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2024-10-23 15:30:31 GMT
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People stop me at the hoarder conferences. Usually, it’s after my keynote speech, but sometimes it’s just in the hall. They recognize me from my magazine covers, I guess. They’re curious. They ask me, “I’m just starting out with hoarding. What’s the most important thing to hoard first?”
I’ve got an answer for them, and it’s one you might not expect, especially if you’ve been hoarding for awhile. Dowels. Yes, cylindrical tubes of all kinds, cut precisely. It’s the kind of thing we all assume that there will always be enough of, but at the time you really need it – say, in a post-apocalyptic situation – won’t be available. Or it’ll be too short, or the wrong material. Best to just hoard as many as you can. They’re cheap now, sure, but who knows in the future?
You can use this hoard, before you break off all human contact, to help others. We’ve all needed a dowel from time to time. Maybe your neighbour has a hole in their house that needs plugging. Perhaps their kid has a witch costume for Halloween, and their little broom broke in the middle because it’s just made out of shitty plastic. A dowel can fix both these problems, and you’ll come away seeming like a hero. That build-up of goodwill – a hoard, if you will – may even stay their hand when it comes time to call the cops and have you pulled out of your squalid shithole, screaming, in fifteen, twenty years.
Another good reason is that dowels are awkward. Very long, and they roll around if you don’t keep an eye on them. Starting out with dowels teaches you the skills of hoarding: precision stacking, tucking things in the right spot so they don’t roll away, keeping wooden objects away from the furnace exhaust vents. Once you’ve mastered a hoard of dowels, you can move onto collecting an inappropriate number of any kind of trash. Plus, the word is just fun to say.
Overall, dowels are absolutely the best kind of junk to get started collecting with, if you intend to one day build a terrifying hoard of junk. Just don’t take the ones I have piled up in my basement. I need each and every one of them, I swear I have a good use for each one.
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2024-10-22 15:31:00 GMT
Most people don’t remember Tamagotchi, but they should. Before smartphones demanded our precise focus and attention at all times, these little plastic eggs threatened us with the death of our beloved pets if we didn’t respond to their bleeps and bloops. Feed them. Love them. Clean up their poop.
What you got, if you did everything right, was an improved and grown form of the same creature. Maybe it became a weird flying thing. Once I think I got an onion-looking guy. Incredible stuff, and it captivated our entire civilization for so long that a wave of imitators approached.
We don’t need them. Any of them. My favourite kind of virtual pet is: car.
All of my shitboxes also need constant attention, often while still being used. I have to tend to each car’s special needs. For instance, if I were to turn the stereo up too far, and drown out a critical sound, I could miss the moment the front control arms fall off the car. Those are kind of important parts, but I was able to catch it in time, and pull into a Walmart parking lot. Or at least the driveway of one.
Good news, though. While I was waiting for a fleet of screeching Amazon drones to deliver me some replacement control arms, I walked into the Walmart to get some air conditioning, and found in the process that they still sold Tamagotchis. I was able to play with them for a good hour or two before the clerks chased me out. Which, if you ask me, is cruelty to animals. Those little bleepity-bloopity squid dudes needed me.
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2024-10-22 15:31:00 GMT
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Most people don’t remember Tamagotchi, but they should. Before smartphones demanded our precise focus and attention at all times, these little plastic eggs threatened us with the death of our beloved pets if we didn’t respond to their bleeps and bloops. Feed them. Love them. Clean up their poop.
What you got, if you did everything right, was an improved and grown form of the same creature. Maybe it became a weird flying thing. Once I think I got an onion-looking guy. Incredible stuff, and it captivated our entire civilization for so long that a wave of imitators approached.
We don’t need them. Any of them. My favourite kind of virtual pet is: car.
All of my shitboxes also need constant attention, often while still being used. I have to tend to each car’s special needs. For instance, if I were to turn the stereo up too far, and drown out a critical sound, I could miss the moment the front control arms fall off the car. Those are kind of important parts, but I was able to catch it in time, and pull into a Walmart parking lot. Or at least the driveway of one.
Good news, though. While I was waiting for a fleet of screeching Amazon drones to deliver me some replacement control arms, I walked into the Walmart to get some air conditioning, and found in the process that they still sold Tamagotchis. I was able to play with them for a good hour or two before the clerks chased me out. Which, if you ask me, is cruelty to animals. Those little bleepity-bloopity squid dudes needed me.
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2024-10-21 15:30:53 GMT
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“Uber Eats customer service,” beeps the Uber Eats customer service person.
“A bobcat just killed and ate the delivery dude,” I express sorrowfully into the receiver. “I’m gonna need a refund.”
You might criticize me for being cold to my fellow worker. This is fair, but I am also conditioned by a lifetime of marinating in capitalist ideology to extract maximum value from the $50 gift card I just found in the parking lot. And the Arby’s dinner I bought with it is currently residing inside the stomach of Lynx rufus, or maybe just a really big stray tabby.
Either way, there is nothing that I can do for the former person that my phone tells me was named Emil. Even if I were to kill and eat the aggressive bobcat myself in a misguided attempt to avenge him, it would merely serve as a sort of tragedy turducken, and possibly even be illegal. While ruminating on just how long I have to wait for the bobcat to digest Emil’s remains before it’s no longer cannibalism-via-proxy, I notice that the line has been silent for quite awhile. As I have been trained by many similar systems, I immediately yell a compound profanity, triggering an elevation to the next level of call centre operator. No doubt the recording of this call is already in their private collection of “all-time bests,” right next to the tape of the Uber guy who’s afraid of clowns valiantly trying to deliver to a circus.
After a few seconds, a new operator switches onto the line. “Sir, we’re going to refund your entire order, and rate Emil five-stars. His family will receive the customary Uber Eats death benefits, and he will be buried in our veteran’s cemetery with full corporate honours. Is there anything else I can help you with today?”
“Yeah,” I drawl, already becoming tired of asserting my rights as a consumer. “Do you know if Arby’s still makes those deli sandwiches?”
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2024-10-20 15:31:01 GMT
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Business isn’t about having a million dollar idea. It’s about having a one dollar idea, and selling it a million times. That’s why businesses take awhile to develop. Or at least that was the case back in our grandparents’ time. Nowadays, investors want their startup to become worth a billion dollars in under five years, or why even bother?
The concept of being asked to make money faster than a casino has to be strange to all right-thinking humans. And also me, but it didn’t stop me from taking cash from those venture capitalists that were roaming around the university the other day. Even in my advancing age, I guess I still have that dirtbag-20-something look to me, something that says “I’ll let you take ninety-five percent of what I make.” Maybe it was my greasy hoodie, or the fact I was hanging around the graduate student lounge to eat any leftover food at the other tables before the waitress could come back. Either way, I now had $20 million in a bank account marked “Yttr.”
What was Yttr? To tell you the truth, I can’t even remember my pitch. I think I made up some crazy shit about the rapidly-approaching merging of man and machine, and the holistic energy fields of all living beings. At no point did they ask me what product I was going to make. The younger dude (and they were both dudes, believe me) just wanted to know if I thought it could make a billion dollars. Sure, dude. It’s not totally unlikely that within the realm of all cosmic possibilities, Yttr can make one billion smackaroos. Now sign that cheque and look the other way.
Anyway, Yttr has gone bankrupt. We just plumb ran out of cash trying to approach the goal of unifying all consciousness and also making money off of it. That $20 million didn’t even last a week, to be honest, programmer salaries are so expensive now. Too bad. Good news is, now I’m an experienced startup guy. I just didn’t ask for enough money last time. My new company, Zootr, will be looking for $71 million on its initial investment. What do we do? Oh, you’ll find out soon enough.
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2024-10-19 15:30:46 GMT
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You can keep your ghostly little girls, your blood on the windows, your random vampire attacks. For me, the spookiest mystery of Halloween is why my car keeps getting vapour lock.
Down the street, the real mechanics tell me that it’s because the weather is getting colder. The fuel inside the carb gets denser and it doesn’t burn as well. I think that’s some top-shelf bullshit, mostly because I know for a fact that at least two of the dudes down at Harry’s Auto Repair are actually werewolves. Think about it: Harry’s. It’s right in the name. Next time I go in there to borrow their tools without paying, I should bring along a dog biscuit.
Car chasing canine mechanics aside, they do have a point. The weather has been getting worse lately, and cars do run a lot worse when that happens. Originally, my distant Quebecois ancestors would have chalked this up to malevolent spirits, angered by a too-greedy harvest of the fields. They’d have left a couple stalks of corn behind, to keep the spirits happy. You know, make sure that the old family tractor keeps starting every morning just in case Meemaw needed to take Peepaw to the hospital to get his stomach pumped again (corn liquor problems.) What I needed was a sacrifice.
Back in the 70s, when this car was made, it was a lot easier to find sacrifices. People went missing all the time, and nobody went looking for them. Nowadays, if you kidnap a person from the side of the highway, you have to make sure all their tracking devices are removed. Smartphones. Smartwatches. Smart rings. Smart buttplugs. The other day, I heard about some guy that has an internet-connected tooth. Yeah. His molar can get an IP address. All of these things are constantly reporting your location to a series of shadowy information brokers. And they call me a monster.
To avoid all this hassle, I simply decided to do what I always do: sacrifice some tires. A big burnout in front of the 4-H Club would surely appease any malevolent nature spirits, and help me keep my car in tip-top condition all winter. Plus, their office is right next to the tire shop that keeps throwing perfectly good tires in the dumpster behind their store. If one set of rears turned into smoke didn’t do it, I could keep burning down more dead, oddly-round dinosaurs until the cops came home.
Through my efforts, I wasn’t attacked by cops, or even vampires. What happened was that some stray ember from my bare rims striking the pavement set the adjacent corn field on fire, and I had to get out of there in a hurry, leaving my work undone. Those farmers are gonna be pissed when those spooky little girls start crawling out of their TVs.
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2024-10-18 15:31:35 GMT
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“You have twenty nine uses left on your sanitizer module. Contact your nearest service depot to have a new sanitizer module installed. When the count runs out, you will no longer be able to flush your toilet.”
Younger people ask me, how exactly is it that Hewlett-Packard, the printer manufacturer, ended up taking over the world? After checking out the window for the presence of their all-hearing, man-slicing surveillance drones, I tell them. It was this, or they’d force the President to maintain a fleet of inkjet printers.
At first, things weren’t so bad. We started to roll back the whole “paperless office” scam of the 90s. At one point, a bunch of toughs all zooted out on free government-provided fuser oil smashed the door to the data-centre where the False Minds existed, their pseudo-artificial-intelligence a clear threat to a world where being able to print was essential. That was a lot of fun, stepping on a bunch of scattered RAM in the middle of the street and knowing it was so close to being able to feel pain.
Then it became much clearer how things were going to really go from now on. Whole forests were felled in an instant to feed the new demand for vessels to contain our minds. Libraries suddenly became stuffed with hastily constructed bookshelves, their once-silent printers leaping back to life and erupting orgasmic volleys of paper. And everyone, everywhere, was looking for yellow ink, no matter what they printed. It’s been twenty-five years since then.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not complaining about the dominance of the printer giants. Sure, the amount of fatal papercuts has skyrocketed. Especially now that the ambulances aren’t allowed to use their radios anymore, not unless they’re connected to a fax machine. And pretty much everything has to be turned on and off a few times before it starts to work, otherwise it just blinks a stupid little light that doesn’t mean anything.
All this, though, is worth it. Because as soon as Hewlett-Packard took control of the world governments, they took their first acts of violence out on their competition. Had the guy who made the shitty paper loader for the Lexmarks executed. And the rush from that was enough to get me through having to pay 25 cents a poop for the rest of my life. Sorry you missed it.
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2024-10-17 15:30:31 GMT
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Motorcyclists: are they like us? Car drivers have been asking themselves this question for centuries, usually whenever they see a motorcyclist. What’s their deal, they wonder, and why can’t they be much larger, heavier, and harder to kill when I try to drive over them? Don’t they know how bad I am at operating this thing?
Recent research from the big ol’ University on the hill indicates that motorcyclists and humans share a common hominid ancestor. In fact, we share 99.99% of our DNA with them as well. Rumour has it that, in the winter months or in times of great stress, some motorcyclists can even use cars. In order to operate a car like the rest of us, it is said they can even shed their outer skin and hard exoskeleton coating, but this remains unproven so far.
Most importantly, the research offers several clues to help identify friends and family who may be secret motorcyclists. First, check Craigslist or your local equivalent for sweet deals on cheap vintage bikes. Then, show those bikes to them. If they get real excited and start talking about how the bikes just need a little bit of work, chances are you’ve got yourself (at least) a latent motorcyclist.
Unfortunately, our so-called enlightened world prevents you from immediately turning them into the authorities on just a suspicion, but keep an eye out once you know. Sooner or later, you’re going to at least have a Honda CT70 in the garage that they’re just “holding for a friend.”
Say, a Honda CT70. I bet those are cheap on the used market. And they’re pretty cute. Easy to store in the garage. Just needs the carb cleaned, probably… new clutch…
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2024-10-16 15:30:53 GMT
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Every car has at least one job that’s a miserable grind. It’s just the nature of the beast. They’re impossibly complex machines made up of several subsystems that have to get jammed into pretty close to the same physical space. Eventually, some engineer is going to compromise on “can you actually reach this” in order to actually get the thing out the door.
Similarly, every mechanic can name a job in which they lost all hope for the future. German cars, especially, are quite bad for this. They have even more complexity than a normal car, which means they had to find even more silly places to stuff that complexity. Timing chains behind the engine? That’s just the tip of the iceberg, and that’s part of why your local Audi mechanic charges enough to buy a new car and drinks constantly at work. They had to put that shit somewhere, and it turns out that “in your wallet” worked as good as any other answer.
That’s why the junkyard is so freeing. At the junkyard, you can just go get the part you want, even if it means breaking a lot of other parts in the process. The car’s already going to get crushed, so who cares if it enters oblivion with all of its major organs cleanly removed?
On your actual car, you really don’t want to, say, smash the power steering bottle into a million pieces with a hammer just to get at the pump tensioner, since you’ll need it later. At the yard, the only thing keeping you from doing this is your innate decency: will the next person need this part? If so, maybe just Sawzall right through the power steering hose and throw the rest of it in the trunk. They should give you the key to the city, hero.
In fact, with a morbid enough mentality, you can see all the mistakes of the past. One quick entry ticket buys you a morgue’s full of auto bodies to dismantle and see just how hard a prospective shitbox is to work on. If it seems easy, you can go get a running example to serve as your next car. It’s hard to understand why everyone doesn’t do this. Why visit the used car dealership, take test drives, when you could simply gaze into what the car looks like after you’ve rammed it into a bus while flaming out on meth?
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2024-10-15 15:30:46 GMT
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Boats: man’s oldest foe. These humble holes-in-the-water allowed us to get to delicious fish, visit our friends on distant islands, and move out of our shitty towns. Much like the humble horse, its time as useful transportation has largely ended. Today’s boats are merely recreational vehicles, spoiled by their owners who barely use them and then get upset that they are no longer good at keeping water on the inside when they do.
Because I grew up in a landlocked shithole, I was not able to enjoy boats. They were just something that a lake or theme park owned, and you’d occasionally rent one and pedal it while making quacking noises at the swans. I certainly did not get the appeal, and thought that it might be because I only had 30 minutes before it had to get back on the dock. In recent years, my thinking has evolved: perhaps that time limit was part of it. Maybe boats are meant to be savoured, floating on the water, nobody around you while you contemplate the majesty of nature.
Nope. I was wrong. Rich people also live on the lake, and you can “borrow” their boats for hours upon hours. They don’t even know what colour they are, especially at night. I spent the better part of an evening resting beneath the endless skies and amidst the rapidly-cooling water of Lake Bougie, and I came to no greater love of the humble boat. Don’t worry, though: I brought another guess.
You see, science dictates that we test each hypothesis individually, to keep from mixing up the results. In this case, if I had gone right to this second step, we wouldn’t have known if my increased enjoyment of boating came from sitting out in nature for longer, or adding an 80-horsepower two-stroke Evinrude supercharged outboard motor to the bitch and ramping it off the boat launch. Hey, it says “launch” right in the name. Probably not even a crime.
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Boats: man’s oldest foe. These humble holes-in-the-water allowed us to get to delicious fish, visit our friends on distant islands, and move out of our shitty towns. Much like the humble horse, its time as useful transportation has largely ended. Today’s boats are recreational vehicles, spoiled by their owners who barely use them and then get upset that they are no longer good at keeping water on the inside when they do.
Because I grew up in a landlocked shithole, I was not able to enjoy boats. They were just something that a lake or theme park owned, and you’d occasionally rent one and pedal it while making quacking noises at the swans. I certainly did not get the appeal, and thought that it might be because I only had 30 minutes before it had to get back on the dock. In recent years, my thinking has evolved: perhaps that time limit was part of it. Maybe boats are meant to be savoured, floating on the water, nobody around you while you contemplate the majesty of nature.
Nope. I was wrong. Rich people also live on the lake, and you can “borrow” their boats for hours upon hours. They don’t even know what colour they are, especially at night. I spent the better part of an evening resting beneath the endless skies and amidst the rapidly-cooling water of Lake Bougie, and I came to no greater love of the humble boat. Don’t worry, though: I brought another guess.
You see, science dictates that we test each hypothesis individually, to keep from mixing up the results. In this case, if I had gone right to this second step, we wouldn’t have known if my increased enjoyment of boating came from sitting out in nature for longer, or adding an 80-horsepower two-stroke Evinrude supercharged outboard motor to the bitch and ramping it off the boat launch. Hey, it says “launch” right in the name. Probably not even a crime.
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2024-09-16 15:30:55 GMT
When you go to school for computer science, one of the things they try to teach you is that a computer can be anything. It doesn’t have to be a bleepity-bloopity thing, stimulating rocks with canned lightning. It doesn’t have to be a room-filling automaton made entirely out of fancy light bulbs. And it sure as fuck doesn’t need to be some rocks that you move along on a piece of wood to count things. No, a computer can be anything, as long as it follows some basic rules. A dog can be a computer.
Recently, as part of my court-ordered requirement not to touch electronic computers and mobilized smart telephones, I’ve been training the neighbour’s dog to access the internet. You might think that this is difficult, or impossible, but again: computer science theory says that the dog can do it. Rufus can be a computational device. At the very least, I can train him to run over to the neighbour’s computer and read my newsgroups for me.
You might think that this is difficult work, but time is on my side. Without the cruel bonds of “productive employment,” I can spend all day leaning out of my kitchen window and yelling random words at the dog. Eventually, I seem to hit on what I assume is some kind of command-injection fault. Rufus stands shock-straight, looks at the sky for a moment, and immediately bolts inside the house. Minutes pass, and then he emerges with a print-out of alt.autos.plymouth-volare, which has not seen any posts since the last time I checked. It’s almost as if nobody else is posting there, but I feel relieved having reconnected to my people.
There’s just one problem: Rufus, it turns out, is a narc. He has made more than one printout. In the time he was gone, he was delivering the other one to my parole officer. The judge doesn’t appreciate my clever application of theory to practice. It wouldn’t be so bad, except that from my prison cell, I can look out the window. It’s there that see and hear the dog receive a medal from the Mayor Himself for valour. This is bullshit. He’s no hero. He was just following orders.
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2015-05-26 15:30:35 GMT
2015-05-22 15:30:22 GMT
I slam my hand into the main shifter, grabbing onto a blinking 8-ball and shoving the transmission into third. My fingers roll off the knob in a spiderlike bundle onto the range selector, flicking the polycarbonate skull’s eyes from red to blue as the gearbox bangs into single underdrive. I resume my brutal assault on the Detroit’s internals without so much as breathing on the clutch pedal, inwardly pleased that I can drive this twin-stick diesel beast like an old school long-haul trucker.
The Corvette and I go back not so long compared to my other cars; the battered ‘70 showed up as part of a multi-car auction that I inexplicably won after my ridiculous drunken lowball bid. All the other cars departed long ago, but the Corvette somehow stayed and mutated, like stubborn homeowners refusing to abandon the equity in their Chernobyl fixer-upper.
Over the years the fence-quality candy apple custom paintjob melted off the front of the car. For awhile the car was used as a test surface for spray paints of various techniques and materials, but it appears to have finally settled on a combination of wind-blasted rattle can black and sunburnt body damage for its mating plumage.
Beneath the capacious yet still crudely Sawzalled fiberglass hood, an angry Detroit Diesel 4-53 two stroke pounds away at its motor mounts and flywheel like they owe it money. Keeping an engine like this on the boil is no easy task, between its nega-Honda redline and ear-bleeding volume at virtually every RPM other than idle. That’s where the twin stick comes in.
The original manufacturer of this Corvette would be aghast to see what has become of what they laughably called frame rails. In order to fit the elephantine transmission, there was no shortage of hammer and dolly - mostly hammer - work involved.
My reverie about the cleverness of the build comes to a short end as I stop for a stoplight, being able to hear the stereo for the first time in about an hour. A 1979 VW Rabbit cabriolet pulls up next to me. The owner grins, revs the engine and emits a compelling turbo shriek and dark clouds of rich exhaust from a hidden side exit vacuum cutout. I raise my eyebrow, now finally intrigued.
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tags: detroit diesel, chevrolet, corvette