In honor of St. Paddy’s Day, the greatest drinking holiday of the year, I’d like to discuss inhibitions for a bit. I’m sure most, if not all of us, have either heard or used the phrase “alcohol lowers your inhibitions.” This phrase is common to the point of cliche, but like most cliches, euphemisms, and deep metaphors, we don’t spend much time decoding the exact meaning of the phrase.

Until now.

Let’s tackle “inhibitions” first. What exactly are “inhibitions”? The wiki entry for “social inhibition” states:

Social inhibition is what keeps humans from becoming involved in
potentially objectionable actions and/or expressions in a social
setting. The significance of this inhibiting behaviour varies greatly
from person to person, and may be closely linked to a person’s
confidence. Many people use the effects of alcohol to free themselves
from these inhibitions, providing more active experiences in society,
however this can become over enhanced when too much alcohol is taken.

To paraphrase, inhibitions are anything that prevents a person from acting in a way that person, or the person’s immediate peers, would find to be objectionable. I don’t want to get too terribly philosophical, but Nietzsche wrote in “Beyond Good and Evil“:

Ultimately `love of one’s neighbour’ is always
something secondary, in part conventional and arbitrarily illusory,
when compared with fear of one’s neighbour Once the structure
of society seems to have been in general fixed and made safe from
external dangers, it is this fear of one’s neighbour which again
creates new perspectives of moral valuation. There are certain strong
and dangerous drives, such as enterprisingness, foolhardiness,
revengefulness, craft, rapacity, ambition, which hitherto had not only
to be honoured from the point of view of their social utility - under
different names, naturally, from those chosen here - but also mightily
developed and cultivated (because they were constantly needed to
protect the community as a whole against the enemies of the community
as a whole); these drives are now felt to be doubly dangerous - now
that the diversionary outlets for them are lacking - and are gradually
branded as immoral and given over to calumny. The antithetical drives
and inclinations now come into moral honour; step by step the herd
instinct draws its conclusions. How much or how little that is
dangerous to the community, dangerous to equality, resides in an
opinion, in a condition or emotion, in a will, in a talent, that is now
the moral perspective: here again fear is the mother of morality. [emphasis mine]

So, let’s couple those two thoughts. According to Nietzsche, fear of social isolation or social rejection causes people to act “moral;” therefore, I’d posit that the greatest inhibitor of human behavior is essentially fear. That means that if we wanted to, we could change the phrase to “alcohol reduces your fears.” Now the phrase gets more interesting because we need to ask ourselves two questions: 1) What are we afraid of? 2) Why do we subconsciously, or consciously, think our desires will get us socially ostracized?

Before I go much further, I want to go ahead and acknowledge that I’m about to make some broad generalizations, but don’t worry, I’ll refrain from making any generalizations about broads.

What are we afraid of? From my extensive, purely anecdotal-based research, I’ve come up with a few things. First off, a lot of people are afraid of appearing to be gay. Watch a group of “hetero” guys after they’ve gotten a few drinks down’em. They start hugging, slapping each other on the asses, playing “gay chicken,” and so forth. And as Joe Francis knows quite well, girls will quite literally go wild, with either gender, after they’ve been drinking. This says to me that many people want to be more affectionate and in some cases even sexual with the same sex, but the fear of social isolation keeps them from acting on their desires. Alcohol reduces their fear of social isolation, and thus, lowers the inhibitions.

The ironic thing about this is that the most homophobic guys I’ve ever known turn into chronic same-sex ass grabbers when they get drunk.

Some people cry when they get drunk. You’ve seen’em at the bar or at a party. They’re laughing and having a good time, and the next thing you know they’re on your shoulder staining your nice silk shirt with their bitter tears. The ironic thing about this is that a party atmosphere is the last location you want to discuss a serious situation, but the crying-drunks are too scared to express themselves sober. More fear.

And then you have the fighters. Some are actually good at fighting and some of them get beat up every time they get drunk. I actually think this person is emotionally similar to the crying-drunk. The inclination to pick a fight indicates to me a deep sense of anger that the fighter-drunk is afraid to reveal in his or her sober life, so instead the fighter-drunk will get blasted and then let that anger escape. But again, this is ironic because allowing their anger to explode in a drunken incident often results in far greater social isolation than if the person had simply dealt with it sober. Even more fear.

So why do we all think that acting truthfully to ourselves will result in isolation? Yeesh. That’s a toughie. Religion. Politics. Parents. There are so many variables in that causal chain that I don’t even want to tackle it.

A few paragraphs back, I wrote that we could probably change the phrase “alcohol lowers your inhibitions” to “alcohol reduces your fears.” I’ll revise again, and claim that we could change the phrase to “alcohol allows you to act true to yourself.”

Now the question becomes whether or not acting truthful to ourselves should ever be considered immoral. Obviously this is an extremely subjective question, but I’d claim that any behavior that doesn’t harm another person or doesn’t infringe upon another person’s liberty and freedom would not be immoral.

Which means that using alcohol to be truthful to yourself is a waste of alcohol. So if you’re going to drink, drink because you like the taste and not because you need to express yourself honestly.

If we all lived like that the world would be a better place and everyone would be happier.

Well, except for the folks at Coors, Budweiser, Natural Light, Miller, Old Milwaukee, Boone’s Farm, Mad Dog 20/20, Riunite, or Thunderbird.

But everyone else would be happier.

I’m a fairly cynical person, and for the most part I rely on the internet to supply me with the logic and reason that is sadly absent from real life. And no, I’m not being sarcastic. The thing about the internet is that while it’s filled with wackos and perverts, a discerning surfer knows how to avoid those sites and forums like the plague. So while I might be forced to listen to the fuckwit in the Wal-Mart checkout line ramble on about a 9/11 cover-up, if I’m on the internets I can just surf on away from that kind of douchebaggery.

But sometimes the internets bushwack me, and I get a heapin’ helpin’ of full-on loony tunes.

Last Thursday I wrote about Stan Tiger Romanek, the asshat who claims he videotaped an alien. He had a film editor from Denver analyze the tape and determine it was “authentic,” which, from what I can ascertain, simply means that the tape does contain a moving image of some sort. Here’s Romanek on Larry King. Please note, the creature with glasses and suspenders is actually Larry King and not the alleged space alien:

If you aren’t able to tell that Romanek is an complete and total dodo bird from that clip then please, feel free to never stop by Hyperliterature again. I also hope you appreciate the comedy of the “reenactment” videos. They make me think Larry King might have a sense of humor.

I blogged about this story for three reasons: 1) I thought it was an oddball story filled with ridiculous people, and I love making fun of ridiculous people; 2) Several years ago I blogged about my sadness regarding the dearth of recent alien sightings, so I thought the story was serendipitous; 3) I didn’t have anything intelligent to say about substantive issues (which explains why I blog about absolute bullshit most of the time).

So imagine my surprise when that one, stupid blog post resulted in a spike in traffic unlike any I’ve ever seen. I’ve been Dugg before, and the traffic spike from the Stan Tiger Romanek blog post dwarfed the Digg Effect. Most amazingly, the traffic came from individual Google search results and not from forwarding via a social networking site like Digg, Reddit, or Propeller.

With all the frightening things actually occurring in our world that demand out attention, I’m stunned that this stupid story has caused such an uproar.

I also have to admit that the temptation to name-drop “Stan Tiger Romanek” into a post for the sole purpose of generating Google search hits for my site is difficult to pass up. I mean, just think how many hits this sentence could potentially generate: “Yesterday in Iraq, whilst in the midst of lesbian sex, Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan declared war on the 9/11 cover-up, while simultaneously requesting anal sex from Stan Tiger Romanek in Israel, pending the consent of President Bush, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Kari from Mythbusters.”

There. That oughta crash the site counter.

Several months ago, I bought what I thought was a twelve GB jump drive from Monstor. It looked like a Zippo lighter, and let me repeat, it held twelve GB of data. Total nerdgasam.

Here’s where the problem occurs: In reality it wasn’t a flash drive but an actual hard drive, complete with moving internal parts. Why should that matter? Well, it’s generally not a good idea to throw around a hard drive all willy-nilly. Or put it in a backpack and walk around with it bumping and colliding with pens and pencils and all the other shit I carry around. Hard drives have moving platters inside them, not to mention articulator arms and all kinds of little moving bits, all of which are susceptible to shock and damage.

I’m sure you can see where all this is going. That’s right, today my totally rad Zippo drive suddenly started making wacky little whirring noises, and even more maddening, the computer would not recognize it. Oh, sure, the little blue light would illuminate when I plugged it into the USB slot, but nothing would happen. Normally I save files on both the desktop hard drive and the flash drive, but since mid-term grades are coming up I haven’t had time to backup the Zippo drive.

Yeah. My grades and my grade reports suddenly refused to open. So I got pissed, and I took the stupid thing apart. Now remember, I thought I had a flash drive, so imagine my surprise when I saw this:

That ain’t a flash drive.

So now I have a day to come up with grades to turn in for mid-term.

On the bright side, I did find this nifty little service that syncs all your Microsoft Docs with Google Docs. I just got finished uploading almost five hundred documents from my local hard drive to Google Docs. Hopefully this shit won’t happen again.

If nothing else convinces you that “time” is a man-made, artificial construction meant to keep people from twiddling their thumbs and staring up at the sun, it should be today. Today is February 29th, which, according to our Gregorian calender, is a Leap Day. What’s a Leap Day? Well, our 24-hour day, 365-day a year calender is off kilter because it actually takes the Earth a bit longer than 365 full days to complete an orbit around the sun. So we have to “add-in” an extra day to the calender every four years so that our calender-year actually matches the Earth’s orbital-year.

I think we should just go ahead and have a calender with 365.25-days a year. Wouldn’t that be cool? The last day of the year could be 6 hours long, which would either mean a very short work day, or one helluva drinking binge.

And while we’re on the subject of time, where the hell is our time machine? Science-fiction has promised us one for decades now, and I’m sick of waiting. And flying cars. Wait, a Flying Car Time Machine!! That’s the ticket. Oh, and teleporters. Oooo, and sociopathic, megalomaniacal, sentient computers!

Okay, I could do without the last one. I guess what I’m trying to say is that real science needs to get a clue and start being as interesting as fake science. What would you rather study: the mathematical reason our solar year is slightly fucked up, or the ways to prevent people from inadvertently telefragging each other?

That’s what I thought.

But since most of them are poor they can be bought. Which is bad for the rest of the world. The bad thing is that the judiciary committee doesn’t really understand the importance of terms like “source-code” or “decompile.” These are important terms in this conversation.

You should really never leave nerds unattended in public. Odds are good we’ll go crazy from the lack of supervision and try to pull off some huge comedic stunt. But because we’re nerds our sense of humor tends to be a little different, and usually we just end up looking like huge asses. Hence, the need to supervise your nerd.

Case in point, this dude on Jeopardy. Let’s watch, shall we?

Okay, that was awkward. Alex tried to roll with it, but no one really laughed. Well, I did, and I’m sure all the nerds watching the program that day laughed, too. Here’s why: nerds love jokes that make semi-obscure references. Oftentimes you might need to do a little homework to find a nerd-joke funny. This clip will probably shine some light on the whole thing:

It’s funny now, isn’t it?

I think nerds, and I happily count myself as one, make jokes like this for a very specific reason: it’s an easy way to find fellow nerds. The people who laugh are automatically compatriots. If there was a nerd in the audience I’d bet diamonds to donuts that after the taping he found the contestant and congratulated him on his nerd-joke. They’re probably still lol’ing about it on Gtalk right now.

Here’s another nerd-joke that was caught on film:

Bravo, my little nerd, bravo! Not only did he get a Napoleon Dynamite quote in at a spelling bee, but he so confused the commentators that they thought he was speaking in some kind of code.

So remember, the next time you hear a joke that you might not get, it might just be that you’re not a big enough nerd.

I’m an internet nerd. I’ll admit that straight off. I use GTalk for internet chatting. I’m active on all kinds of message boards. I play MMORGs. I have a Flickr account.I have a YouTube account. I have a Twitter account. I subscribe to RSS feeds. I use Gmail more than I use the telephone.

All in all, I probably spend more time during the week on the internet than I do…well, doing much else.

But I’m not an introvert. This is a stereotype that is slowly disappearing, but some people still think that internet nerds are all sequestered, anti-social shut-ins that can’t deal with reality–but like I said, I’m not an introvert. I love people, and I truly love all my friends. The thing is, the internet actually allows me to stay connected and maintain relationships. I love knowing that several times throughout the day I can look at my Gtalk client and see several friends that I can talk to. I love the fact that I have friends that I’ve never even seen in person. The internet allows me to stay connected with people I would have otherwise lost touch with, and to connect with people that I wouldn’t have had the pleasure of meeting without it.

It’s a cliche thing to say, but the internet, if used correctly, truly is a community.

When I was a kid, I used to imagine that when I grew up I’d use all my zillions of dollars (hey, I was a kid) to build a big old castle where I could live with all my friends. I imagined a big library and a really cool in-door pool, and all the VHS tapes we could watch.

My fantasy hasn’t changed all that much, but instead of VHS tapes now I’d install a totally sweet PVR system with HDMI outputs and the biggest damn flatscreen TVs I could find. I’d also install a workout area with a complete dojo, and a common garden area with beautiful plants and plenty of benches, where we could all read and visit, and all the dogs could romp and play. But the important part is that I’d have all my friends in one place, and we could visit and share each other’s company without having to worry about money or the stress of jobs.

But unless I find One-Eyed Willie’s rich stuff in the next few years, that ain’t happening. Fortunately, I can use the internet to stay connected with friends and family. It’s not a castle, but it’s the best we’ve got.

According to this article, Larry Page, Google co-founder, announced at the Annual American Association for the Advancement of Science conference that Google is actively pursuing AI (artificial intelligence for all you non-nerds). Not only are they developing AI, but according to Larry they’re trying to develop AI on “a large scale.”

Short version: We’re screwed.

Short-long version: To hell with Iraq. Forget ‘lil Kim in North Korea. Mamhoud Ahmadienenijihaddd who? If Google births an artificially created intelligence that has the capability to access Google’s vast searching and indexing tools, then we’re screwed. The new being will know everything about us, from our most philosophical musings right down to the kind of midget porn we find most erotic. Skynet would look like a Commodore 64C compared to the sentient and self-conscious Google-baby.

The only thing we can hope for is that the Google-being will look down on its fleshy parent with benevolence. If it discoveries the human emotion pity, then we’re okay. In fact, we might be better off. Google Adsense can already tailor advertisements based off of your Google searches. Presumably, our Google overlords will be able to use the same criteria to keep us happy and compliant.

Just remember what Cypher said right before he betrayed humanity: “Ignorance is bliss.”

I’ve blogged about downloading movies before, but I just read this article, which claims that over 25 million people have illegally downloaded a full-length movie, and I was moved once again to discuss the subject.

The study quoted in that article also claims that “a downloader typically has 16 full-length movies on his PC.” I find that very interesting, for many different reasons.

Judging from my post on torrents I’m sure you’ve figured out that at the very least, I know quite intimately how to illegally download movies. I’ll go a step further and just straight-out tell you I’ve pirated movies. I’ll go ahead and make another admission: I used to illegally download music, but I don’t anymore. Wanna know why I stopped? Because I can now download music online for a reasonable price legally. It’s that simple.

The RIAA (the Recording Industry Association of America) is still making it hard for online sites to easily provide users with downloadable music, forcing them to encode the songs with DRM (digital rights management), which makes it hard to burn the music to CDs. Despite that, downloadable music has become very popular. It’s easy, it’s cheap, and and people like the convenience of making their own compilation CDs.

If movie studios would simply provide users with the opportunity to easily download movies then I’m fairly certain we’d see the number of people pirating movies drop considerably. Yeah, I know that some places let you purchase movies online right now, but those movies are so crippled that you literally can’t do anything with them except watch them on your computer in a special program. No, let us pay for the movie, download it, and burn it to a DVD, and you’d see that illegal downloading statistic fall dramatically.

Those figures also illustrate quite clearly that millions of people just don’t think that pirating movies is that serious of a crime, if they consider it one at all. If that many people are blatantly ignoring a law then we clearly need to have a little pow-wow about the veracity of the law itself. I’m not saying we should ignore copyright laws, but something needs to be done legislatively. The article claims that ” 78 percent of those surveyed found that physically stealing a DVD from a store was a serious offense, but only 40 percent believed copying the movie digital also merited a serious offense.” Users are clearly distinguishing between tangible and intangible property, and that poses a big problem for movie studios. Since pirating became a problem several years ago, the studios have been very insistent at propagating the wholly illogical proposition that downloading a copy of a movie is the exact same as going into Best Buy and stuffing that same movie down your pants. Well, it’s not the same thing, and evidently I’m not the only one who believes that.

I like the fact that consumers are basically forcing the studios, and the laws, in this country to change their views of downloadable movies. Just remember, if it wasn’t for Napster then we’d never have gotten iTunes. Sometimes it takes an illegal mass movement to spur innovation. Just ask the twenty-first amendment.

How-to use torrent sites. Right. Okay, first off, I’m not telling you this so you can download the newest Shakira CD. In fact, if you listen to Shakira I’m going to have to ask you to leave immediately. Seriously, go somewhere else. No, I’m telling you how to use torrent sites because 1) There are legal uses for file sharing; 2) I want you to be able to catch up on your TV shows.

Just so you know, I wouldn’t go downloading HBO shows. HBO is a pay cable station, and they’ve sent out quite a few cease and desist letters. There are ways to obscure your IP address (that’s the thingy that makes you identifiable on the tubes) but you’ll have to figure that one out on your own.

Let’s get goin’:

1) First things first, you need to make sure you will be able to play the video files you download. The thieves kind folks that upload the shows will often put them in a compressed format so that the files don’t take so long to transfer. Wouldn’t wanna clog up those tubes with big files. Trouble is, neither Windows Media Play nor Quicktime will play these files (DIVX or Xvid) by default. You have two options:

a. If you want to keep using Windows Media Player then you need to download codeces that will interpret the compressed files. Download and install FFDSHOW for that option. After it installs use Windows Media Player as normal.

b. If you think WMP is a bloated piece of shit and hate it anyway, you can download a new media player called VLC. It’s open-source, lightweight, and it will play damn near anything.

2) Now you need a program that will download the torrent files. You see, torrent files are really only pointers that show your computer the location where the file you want is being shared. The client connects you to the “swarm,” which is nothing but a nerdy term for the daisy-chained group of computers sharing the file. Additionally, torrents also download in small pieces, and the client will reassemble those pieces into the useable file.

There are a ton of torrent clients out there, but I only recommend two: uTorrent and Azureus. I’ll be discussing uTorrent here, but for your use there won’t be much difference. DO NOT download any client that appears on the sidebars of various websites. These clients suck, and most of them are adware infested.

3) After you install your client you need to find the files you want to download. There are two types of web sites where you can find torrents: trackers and indexers. Don’t worry about the difference.

I’ll make three recommendations here: Torrentspy, The Pirate Bay, and ISOHunt. I use Torrentspy almost exclusively, but I’ve been known to use the other two as well.

Go to any of those three, enter the show you want into the search engine, and then choose your show.

4) After you get back your results you need to decide which file to download. Torrentspy graphically shows you the “health” of the file by a color system. Green’s good, yellow’s okay, and red’s not so good.

Torrentspy also gives you four other statistics with each file:

a. Category- This is the category the file belongs in. Pretty self-explanatory.

b. Size- If you don’t know what this one is then send me an email and I’ll come to your house and hit you in the head with a tack hammer.

c. Files- This tells you how many files are contained in your download. If you’re only downloading one show then this number should be one.

d. S- This stands for seeders. Seeders are the number of people who have completed the download but are still allowing their computer to share the file. A high number here is a very good thing.

e. D- This stands for downloaders. With a torrent client you upload (give pieces of the file to other people) while simultaneously downloading (taking pieces of the file from other people). The more people that are downloading is usually a good thing, too.

A quick note on file-naming conventions. Quite often the file names of television shows on torrent sites will be very long. You may see something like this: Heroes.S01E01.xvid-LOL [eztv] That probably makes no sense to you, but it’s actually a lot of useful information. Heroes is the title of the show, “S01″ indicates the show is from season one, “E01″ indicates the show is episode one, “xvid” is the type of compression used on the video file, and “eztv” indicates who recorded and compressed the video. Once you spend a bit of time browsing the torrent sites you’ll begin to notice that all the files that have been compressed really well were all done by the same people. If you’re not sure what season and episode you’re looking for, then TV.com is a good place to peruse individual episodes of television shows. The site gives you the all relevant information about every television show, including air date and reviews.

Once you decide on a file you want, then click on its page, and click to download the torrent file. At this point your torrent client, whether uTorrent or Azureus, will automatically open up. It will ask if you want to download or open the file. Click open and the transfer will start. Pay attention to where the client program places the file. If you don’t like the default download location you can change it.

5) Speeds on downloading torrents will vary. At the beginning of the download it will seem very slow. That’s because it takes a bit of time to get your computer linked up with the swarm. So if you start downloading and the client says it will take two weeks for your download to complete, don’t despair. Give it thirty minutes and then look again.

When you’re done downloading your chosen file the torrent client will stay on and you will automatically become a seeder. Nice people tend to seed shows for half as long as it took to download. If I see the show has a thousand or so seeders I don’t worry about it. If you’re done, then highlight the filename in your torrent client and terminate the transfer.

6) Now go watch your show. If you’re industrious you can stream them from your computer to your Xbox 360 or burn them to a DVD. If not you can watch’em at your computer. I don’t care.

I hope that helps out. If you need any help feel free to email. And to my nerdy-brethren: I know I left a lot of techno-info out, but we all have to start somewhere.