Today was a good day.

An expensive one, but a good one nonetheless.

I scored tickets to the long-awaited NIN they’re-not-calling-it-a-reunion-of-which-I’m-glad-because-we-never-considered-them-to-be-broken-up-anyway Tour.

Or

for short.

Last weekend, however, I was at a party with some fine folks at which it was discussed that young kids lack the deep devotion to music that so many previous ones held. They don’t identify themselves with a genre or even very general swath. They don’t really care about the lyrics or whether or not they even agree with them once they do find out what they are.

Doubtlessly there are exceptions, and those lucky few will likely get to experience something like this. The immutable excitement of getting to once again see a band you’ve loved – I still listen to Ghosts all the time kind of love – for what not only seems like but is damn close to your entire life.

It’s been   censored   years since I’ve seen them. There are many bands that I can say that about. But you don’t get like this for the ones you haven’t followed every step of the way since.

This is all a bit of a turn from last night, when I once again completely changed my video game loyalty.

Because this:

I heard all that I needed to hear in those two divergent E3 performances.

Five years ago, I had never bought a single thing that wasn’t Nintendo. True, my brother had a Sega Genesis when we were kids. I just barely touched the thing. Still, the Wii was seriously disappointing and I’d just come to NYC to live in a tiny little apartment where swinging your arms around to play a game was less than practical.

So I went and got the best system at the time: a 360. There were more games and Sony was acting a fool all the time. It was a no-brainer.

The tables have turned. Microsoft’s playing NSA Spy-At-Home with an always-on Kinect and required Internet check-ins with Mom and simply insane used game policy.

Nope.

I’m the type who hears “you can’t do that with this software and hardware” as a likely-won challenge. Even normal people were screaming for joy when Sony announced they’re not pulling any of that crap. Again: no-brainer.

I haven’t always been right in choosing which loyalties to hold on to and which to abandon. But man, did I nail those two.

I tried to read through this, one of the latest “let’s try to break down the new generation” stories, but I am so done with this whole thing.

I am so very, very tired of people defining everyone born after ’79 as a goddamn Millenial.

I was born in January of 1983, and every single time I read one of these diatribes, there is a blanket look of confusion and surprise plastered across my face at all the things that these kids don’t know and never experienced.

BECAUSE NONE OF IT APPLIES TO ME.

The truth is: there is very little difference between me and any given person who was born in 1978.

I loved my Gremlins 45s with the read-along books. In 1994, I was distraught over Kurt Cobain’s suicide because I did and still do love Nirvana. I also remember watching the white bronco that year. My first R-rated movie was Total Recall. I never wanted to be someone else so badly as when I first met Bastian. I know how to operate a reel-to-reel. My brother and I drove the shit out of our aunt demanding to see her recorded-from-NBC-with-the-original-commercials-intact copies of Star Wars all the time because we did not yet have a VHS player at home. I had the Enter Sandman/Stone Cold Crazy cassingle. Friday visits to the video store were a religion. The elder Bush’s presidency is a clear memory, as is the end of Reagan’s. It was a crushing disappointment when I learned how unlikely it would be for me to be a contestant on Legends of the Hidden Temple, despite the fact that it was filmed just a few hours drive away. My first video game was not on an NES. It was Mattel electronic football (which I remember as being a lot bigger).

Look, I got a million of these. The point being: what in the holy fuck do these people think I have in common with a 10-year-old?

We’re not the same generation. We’re barely the same species.

People, particularly people who get paid to write authoritatively about this topic, need to get it through their thick skulls that generational striations have become incredibly thin. Think, McFly. Think.

See? A reference I can make because I saw the damn thing in the 80s. Both sequels: in the theater. Find me a teenager who knows about velcro-topped basketball shoes.

My wife was born in 1986, and her sister is from ’89. While the two of us have a strong cultural/experiential connection, we don’t know what the hell her sister is talking about half the time. Her brother, who’s just turning 21, makes sense far less than that.

It’s an insult to me to say that I am of the same stock as people who’s first memory of Alfonso Ribeiro is from The Fresh Prince and not Silver Spoons. And it’s an insult to those people to tell them that they’re no different from someone who didn’t exist before iPods.

I don’t know how the generations should be broken up. I’m not an anthropologist nor do I have enough concept of what younger people experienced to draw those kinds of lines. But I do know that the line, as it exists now, is way off.

So until that’s fixed, stop calling me a Millenial.

As a professional computer person of any type, one learns very quickly that we must find a way to deal with people using incorrect, often bizarre terminology when referring to technical stuff.

One must train their ear to hear “VGA cable” when someone says “monitor cord with the blue thing on the end.” A monitor might be a “screen” or be talked about as if it is the computer itself. “Window” refers to windows, dialogue boxes, command prompts, or any other rectangle. And anything in bar format will have a unique name depending on who you’re talking to at the moment – just forget about the words “taskbar,” “ribbon,” “menu bar,” etc.

I really don’t give a shit if they know the proper words for things. Sure, it would make my life a lot easier to hear an accurate description of a problem or to not have to tell people where to click by sounding like a dyslexic reading the first part of the Konami code. But let’s leave that brain effort to doing whatever the hell it is they do that earns the overhead which is my salary.

But there is one weird-ass language development that I cannot abide. The “My [blank].” My Facebook. My Twitter. My whatever-the-fuck-piece-of-software-I’m-talking-about-at-right-now. My phone (almost everyone I’ve ever heard use this construction has an iPhone, and that shit belongs to Apple, kids).

Someone said “my Google Chrome” the other day, which really drove home how entrenched this concept is.

I’m no psychologist, but it seems to me that these software companies have exceedingly good marketing departments which are exceedingly good at convincing people that their use of these products confers some type of ownership.

It was once standard (and proper, for that matter) to refer to “my Facebook page.”

So, let’s compare the two sentence constructions.

The latter makes “Facebook” an adjective within a prepositional phrase. Given a contextual antecedent, it would be nonessential, allowing for the phrase to be shortened to “my page.” The indication in this construction is that one has ownership over the page, and that Facebook is merely the type of page they own.

The former is far simpler. “Facebook” is the object of the preposition. The indication is that one has direct ownership of Facebook.

That’s where it gets complicated, at least for me.

I do not understand how that word is being used conceptually. The simple page structure no longer exists. It’s all a (Doctor forgive me for saying this) wibbly-wobbly mash of sharing and friends and not really friends and companies and branding stamps and all sorts of shite. What once was a list of the activities of friends has been purposely shaped into a marketing tool for the highest bidder.

Having walked away from FB quite a while ago, perhaps I have a different perspective. One of the big reasons I stopped using that service was because I was tired of slowly watching my content ownership dissolve. At one point, they were happy to let you post anything and retain rights because they wanted to make things look appealing in order to get more users. Now that virtually everyone is on there, the individual is a commodity.

Aside: I also stopped using that crap because the dynamic fell apart. Suddenly there was “etiquette” and everyone’s parents were on there and it was very easy for every dickhead I’d ever met to find me. I won’t even get into the fact that it’s become an acceptable substitute for actual friendship.

There are other social services that I use. I’m just not ever going to talk about them like they’re in any way mine. The things I post are of my mind, and their totality is an appropriate representation of who I am. That’s it. At most, the only “my” in this equation is my username.

It’s one of those things that, hopefully, will fade away fairly quickly. Like Napster or penicillin-treated clap.

Perhaps if people to read up a bit on how very little these social sites’ owners care about you and yours (and remember that information for more than five minutes), they’d not be so quick to claim them as their own.

Update:

The always-interesting Marginal Revolution put up a link this morning to a story referencing this HuffPo piece about what teenage girls actually do on their phones. I have to say that I’m more confused about this whole thing than ever now. 165 motherfucking text messages a day? Not hanging out with someone for 6 months because they don’t have a shitty iPhone? These little bastards need to get a life. A real one that exists in the real world.

Also, I’ve been more flirtatious with the idea of having a kid in the last year or so. That’s the end of that.

I am generally fine with watching portions of our culture wither away and die.

Newspapers, video rental stores, AOL, the Republican Party, etc.

But I pray to His Noodly Appendage that the small theater sticks around until after I am gone.

The IFC center showed The Shining all month as part of a Stanley Kubrick series. The marquee caught the eye of myself and a friend when out one night, and we immediately decided that we had to experience it the way people did 33 years ago.

At first I was all:

In my defense, that thing starts out sssssslllllloooooowwwwww.

It was just kind of cool to be seeing it in a different setting and on a really large screen. Nothing special.

Then I got a bit:

The vastness of the settings and the moodiness really began to wrap around me after a while. Being 16 inches from the person next to me didn’t detract much from the sense of isolation that Kubrick managed to create through shot after shot of showing the characters as tiny in comparison to their surroundings. And being in front of a giant screen, inundated with these images, further reinforced the feeling.

Wasn’t too much longer before I was:

I think that everyone should know the name Kryzysztof Penderecki. Though, it’s hard to truly appreciate his work on this movie without seeing it in the theater. Knowing how haunting the music is at home, I thought nothing of preparing for that aspect. Then the volume hit me.

At home, the high-pitched whines and jumpy strings are guaranteed to make you adjust the volume, or at least think about it. In the theater, it’s significantly louder than any reasonable person would play it in their house. At times, it’s downright uncomfortable. And there’s nothing you can do about it.

Now you’re isolated and having unpleasant things forced on your brain. I didn’t even notice at the time that the tiny-person-big-background shots started to come in closer and closer as Jack descends into madness.

By the time that axe comes out, you’re very:

Now you’re seeing all kinds of completely fucked up shit and it’s moving ten times faster than before and that music is still pounding against your skull and you manage to forget the anticipation despite having seen this movie 20 times before and then that bitch sitting next to you laughs at the “Here’s Johnny” bit and it’s only for a second that you consider chopping her up for ruining the moment with whatever happens to be handy but it’s only one more second before you don’t have a choice but to go back to watching because oh my fucking god this is infinitely better in the theater.

There was a time before I was born when directors used the theater as part of their art. You knew your viewer would be watching under a specific set of conditions because there were no other options. You couldn’t rent a movie reel for your home projector. You see it in the theater, while it’s running, or not at all.

The Shining came out at a time when VHS was around, so Kubrick wasn’t technically bound by this structure. Didn’t stop him from exploiting it and making something that was best experienced within those confines. I can only imagine how seeing that movie in that setting for the first time would have been terrifying.

Downside of all this: that copy I have at home is now totally useless. It will never again be more than a shadow of the real thing.

This is a bit heavy, so best to click through.

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Fact: the only EA games I own are the three installments of the Deathspank series, which just barely counts as one of theirs.

Next time you think about buying an EA game, ask yourself: “When was the last time someone paid me to do something and I responded by never doing that thing again?”

Sometimes, the best way to catch a tech scumbag is to use really dirty tricks that could cause major problems if they were to be applied to anything other than a very narrow set of scenarios.

I’ve been a fan of Ride the Lightning for quite some time now (note: if you are in any non-superficial area of tech and don’t know about Sharon Nelson, update your damn feeds, dude), so it’s a fairly regular thing for me to read about a federal case that leaves me a bit torn.

In point: the Arizona review of stingray trackers, which finally started to be argued just last week – the stemming indictment came down just shy of 2 years ago, so it’s been a long fight to even force the FBI to justify their actions.

The rub is this:

These guys fucking suck. They stole tax refunds on a pretty large scale. That means they stole from everyone in the country, including me personally. Who knows how many innocent people got their business combed through by the feds just because they ended up matching IPs with these dickheads. Total violation of the Spider Man principle, to which all people with higher computer knowledge should hold themselves. If that’s what it took to break them, fine.

At the same time, dafuq does the FBI think it’s doing? You’re just running around scanning every single phone in a given area, without telling anyone that might be affected? Have you lost your damn minds? Because you sure as shit don’t want to make this a common thing. You wouldn’t want your bureau pals free to find you or your kids at their leisure. Plus, some of the people you chase are way better than you, so standardizing the practice exponentially increases the odds that the wrong person will get one of these, or just build their own (if they haven’t already). Good luck catching anyone when they can track you coming to get them.

And there is where I get stuck.

I lean about 90% towards the ‘screw catching the guys if you’re going to be stealing everyone’s rights to do it’ side. Then I think about what they would have to do without this kind of tech. I think about all the horrible things that the government is willing to do these days and, a few logical inferences down the line, having my phone pinpointed by the FBI doesn’t sound so bad.

Or course, that’s how they get you.

Tell me that, 20 years ago, people wouldn’t have gone apeshit at the slightest suggestion of the government maybe considering a doctrine that could at some point lead to the killing of our own citizens. Never mind coming right out with it and saying they’ll do it right here in our own country.

So good on everyone in that Arizona courtroom. Lines must be drawn.