Is it a guest blog? Or just a... blog? The World May Never Know (TM)

So I write some funny things on Facebook sometimes. These are some of those.


First, as context, for a while (approximately twelve hours) my profile picture was a ridiculously confused baby. This baby had nothing to do with me at all but was still pretty confused. I wrote the following status:

"the lowercase italicized "f" is always a character I am quick to study in great detail when judging the merit of a typeface. If you can't produce an amazing lowercase italicized "f" easily, you probably shouldn't be in the typeface business."



I then wrote the following comments on that status:

"note that this is only on a computer with the aid of advanced software; I just watched a video about making a good lowercase italicized "f" and the technique involved and it was pointed out that it's the longest stroke in the typical italicized alphabet and therefore in fact rather complicated. If you lack skill in that, it's certainly understandable, and I laud you if you have found personal success therein."

"these are the sort of status updates I make after being up all night"

"it's best if you keep in mind that a confused baby is saying all of this"

"I'd just like to clarify that I'm not actually a confused baby. That's just my profile picture. It's a common trend to use a photo or image that is not one's self to convey a humourous (look at that British spelling! Gee whiz! That's something to write home about.) concept or idea that one feels is especially well summed up by that image. In this case, I feel the confused stare of this particular baby to be particularly good at expressing my own confusion with the social norms and customs of the society in which we exist, especially as it relates to the subject of status updates on Facebook; whereas formerly most communication was either face-to-face (or at the very least telephone-to-telephone) or through long-form correspondence through the postal service with often great delay (though remarkably consistent service, in line with the popular claim that the United States Postal Service will properly deliver your mail in rain, sleet or snow [I feel it's pertinent to point out here that it's entirely intentional that I don't use the Oxford comma, and I get a sense of glee every time I craft clauses with minimum ambiguity with regards to this habit of mine], a claim that is admittedly much more exciting and daring than "you can get an insurance plan on your delivery for only thirteen dollars and ninety-seven cents"), we now live in a world where instantaneous transmission of data is possible to almost anyone who wishes to access it, despite the fact that not necessarily anyone is really all that interested in the things you have to say at seven'o'clock in the morning on the first day of the new year and the new decade (a phrase I use despite the inevitable negative Nancy who will feel it pertinent to inform me that in fact there was no year zero and therefore we still have another year before the next decade; to that person I can say only that you're annoying and hope you will go away), a result of our own obsession with the constant pounding like drums of time, a pounding that seems counter to this invasion of real-time communication media, suggesting that in fact the technology we have created is far beyond our own understanding of it as a people, and therefore, such as in this case with the example of the confused baby, though it might seem to the ignorant viewer that the baby in question has nothing to do with me that only represents a misunderstanding on the part of the viewer of the baby of the core concept of self-presentation on the internet, a world where suddenly though one does not necessarily present an accurate version of one's self one certainly provides a version that has not been pointlessly idealized to be what others might prefer; this runs counter-intuitive to the idea, such as in professionally-taken portraits, that one must look one's best in order to impress others. Indeed, the image of the confused baby is one that, for instance, Richard Milhouse Nixon or Harry S Truman would certainly not appreciate being associated with, being people of an era when personal image was something which all sought to bring to a perfection far beyond reality, and therefore Richard Milhouse Nixon and Harry S Truman would have been exceedingly unlikely to use those images in a profile picture for Facebook, had Facebook existed during their term in office and had national security been so lax as to suggest that allowing the President to maintain a personal social networking account is something that makes any sense at all.

In closing, I feel that babies are exceptionally cute and/or amusing in many photographs taken of them and thought that this one was especially amusing and not very Presidential at all, which is good since I'm not the President of the United States of America or anything else for that matter because in the case of the former I am not at least thirty-five years of age. The end."

I was feeling pretty good about all of that, so I decided to suggest to a certain friend of mine who is also a person who "occasionally" writes for this blog that he should post them here. He didn't and gave some dumb excuse about a vacation that he was on or something like that. I mean, geez.

So I wrote the following on his wall (facebook parlance for a place where you put stuff so a person will ignore it):

"when are you going to post my brilliant guest piece"

I then made the following comments:

"it is literally the best thing ever written"

"Scientists are currently running complex analysis just to figure out how awesome it is. Their conclusions so far is that the awesomeness expressed in the piece may in fact be so great as to cause a black hole that could devour the Earth if anything even half as awesome ever happens again. I, of course, ever the scientific maverick I have been known as since first I suggested that perhaps there was a scientifically-based answer to that never-ending question, "who really cares about paint colors anyway?", which led to an experiment in which, though my results were not completely conclusive, led to important results with regards to decorative plastic fruit placed in places where children might prominently be able to reach them, knew that I needed to test this, and so I decided to write this very comment, which achieves an additional layer of inscrutable excellence through its nature as a meta-comment, or a comment about comments, and indeed it is also in a way a meta-meta-meta comment since my wall post published approximately ten minutes ago as of the writing of this sentence was itself relevant to a comment that I made on the subject of my own comments, and therefore this comment can be taken as an ironic attempt at disseminating itself, a task which it is quite successful at due to my own skill in writing excellent things which everyone cares about because of how wonderful they are, as evidenced by the brilliant guest piece I referred to in the wall post to which this comment is directed, a piece which has been lauded by reviewers as "lol" and "WTF austin i mean seriesly come on man", reviews which while not necessarily up to standard with regard to spelling, grammar and other necessary components of human writing are still notably chock-full of references to just how brilliant I am.

Science has determined that it is impossible to be as cool as myself, so you may as well give up trying. I mean, it's cool to go for second place --- you'll be in tough competition with a wide variety of excellent people, and they're all very cool and therefore will be fun to hang with and discuss strategies for becoming cooler --- but there's simply no way that you'll ever be as cool as me, because I am mathematically defined as the coolest person no matter what I do. Steal a toaster? Coolest ever. Eat raisins? Pretty cool! Eat raisins while stealing sixteen toasters from the local mini-mart (raisins themselves stolen from, say, a delicious raisin farm in Connecticut, or Maine [do they even have raisins in Maine? Are they cool enough? Must remember to research this at some point])? That's basically the coolest thing physically possible. I mean, you can't even begin to understand just how ridiculously cool that it. Definitely just the best thing ever. You may as well even stop trying to be as cool as me, because that's part of my morning routine (though I usually stick to raisins from a raisin farm in Detroit, Michigan, something scientists are currently unable to define a definite Coolness Value Factor to, though they claim that it is apparently quite large, using adjectives like "stratospheric" and "whoa" when describing it in their scientific journals in which they publish their findings about just how cool I really am [such as the Austin Cool Findings Annual and Austin: Baller Research and Ideas]), right after I brush my teeth with my toothbrush made of diamonds and ruggedness (I actually have several of these, but I refer here to the one that has caused multiple explosions every time it touches anything, which is currently as of this very moment causing all sorts of horrible heartbreak to the poor old people of San Antonio, Texas on account of the fact that I had it shipped to Dallas but the plane exploded because it was on board and luckily everyone survived but they all had to evacuate and when you're living in San Antonio where do you evacuate because I mean do you head north well then people who are bigoted against Texas because of the possibly extremely accurate stereotype of them all being homophobic gun-totin' hicks are going to be unwilling to hire you and that's just not a good way to get ahead in life because you need a job if you want money to support your family so that your children can eat their rice or noodles or salami or rutabaga or whatever it is all the little children of San Antonio, Texas like to eat if they've been good that day, and so it's all very hard and they're currently considering filing a class-action lawsuit against me but that's okay because I have a crack team of robot donkey dinosaur ninja lawyers who will protect me from their class-action lawsuit ways and if worse comes to worst I will have my robot donkey dinosaur ninja lawyers just go and dino-stomp all of them until they quit it and they won't be able to prove that I was behind it the whole time because I'll destroy all the evidence but I'll replace it all with pictures of funny cats so down at the detective's office he'll think "well gee I must have accidentally taken all of that evidence proving that this is all Austin's fault for mailing that bomb-toothbrush to Dallas I mean come on how could I have done that and I must have put it somewhere around here when I was reorganizing things so I must have put these pictures of cats there instead but that was pretty stupid of me though I have been known to do very silly and dumb things like this in the past I just hope that I don't get fired or assassinated now" but he won't get assassinated because I will make sure this isn't the case because I don't feel that my freedom should create more victims) imported from a small village in Brazil where they grow ruggedness on these bush things which they then sell to a variety of manufacturers of rugged products which American people then buy at a ridiculous markup which has led certain producers of especially rugged things to suggest that a fair-trade-style setup might be more fair to them.

Personally, I'm not in favor of that because I feel I should get all the money in the world to fund my never-ending stream of interesting scientific projects such as the one where I tested what would happen if certain dogs and certain hair gels were fused into one thing, which was inconclusive because I spent all the money on burrito runs and that would not be a problem if I had all the money in the world. And that's why you should vote for me in the year 3000."