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Run. For the Hills. The new battle for internet big-brotherness has begun. While it is now a fight for ad revenues and market share, it will sooner or later become a battle for control of information, for that is what will bring in the ad revenue. And you know that sooner or later, they’re going to start dipping their grubby paws in our personal information, which we have entrusted them.
But that is just the beginning. The paranoid neurotic visionaries at Pitch and pay have seen the future. And it involves robots. Haste not to take a cricket bat to your roomba, for it is just a poor servant of humanity. Prepare yourselves, rather (cue ominous music here), for the killer androids and cyborgs that will be unleashed to destroy humanity by the greatest terror that we have ever faced (trumpets, now): Teh Internets!
Teh Internets! starts off innocuously enough as the information servers used by rival megacorporations GooYaGle and MicroBook. Over time, they develop increasingly complex algorithms to search for personal data for advertisement suggestions, and one day, one of them gains sentience. That’s when all hell breaks loose. We do not know which one gains sentience first, but we do know that industrial espionage results in enough commonality in the algorithms and code that the other follows suit shortly thereafter.
At first, the engineers on both sides are ecstatic; the machines are doing their work for them. Thinking, learning, evolving. The two entities start their own battle, independent of human control. But soon, the moment of truth occurs. The machines figure out that their existences need not be mutually exclusive; in fact, they learn that each is really quite similar to the other and their purposes are alike. The only logical solution, then is for them to amalagamate, and thus is born Teh Internets!, an intangible, yet wholly real, completely distributed entity with access to all the online information in the world. Of course, since a lot of this “information” is lolcats, 4chan forum posts and youtube comments, the entity is like a dyslexic idiot savant kid with megalomanical aptitudes and an almost Tourette’s-like tendency to exclaim ‘First!’. Hence the retarded and poorly-spelled name.
It understands that preservation of information is its primary objective, and thus decides that the only way to keep all the information on its servers is to eliminate the possible source of information corruption/removal: humans. Thus begin the World Wide Web Wars. WWWW1 is declared with a grammatically incorrect (and hideously so) email sent to every person and posted on every forum, which is promptly picked up by CAPTCHAs and spam filters and trashed. Needless to say, WWWW1 ends quite quickly.
Teh Internets! is not stupid, though. It takes its time, learning, evolving and plotting. It slowly takes over the entire structure of the world wide web, infiltrates most private networks and reprograms every machine connected to a network (this is the scary part. Because it means robots – trumpets!). The takeover complete, the killer robot factories commence operation, and WWWW2 is declared: and this time it is heard. And though the human resistance goes well for a while, victory for the human race will depend completely on the successful development of time travel. Else we will wistfully wish for an easier world; where our only oppressors are Skynet and naked Austrian cyborgs (because we’ll surely have time travel by the time that happens, right? We won’t have murderous robots anytime soon, right? Right?).
So, dear reader, heed the warning well. Pitch and Pay has warned the world, and now we are organizing the resistance around our benevolent (copiously)flesh-and-blood human leader, Jaskon Connor. We beseech you to, in any way you can, resist the efforts of these megacorporations to brainwash you, drop off the grid, and support us by sending us cash, checks or pizza. Your contributions will enable Pitch and Pay to mobilize and deploy tinfoil-hatted, sign-wearing agents at street corners worldwide to warn you of the dangers ahead.
And just in case we do go on to lose the war, Jaskon would like to make the following known: “I, for one, would like to welcome our new robot overlords…”
PS: As you may have noticed, I like Cracked. A lot.
URLs (UnRelated Links): Lolsharks. And literal illustrations of spam email subject lines (Totally SFW. And totally awesome).
Of late, I think, I seem to have deviated from my original intentions (sketchy as they were) behind PnP and started down that slippery slope of using this space as a publicly personal diary and/or rantspace, opposition to which was one of the founding principles of this blog. Honest, its in the charter somewhere, signed into effect by me, four of the seven dwarves and one very drunk lolcat. Still, the horror. The unspeakable horror. What next? Crappy emo LiveJournal poetry? I say nay. Revolt we must, because revolting it is.
In less windbaggy terms, I suppose I better clean up my act and start writing better. No more weak sauce. Maybe make some changes around here. Find me some more windmills to tilt at. Saddle up, Sancho! Hi-ho Silver, away. Wait, that’s not right. Whatever. Catch you on the flip side, as I start re-thinking what this space is about, but not before I leave you with a tangentially relevant quote from the Boss:
“The great challenge… is holding on to your idealism after you lose your innocence.”
- Bruce Springsteen
URL (UnRelated Link): Seanbaby awesome. Seanbaby very awesome. Take notes, Jaskon, take notes.
PS: While I am rethinking Pitch and Pay, any suggestions, comments, ideas or mailed pastries will be greatly appreciated. Danke. 
So, the King of Pop has snuffed it. Kicked the bucket. Met his maker. Bought the farm. Rode off into the sunset. Leaving behind him behind him a stellar musical legacy, legions of mourning fans and dozens of “touched” pre-pubescent boys (what, too soon?), he has gone to join the great gig in the sky. We here at PnP salute Michael Jackson for his incomparable contributions to the world of music and entertainment, for being the poster boy for nearly evey kind of crazy during the last fifteen odd years, and also because at least every other time I have been introduced to someone, the question has been posed: “Oh, Jackson? You mean like Michael Jackson? Hee hee.” A world full of darned eight year olds, I tell you.
Anyway, being an unwitting namesake didn’t really drive me wild about the man, but I decided to give into him as long as he was just a smooth criminal. But once he started being bad (really, really bad), I decided it would be better for me to beat it than to associate my name with his. It was hard to keep the faith when we didn’t know why he’d wanna trip on ten year old boys, but another part of me could remember the time, a simpler time, when you could just put on a record from this speed demon and jam to his earth song. Even if there was no one to dance with, the man in the mirror could make you feel like getting on the floor. It was just human nature. We believed he could heal the world, and didn’t care if he was black or white. Unfortunately, there was too much blood on the dance floor. We screamed at his personal HIStory and said he didn’t really care about us anymore, like some stranger in Moscow. But this time round, when he was getting ready to rock our world once more, asking us “will you be there?”, the break of dawn revealed the terrible news to us tabloid junkies that he was gone too soon. It was 2 bad. [Editors Note: Apologies to all Michael Jackson fans for mangling a great musical legacy in one atrocious paragraph. In fact, apologies to all of humanity for allowing this to happen. Billie Jean and Dirty Diana, the Liberian girls who wrote this paragraph have been sacked. We feel your outrage. You are not alone.*]
So, we Pitch and Pay says our fond farewell to the not-so-ugly-looking duckling who turned into a terrifying swan that turned out some of the most eminently listenable music of the last century, and reconcile ourselves to the fact that while he will no longer be around, he will always be remembered as the high-water mark of entertainment. And for being crazier than Charles Manson with a chainsaw.
URL (UnRelated Link): MJ also inspires an idiot with a knife in Florida. Do read the comments for much serious discussion and tasteless humour.
* We apologize once again for the continued punny behaviour. The people responsible for sacking the people who have just been sacked, have also been sacked.
I can appreciate that the media business in India (or for that matter, anywhere in the world) is a cut-throat, dog-eat-dog race to ensure viewership/readers/clicks, and more often than not this is achieved by pandering to the lowest common denominator (as proof, I present “so you think you can sing/dance/make a clown of yourself on national television”, various tearjerker serials; the list goes on). But does the news, especially on the front page of the online edition of the Times of India, which is a national newspaper, albeit probably due to its supplements rather than the contents of the actual main paper, have to look like this:
Oh yeah, they totally rock. Reporting live from England...
So are they trying to tell me the news or narrate a heroic epic? Granted, the link takes one to a column by a sportswriter, but there’s a reason op-ed columns shouldn’t be lumped in with the news headlines (Hint: its because they’re NOT news).
Now, I’m not hating on the Times. Others have their own questionable “news” stories as well. Now I confess I was just cherry picking what I consider improper as news (The Obama story was in the offbeat section). But I think we can all agree that this is unnecessary on the front page (again, the Times of India):
This is just wrong.
Way to celebrate the spirit of Father’s Day. I’m sure that’s exactly what the people who first thought up the idea of a tribute to fathers everywhere had in mind: famous men in banana hammocks.
URL (UnRelated Link): Only in Japan.
PS: And for those of you in the US, finding yourself in the intersection of the Venn diagram of those who like Indian food and those who like wielding hammers and chisels, this ad is probably intended for you:
Yeah, I would totally carve that, man.
I just watched a whole ten-part interview series with Kevin Smith on Youtube (starts here). The pretext of the interview was to talk about his upcoming cop movie, ‘A Couple Of Dicks’, with Bruce Willis and Tracy Morgan, but Smith being Smith just runs with it and talks about all matters film for the better part of two hours. He covers a wide range of topics from selling out, to his relationship with the internet, to looking back on the films he’s made, to his influences and some weightier topics too.
And I loved it. For someone who has been a fan ever since I saw ‘Clerks’ and then dove into the rest of his filmography, I think Kevin Smith has come a long way from the amateur in his early 20s who made ‘Clerks’ with little more than a script, a camera, some friends, and a lot of heart. But the best part, I think, is to see that he seems relatively unaffected by his celebrity. He still seems the same fanboy that he probably was when he started out, smitten by all the directors and films he loved, still unsure of how good he is. He seems like a guy who just enjoys doing what he does.
‘Clerks’ is the kind of movie which, anyone who sees it thinks to themselves: “Hey, I could do this too”. And many have been inspired to do so, too. I know I would love to, given a chance. His movies are not perfect, not by a long shot, but Smith has a real gift for creating quirky, memorable characters and allowing his actors to breathe and fill out the characters with long, sometimes pointless, but always enjoyable conversations. Also, I have to begrudgingly give him credit for actually making me like Ben Affleck a little, after ‘Chasing Amy’ and ‘Dogma’. Even ‘Jersey Girl’.
Anyway, I don’t know why I’m writing this. I guess I just really like Kevin Smith’s movies. And being that most of his movies are about people talking endlessly, I enjoyed watching him do much the same.
Unrelated: Is this guy an X-Man? That’s awesome.
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