For example, I sent out a tweet a couple of hours ago about how I’m really excited about the Oculus Rift, a 3D headset that monitors how you move your head while immersed in a video game. In the tweet, I said it seems so much cooler than the Wii or Kinect or traditional 3D, while adding a link to The Verge article on it. There’s not much else interesting I could have added to those thoughts. Two or three years ago, I would have embedded a YouTube video about it and spit out a couple of paragraphs about the gaming possibilities and how awesome or nauseating it would be to play Mirror’s Edge while wearing the Oculus Rift.

Back then, I also had more real-life friends who read this blog at least occasionally. Due to the lack of updates, and not posting links to this blog on Facebook due to keeping my real name and this internet handle separate (half-assedly), the people reading any posts on this blog are almost all internet friends who are already exposed to my thoughts on Twitter. So the only things worth writing here are sufficiently thoughtful and lengthy posts, something akin to this R.A. Dickey fanpost I put together over at Amazin’ Avenue. Maybe I should re-post that piece here just so it looks like I still care about this blog.

The idea of our brains being rewired to acclimate to the internet probably isn’t a surprise to anyone who can’t go a few minutes without checking their e-mail or Twitter or Facebook or forum of choice. We (I say “we” since I’m one of these people) want everything as quickly as possible and without that constant flow of information we feel disconnected from the world. Even while reading this book, I probably checked my iPod Touch at an average rate of two times a chapter. (Yes, I carry around my iPod Touch because I’m too poor to want to pay $90/mo for an iPhone and I live in the city now and there’s always a hotspot nearby even if I’m not on campus.)

I had already read about a study cited in this book that revealed students did better on a reading comprehension quiz of a short essay when they were given a plain text version (or a paper version, I forget) as opposed to a version filled with hyperlinks. Clicking on a hyperlink has the effect of breaking your concentration and not allowing your brain to absorb the information in its entirety, even if it seems like you’re learning more by reading the content of the hyperlinks. The reason posited for this phenomenon is the limit of the brain for working memory. Possible long-term memory is practically infinite, but such retention is only attained after memories are allowed to be stored in the hippocampus for the required amount of time, which can apparently range from an a few minutes to years.

I was probably most intrigued when Carr went through history and talked about the effects of other technological advances on the workings of the mind. He writes about the invention of the book, the printing press, the clock, the phonograph, etc., citing reactions from prominent scientists and thinkers, and detailing where they were right and where they were wrong. It’s almost strange to think that a transition from handwriting to typewriters could have an effect on the content, tone, and structure of someone’s writing, but there are a few anecdotes mentioned that seem to suggest otherwise; one being that the flow of cursive lends itself to more meandering sentences compared to the staccato of a typewriter.

A theme running through all this discussion of technology and its effects on humanity as a whole and on an individual level is that there’s never any turning back (unless we bomb ourselves to hell, I guess). The internet is only becoming increasingly prominent in our lives and the trend in all likelihood will not reverse. When new forms of media were created, others were never done away with entirely. Newspapers didn’t kill books. Television didn’t kill the radio. The internet hasn’t killed anything yet, but it is the first technology that has been able to absorb and provide practically every form of communication the human race has created. And it has greatly affected every other form of media. Many magazines are now laid out more like webpages and there are television shows like Tosh.0 that live off YouTube clips.

But maybe it’s bullshit to worry about the internet-ization of our brains. It’s not like reading is an activity the human brain is particularly evolved for; a person needs to develop a love of reading, which in turn leads the brain to crave more of a similar stimulus. I feel as if I’ve had to work to get back into reading at length, or even watching full movies at home, but I like to think I’m almost there. And it does feel more satisfying to finish a book or watch a great film than it does to jump around reading blogs or watching 20 minute television show episodes. But is it efficient? When Carr posed this question to some very intelligent people, a number of them said they don’t even read books anymore because it’s just not worth the time and effort when the internet is so easily searchable — just Wikipedia it! Well, you probably indirectly Wikipedia it by googling it first.

I mean Google because there’s an entire chapter of this book dedicated to the search giant. The search giant that has attempted to get its fingers into every inch of the internet and subsequently our lives. They want to know everything and they want everything to be searchable. The ideas of Sergey Brin mentioned in The Shallows point to the idea of a massive internet cloud singularity in the future of humanity. Perhaps this is inevitable, considering the march of technological progress and the willingness of people to upload as much as possible. Just thinking about such a possibility reminds me of “The Last Question” by Isaac Asimov, one of the favorite short stories. Try to read it without being distracted by the rest of the internet.

As written about by Carr, a move toward such a future would be scarier than the idea of our brains just being overloaded with too much data and not developing enough deep knowledge, as it would basically end all individuality. Although the two are linked — if you’re not forming individual thoughts through personal reading and writing, then it’s all external, which basically means the internet going forward. Already, people on the internet group together around similar interests, e.g., politics or sabermetrics, developing thoughts and worldviews alongside each other virtually. Sure, have a predilection for such behavior, but the internet only exacerbates the narrowing of experience. Imagine such an echo chamber effect across the entire human race. Or maybe just watch episode 2 of the British television series Black Mirror.

ALCOHOL

I was thinking before New Year’s Eve that perhaps I should cut down on the drinking in 2012. Then when I woke up the next morning to a text from my good friend saying I should probably apologize to his long-time girlfriend for calling her a “cunt” multiple times, I really thought it would be a good time to take a break. Important note: this is only because she’s awesome; if she were really a cunt, I wouldn’t have felt bad.

Of course, at 10pm the next day my roommate busts into the apartment and tells me to put some pants on (I had pajamas on, ok?) because “we’re fucking going out.” I wish I could say he wasn’t going to take no for an answer, but it was just me displaying my total lack of willpower. Insecurity tends to leave one susceptible to peer pressure. Luckily, since I got such a late start, I was able to contain myself fairly well. The next Sunday was a different story.

Holding a football party for a game that starts at 1pm is dangerous. By 6:30 or so (after everyone had left), I was all ready to stop drinking. Then my roommate and his girlfriend went into his bedroom to partake in an activity I haven’t experienced in a while which I know I can when I go to https://www.sexdatingapps.com/. Thus, it was time to go to Village Pourhouse to meet up with some of our earlier guests. Would I have heard them fucking if I stayed in the apartment with the Steelers-Broncos game blasting? Probably not. Have I heard them before? Plenty of times. But I wasn’t going to watch Tebow Time alone when I could be watching it in a bar among massive alcoholics — and I mean massive in both drinking quantity and physical size.

My plan was to grab something to eat immediately after the end of the Steelers-Broncos game. As it turned out, I was abandoned by four girls who had walked up into my general area right before the Tebow Miracle. In my despondence, I was sucked into stepping foot in another bar. Minutes later, the 35-year-old, 6’5″ Russian alcoholic I was hosting a couple of hours earlier ordered 10 tequila shots for three people. One of these three people was a 40-year-old woman (estimating) who didn’t want to drink any of the shots. As a result, I ended up downing three or four of the tequila shots.

After reaching a transcendent level of drunkenness, I figured it’d be a good idea to harass the cute bartender who had just gotten off her shift. I even tried to make light of the incessant drunken wooing she must encounter every day she works. It seemed to work, because I do remember talking to her for a significant amount of time. What I don’t remember is anything after she plugged her phone number into my phone. It was as if my brain decided to turn off the second it knew it had done its job. “Welp, you got an attractive female’s number? Time to shut down for the night.” I later arrived at my apartment unable to open the locks with my keys and cursing out the door for not letting me in and then screaming like a possessed person while I lay in bed.

The bartender never responded to my later text.

WOMEN

I’m not sure how much I need to expand on this topic, considering the initial section of this blog post. I did get the number of another bartender on Monday night, though. Unfortunately, it ended up being the wrong number. I figured this would happen after I asked the girl for her number, I typed it into my phone knowing it was wrong, asked her if the last four digits I had typed into my phone were right, she said they were wrong, and I typed them in half-heartedly knowing they were wrong yet again but didn’t want to ask a third time. Fuck. Me.

I also have replaced one unhealthy online obsession (which existed in the real world for a short period of time) with another unhealthy online obsession. Is this progress?

BLOGGING

I took a three month break between posts. It has been about an additional month’s wait for another post. This is obviously unacceptable. And while I haven’t made much progress on this individual blog front, I have created a baseball blog at Second Squad Sorrows. I credit former Roto Hardball colleague and fellow long-distance relationship sufferer @scottskillings with pushing me to create the blog. Mets and White Sox fans together to wallow in the patheticness of their respective teams. Wonderful.

INTERNET

I want to spend less time on the internet; I assume most people nowadays feel the same way. I have not improved at all since the calendar flipped over to 2012. I feel comfortable in assuming this is the case for most people who try to cut internet social interaction out of their lives. I know one person on NeoGAF who has just replaced his NeoGAF forum time with tweets and YouTube comments. YOUTUBE COMMENTS. It doesn’t get any more desperate than commenting on YouTube. That is like when Josh Hamilton took whatever painkillers he could to simulate his Oxycodane addiction (note: I have no idea how accurate this is).

EXERCISE

It took me about a month, but I finally did some intense exercise in 2012. And it was only due to the insistence of my roommate’s girlfriend. And it was only for 15 effective minutes out of a total 30. It was the P90X Ab Ripper X video and it’s four days later and my hip flexors still hurt. Goddamn it. I better take at least a couple of runs this week or else the indoor soccer game I have next Friday is going to be an unmitigated disaster.

- Since I didn’t make a 9/11 post here a week ago, I’ll just mention how I do not give a shit where people were when the planes hit or the towers fell. We were all in class or at work or sleeping, I get it. If you’re going to write something like Rany Jazayerli did, that’s cool, but 140 characters is just garbage in this case.

- It’s pretty amazing how people — on my feed, at least — show up when a sporting event gets really interesting. I like to think Twitter has allowed people to see many more no-hitters, 5-set Grand Slam tennis matches, and overtime Stanley Cup playoff games.

- I don’t understand people who follow a few select people who exclusively tweet about one topic. I follow people I find interesting or amusing, regardless of content. It just so happens I follow a very large percentage of baseball (and Mets) fans because they are the people I come across most. I’m sure this has nothing to do with my own tweeting habits.

- My follower count really wishes I were an attractive girl, or at least played one on the internet.

- Every person I’ve talked to about Keith Law (@keithlaw) thinks he comes across as arrogant (and even Michael Lewis jumped in this week). But he’s still the only ESPN employee (outside of Grantland writers) I follow, due to him being, you know, intelligent.

- I’ve said this before, but I should have quit Twitter after this tweet.

- Does everyone remember when you could see all the tweets from someone who you followed, even the replies to people you didn’t also follow? I definitely remember the uproar when that changed. Can you imagine how much of a disaster your feed would be if that magically changed back?

- Drive has to be garnering the most polarizing movie tweet reviews I’ve ever seen. It’s either “fuck awesome” or “one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen.”

- Outside of the previously linked Ayn Rand fatality tweet, I really don’t understand why I come up with my best Twitter material when everyone is asleep. I guess it’s probably because once my head hits my pillow I have to choose between thinking about my life or coming up with humorous tweets; the latter is much less stressful. Honestly, unwinding with some indacloud beforehand makes the late-night creativity flow even easier.

- The difference between the David Wright mentions in my last two REAL TALK posts is hilarious and depressing. June: He’s awesome! August: He sucks!

- How is it that women just know when you have given up on or forgotten them and subsequently decide to initiate intimacies again?

- The Prisoner (1967) is one of the weirdest television shows I have ever seen, but it also has one of the best openings ever.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9AL7npkSXZE

- Who decided Chris Bosh was a great basketball player? I’m asking because due to my lack of basketball knowledge nowadays, I was led to believe he would make a perfect third man for the Wade-LeBron duo. Is this like the baseball writers who thought Jeff Francoeur was good?

- Someone needs to manufacture a breathalyser for people to log on to their computers.

- I think forgetting to wear a belt for the second time in a month is grounds for being committed (I’m losing my mind).

-  The American public seriously needs to stop being averse to subtitles. Inglourious Basterds did well because it was by Quentin Tarantino and featured plenty of English, allowing it to hide the presence of subtitles in its marketing. I remember telling my “boss” to watch it and when I mentioned subtitles he groaned and I wanted to slam his face into the nearby desk.

- I must be one of the few internet-obsessed people left in the Western world without a smartphone.

- As great as the Mets’ front office now is, it’s going to be a depressingly inactive offseason for them. But hearing your GM say that their top starting pitching prospect is not going to be used in the bullpen as a stopgap anymore can’t help but be encouraging.

- Building a PC is less intimidating to me than preparing a multi-course dinner for two. Unfortunately, only the latter helps you get laid.

I must have wanted to make this thread for around two months now. Once I was invited to thebox.bz I quickly acquainted myself with the amazingness of Newswipe – basically the UK’s answer to The Daily Show. Only instead of episodes every weeknight throughout the year, Newswipe follows the usual British TV schedule of six episodes each year. This allows Newswipe to maintain its high quality throughout an entire run, except for the poetry segments (you’ll see what I mean).

I’ll go ahead and post a segment from the show — despite it already made the rounds on the internet multiple times — because it is that perfect.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHun58mz3vI

Charlie Brooker is really, really awesome. I did a little wiki’ing and I found out that Newswipe is actually a spinoff of the more popular Screenwipe, in which Brooker rips on (I assume) British television. I’m sure it’s awesome, but I’ve never had the urge to watch, due to my non-existent knowledge of the vast majority of television across the pond. Except for one show, of course. And that would be Peep Show. But I highly doubt he makes fun of that show, since it’s fucking awesome.

Since I was on a Charlie Brooker -wipe binge, I noticed something called Gameswipe on thebox.bz as well. That was an extremely entertaining 50-minute rundown of gaming history. So basically, anything Charlie Brooker is involved in proves to be awesome. Which means I need to get around to checking out You Have Been Watching. The following is the only clip I’ve seen from it, and I’m still recovering from the knowledge that BIBLEMAN is real.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8EIS5_kpS4c

I also need to check out That Mitchell and Webb Look, since it’s the same guys (David Mitchell and Robert Webb) who star in Peep Show.

And then there’s The Thick of It, the television series which In The Loop — probably the funniest movie of last year — was based on. Oh oh, and Misfits, which I actually have watched. It’s been described as a cross between the British teen drama Skins (which I’ve never seen) and Heroes. That probably doesn’t sound all that good to a discerning American TV viewer, but it’s pretty fun. It’s like if Heroes starred all teenagers with superpowers, but actually featured competent writing. And there’s swearing. And tits. I hope it sounds more enticing now.

So now you have a list of shit you should download if you ask for an invite (which you obviously should do):

Peep Show
Newswipe
Gameswipe
You Have Been Watching
That Mitchell and Webb Look
Misfits
The Thick of It

Just make sure to keep your ratio above 1.00, alright?

Edit: You should probably check out Spaced, too. If only because it’s by the same guys behind Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. I really need to start taking my own advice, though.

- The slow animated GIF problem will always be there. And in addition to that, I had heard some Mac users complain about how GIFs need to load completely before they animated at all, but I hadn’t come across it until a couple of weeks ago. Thankfully, it only lasted for a day or two. I have no idea what happened.

- When I was recently looking for info on golf handicaps, I was directed to About.com and when I got there, the correct formatting flashed for about 0.3 seconds before reverting back to a 1995-style webpage with no formatting whatsoever. I try reloading numerous times and the same thing happened everytime. And it happened with a bunch of About.com pages. But hey, it seems to be working now!

- Highlighting text can be extremely wonky sometimes. I have no way to expand on this — it’s just very annoying.

- Almost every time I click on the “Publish” button after finishing up a blog post, it ends up loading forever and I need to highlight my entire post and copy it and then refresh the page and paste it back in the editing box and hit “Publish” again. I even tried hitting “Save Draft” before attempting to publish, and while it worked the first time around, that was not indicative of future attempts.

- As someone commented in my last Chrome-related post, the search bar (apparently called the OmniBox?) is not nearly as quick as the Firefox AwesomeBar. It is also much less reliable.

- In preparation for my Song of the Week post yesterday, I attempted to listen to the direct link of “Sorrow” only to greeted with a second of painful corruption noise before the song actually started. I thought the song got corrupted during its upload to my webspace, but when I tested it in Firefox, it was totally fine. And when I tested it within its Flash player in the actual blog post, it was also fine. Bizarre.

These complaints aren’t enough to push me back to Firefox because it’s much easier to stick with the status quo, and that is now Chrome for me, minor frustrating issues aside. It just sheds some light on why Chrome hasn’t eaten much into Firefox’s marketshare; IE has been the browser hurt most by Chrome since the latter’s release.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLWlBgj0uOc

The All 35-And-Older Team – A collection of the best old men of baseball, lead by — who else — Derek Jeter.

Cutting the Currency Gordian Knot – This doesn’t even require a link, since it’s such a simple idea, but I’m totally low on links this week — especially since an awesomely bad YouTube video involving Scott Stapp was taken down.

Top 10 Ways to Access Blocked Stuff on the Web – Download YouTube videos, utilize proxies to watch other countries’ streaming TV, read news behind a paywall — do all this and more!

Climate Catastrophe: A Superstorm for Global Warming Research – A pretty good rundown of Climategate and all the political and societal forces that surround it.

Baseball Tweets: A Series? – I am constantly amazed by how much Joe Posnanski is able to write. And he’s able to do it with referencing Beverly Hills 90210 or some other shitty 90s show, like some other sportswriter that can’t fit a column into less than 5,000 words.

This blog, The Somewhat Manly Nerd, was originally just another WordPress.com blog. As you can tell by the archives, I started it about three and half years ago (Fuck).

About two years ago, I bought the somewhatmanlynerd.com domain from GoDaddy. But then I didn’t do anything with it for a year. I should have been telling people to go to that URL, while having it redirect to my thesomewhatmanlynerd.wordpress.com blog. Instead, I paid 10 bucks for that first year and did nothing with it. By this time, I was getting about 400 hits a day on the blog. Not too many commenters, but certainly more than I’ve gotten since I moved to self-hosting.

So after that first year of wasting my lame domain, Dreamhost had some deal for four years of hosting for 200 bucks. I figured it was a decent enough time to jump in, if only to have somewhere to host all my GIFs in one place without having to worry about going over my Photobucket bandwidth limit. And I also had wanted to move my blog to self-hosting for a while. I guess the reasons ranged from possibly wanting to put an ad somewhere just for curiosity’s sake, to not liking any of the themes on WordPress.com, to wanting to be able to use Javascript on my blog.

Moving my blog over to my new webspace about a year ago has resulted in this creation, and I’m almost as proud of it as the awesome putt I made on a practice green today. A few dozen people read it and a handful of them occasionally comment. But it is kinda maddening that the old version still gets twice the traffic after not being updated in over a year. I shouldn’t have moved in the first place. I gave up 400 hits a day! Now I’m lucky if I get that in a week. And I guess pride does factor into it, but I also just miss having massive comment threads like the one I got on this Bear Grylls post; I like creating discussion with my blog, even if it’s moronic discussion.

And then I see that WordPress.com now has the very theme I’m using, and on top of that it’s being used by an e-friend of mine on her blog Baby Got Books. She was no doubt inspired by me, which is flattering, but it also makes me want to move back. But then I’d have to give up my nice looking polls, and my Featured Content Gallery, and my embedded Hulu videos. It’s too much to sacrifice.

I remember I also thought about moving to Tumblr, just because people seem very big on reposting stuff from other Tumblr blogs and following people and all that community crap. But that crap allows people to build up readership. I stayed away from Tumblr because I thought every possible theme looked like crap, but I guess there is quite a bit you can do, as evidenced by this Tumblr creation from another e-buddy, How To Kidnap A Supermodel. If only Tumblr allowed massive GIFs, I would have an awesome Tumblr just for them.

I need to move to a new paragraph, because I’ve hit the limit for the word “Tumblr” contained in one. It does hit that balance between blogging and Twitter. Maybe I’ll try to make some more awful movie charts and make a Tumblr just for them.

And this is another shitty, boring blog post that I’m going to end now. I apologize to anyone subscribed to me waking up this Monday morning. Not a good way to start your week.

ICheckMovies isn’t nearly the site any of the above are, but it’s a fun way to keep track of the movies you “need” to see. Sure, you could just keep track yourself by looking at the IMDB Top 250 yourself and making a mental note of the fact that Seven Samurai should really be given top priority, but where’s the needless time-wasting in that? With this website, you can take a quick look at the unchecked movies in that Top 250, or Roger Ebert’s (338) Great Movies, or The New York Times Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made, or Academy Award Best Pictures, or any of the few dozen lists on the site. Damn, there’s even a list for A.V. Club’s New Cult Canon — that’s pretty fucking cool.

All I’ve done so far is go down the IMDB Top 250 list, checking off just over half of the movies. I like the decade breakdown for the movies I’ve seen:

I think it’s a combination of my own arguably philistine viewing habits and the IMDB Top 250 itself, and the endless stream of content IPTV Angebote. When The Dark Knight is ranked 10th and (500) Days of Summer is on the list AT ALL, you know there’s some voter partiality towards newer movies.

I can tell I’m going to have fun going through all the lists on the site. The idea to bring together so many great lists and allow you to keep easy track of your progress on each is yet another example of why I love the internet, even if sometimes I hate many of the people that populate it.