Tuesday, August 15, 2006

Burnishing my Hipster Credentials

alberta_spiral

After spending much of the previous post lamenting my tragic non-hipsterdom, I figured I really ought to do something about it. This post is the result. The top photo is a detail of a funky sculpture on NE Alberta St., somewhat near the Mash Tun brewpub I mentioned. I suppose really the only hipsteresque thing about it is the location, so, ok, primarily the photo's here because I just thought it looked kind of cool. So whatever, or not.

pbr

Ok, so that first photo didn't help a great deal (although check out that cool, indifferent "who cares" attitude of mine right there at the end -- neato!). Anyway, let's try a different tack now. The second photo is a grainy B&W photo of an open can of PBR on my desk at the office, taken a few minutes ago. I get points for that, right? Ok, ok, I'll admit the can's been empty for like two years now, and I only drank it on a dare, and I didn't enjoy it. But still. I own an empty PBR can, anyway. That ought to count for something. It's part of my colorful cubicle collage-o-pop-culture. We programmers have to do eccentric stuff like this, or we'll lose our mystique, and Management will wise up and stop paying us big bucks for mostly surfing the net all day. We mustn't tell them it's all a conscious act, either. It helps if they think we're all borderline insane. It's great for job security. They'll come to think that the only way they can replace you is if they find someone who's crazy in precisely the same way that you are, and what are the odds of that?

The books to the left of the beer can are Nagar's Windows NT File System Internals, and an ancient copy of Brockschmidt's Inside OLE, in case you realized those were books and were curious.

Let's see... What else have I got in the way of street cred... Um, I need to go to the optometrist anyway sooner or later, and I could in theory get myself a pair of those black-rimmed retro indie-rock glasses everyone's wearing, just so I can be like everyone else. I'm not making any promises, but I'm saying it's at least theoretically possible, that much is certain. I've never really understood why the sort of rims your glasses have matters so much, but everyone's doing it, so it's obviously crucial, so I guess I'd better follow the herd here. Plus, I love tater tots. I do. Seriously.

Oh, and I also know a bit of Perl and have a MySpace account, but I'm way too cool to actually use either of them. I sneer at your crufty Perl. Ruby beats up your kludgy Perl and steals its lunch money. So there. Ha.

Also, I personally know multiple people who are in actual bands. Bands you definitely haven't heard of, in fact. They're so obscure even I don't know what they sound like, although I know for a (mostly) absolute fact they exist. I also know their early stuff was, like, a million times better, back before they sold out. How cool is that?

I think I'm going to go have some tater tots now. Whatever.

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