Category Archives: tech: posts from tech-ish.com

Hipster Hunting

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Janet said she wanted to go the Missouri Lounge to make fun of all the hipsters. Everyone agreed that The Missouri Lounge was just crawling with the little buggers.

I was surprised. Not about the Missouri Lounge—though I’d always thought the shack looked like more of a redneck dive—but that Janet wasn’t herself a hipster. She had the chunky, short-cropped hair and the thick black plastic glasses. But no. She was a hipster hater. How could I get them confused?

We ordered drinks and Janet picked out the most egregious violators and made fun of their outfits and drink selections. We did not stay long. Janet made a request from the DJ and there was some misunderstanding, or altercation. So we left.

That incident got me thinking. Did those people deserve to be made fun of? What made them worse people than Janet? What the hell was a hipster, anyway?

Since that day many moons ago, if I hear someone use the word I always ask them what it means. Two things quickly became apparent: 1) no two people seem to have the same definition 2) never have I ever heard the word used in a positive context.

For my money, a hipster is a person with an overly-developed sense of irony. But by that definition, the guy I know who is most likely to be a hipster is a 35-year-old Indian metalhead. He’s also the biggest hipster-hater I know. The “H-word” also seems to be associated with indie rock, though no one seems to know what the fuck that is either.

Here is what some of my research has come up with:

  • “Hipsters are trust fund babies that go to expensive private art programs.”
  • “Hipsters are people who wear mismatched, ill-fitting clothes and think they are hot.”
  • “Hipsters are the shallow types that live in the Williamsburg neighborhood in Brooklyn.”
  • “Hipsters drink Pabst Blue Ribbon and ride fixie-bikes and make fun of normal people.”

Oh well then, that’s clear. If I am in Williamsburg and I meet someone in an art program I can assume they are shallow and living off daddy’s money. Additionally, if I meet a girl on a fixed-gear bike in Goodwill frocks I can assume she is a snotty bitch that can’t wait to talk about me behind my back. It would do the world a good deed to run off with her inexpensive union-made brew, taunting and laughing.

Much like the yuppies in The Last Days of Disco, “hipster” seems to describe a group of people that everyone seems to agree is omnipresent and easily identifiable yet no one can find one among their circle of friends.

In case you can’t tell, this whole thing pisses me off. Being cruel to someone based on the way they dress, the music they listen to, their neighborhood or school of choice is discrimination. It may not be based on a thousand years of oppression like the prejudice we all like to think we’re too good for, but it is certainly the opposite of the moral high-ground the hipster-haters think they have.

The American College Dictionary defines Bohemian as “a person with artistic or intellectual tendencies, who lives and acts with no regard for conventional rules of behavior.”

I see very little to distinguish the hipster-hating of today from those who hated the punks and before that the hippies and before that the beatniks and on and on. No one can deny the fact that the hipster is the new bohemian, except the bohemians themselves, who’ve been tricked into thinking that the hipsters are the fake bohemians.

die hipster scum tshirt p235410750249420446yxzc 210 Hipster Hunting

Can't wait to meet this friendly guy!

Thus we have an odd scenario where sews-her-own-clothes girl (eg hipster) and shops-at-the-Gap girl (eg the anti-hipster) can both commiserate on how much they hate the oh-so-fake shops-at-Urban-Outfitters girl. Sews-her-own-clothes girl thinks she is immune because she is somehow more authentic. But you can bet your best pair of Pumas that the Gap girl and the Urban Outfitters “fake” hipster would be just as quick to make fun of the freak girl with the weird clothes she she probably made on her grandma’s sewing machine (as if that’s a bad thing).

The whole anti-bohemian attitude strikes me as a backlash against a group of people who feel slighted by those who have a different set of moral standards. An example would serve better than an explanation…

One of the definitions from Urban Dictionary for the word in question:

Someone who thinks that they are being “special” and “unique” for liking some underground bullshit no one else cares about. And they pointlessly look down on people who don’t know anything about indie culture, because that’s the only thing they know anything about. They’re quick to call the rest of the world conformists when in reality, they are the ones conforming by partaking in a “too cool for mainstream so i am going to reject it by looking and acting like a grungy asshole” way of life only to seem uber-fashionable. They just end up looking like idiots.Hipster: I won’t drink at starbucks, it’s too corporate.

    Non-Hipster: I want a Louis Vitton purse because they are cool
    Hipster: You’re such a conformist, haveing a Louis Vitton purse is so unoriginal. I like my purse I found in the gutter for $4 dollars.
    Non-hipster: but it’s fugly
    Hipster: yah, but no one else has it. It’s completely unique.
    Non-hipster: that bum over there has something pretty similar though.
    Hipster: You’re ignorant because you can’t see the real beauty in life.
    I don’t have time for this, I’m gonna go to my cave of an apartment and listen to some indie rock you’ve probably never heard of….
    Non hipster: You need to see a therapist
    Hipster: I am my own therapist.

So the sad fashion whore that wrote that definition feels as though she is being judged because she doesn’t care where her clothes are made or how her consumption choices affect the local economy. And she’s right! I think the person who wrote the definition above is shallow and ignorant! I expect to be hated and unkindly labeled by anyone who thinks avoiding Starbucks is an example of “some underground bullshit.” That’s totally fine. Fuck that girl, and the guy who runs http://www.latfh.com/, we were never meant to be friends!

But when I see the anarchists, punks, queers, ravers and other manner of adorable bohemians bitching about the “H” word, it’s too much. When someone seeks to say mean things about a nonconformist, hipster is the first word they turn to, even if the nonconformists themselves think a hipster is something entirely different.

The focus on the hipster’s inauthenticity as an outsider, art appreciator, or moral consumer is a defense mechanism based on the labeler’s own insecurities in those same areas. The Louis Vitton-lover in the example above is an extreme example because s/he can’t even conceive that anyone would care about the journey of their designer purse from sweatshop to landfill. Your average anti-bohemian likes to think they appreciate art and philosophy as much or more than any weirdos with their weird music and their weird hair and their weird clothes. The assumption is that any reasons for being different are not better or coming from any set of values, merely contrivances. In this way, anti-hipsterism becomes another extension of the big-city-elitist versus corn-fed-anti-intellectual debate that is the hallmark of the American class system.

When the freaks, geeks, queers and quacks take aim at hipsters they are supporting conformity, regardless of what they think it means when they are around other bohemian-types.

Let us celebrate the hipster. Let us drink inexpensive beer and wear used clothes. Let’s  listen to obscure music. Let’s have debates about crap surrealist literature and condone veganism. La vie Boheme, under any name: embrace it.

Trust No One

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My boyfriend got miffed at me a few weeks ago. I had put his email in a list that would invite him to join Shelfari. Though he was slightly annoyed to get email from them, he was more annoyed that I gave this site my google name and password. It really didn’t occur to me that this was possibly insecure.

I would have challenged him as paranoid but the day before I had been downloading aps for facebook. I came across a particularly lovely app that would auto-check your myspace and tell you if you had any updates. But the programmer who wrote the nifty app had taken it down. He had an accidental security hole that allowed the username and password to be transmitted transparently, causing malicious folks access to the email info of those who had the installed the application.

I have to remind myself that just becuase I trust the programmer that wrote the program not to do anything shady with my info doesn’t mean that its safe to pass it along.

Here’s another way to look at it: If you have a password, one reason you don’t give it out to those you trust is because if there is some kind of security breach — whether it be a home robbery or online identity theft — you can detective* out how your password got into the wrong hands. The more people who have access to your info, the more difficult that is. And I have heard of cases where the source wasn’t resolved and the same asshole cracker** came back and socked the victim again.

This is all a long lead-up to this link, from hackademix.net, about four recent security weaknesses in google.

This is particularly telling, as google is so widely respected. I don’t know about you, but I’m holding my passwords a little closer to my chest in the future.

Doing My Part to Villainize Microsoft

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“The state can’t give you freedom, and the state can’t take it away. Freedom is something you’re born with, and then one day someone tries to deny it. The extent to which you resist is the extent to which you are free.”

-Utah Phillips

Those new Vista ads are so alluring aren’t they? The new Microsoft operating system is going to be just like seeing a deer walk by your window! It will be just like that rocket ship to the moon! Dear God it is state of the art. It is so state of the art, most video games won’t be designed to run on it until mid-2008 . Vista is so ahead of it’s time that more than half of the computers in the U.S. can’t even run it! If you want to run the Vista operating system, you had better get a new computer because a study conducted by SoftChoice Corporation stated that 50% of the current breed of personal computers are “below Windows Vista’s basic system requirements” while 94% are not equipped to run on Windows Vista Premium edition Which is fine because computers are disposable, right? It is not as though there are landfills filled with computer junk.

Well, not in this country, anyway. We just send it all to the Phillipines, Thailand, and other places an ocean away from the stench of the dumpsite. I sure hope the next Microsoft operating system is more backwards compatible than Vista because it is supposedly due out in 2009. Fortunately, Vista was six years late because it took so long to fix all of the glitches in Windows XP. Perhaps that will give some of the people in Manila a chance to sort through the wreckage this new software will bring.

Microsoft is not thinking about this. Who can blame them; they are too busy with lawsuits. Anti-virus software makers Symantec and another company named “Vista”. One of the selling points of Vista is that it comes with its own anti-virus software built in. Symantec is claiming that software is theirs, and patented. Just by bundling security products with Windows folks will talk of Monopoly. That is all it took for Internet Explorer to squash the business of far-superior Netscape. But this case is different.

First, an inside source told me that Microsoft didn’t bother to insure that competitors software will actually work on Vista. This could be incompetence: many things don’t yet work on Vista. But it also looks sinister. People that don’t know much about computers will just assume that Vista’s competitors’ anti-virus software doesn’t work at all. They will not assume that the beautiful, (Wow! Look at it!) Vista goddess is the problem.

Second, it is getting much harder to buy computers that don’t come with Vista. I have a friend that was shopping for a laptop at a large, west coast computer store. All of their computers that had WindowsXP were on clearance. The salesperson told her they weren’t supposed to be selling them at all because their contract with Microsoft says they will only sell computers with Vista (if you were considering buying a computer and not building it yourself, best go now while you can still get one with XP). I can’t think of anything more monopolistic than such a contract that forces you to only sell one product. But hey, I’m sure Bill is just thinking off all of those poor unemployed Filipinos that could be staffing dumpsites to hold the brand-new XP computers no one is allowed to sell.

BUT DON’T I ALWAYS SAVE THE BEST FOR LAST?

This whole blog is a sham, a set-up. It is nothing compared to what truly makes Vista an evil abomination. The real reason to give Vista the boot is DRM: Digital Rights Management. DRM is the technology that decides whether you have the right to access things on your own computer. You want to watch a movie? Vista will make sure you have a legit version of it or it won’t play.

Presumably, Microsoft has implemented this at the nagging of Hollywood and the record industry. But that’s a bunch of hooey. From the security blog on Forbes.com:

“And while it may have started as a partnership, in the end Microsoft is going to end up locking the movie companies into selling content in its proprietary formats.

We saw this trick before; Apple pulled it on the recording industry. First iTunes worked in partnership with the major record labels to distribute content, but soon Warner Music’s CEO Edgar Bronfman Jr. found that he wasn’t able to dictate a pricing model to Steve Jobs. The same thing will happen here; after Vista is firmly entrenched in the marketplace, Sony’s Howard Stringer won’t be able to dictate pricing or terms to Bill Gates. This is a war for 21st-century movie distribution and, when the dust settles, Hollywood won’t know what hit them.”
This is not only about mp3s and bootleg videos. DRM can be used on any part of your system. Before Windows even starts, it can ask the computer if this user has permission to use the computer. If not, Windows won’t boot at all.

Few outside of the tech world are worried about this, mostly because they don’t know about it. And many of the law-abiding citizens that don’t have a multi-gig collection of contraband will say DRM makes the internet a safe and legal place to download. These are the same people that smiled and nodded as their civil liberties were Patriot-Acted away. Make no mistake, this is about freedom. If it is not recognized as such, it is only because our computers are one of the only spaces left where people are accustomed to having absolute liberty. It is only because we have never had that freedom taken away.

“I want to resist!” I hear you saying, “But what am I to do? You are suggesting problems with no solutions, like a typical liberal democrat!”

Fear not, gentle reader, there is a solution. Take a look at that slick interface at the top of the screen. You might have thought a transparent 3-D desktop and windows that burst into flames are the hallmarks of Vista. But this “WOW!” factor belongs to Linux. The computer shown here is running Ubuntu Linux. It is free and it is fully supported for free (Microsoft has raised the price of support for their products to $59 per incident). It is easier to install and easy to use. It comes with hundreds of free programs. It is more secure and stable than windows will ever be. And it leaves your desktop with that minty-fresh, non-corporate smell.

This is What My Computer Dreams About

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Let’s hear it for the internet. Through constant innovation, the web seems to be buidling a better everything.
Or in this case, a screensaver.
I was just sitting here, in rapt awe of my screensaver, and I thought I’d take a few minutes to tell you why my screensaver is more bad-ass than yours (unless you have the same one, of course). Anyhow, I really want all of my readers to listen to the Derrick Jensen speech I posted in my last blog so I didn’t want to have any heavy reading in this one.

The screensaver I use is called “Electric Sheep”, so named for the Philip K. Dick novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.
It starts with a fractal. Now, I’m used to the electric art of Winamp visualization plug-ins. This makes those look like a fourth graders computer class project (or a Windows Media Player visualization, same thing, really). Each of these fractals is a “sheep”.

But people who have the screensaver can vote, yay or nay, on whether or not they like the sheep, as the screensaver is going. The bad ones drop and — here’s the beauty part — the winners breed.

The original sheep is soon lost, as all over the world thousands of people vote for their favorites and these beget newer, more beautiful sheep, for sheep-generations. This adds to the beauty because the sheep are always delicate and extreemely complex, with the whisps and shadows of their electric ancestors still vaguely visible. It also makes them less predictable than your average pixelated visualization, because patterns are not based on a program but on previous sheep. It does all this while your computer is sleeping. Because people are always voting, the sheep are always changing, so no matter how long you run it, it never gets old.
There’s no Paula Abdul overseer, the screensaver blends them automatically. However, if you go the website, you can look up a sheeps “lineage”
and “genomes.” It’s a great concept with a stunning execution. If you’re still using that bouncing Windows logo, you might want to give this a try. It’s freeware. It works for Linux too, but obviously wouldn’t be recommended for folks with dial-up connections.

http://electricsheep.org/

the Ever Expanding Blogosphere

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Last night I was looking for a good way to host pictures on myspace when I got sucked into the blog mashable until three o’ clock in the morn’. This is a blog about blogs and the social networking sites, specifically the economics and business models they are using. But they also do a lot of research and talk about various newcomers to the scene. Here is a summation of what I learned:While everyone knows that myspace has the lead when it comes to the width and breadth of social networking sites, there are some contenders for specific interests. I had heard of deviant art (for artists) but not urbis.com, social networking for writers. There is a new competitor for art by the name of humble voice, which supposedly has a noteably more beautiful interface than myspace. Urbis’s strength is the opportunity for criticism of one’s work. Both sites have a ranking system, in the tradition of sites like hotornot.com but judging your work, rather than looks. I will most likely start an urbis account for my creative writing, as this blog isn’t the appropriate outlet for it.

I am also excited to start an account with bikespace, a social network for cyclists. On bikespace, you can create route maps, form groups of riders, and evite folks on rides. Bikespace is still in beta so newcomers could be influential.

If you are looking for someone to host all the pics and songs you want on your page, try badongo.com. They give you a gig and you can upload files from your computer. They will spit out the html to put it on your page. The only catch is that they delete your content if you are inactive for a month.
If you just want to throw some pics on your myspace, most folks have been using flickr and photobucket. But I am more excited about tinypic, allyoucanupload, and imageshack, which don’t require any login information. I’m not a professional photographer, I don’t want to chat about my pics. I just want to get them up and out to myspace.

Another interesting addition to the blogoshere are the remixing sites splice and jamglue. At these sites, you can take songs and sound clips with creative commons liscensing and remix them to make new songs.

I have been downloading mixing plug-ins from winamp.com but now you can just do it all on the web. Then you can upload it to your blog for all the world (okay, the myspace world) to hear.
Here’s an example:

.. classid=”clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000″ codebase=”http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=8,0,0,0″ height=”150″ width=”400″>..>
I am most excited about weedshare.com. Put your pipes away, my Oakstermdam friends; it’s a music sharing site. If you have been looking for a way to give money to the bands you love but want to keep downloading and sharing music, weedshare might be the answer. Personally, when I get my hands on good music I can’t wait to share it with others, particularly because the music I like is not playing on MTV (but then, what is?). The problem is that bands need distribution and the only way to do that has been through record companies. But with weedshare, you become the distributor. You can play any song free three times, then you buy for five dollars. If your friend wants the track, instead of buying it from itunes, they can buy it from you. You get a percentage of the money. Then if your friend passes the song on to someone else, they get a percentage, too. It is a concept so beautiful it makes me want to cry (or are is that the last vestiges of PMS?). More on this later, after I’ve thoroughly checked out their site.

All in all, the mashable blog raises one particularly interesting point: the more myspace expands, the more it cuts into the business that it is creating. If myspace video becomes hugely successful, youtube will lose their business. While this looks unlikely, it is certainly possible for smaller contenders like those mentioned above. Yet add-ons like this are what made myspace hugely popular. On the other hand, one can’t blame myspace for wanting to provide everything, so folks don’t have to look to other websites to complete the social networking experience.

All this means to my awesome, devoted readers: you will be seeing more and hearing more on my blog in the future. As usual, your comments are always welcome.