Delish.com has gone too far

Real, actual screenshots from the renegade recipe website.

Happy meme year

2016 may have been the worst year since mankind first started talking about years, but it did give rise to an internet meme that I particularly enjoy: the "Me at the End of 2016" meme. You've probably seen a bunch of these; there's no shortage. But that won't stop me making my own.

OK, this one may be a bit esoteric. Long story short, the kid on the left and the sea monster on the right are the same guy.

That last one makes me want to cry.

Happy new year, everyone! May your 2017 be comparatively painless.

Tech support

I'm in the process of redesigning this blog's color scheme, as you will have noticed from the sudden photo-negative effect that has taken hold around here. Unfortunately, what should have been a relatively easy conversion has been stalled by an apparent change to Blogger.com's image uploading protocols. When I upload my new white version of the titlebar, which is quite dapper if I do say so myself, it gets compressed very badly.

Does anyone know how to correct this? I've tried uploading the image at smaller sizes, in different formats, and even with a simplified color pallet. Nothing works. Every time I end up with an ugly, fuzzy JPEG.

If you can help me with this, I'd be so very appreciative.

UPDATE:

I seem to have it under control. But what a pain in the face.

Please let me know what you think about the new style. I'm told that dark text on light background is easier on the eyes than the white-on-black theme I was using before, but I have to balance that advice against the fact that the person who gave it to me may have had no idea what he was talking about.

The joke wasn't funny until I made it funny

I never want to hear the phrase "selective grief" again

I will lay out in plain terms why putting a French flag filter on your Facebook profile image does not constitute "selective grief."

1. All grief -- and for that matter, all emotion -- is selective. Humans aren't capable of anything but selective emotion. The opposite of "selective grief" would be "total grief," in which we express grief for every single grief-causing thing that happens in the world at any given moment. Guess what, nobody has enough time on his hands to show "total grief," because bad things happen every minute. Selective grief is the best anyone can do.
2. It's not grief, it's a profile photo. A picture on Facebook doesn't constitute grief, nor does it prove the act of grieving. It's not even designed to do that. By Facebook's own description, the French flag filter is meant to "show solidarity with the victims" of the Paris terror attack. Selective grief? No. Selective Facebook participation, maybe. But again, what other kind of Facebook participation is there?
3. Westerners are numb to the idea Middle East violence (yes, that means you too, Lebanon) through no fault of their own. When a terror attack happens in Paris, it makes big headlines because we aren't used to it. That's what makes it "news." The Syrian civil war, on the other hand, has been spilling into neighboring countries since it began in 2011 (and into Lebanon since 2012), yet it took an attack on Paris to bring some people's attention to this fact. Which people are those? Mainly the ones whining about selective grief.

I now consider the matter closed. "Selective grief" will henceforth be added to my list of Phrases That Trigger My Auto-Ignore Response. It'll be in good company there, with friends like "law-abiding gun owner" and "War on [anything]."

Will someone please think of the flags

Don't let the "politics" tag scare you off. I just wanted to show you this little gem of a debate (I guess?) from the Facebook wall of a guy I went to elementary school with...and who probably hates me now.

Hates me for my freedom.

No, I didn't watch the animal doctor "take down" the flag stompers. The click bait didn't work on me. "Under two minutes?" Do it in under 30 seconds and we'll talk. And yeah, I know the phrase "your mom" is the internet equivalent of depleted uranium. I guess I mostly just wanted to show off my correct use of "your" as opposed to "you're."

The moral of the story is, guard your opinions well. If you have an opinion, I will show up to trivialize and ridicule it until you change it. Because you don't need opinions. You need facts.

Piss me off: Image macros

The internet is garbage.

I mean, LOOK AT IT.

"But Jesse," you're saying in my imagination because that way I can make you say what ever I want. "Why do you hate the internet? You use it every day. It serves you well. Aren't you being a little hard on the good old WWW?" (By the way, in my imagination, you have an Indian accent and a very low voice, and you pronounce "WWW" as "wuh-wuh-wuh.")

Well, let me answer that question with another question: Do you know anyone who posts things like this on their Facebook wall?

Not for you, it doesn't.

These JPEGs full of text have to go. I'm serious. What happened to pictures of....stuff? I mean, stuff besides words? These pseudo-images serve no purpose. They aren't art. They aren't intelligent. Best case scenario, they're insipid motivational posters. Often, you get the double whammy of bad wisdom paired with illiteracy:

C+ PS: YOU'LL SHOOT YOUR EYE OUT

The only thing worse than putting your asinine musings into an image file for no reason is making typographical errors when doing so. Nobody's going to edit your image and fix the mistakes. Those typos are forever. They're like the plastic rings that hold six packs together. They're only questionably useful, and after the short period during which they are used, they'll just end up choking a dolphin.

Any time I'm dumb enough to be tricked into reading the contents of one of these pictures, I curse myself for wasting time.

Guess what I found, a comma splice inside it.

Not only did you just read a depressing (albeit probably made-up) story, you're now ten seconds older. Sorry, your time is non-refundable.

Other times, the message itself is just not true. How many times after the March 11 Tohoku Earthquake did people re-post this iridescent map, thinking it showed the flow of radiation from Fukushima?

Being misinformed is forgivable. But what everyone inexplicably seems to forgive is the fact that these re-posted images are just thinly veiled, socially accepted examples of wholesale unoriginality. If you want to post an image full of words, post this one:

Here are a few more types of social network re-postables that I'd like to see permanently phased out:

Like

I set up a Facebook page just for my musical endeavors. So if you like clicking "Like," try liking this:

Lousy Book Covers

This is one of my new favorite things: An oft-updated gallery of really bad book cover designs. Bonus: Each entry also has a link to the book's page on Amazon, where one can invariably find an unintentionally humorous synopsis.

Comments Moderation

Perhaps inevitably, it has become apparent that I must be vigilant about who is and isn't allowed to comment on my blog. After about one instance per week of someone posting spam ads (always consisting of a nonsense English sentence, followed by a series of about twenty links to various Chinese-language websites), it seems like it has become a necessity. So from now on, everyone who comments will have to sign in, and all comments will be moderated before they appear online.

Funniest Thing I Have Seen So Far This Month

I won't waste time trying to describe it. Just watch it for yourself. I can't embed the video, so here's the link.

Don't Install MacCinema

After a close call with this threat to Mac OS's hitherto ironclad security, I'll be extra careful about what I install on my machine.

[link]

Yahoo to End GeoCities

Yahoo has said it will shut down GeoCities, the free website hosting service it purchased ten years ago, this year.

GeoCities was one of the most popular ad-driven hosts where people built their personal web pages back in the days before blog hosts became the easiest way to do so. It also became known as a virtually infinite graveyard of some of the most pointless, ill-looking and dysfunctional pages on the entire internet. Any time I was looking for information online and found a link to a GeoCities page, my hopes of discovering anything relevant on that page sank considerably. Most of the time the link would lead to a page that hadn't been updated in at least three years, and whose images had all vanished because the user's allotted bandwidth had been used up.

Hallmarks of GeoCities websites included random GIF animations, illogical linking, seizure-inducing color schemes and hit counters that looked like this:

(The way I'm describing it, GeoCities sounds an awful lot like MySpace...but trust me, it was totally different.)

Countless internet users, including myself, can truthfully say that GeoCities was their first ever "home on the web." The service GeoCities offered was perfect if you wanted to build a website with basically no content, and you wanted to do so for free. I took advantage of this perfect storm of pointlessness and created my first website, entitled The Hall of Crushes, in 1997. It was, as you can imagine, a high-tech shrine to unrequited love; kind of like the movie High Fidelity, only instead of my lost loves being played by Catherine Zeta Jones and Lili Taylor, they were portrayed in cute little caricatures I drew myself. It was a vigorous exercise in self-indulgence.

Aren't you glad I stopped being self-indulgent?

Mathew Chromecki: "It Wudn't Me"

I received the comment below on my August 2008 post "When There's Nothing to Write About, I Make Fun of Other Writers." It contends that the attribution of the essay entitled "Right so, what am I doing here?" to Mathew Chromecki was a failure of editorial oversight on the part of Tokyo Notice Board. In light of the possibility that I have credited the wrong person with writing so bad not even light can escape it, I will not refer to authors of bad essays by full name in future TNB dissections.

Dear Jesse,
I've enjoyed reading your blog. I'm new to making Web logs. I found yours when I was surprised to find it on a search engine list with my own name. I was then further intrigued as to quotes assigned to me I never made. After opening your page and read your comments from something I never wrote, I chuckled. You could never know that TNB accredited the article to the wrong person, could you? But this is not the first time. Imagine receiving a check in the mail for something you didn't write? It's a small publication house. Now, I wish I could tell you who wrote the article, but I don't know myself. I do, however, sympathize with your sentiments. Where there is too much "I" in an essay, it begins to sound like depression writ large; somethings are best left unsaid.
As a happy coincidence, I, the real Mathew Chromecki, am pleasantly acquainted with M. Guffin who, by my humble account, is a fine bassist and accomplished music teacher. Guffin, if you happen to read this, I hope all is well you.
Thank you for your attention, Jesse. All the best for your blog.

QWOP

Fiance pointed this Flash game out to me after it became a favorite time waster with her co-workers. Use the Q,W,O and P keys to move the runner as far as you can before he falls. My personal best distance so far is 13.5m; Fiance's is somewhere around 25m.

[LINK]

Comments Experiment

I'm going to experiment for a few weeks with allowing anonymous comments from unregistered users. The idea is to get a better picture of how many regular readers I have. If my blog becomes a swamp of spam ads for Chinese herbal fertility medicine as a result, I'll go back to registered users only.

2008: The Year in Review

Next month Chorus, Isolate, Confirm will be four years old. They grow up so fast, don't they? When my blog's birthday is coming near, I like to recap the year's events and reminisce. Let's make like a mirror and reflect.

In January I explained why Kojima Yoshio is funny (or was funny...he hasn't been on TV much lately), asked the question "What's the deal with Stef?" and experienced iPod trouble.

In February I attacked the Delight Factory, saw The Police and recommended the music of Jerry Schroeder.

In March I BLEW THE LID OFF the Nomigawa boat graveyard and did my fourth annual Big Walk.

In April I saw a funny TV commercial, drank with Fiance's co-workers in the park and (accurately) predicted that Perfume was on a fast track to super stardom. Sure enough, they'll be one of this year's headlining acts on the New Year's Eve Kôhaku Uta Gassen music competition.

May was a busy month indeed. The highlight, however, would have to be my un-anesthetized vivisection of the Interchange ESL textbook and its ghastly illustrations.

Speaking of ghastly, June saw Debbie Schlussel, Cal Thomas, random stabbings AND blue Pepsi! The horror!

In July I pounded a big drum. I encouraged high school girls everywhere to enjoy the benefits of underwear. And I made the Japanese language just a little brighter with my own made-up words.

In August I turned 30 and there was much rejoicing. Then I used my Maximilian whirling blades of robotic death on an issue of Tokyo Notice Board.

In September I jumped on the Sarah-Palin-Is-Rubbish bandwagon. Then I built a bandwagon of my own: the Facebreaker-Is-Rubbish bandwagon.

October saw my attention divided between political intrigue and a most inconsiderate man whose failed suicide attempt killed a lot of people other than himself.

In November I was the curmudgeony old man who shook his cane at young good-for-nothing whippersnappers on the Yamanote Line. I also did a fairly timely video game review (Bleach: Soul Carnival) and a not-so-timely one (Life Force).

And this month Tokyo Tower turned 50 and I experienced a Christmas miracle!

Heartfelt thanks go out to all my regular readers. I encourage you all to write comments on my posts. Doing so will likely push me to update CIC more often.

Happy New Year!

Automated Banner Ads Are Silly

My Blog is Better Than Debbie Schlussel's

Chorus, Isolate, Confirm does not pretend to be an important blog. It does not presume to be ground-breaking, nor does it view itself as a "top blog" in any category. But it's better than at least one political blog I can name:

DebbieSchlussel.com.

Her name sounds like a German pastry, but somewhere along the way, this woman has given up sweetness and decided to focus on just being flaky. Conservative blogger Debbie Schlussel regales her audience (?) with hateful tirades against Muslims and a vindictive, unending dislike of Sex and the City. She plays at being a movie critic, cramming her reviews with unrelated political commentary and rating films with "Marxes" or "Reagans."

She is a loser.

Appropriately for someone who has nothing nice to say about anything, Debbie Schlussel looks and sounds like a Michigan soccer mom who's been ingesting lead for the past 40 years. Observe:

I know being a blogger normally entails a lot of trash-talk, but come on, Debbie Schlussel. What did Sex and the City ever do to you?

Accept No Imitation

EDIT (Feb. 15, 2008): Since the original posting of this entry (in which I accused We Are Not Journalists of imitating my Portrait of a Badass feature), both parties involved have made things right with a friendly link exchange. If making enemies was all I wanted to do, I'd change this blog's name to You're Stupid, You Stupid Dummy. But be warned, if someone goes and actually starts a blog called You're Stupid, You Stupid Dummy, I'll be right back on the copycat accusation warpath.