

Maybe I'm being harsh here but they should just scrap the whole website and start fresh. The website has absolutely no appeal to me. I'm all for expressing yourself and being who you are but not if it's going to physically damage my eyes to look at your myspace page.

Blog Post #3

For this blog post I decided to browse MySpace pages. I did not know what e-Dosing was and I have heard a lot of creepy things about ChatRoulette. The first thing I noticed was that the homepage had changed from the blue and white with a simple login in to a page filled with videos, music updates, ads, and a new logo. However it was also good to see Tom the guy who was automatically your friend when you signed up was still on there. As I browsed through profile I found that you could edit your name. I came across interesting names, ‘Thug Lovin Baby’, ‘Lil’Momma’, and ‘Flaka’ who claims she is 18 but looks no more than 12. I also noticed one can update their status plus add what their mood is with an animated smiley. I thought it was creepy how advance you could search someone, filter people based on ethnicity, religion, body type, income and more. I never had a MySpace when I was younger but my friends did and I look back and I can’t believe that they would accept random people as “friends”. I feel that if our parents actually knew how these sites worked they probably would not have let us go on at such a young age.