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Lifted without
permission from Microserfs by Douglas Coupland. You are encouraged to
get your own hardcopy from your local bookstore.
I am danielu@microsoft.com. If my game was a life of Jeopardy! my
seven dream categories would be:
- Tandy Products
- Trash TV of the late '70s and early '80s
- The history of Apple
- Career anxieties
- Tabloids
- Plant Life of the Pacific Northwest
- Jell-O 1-2-3
More details about our group house-Our House of Wayward Mobility....
....Littered about the Tiki green shag carpet are:
- Two Microsoft Works PC inflatable beach cushions
- One Mitsubishi 27-inch color TV
- Various vitamin bottles
- Several weight-gaining system cartons (mine)
- 86 copies of MacWeek arranged in chronological
order by Bug Barbecue, who will go berserk if you so much as move one
issue out of date
- Six Microsoft Project 2.0 juggling bean bags
- Bone-shaped chew toys for when Mishka visits
- Two Powerbooks
- Three IKEA mugs encrusted with last month's blender
drink sensation
- Two 12.5-pound dumbbells (Susan's)
- A Windows NT box
- Three baseball caps (two Mariners, one A's)
- Abe's Battlestar Galactica trading card album
- Todd's pile of books on how to change your life to
win! (Getting Past OK, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People...)
Susan is 26 and works in Mac Applications. If Susan were a Jeopardy!
contestant, her dream board would be:
- 680X0 assembly language
- Cats
- Early '80s haircut bands
- "My secret affair with Rob in the Excel Group"
- License plate slogans of America
- Plot lines from The Monkees
- The death of IBM
Microsoft, like any office, is a status theme park. Here's a quick rundown:
- Profitable projects are galactically higher in status
than loser (not quite as profitable) projects.
- Microsoft at Work (Digital Office) is sexiest at the
moment. Fortune 500 companies are drooling over DO because it'll allow
them to downsize millions of employees. Basically, DO allows you to
operate your fax, phone, copier--all of your office stuff--from your
PC.
- Cash cows like Word are profitable but not really considered
cutting edge.
- Working on-Campus is higher status than being relegated
to one of the off-Campus Siberias.
- Having Pentium-driven hardware (built to the hilt)
in your office is higher status than having 486 droneware.
- Having technical knowledge is way up there.
- Being an architect is also way up there.
- Having Bill-o-centric contacts is way, way up there.
- Shipping your product on time is maybe the coolest
(insert wave of anxiety here). If you ship on time you get a Ship-It
award: a 12-x-15-x-1-inch Lucite slab - but you have to pretend it's
no big deal. Michael has a Ship-It award and we've tried various times
to destroy it--blowtorching, throwing it off the veranda, dowsing it
with acetone to dissolve it--nothing works. It's so permanent, it's
frightening.
First, Abe. If Abe were a Jeopardy! contestant, his seven dream
categories would be:
- Intel assembly language
- Bulk shopping
- C++
- Introversion
- "I love my aquarium"
- How to have millions of dollars and not let it affect
your life in any way
- Unclean laundry
Next, Todd. Todd's seven Jeopardy! categories would
be:
- Your body is your temple
- Baseball hats
- Meals made from combinations of Costco products
- Psychotically religious parents
- Frequent and empty sex
- SEGA Genesis gaming addiction
- The Supra
Bug Barbecue's seven Jeopardy! categories would be:
- Bitterness
- Xerox PARC nostalgia
- Macintosh products
- More bitterness
- Psychotic loser friends
- Jazz
- Still more bitterness
Finally, Michael. Michael's seven Jeopardy! categories would be:
- FORTRAN
- Pascal
- Ada (defense contracting code)
- LISP
- Neil Peart (drummer for Rush)
- Hugo and Nebula Award winners
- Sir Lancelot
I learned a new word today: "trephination"--drilling a hole in the skull to
relieve pressure on the brain.
I went to Uwajima-Ya and bought some UFO yaki soba noodles, the ones that
steep in hot water in their own little plastic bowl. Amid all the
lunch-with-Bill foofaraw, Karla and me managed to eat together. I asked her
what her seven Jeopardy! dream categories would be--I told her about
everyone else's, and she considered these as she twisted the yaki soba
noodles in the little plastic dish, and then she said "they would have to
be:"
- Orchards
- Labrador dogs
- The history of phone pranks
- Crime novels
- Intel chips
- Things HAL says in 2001 and,
- My parents are psychopaths.
And this got me thinking: I looked around and noticed that if you took all
of the living things on the Microsoft Campus, separated them into piles and
analyzed the biomass, it would come out to:
- 38% Kentucky bluegrass
- 19% human beings
- .003% Bill
- 8% Douglas and balsam fir
- 7% Western red cedar
- 5% hemlock
- 23% other: crows, birch, insects, worms, microbes,
nerd aquarium fish, decorator plants in the lobbies...
Personal Computer
I am your personal computer
Hello
Stop Being Carbon
CNN 666
Lenscrafters airbag
magnetic ID card employee number
instant noodles birth
dodecahedron ATM
Lawry's Garlic Salt
808 Honolulu 702 Las Vegas
503 Klamath Falls 206 Tacoma
604 Victoria 916 Shasta
oatmeal laxatives
cherry flavored antacids Rubbermaid
holodeck Courtyard Marriott
Sierra Big Gulp
NCC-1701 liquid money
Schroder Wagg/London Rank Xerox
Welcome to Macintosh Carl's Jr
Gore-Tex gray metallic Saabs
Barry Diller KISS
minibars frequent flyer points
ads for pearls Oscar de la Renta
outer space minimum wage
manufacture
dungeons
magazine scent strips flame broiled
Bell Atlantic switchbox
phone jacks the DMV
F-16 MiG-29
Calvin Klein Han Solo
bourgeois decay images Download
Upload Drive
Sparkletts Tori Spelling
Advil Kotex
Rosslyn Langley
You jerk Lee Press-ons
I went to the library and looked up books on freeway construction--the
asphalt and cement kind--Dewey Decimal number 625.79--and there haven't been
any published on the subject for two decades! it's bizarre--like a murder
mystery. It's as if the notion of freeway construction simply vanished in
1975. Sizzler titles include:
- Bituminous Materials in Road Construction
- Surface Texture Versus Skidding
- Engineering Study: Alaska Highway
- Better Concrete Pavement Serviceability
- Vehicle Redirection Effectiveness of Medium Berms
and Circles
At the Bellvue Starbucks, Karla and I discussed the unprecedented success
of Campbell's Cream of Broccoli Soup. On a napkin we listed ideas for new
Campbell's soup flavors:
- Creamy Dolphin
- Lagoon
- Beak
- Pond
- Crack
Capture
specific
functions
Microsoft Navajo
NASA Kristy McNichol
Flesh-eating bacteria Lance Kerwin
Arthur Hiller skateboard
trail mix job description
PERL toner cartridge
very a lot
really ummmm...
Martin-Marietta
Industrial Light & Magic We're just friends
jump run
hit multi-user dungeon
Ziggy Stardust Wells Fargo
SkyTel paging Safeway
FORTRAN hummingbird
IKEA I am an empath
4x4 Kung-Fu Death Star platform
oligarchy Kraft singles
Highway 92 cordless
Deuteronomy brain ded
Staples Silo
Pearle Express an executive lifestyle
Maybelline implicator
Insert Format
Font Tools
Sierra nevada Pale Ale starburst explosion
Cedars Sinai Gak
UNDO
Ctrl Z Ctrl Z Ctrl Z
Phoenix LA Lakers
Cleveland San Antonio
Luis Vuitton bubble economy
Kalashnikov Creamsicles
Waxahachie Livermore
the place for ribs
Taylor Sequences Bleeding eyeliner
frog Colossal
UV rays
...arms armor ammo health
Brillo backlit Plexiglas
Chicken Marsala N x S x T
WW3 Tetris
Tonopah, Nevada cat food
locate the source of urges System Seven
Woodside 8
Los Altos Hills 17
San Jose 32
Space Cruiser 487
Superstar COBOL
Fear Uncertainty Doubt Steak house
Crashed in a cornfield Calorie factory
Format? Reject?
Susan read aloud bits from the Handbook of Highway Engineering:
"'Improperly installed or unwarranted signals can result in the following
conditions:
--Excessuive delay
--Disobedience of the signal indications
--Use of less adequate routes to avoid the signal
--Increase of accident frequency...'"
She paused and looked at the fire for a while. "I wonder if this guy is
alive and if he's married?"
Space Needle 1962
Mattel
C+++++++++++
silver lens sunglasses Redmond
Schaumberg, Ill.
Interstate 80/287, NJ
Dallas Galleria/LBJ Fwy.
Torrey Pines/UTC Sorrento Valley,CA.
Metroplex/Irvine,Ca.
King of Prussia/Route 202
Tandy Corp., Fort Worth, Texas 76107
relentless...
crispy...
fluids...
200 years from now
Ebola Reston
Marburg Michaelangelo
Hepatitis non-A/non-B Machupo
Ebola Zaire Rift Valley
Sabia Hanta
He sent us a rough draft of a product description he's written plus ERS--
Engineering Requirements Specifications, Herewith:
Oop!
Oop! is a virtual construction box of 3D Lego-type bricks that runs
on IBM or Mac platforms with CD-ROM drives. If a typical Lego-type brick
has eight "bumps"; an Oop! brick can have from eight to 8,000 bumps,
depending on the precision demanded by the user.
Oop! users can virtually fly in and out of their creations, or
they can print them out on a laser printer. Oop!users can build their
ideas on a "pad" or they can build their ideas in 3D space, a revolving
space station; running ostriches... whatever. Oop! allows users to
clone structures, and add these clones onto each other, permitting easy
megaconstructions that use little memory. Customized Oop! blocks can
be created and saved. The ratios and proportions of Oop! bricks can
also be customized by the user in much the same way typefaces are scaled.
Imagine:
"Oopenstein"--flesh-like Oop! bricks or cells, each ascribed biological
functions that allow users to create complex life forms using combinations
of single and cloned cell structures. Create life!
"Mount Oopmore"--a function that allows users to take a scanned
photo, texture map that photo, and convert it into a 3D visualized Oop!
object.
"Oop-Mahal"--famous buildings, preconstructed in Oop!, that the user
can then modify as desired.
"Frank Lloyd Oop"--architectural Oop! for adults.
As Oop! users won't have the actual plastic blocks in their hands, Oop!
generates new experiences to compensate for this lost tactility: feedback
loops...hidden messages...or "rewards" for properly completing a kit;
i.e., King Kong will climb up and down your Empire State Building and
install the flag if you finish. Oop! comes equipped with "starter
modules" such as houses, cat shapes, cars, buildings, and so forth that
can be added on to or modified or finished in an unlimited number of
colors or surfaces: slate, leopardskin, woodgrain, and so forth. Oop!
structures can grow hair or plant life. Oop! strcutures can be
distorted, stretched, morphed, or "Jell-O'd." Oop! users can dissolve
the connection lines between bricks to create "solid" structures.
Oop! constructions can be saved in memory or they can be destroyed by:
"Los Angeles" (earthquake simulator)
"Pyro" (fire and melting)
"Ruins" (decay simulator: x-numbers of years of decomposition can be
selected and simulated. Imagine your ranch house rotted into fragments
and covered in kudzu or a variety of choking vines. Another idea:
"Flood")
"Big Foot" (elder sibling emulator: kicks construction into bits)
"Terror!" (a bomb explodes either inside or outside the structure)
As the Lego Generation ages (and as the Oop! product invariably grows
more sophisticated), Oop! becomes a powerful real-world modeling tool
usable by scientists, animators, contractors, and architects. Object
Oriented Programming design allows great flexibility for licensees to
develop cross-platform software add-ons.
Build every possible universe with...
Oop!
Q: If there were two of you, which one would win?
Jeffersonian individualism
victim loser
winner thief
http://www.city.palo-alto.ca/
Lexus.cel.phone.traffic.
My body type was in last year
We can no longer create
the feeling of an era...of time being
particular to one spot in time.
1999: The people were lying on the ground.
Demonize the symbolic analysis You're smarter than TV.
So what?
Uranium and Beethoven.
Define random Ezekiel
MFD-2DD Sony
nCube computers simulating the Tokyo power grid
They left a dead escalator, chewed and torn lying on the
pavement like a dead gray candy necklace.
Imagine:
In Florida the wind is rattling the chimes.
You look over the alligators and
the sea grass and water. There it is:
The rocket's burn. The best century ever.
We were here. But now it's time to go.
The past is a finite resource.
Shinhatsubai!
You may have alreday won!
Technology of mythic strength given surrealistic
applications.
Socially disengaged meritocratic elites.
Sporting goods stores always smell like the most
advanced plastics.
Did the neutron bomb ever actually get built?
I erased the office voice mail message that has served me well for the past
six months:
"Thank you for phoning the powerful Underwood personal messaging center.
Press one for Broyhill furniture
Press two for STP, the racer's edge
Press three for the roomy, affordable Buick Skylark
Press four for Rice-A-Roni, the San Francisco treat
Press five for Turtle Wax
Press six for Dan
Press pound to repeat this menu."
I'm driving up Interstate 5. It is raining and I remember
I have to pick up paper towels and decaffeinated coffee at Costco.
And did you fell about that?
Mom... Dad...
I'm okay. I am not being starved, or beaten, or
unnecessarily frightened.
Dropshadow lettering
Granite backgrounds
Hand
Held
Game
This is the end of the Age of Authenticity.
Oracle Ampex
NeXT Electronic Arts
Garage sale day...
...Also for sale:
- Japan Airlines inflatable 747
- official Hulk Hogan WWF focus-free 110 signature camera
- antique Ghostbuster squeeze toys
- Nick the Greek professional gambling home board game
- Ping-Pong table
- shoe box full of squirt guns
- blenders (2)
- vegetable juicer
- dehumidifier
- unopened cans of aerosolized cheese food product
- M.C. Escher pop-up books
- far too many Dilophosaurus figurines
- huge Sony box full of collected Styrofoam packing peanuts
and packing chunks from untold assorted consumer electronics
National Enquirer:
"Loni's Diary Rips Burt Apart"
He threatened her with a
gun in jealous rage
He locked her out of her
honeymoon suite
He hid vodka in water
bottles
PLUS:
Burt: "I wanted to
ditch her at the altar."
Exclusive interview on his
tell-all book
I do not want this to be me.
Cars for the trip:
Me: Michael's Acura
Karla: her Microbus
Todd: his Supra
Susan and Bug: their Tauri with U-Haul trailers
Personal Computer
Stars drinking glasses wrapped in tissue paper burnt
arbonite dial telephones
Ethan's nine blender settings are labeled with little LaserWriter labels in
7-point Franklin Gothic:
1) Asleep
2) In-flite movie
3) Disneyland at age 25
4) Good $8.00 movie
5) IMAX with Dolby
6) Lunch w/D. Geffen and B. Diller
7) Disneyland at age 10
8) Aneurysm
9) Spontaneous combustion
Should some future historian ever feel the need to duplicate an SF coffee
bar circa The Dawn of Multimedia, they will require the following:
- thrashed PowerBooks covered with snowboarding and Chiquita
banana stickers
- a bad early 1980s stereo (the owner's old system, after
he upgraded his own personal system)
- used mismatched furniture
- bad oil paintings (vaginal imagery/exploding eye/nails
protruding from raw paint)
- a cork bulletin board (paper messages!)
- sullen, most likely stoned, undergrads
- multi-pierced bodies
- a few weird, leftover 1980s people in black leather
coats and black-dyed hair
- nightclub flyers
Learned a new word today: "interiority"--it means, being inside somebody's
head
Habitrail 2 also features:
- 4-fingered cartoon gloves
- ubiquitous Nerfiana
- 24 Donna Karan coffee mugs (long story)
- a decaf coffe tin labeled "666"
- GoBot transformer-type toys
- Glass beads at the door, like the ones Rhoda Morgenstern
had
- herbal tea packets and tea-making apparatus
- several Game Boys
- three 4'-x-8' dry-erase wall boards
- a diet 7-UP pyramid
- an extensive manga collection
- T2 spin-off merchandise
- one Flipper thermos
Microsoft Apple
waiting for the stock to vest trying to get laid off
"the Campus" "the Campus"
make money "1.0" sensibility
Microsoft Way Infinite Loop
Bill (no longer any equivalent)
Apple envy Microsoft envy
boring buildings/good art good buildings/art a sideline only
better cafeterias better nerd toys
soccer field scuplture garden
I-520 I-280
Intel Motorola
average age:31.2 average age:31.9
gray Lexus white Ford Explorer
not wild at creating new things but good at creating new things but not
good on follow-through wild on follow-through
no one ever no one got fired...until
gets fired the layoffs started
wacky titles on business cards wacky titles on business cards
eerie, Logan's Run-like eerie, Logan's Run-like
atmosphere atmosphere
uneasy IBM symbiosis uneasy IBM fusion
13,200 employees 14,500 employees
people hired in 1991-92 people hired from colleges
being shuffled around in 1988-89 being turfed
stock set to split stock price at cash liquidation
value of company; now's the
time to buy
I saw doves and I thought they were rocks, but they were
asleep. My breath made them stir, and the rocks
took flight, the earth
exploding...and my only thought was that
I wanted you to see them, too
The man from Whirlpool came to fix the
washer today, and he found Black Widow spiders nesting
underneath its broken engine, and
he showed me the web, and I found myself thinking of catch-
ing you, biting you, spinning you within my
limbs and setting you free
Don't tell me this isn't true.
Tell me you fell this fire
Oxydol throw cushion Revell binder paper
makeover lipstick
The liquid engineers left the pool
heater on too long, and at night, chlorine vapors
rose above the plant life of the planet, and I
imagined my flesh,
being inside the pool, being warm, and protected, feeling
gravity, but able to mock it as I floated. Would
you float with me now, if I asked you, would you jump in the
pool and not even bother to strip? Could I strip you
down, remove your clothing and we would fall inside the water together?
It scares me.
I don't want to lose you. I can't imagine ever feeling this
strongly about anything or anybody ever again.
This was unexpected, my soul's connection to you.
You stole my loneliness
No one knows that I was wishing for you, a thief, to enter my
house of autonomy, that I had locked my doors but my
Windows were open, hoping, but not believing, you
would enter.
The 8 Models of Interactivity (as far as I can see)
i) The Arcade model
Like Terminator: kill or be killed.
ii) The Coffee Table Book model
Enter anywhere/leave anywhere; pointless in the end; zero replayability
factor.
iii) The Universe Creation model
I built you and I can crush you.
iv) The Binary Tree model
Limited number of options; read from left to right; tightly controlled mini-
dramas.
v) The Pick-a-Path model
Does our hero smooch with Heather Locklear, or not-you decide! Expensive.
Unproven entertainment value. Audiences don't pay money to work.
vi) RPGs (Role-Playing Games)
For adolescents: half-formed personalities roaming 9in packs) in search of
identity.
vii) The Agatha Christie model
A puzzle is to be solved using levels, clues, chases, and exploration.
viii) Experience Simulation models
Flight simultors, sport games.
"Embedded intelligence":(Intelligence buried in the nooks and
crannies of code and storyboard design).
unraveled brown cassette tape on the freeway
Staples PIN number CK-one basketball hoop
If we were machines,
we'd have the gift of being eternal and I want you to understand
"You never heard about people 'not having lives' until about five years
ago, just when all of the '80s technologies really penetrated our lives." He
listed them off:
"VCRs
tape rentals
PCs
modems
answering machines
touch tone dialing
cellular phones
cordless phones
call screening
phone cards
ATMs
fax machines
Federal Express
bar coding
cable TV
satellite TV
CDs
calculators of almost other-worldly power that are so cheap
that they practically come free with a tank of gas."
SpaghettiOs What's My Line
Aspirin Jell-O simulator
invasion Russian winter
Q: What animal would you be if you could be an animal?
A: You already are an animal
I am Bill's machine
I may be the largest machine that will ever be built.
I may be the richest machine that will ever be built.
I may be the most powerful machine that will ever be built.
Raised with Cheerios and station wagons. Diagonal-slotted
parking stalls of the Northgate mall.
As a child I once drove in a sedan's backseat along Interstate 5 and
looking out the windows I saw my city beside the sea, dreaming in
airplanes and wood; metal and rock ballads...better ways of living.
Golden sun falling on this city that wanted for more; sailboats atop
the golden water.
Pocket calculators cheeseburgers
sneakers Datsun
The challenge of newness
Saturday morning cartoons recycling programs crying Indians.
You think you can live without me, but try.
You desire images of a better tomorrow;
I feed you these images.
You dream of a world in which your ego will not dissolve.
I am the architect of the arena.
Reconsider your notions of what you think will rescue
you from a future sterilized of progress.
Everybody's decided what title to put on the business cards Susan designed.
Bug: "Information Leafblower"
Todd: "Personal Trainer"
Karla: "Who can turn the world on with a smile?"
Susan: "Her name is Rio."
Me: "Crew Chief"
Ethan: "Liquid Engineer"
Michael: "You're Soaking In It"
Windows Win7ows cQndo#s 2ind5ws &_s4Zaa 5@sFAz cozrPa
Pzraoc zocPar aPzroc
My brain is built of paths and slides and ladders and lasers and I
have invited all of you to enter its pavillion. My brain, as you enter,
will smell of tangerines and brand-new running shoes.
HELLO
My name is:
UNIX
Friend or Foe
I learned a great new word today: "deletia." When you send an e-mail and
reply to the sender, you simply obliterate everything they sent you and then,
in small square brackets, write:
[deletia]
It stands for everything that's been lost.
So Todd hacked together a quick in-house version in our network, called
RumorMeister. It got way out of control almost immediately:
1) SUSAN SHOPS AT TARGET BUT PUTS HER STUFF IN NORDSTROM BAGS
2) DANIEL SELLS HIS USED BOXERS VIA MAIL ORDER
...$5.00 PER DAY OF WEAR
3) BUG SWEATS TO THE OLDIES
4) DAN...THOSE DOCKERS...HIP!
5) TODD HAS SAGGY NIPPLES FROM TOO MUCH BODY BUILDING THEY'RE CALLED
'BITCH TITS'
5) TODD WEARZ DEPENDS WHEN HE BENCH PRESSES BECUZ UTHERWIZE HE'LL EVACUATE
HIS BOELS ON THE BENCH
7) KARLA PAID TO SEE "THE BODY GUARD"
8) BUG LAUGHS AT GARFIELD CARTOONS
9) KARLA CAN'T ACCESSORIZE
10) SUSAN HAS COMBINATION SKIN
11) TODD SMOKES 'MORE' CIGARETTES
12) I CAN HEAR KARLA'S COLOSTOMY BAG SLOSHING
13) ETHAN'S FERRARI IS A KIT CAR
14) ETHAN BUYS TIRES AT SEARS
15) BUG LOVES BARNEY
16) KARLA THINKS SHE'S A SUMMER BUT SHE'S REALLY A FALL
17) BUG HAS 2 RAFFI CASSETTES
18) DAN HAS A YANNI CD IN HIS CAR
19) ETHAN'S VISA LIMIT IS $3,000
20) SUZAN'Z BOYCRAZY SUZAN'Z BOYCRAZY SUZAN'Z BOYCRAZY SUZAN'Z BOYCRAZY
SUZAN'Z BOYCRAZY
21) DAN: LISTERINE KILLS GERMS THAT CAN CAUSE BAD BREATH
22) DAN STILL LIVES WITH HIS MOTHER
23) BUG SHOPS AT CHESS KING
24) MICHAEL'S SHIRT SMELL LIKE GERBIL PEE
Todd quickly removed the program from the system.
NEW YEAR'S RESOLUTIONS
Me: to penetrate the Apple complex
Karla: undisclosed (doesn't want to jinx)
Ethan: to slow down time
Todd: visit junkyards more often, to bench 420, and
to have a relationship
Susan: to hack into the DMV and to have a relationship
Bug: to overhaul his image and to have a relationship
680X0
a burning Lego Los Angeles moon
880 Nimitz Freeway Premium Saltine crackers
Control and the feeling of mastery I Robot
The Apollo rocket designers and the NASA engineers of
Houston and Sunnyvale grew up in the 1930s and 1940s dreaming
of Buck Rogers and the exoterrestrial
meanderings of Amazing Stories. When this aerospace
generation grew old enough, they chose to make those dreams
in metal.
Champaign-Urbana
Her parents are engineers but that wasn't enough to keep them together.
Pull the wires from the wall
Chelyabinsk-70
Bulimia Top Ten List:
- several buckets of Häägen-Dazs strawberry
- two large spaghetti dinners
- large box of Godiva chocolates
- stack of eight grilled cheese sandwiches with ketchup
- entire cheesecake
- two dozen chocolate pudding cups
- four hundred grapes
- bucket of McDonald's french fries
- even larger box of Godiva chocolates
- largest box of chocolates in the universe
Dusty was trying to tell us all about "Mehrwert"--surplus value per
unit of time/labor: "A worker creates more value than that for which he is
compensated. You know?"
Susan told us today what our characters and powers would be if we were on
Star Trek:
- Michael:
- Disembodied neocortex afloat inside a tabk of nutrient-bearing
solution; has ability to see back and forth in time; communicates via
LEDs and a synchronized swim team of hybridized dolphins living in a
satellite-linked inlet on the Goa Coast.
- Todd:
- Repairer of broken machines; has tools instead of fingers;
regulation hunk required by TV network to stimulate sales of tie-in
merchandise; able to telepathically determine sexual coefficient of
alien beings; skin can turn to gold by beaming himself to the planet
Tanfastic.
- Karla:
- Crew Biologist; able to camouflage feeling with scientific
theories; superior intelligence allows for dominance over all males
or spore-bearing entities.
- Me:
- Token earthling; prey to foibles and pratfalls of all
humanity (thanks Susan).
- Bug:
- Feathered creaturepicked up in sympathy from a
collapsing Throm Nebula; most likely to say uncontrolled angry things
about fellow cast and crew members to Entertainment Tonight years
after the series ends up in syndication...lack of Screen Actors Guild
residuals plus an addiction to cosmetic surgery will provide an inpetus.
- Susan herself:
- Priestess of the Right Lobe; erotic female interest
demanded by TV networks; will devour males if overly excited; designs
castles while sleepwalking; flawless plastic skin; thighs conceal bevatron
guns.
- Dusty:
- Bionic creature from a destroyed Valley planet; disciplinarian;
feeds on X rays; arms contain snakes that will fight her wars.
- Ethan:
- Bearer of the Dark Force; can transmute feces into
uranium; owns hyperspace cruiser that can vanish and reappear at any
moment across time, space, and money.
- Abe:
- Wise hermit cast adrift on asteroid for thousands of
years; has developed odd code languages for everyday actions; lonely
but not bitter; his heart is cryogenically frozen, and he must search
the universe pursuing the Thawer.
CAP'N CRUNCH:
Reason this cereal is decadent:
a) Colonial exploiter pursues naïve Crunchberry cultures to plunder.
b) Drunkenness, torture, and debauchery implicit in long ocean cruises.
SUGAR FROSTED FLAKES:
Reason this cereal is decadent:
Silky throated military-industrial complex spokestoad "Tony the Tiger"
exploits the need of the undereducated underclass for a paternalistic,
Reagan-like figure. A cautionary tale of the perils of not indoctrinating
at the crÈche level.
TRIX:
Reason this cereal is decadent:
Well-meaning rabbit, "Trix," kept in continual state of malnutrition/
subservience by dominant children of the parasitic bourgeoisie. "Silly
rabbit, Trix are for kids" can only be construed as a call to class
warfare.
LUCKY CHARMS:
Reason this cereal is decadent:
Man with no known adult friends lures children into forest for purpose
of nutritonal (ideological) seduction. Sprightly twinkle motif on
packaging (putatively an allusion to "flavor") are, in fact, metaphors
for soul-deadening sucrose.
RICE KRISPIES:
Reason this cereal is decadent:
Snap, Krackle, and Pop thinly veiled emblems for the Trilateral Commission.
COCOA PUFFS:
Reason this cereal is decadent:
"I'm cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs," the demented cackle of Sonny the
Cocoa Puffs bird/spokesmuppet, is resonant with the insanity inherent in
the needless enslavement of the proletariat.
COUNT CHOCULA-FRANKENBERRY:
Reason this cereal is not decadent:
Gay relationship offers an excellent role model for this new era of
diversity. Witty empire motif plays on never-ending struggle of the
oppressed to topple the ruling classes.
FISHER PRICE minifigs versus LEGO minifigs
Fisher-Price Minifigs:
Plus: limbless figures give children a feeling of helplessness
Minus: faces resemble those of beloved but unfunny cartoon characters
in FamilyCircus
Plus: generic, Gap-like outfits
Minus: height/weight-disproportionate bodies imply eating disorders:
bad role model for millennial youth yearning to be functional.
Lego Minifigs:
Plus: interchangeable, unisex hairdos
Minus: clawlike hands are scary and potentially traumatizing
Plus: bodies can be incorporated into architecture
Minus: bad fashions
The Eight Laws of Multimedia Hiring:
1)
Always ask a person, "What have you shipped in the last two years?"
That's all you should really ask. If they haven't shipped anything in the
last two years, ask, "So what's your excuse?"
2)
The "job-as-life phase" lasts for maybe ten years. Nab 'em when they're
young, and make sure they never grow old.
3)
You can't trsut a dog that's bitten you. You wouldn't want to employ someone
who you can steal away from another company in the middle of a project.
4)
The industry is made up of gifted techies or smart generalists--the people
who were bored with high school--the sort of people the teacher was
always telling, "Now Abe, you could get As if you really wanted to, Why
don't you just apply yourself?" Look for these people--the talented
generalists. They're good as project and product managers. They're the
same people who would have gone into advertising in 1973.
5)
One psycho for every nine stable people in the company is a good ratio. Too
many maniacally-driven people can backfire on you. Balanced people are
better for the long-term stability of the company.
6)
Start-up companies beware: kids fresh out of school invariably bail out
after a few years and join the big tech monocultures in search of stability.
7)
People are most ripe for pilfering from tech monocultures in their mid-to-
late 20s.
8)
The upper age limit of people with instincts for this business is about 40.
People who were over 30 at the beginning of the late 1970s PC revolution
missed the boat; anyone older is like a Delco AM car radio.
I went to Price-Costco. My weekly job is to purchase in-office snacks, all
setup in an IKEA skelf unit in the kitchen. Everything costs 75¢.
Mr. Noodles (for Dusty)
Pop-Tarts
hot chocolate mix
Cup·A·Soup
granola bars
Chee·tos
Famous Amos cookies
Fig Newtons
microwave popcorn
BBQ potato chips
We then got into a discussion of Nerd Schools and the end of the era of
"single-dose" education--and of course this led to a listing of schools
that had the best nerd reputations.
- Cal-Tec (Extreme nerds; the Jet Propulsion Lab is just
up the hill and around the corner. The big rumor is that they had to
institute pass-or-fail grading because there were too many GPA-related
suicides.)
- CMU
- MIT
- Stanford
- Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (for undergrads)
- Waterloo
- UC Berkeley
- Dartmouth
- Brown--"Hipster nerd school with a good undergrad
comp-sci program."
Melrose Voyager Melrose Voyager
"Press pound now..."
vasectomy reversal billboard
breakfast moccasins
Siegfried & Roy Sahara
Compaq Nokia
NY Steak & Eggs $2.95 47-Tek
control. remote. keno
forgotten cocktails
social interface name tag
cardboard IBM box cheddar
is it loud? interactive virgin
tanked girl Flamingo
reflective surfaces dry ice
Heywood Floyd American Moon
cities destroyed fight
win win win morphin mighty
Nam-1975 VFX-1
monster lab colonize
air lock thrust
Bob boy game
orb 64 bits
tatami pods
rings Softimage
object popping anti alias
lemon BAR
trilinear MIPmap interpolation
Ultra 64 gravy
Samsung paper napkin cherry
synthetic
emotional
response
Nye County, Nevada Dept. of Energy
traffic lights White Tigerzoid
computer personal floral carpeting
Howard Hughes Parkway *69
cinderblock walls escort leaflets
First Interstate 00
implant beverage
strip bell
Big Indian I Endian
Sands
stolen watches abandoned wedding rings
buried cinderblocks full of $100 bills.
You want to surrender.
Subjected to the random, you acknowledge your inability to
comprehend logic and linear systems.
21
royal flush three lemons
barbecue sauce plastic bucket
garage door openers woofer
antenna touch-tone
La Quinta calling card
We generate stories for you because you don't save the
ones that are yours.
plane window green squares
towers lights
telephone lines baggage
The New World dream
The extended arm
The caravan traversing a million miles of prairie
Cross the uncrossable
Make that journey and build the road along the way.
You succeeded at memory-creation beyond all wildest dreams
Hanshin Expressway
Stephen Hawking walking through quiet rooms pointing out things
you've never seen before.
Mitsukoshi department store, Kobe, Japan, at a 45-degree angle, its
contents smashed against walls
Western Washington State, minus Seattle's metro region, is
assigned a new area code, 360, effective January 15, 1995
R U Japanese?
thin blood rear-view mirror
Nirvana Unplugged Hawaii
what I wanted what really happened
Nikkei Index Embolus
Cerebrovascular event Possible reversibility
Monsterbreaker
Mothermaker Kidnapper
System-beater Codebreaker
Sharkprincess Keypadburner
Skywalker Clot
Godseeker
Braineater
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