Great Things

+  The new Balance and Composure song Kaleidoscope is soo fucking good.  Listen to it HERE.  They’re releasing a split with Tigers Jaw in May which features 4 new songs from both bands.  I’m really looking forward to that.

+ 4Chan founder interviewed at the TED conference.  Nothing really profound happens in the interview but it is interesting to learn that he started the site at 15 and he doesn’t look as nerdy as you would think the founder of 4 chan would look.

+ This is pretty amazing.  The Bloom Box is a small wireless device that can generate power without being connected to the grid.

Depressing Things

+ Girl sings a cover of Tik Tok by Kesha on youtube and gets flamed horribly.  People on the internet are pricks.  StreetBoners has some funny stuff to say about it.

It’s more abuse than anyone in human history has taken. She’s like an experimental crash-test dummy for a bleeding-edge form of online punishment: rapid-fire, anonymous, continual, explicit, targeted, specific. It’s life-changing, serial-killer-making EGO DESTRUCTION.

Even the worst American Idols are not exposed to this degree of punishment. Their millions of mocking viewers can only laugh in their livings rooms — they can’t directly lash out…

Observations:
A) WHAT the fuck is wrong with her parents that they could expose her to this? This girl is not just overweight, she’s also got some kind of developmental issue. WHERE the fuck are her parents? The trailer can’t be that big.

B) WHAT the fuck is wrong with humanity? It’s so great to see how people REALLY act when they have anonymity. It’s like staring into a stranger’s eyes from a subway platform once the subway doors have closed — you each know the other guy can’t physically get to you, so all bets are off.

C) Every ten comments or so, someone surfaces who can’t bear the raw and terrible honesty of nature. They tell her how beautiful she is, and how if she keeps at it, she can make all her dreams come true. These people are worse than the haters; by giving her these droplets of hope, they are keeping her addicted to the punishment channel like a smack addict crawling through a burnt-out poppy field.

What a clusterfuck.

+ If you’re worried about the economy read this article and figure out that the future is looking bleaker than you had imagined.

Last spring, an organization called JobNob began holding networking happy hours to try to match college graduates with start-up companies looking primarily for unpaid labor. Julie Greenberg, a co-founder of JobNob, says that at the first event, on May 7, she expected perhaps 30 people, but 300 showed up. New graduates didn’t have much of a chance; most of the people there had several years of work experience—quite a lot were 30-somethings—and some had more than one degree. JobNob has since held events for alumni of Stanford, Berkeley, and Harvard; all have been well attended (at the Harvard event, Greenberg tried to restrict attendance to 75, but about 100 people managed to get in), and all have been dominated by people with significant work experience.When experienced workers holding prestigious degrees are taking unpaid internships, not much is left (for everyone else.)