Don’t pretend that you don’t know what I mean. Everyone has heard the counterexamples to this; plenty of successful, intelligent people smoke pot, and sometimes they smoke a lot of pot. That doesn’t matter. The vast, vast majority of people who smoke pot every day are lazy, stupid, and unambitious. If you disagree with this, don’t bother reading the rest of this article. I’m too busy being honest to care about people who can’t cope with reality.

There’s a very simple reason why people who smoke pot constantly are that way, though. It’s not that pot actually physiologically causes a person to behave like that (or if it does, I’m not qualified enough to know). As far as I know, it’s largely a psychological thing. Think about it: when you’re just sitting around, not doing anything, what tends to happen? You get bored. But when you’re high, you don’t get bored. Smoking pot is a great way to relax and escape the tedium of reality, but it’s also an escape from the things about reality that cause people to actually do things. If you’re just sitting around relaxing all the time, you’re being lazy. You’ll act stupid because you’ll be high all the time. You won’t be motivated to further yourself because you’ll be in a neutral state of relaxation all the time. That’s why stoners have the reputation that they have.

If you want to chase your dreams, you need the motivation to do so. If you smoke pot all the time, you’ll keep receiving the little burst of artificial happiness that being high gives you, and eventually you’ll forget how much more rewarding it is to actually do something for real. I know this because I’ve experienced it before. It’s very easy to smoke pot once, be happy, then wake up the next day and think “Hey, wouldn’t it be fun if I smoked pot again?” Pretty soon, you lose track of what you were trying to do in the first place and you end up settling for drug-induced happiness instead of actual happiness.

The scary thing is, this is an easy settlement to make. Drugs are a lot of fun.

What’s more fun than drugs? Building a house, writing a book, making a lot of money, or getting married to someone you love. What’s less fun that drugs? Doing the dishes, having a shitty job, going to class, or admitting that you’re not as successful as you always wanted to be.

Smoking pot can make all the less-fun things into more-fun things, but without all those little annoyances in your life you start to lose your motivation to achieve the actual more-fun things. Pretty soon it becomes easy to rationalize your drug intake with a line of thought that sounds an awful lot like, “Drugs make me happy without much effort, so I’ll settle for that instead of making an effort at doing something worthwhile.” That’s laziness. And the worst thing about it is, you won’t have very much respect for yourself. It might seem like you do, but when you see other people you knew in high school becoming the next Bill Gates, you’ll look at yourself and say, “What the hell did I do with my life?”

For some people, pot can cause the creative stroke of brilliance that lets them do things they only ever dreamed of. For most people, pot is just something to do for fun and really doesn’t help them at all. I always seem to hear the excuse that people are using drugs to “find themselves”. That sounds deep and meaningful when you’re sixteen, but when you get older it starts to ring hollow. How exactly are you going to find yourself if you keep using drugs to escape yourself? You need to put things in perspective in a way that indicates actual maturity.

When I see someone who has so much potential for long-term happiness throw that potential away in pursuit of short-term happiness, it’s so frustrating and depressing that I can’t put it into words. In one case, a person who did this was someone I loved like a brother, who had such an enormous impact on my life that I truly believed, even in my normally-cynical heart, that he’d be there forever. That person meant too much for me to ever fully let him go. In the end, though friendships can be repaired in time, damage is done forever, and I’ll never be able to forget the times that I’ve been lied to over a drug.

It’s easy to realize that there’s no real scientific or logical reason to make pot illegal. On paper, it seems like the people who build their lives around a drug that’s not even particularly potent or addictive could easily be ignored. It seems easy to realize that you don’t need to have them in your life. You shouldn’t have to care about them. In reality, sometimes they’re people that you love.

Their actions explain why pot is illegal better than any after-school special ever could.

“Anonymous” is a name that can be used by anyone on the internet. When “Anonymous” does something, what that actually means is that one or more people using the name did that thing on behalf of everyone who identifies as “Anonymous”.

A statement like “Anonymous will hack Sony” is not a warning to Sony. It’s a request made to other people identifying with the name. So, “Anonymous will hack you” really means “hey, somebody should hack these guys, does anybody feel like doing it?”. Likewise, “Anonymous will boycott Sony for reasons xyz” is effectively saying “let’s boycott Sony, here’s why they deserve it”. The fact that the media scrambles to publicize anything anybody says under the name Anonymous plays directly into their hands.

If enough capable people feel like doing it, then it gets done. If not, it doesn’t. So no, Anonymous does not make promises, nor does it go back on them. Statements like “Anonymous never does anything” demonstrate a fundamental misunderstanding of how the system works. If you’re mocking Anonymous for “attacking the wrong people” then you are way off-base. That video was released by a single person. If people don’t feel that Justin Bieber deserves to be attacked, then he won’t be. If they do, then to be honest, he probably does.

The point of hacking something like the PlayStation network is to make these complex issues directly relevant to the everyday lives of a large demographic. A convenient side effect of hurting the users’ experience is that it can cost Sony financially, but that was never the primary goal. The goal is to draw attention to the unethical behaviour of this company, for its support of SOPA, its obsession with drowning all of its products in DRMs, or anything else that could be considered harmful.

Sony is already on the lengthy list of corporations that I’m not going to fund. In that sense, I myself am participating in a Sony boycott (though as a pretentious indie).

And could somebody tell me who the fuck Kim Kardashian is?

With that out of the way, here’s something I’m completely sick of: the James Bond franchise.

For 20 straight movies, it had a consistent style. Whether or not you actually like it personally, it doesn’t matter. The objective fact of the matter is, all 20 of these movies had basically the same tone and meaning to them: a light-hearted story about a spy with plenty of humour thrown in, meant for entertainment only. As the times changed throughout the 30+ years that these films were released, they each updated the franchise to fit the times without completely altering the franchise. For that reason, every Bond movie up until Die Another Day was at least recognizable as a Bond movie.

But since 2006, Eon has produced two Bond movies (with a third currently in production), all of which are part of their “rebooting” of the franchise. None of these new movies are even remotely similar to the old movies, other than sharing one actress (whose character has been changed beyond recognition). Now, I really don’t care if people like these new movies. I personally don’t, but that’s not the point. The point is that this “reboot” is completely unnecessary and insulting — not just to fans of the old franchise, but to anyone who puts their money forward to Eon.

What they’re doing is part of a big trend nowadays: companies that have or gain the rights to a franchise, change everything about it other than the names, and claim it’s a “reboot”. People who liked the series before will buy the new rendition even if they don’t like the new direction the series is taking, so the company is successful. The thing that’s so insulting about this trend is that these “reboots” aren’t just a new direction that the series is taking — they’re entirely different series released under the same name solely for the purpose of making a quick buck.

Yes, I am aware that making money is the point of a company, but they’re supposed to hide that fact by making quality products that are actually worth money in the first place. If you need to defend a company by saying that they’re just trying to make money, you’re an idiot.

If you want to make a serious, true-to-the-books rendition of James Bond, go ahead and do it. But don’t call it James Bond. There’s already a franchise using that name. There might be an argument for using that name anyway if the new franchise were closer to the books (since the books had the name first), but that’s not the case at all. The Bond stories were trashy stories about a spy written for pure entertainment, and the original film series already is the movie adaptation of that. Even if the new Bond movies are superficially more similar, their tone and style is nothing alike; the new ones act like they have some kind of deep meaning behind them. That’s the only part that actually matters, not the superficial crap like whether Q should be named Major Boothroyd or not. If you don’t believe me, look up what Ian Fleming had to say on the subject: he was alive for much of the franchise’s early history and thought it was exactly what he wanted: a fun story about a spy.

Microsoft has been steadily changing the format of their Office documents with every release of Microsoft Office. They have also not released the details of these formats, which means the only program that can reliably read the file you sent is the same version of Microsoft Office that you wrote it with (or newer). People with older versions of Microsoft Office, or people who don’t own any version, cannot reliably read these files.

This means we cannot exchange information until one of two things happens:

1. the information is sent to me in a standard format that I can read with a program of my choice.

2. I purchase and install the newest version of Microsoft Office (and anything else I need to run it).

I will not be doing the latter. A good standard format to use is the PDF, and I humbly request that you not send Microsoft Office attachments to anybody in the future. Some people may feel that not owning the latest version of Microsoft Office is somehow their fault.

(For more information, see http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html)

If you’re still using Microsoft Office, do yourself a favour and install LibreOffice.

I feel like this class has improved my writing dramatically – I have moved from sporadically writing about anything to frequently writing about nothing, which is obviously a great leap forward. I look forward to this time next year when I will hopefully be writing constantly but seeing no ink appear on the page at all.

Possibly the most important thing I’ll take away from this class is the way words are spelled – especially big words, like “irony” and “refutation”. Orthography is surely one of the most important fields of study of our time, second only to religion and possibly archaeology. I now realize that there can only be one way to spell “refutation”, that it must include at least two ‘t’s and an ‘f’. Any other way is just wrong. Back in my dark days, I might have drawn a surfboarding shark by mistake.

I have accepted how important it is to use commas in the prescribed way, and only the prescribed way. Smooth phrasing and logical sentence structure should always come second to tradition and conformity. It has also come to my attention that when using quotation marks, a comma needs to be placed at the end, but before the last quotation. Regardless of whether it makes any sense whatsoever, and even though it mutilates an otherwise perfectly good string of characters, that’s just how it’s done. Best not to question it.

The students in this class are of a very educated folk, and I know I am very lucky to have had this opportunity to teach them and to learn from them. The experience shared will surely last a lifetime or two. In particular, the ones who think war censorship is nifty are the ones who will forever plague my memory. I do hope though that that one girl will come to accept that Swedes are people too, even if they do talk funny. It is a very good thing the prof took attendance every day (and deducted points for absences) or I might not have gone at all, and such wonderful fortune may have passed me by.

There have been untold times when I’ve walked into class practically blind and left feeling as though I had had my eyes opened for the very first time, with some new fantastic revelation. Have you ever seen The Matrix? It was like that, only with more poetry. Well, more Spoon River Anthology, anyway.

I’d like to think people don’t judge others on their personal preferences, but that’s just not the way it is. Smokers are assumed to be morons even more quickly than artists are assumed to be gay. It would be really nice if we could all realize that what a person chooses to spend their time and money on really doesn’t say very much about who they are. I’ve met plenty of smokers who are perfectly rational people, and far more than my share of dickheads who would insist that tobacco is the devil’s blood and should be outlawed.

Yes, smoking is dangerous. I know it, you know it, and every smoker knows it. They’ve decided to take the risk of getting sick in thirty years in exchange for some short-term pleasure. Stop pretending you don’t do the exact same thing. You do, and you should keep doing it. It is never a poor choice to want to be happy.

So, for fuck’s sake, stop pointing at every person you see with a cigarette and telling me all about their bad life choices. It’s their life – let them do what they want.

You see a bunch of schlubs taking Scientologist happiness tests in the subway, you read about how a lot of Americans think their president wasn’t born in the US, or sometimes it’s just that people are generally watered-down, dull, stupid people who don’t think critically about anything and can’t spell. What the fuck is wrong with these people?

The beauty of human interaction is that even relatively stupid people can empathize with this frustration, as intelligence is not black and white but a gradient, and arguably it isn’t linear either, but more some abstract pattern which curves and spikes due to various outside influences, such as upbringing and genetics. In other words, no matter how fucking stupid you are, you’re always smarter and more insightful than someone else, because you happened to be somewhere where a lesson was learned, and they missed it by not being there. This is why even dumb kids know not to brag to their parents about getting pregnant, or walk into traffic, because they learned through first- and second-hand experience that neither of those are very good ideas.

But simply being in the right place at the right time with your eyes and ears open isn’t enough to save most people from the rapidly expanding black hole that is their own ignorance. This is evident from the fact that there are plenty of people in their old age who are still as stupid and diluted as the hood teenagers who bag their Depends at Rite-Aid, and who they just love to admonish and put down for not being successful. The difference is that these assholes have had seventy years on the Earth to figure out their shit, but instead they can’t even figure out when they have to shit.

So what is it that makes some people smart and some people incompetent? Though a lot of people would like to believe it’s all genetics and God and thetans, the truth is that it’s actually rather simple; the basis of intelligence is interest. People who are successful and intelligent and “geniuses” aren’t really endowed with something you don’t have; that’s just something we’d like to think because it gives us yet another excuse to feel deprived about something. The truth is that these people are simply interested in learning; they’re curious. If you aren’t interested in the world and how things work, you won’t learn about it. Who would have fucking thought, right?

And it’s not even something that’s terribly difficult to ascertain when you look at every day occurrences of stupidity. Many people are intense sports fanatics who follow every facet of every game and can debate these components with a shocking amount of insight and perspective, yet they will vote a make-believe cowboy into office because he reminds them of their buddies. They are clearly capable of understanding why that’s stupid, but they choose not to think about it. Again, it’s about interest. Anyone can figure out that the real reason kids don’t know how to spell beyond a first grade level on Facebook is not because they’re mentally challenged but because they simply don’t give a fuck; i.e., they have no intrinsic interest in the medium we use to interpret the world and communicate with each other: language. Now that’s the definition of stupid.

It’s really a shame, too, because aside from various exceptions due to pathological causes (autism, retardation, etc.), it’s pretty well established that kids are born curious and interested in what goes on around them. The problem is that a lot of parents are more concerned with making their child’s existence convenient for them than actually nurturing an intelligent, innovative future generation. Fun fact: your kids didn’t choose to be put on the Earth and they have no inherent obligation to you whatsoever. On the contrary, they are owed an upbringing that allows their individuality and natural inclination towards learning to flourish.

So, unless you want smug blogger assholes like me to harbor infinite amounts of disdain for your offspring and write angry rants about them on the Internet, I suggest you either invest more care into their mental and social development, or wear a rubber. Either would be a smart idea.

Let’s start off: Skype is currently multi-platform. It’s available for Windows XP, Vista, and 7, for Linux and Mac OS X, and for Android, iOS, Blackberry and Symbian. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has clearly stated that Skype will be continued for “non-Microsoft platforms”, but did not mention any specifically. He went on to state that limiting the userbase would reduce the value of Skype, which is completely true. However, it also works the other way – limiting Skype users to certain platforms reduces the perceived value of all other platforms.

My suspicion is that Microsoft will continue to support many platforms, but not all of them. I don’t think there’s any way they can drop support for Mac OS X without rendering Skype nearly worthless as millions of users switch to a different VoIP service. However, Linux doesn’t have nearly the installed userbase that the Macintosh has, and I suspect only a minority of Linux users are interested in Skype to begin with. I don’t believe that Skype for Linux holds much value, so I don’t think it’s very likely that Microsoft will continue to support it.

The second system to go will be Windows XP. Microsoft has been trying very hard to kill XP in recent times – just look at Internet Explorer 9 for an example. They want people to stop using XP for two reasons: because it’s holding up progress, and because they want to sell more Windows 7 licenses. Windows XP is still the most common operating system in the world, for the time being.

Lastly, I can’t see Microsoft funding work on Skype for Android. Google is probably Microsoft’s top rival, and Android is rapidly becoming one of the most popular mobile platforms. This product competes directly with the Windows 7 Phone. I’m predicting Microsoft will do whatever it can to curb the growth of Android, even at the cost of hurting Skype.

Don’t be too surprised to see Skype bundled with Windows Live Essentials and frequently pre-installed by manufacturers on all new Windows systems starting in a year or so. It’s the strategy Microsoft has used a dozen times before, with Office, Internet Explorer, Windows Media Player, MSN, and Windows itself. Microsoft is fully aware that most people won’t know how to install a competing product, and it’s going to count on that to boost the usage of Skype. Once ubiquitous, they’ll use Skype to boost the rest of their products, from Windows 7 Phone to Windows Live and possibly even the Xbox.

A possibility that I’m not too sure about is embedding advertisements in the Skype client. Microsoft doesn’t seem to object to this practice, as they’re willing to do it to MSN users, but adding ads after Skype has been ad-free for years may result in a nasty backlash from the userbase. There’s no doubt that ads would make Skype more profitable in the short term, but it may have the side-effect of making it less of a weapon in the long term.

Has Microsoft overpaid for Skype? Probably, but not by too much. It may not have $8.5 billion immediate value, but with proper abuse, it could turn out to be the very thing Microsoft needs to catch up to its competitors. You Skype users out there had better hope they don’t mutilate it too badly.

I currently own $10, 946 worth in gold from Goldline, as you recommended. When the economy collapses again, I will not be left behind. Sadly, when my attic collapses again, I will have to move the coins somewhere else. The last time they fell on me, I was nearly crushed.

I remember that day on your radio show when you were talking about the Marxist invasion of our homes. I was probably paying twice as much attention to you as I was to the road! Coincidentally, I went plowing into a ditch and dislocated both of my shoulders, but when the Marxists showed up at my door, I was ready for them.

I have also become a devout Mormon, although I do not know exactly what that is. If you lose your home as a result of this, I want you to know that you can store your chalkboards in my garage.

I used to have a friend who had a brown, ugly dog. His name was Woofers. I don’t understand why anyone would want an ugly pet. It used to run out to the road and bark at anyone who walked by. That is, until the day when it was suddenly hit by a car. Incidentally, Coke is great for getting bloodstains off your bumper before the cops show up. Anyway, after that Woofers didn’t want to be friends with me any more. Some people need to learn to forgive and forget.

The neat thing about pets is that they look cute but they can also be used to exact vengeance on your enemies or total strangers. My parents used to have a cat that would immediately scratch anybody who entered the house. Whenever Jehovah’s Witnesses showed up at the door, we would act all interested and invite them in for tea. They had to tolerate the scratching – we told them we couldn’t put the cat in another room because we were too afraid of it.

Another benefit of having a pet is that, unlike people, pets don’t talk. This is good in two ways: firstly, you don’t have to worry about your pets yelling out the answers when you’re trying to watch Jeopardy. Secondly, no matter what you do to them, they can’t tell anyone.

When I get my pet, it will be the happiest pet ever. We will play fetch and paintball and we will re-enact my favourite Western movies. I will be sure to feed it every day unless I forget or am angry at it.