I am done with work until next year. Hooray! Now to get caught up on the 10,000 or so news articles I have failed to read over the last few months.

Bobby, this is for you.

WordPress’s absolutely piss-poor support of the different YouTube video size dimensions leaves something to be desired. I tried to post a larger size of this so you could see this in all its full glory, but only the standard size is available for here. Fuck. This really must be experienced in full-screen mode for the full effect. I’d suggest going to YouTube and watching the bigger version there.

WordPress, all I want for Christmas is better embeddable object support. Get to it!

The site is called Guys with iPhones. It shouldn’t be too hard to figure out what this site’s about. Simple concept here, but flawless execution. It probably goes without saying that the site is NSFW. Conspicuous consumption and societal conformity aside… it’s one of my favorite sites now. I’ve always liked these kinds of self-pics but never knew of a one-stop shop that accumulated them. Hooray!

This year, I am not going to get caught up in the typical Christmas shopping bullshit. I have decided that, until I am finished with my shopping, I will go shopping on my lunch break every damn day until it is complete. I actually started this practice a couple of weeks ago, and I’d say I am a little over halfway done with my shopping already. Normally I’m a last-minute kind of shopper, and going out among the other raving, foaming-at-the-mouth capitalists is always a pain and makes me sad about humanity. But this way, I can fulfill my societal and economic obligations in a way that will minimize the amount of human interaction required! Plus, having to sacrifice my lunch break to do this gives me an incentive to hurry up and get it over with, which will free up my time in December around the holidays. Hooray!

And no, I am not shopping tomorrow. I am going to get my oil changed and my tires balanced and rotated, which is something I’ve been needing to do for some time. It is also tempting to indulge in Buy Nothing Day, but I can rationalize getting my car worked on since it’s not really a product I’m buying but a service. I think the day’s more about not consuming any products rather than not engaging in the exchange of money at all.

The psychological implications of Crazy Frog’s foray into reggaeton have yet to fully dawn on me. There is too much shit going on in this video.

The lack of pants… the presence of children… I don’t even know where to begin with this. Internet, you continue to amaze me with your capacity to jump the shark with every goddamn meme available… and to disturb me in profound ways with all these situations and premises that never even occurred to me.

I was never particularly close to my great uncle; he was on a side of the family that I didn’t often interact with. So when my mother notified me last night that he had killed himself, my immediate reaction was not of grief, but of shock.

We had missed it. We had missed all the warning signs that could have tipped us off that something was terribly, terribly wrong. But hindsight is always 20/20, and there were things that we should have noticed. He was out of work and they were slipping deeper and deeper into debt. A lifelong alcoholic, his addiction worsened and he became more reclusive, not even going out to visit his sister here a few weeks ago when she flew in from Washington state. We should have stepped in. We should have all been closer. We should have done something different than what we did… which was nothing.

This is not the first time my family’s been marred by such self-destructive behavior. When I was just a little boy, my teenaged second cousin took a rifle and ended his life. I was too young to be fully aware of what was going on, of what had happened and what an impact it was having on everyone. There was some speculation that it might have been accidental. I think in times like that, it’s something to soften the pain, the incomprehensible feeling that a part of your family felt so alienated that he could off himself–and not only that, but that the person could feel so indifferent to what effect such an act would have on the surviving family. It is a pain far sharper and far more difficult to deal with than an ordinary death under ordinary circumstances. It truly is the ultimate selfish act.

It is no secret that I’ve had such thoughts and such desires in my past. I’ve wandered through some dark places when I was lost in my emotional devastation, and I’ve considered that ultimate selfish act as a possible means to an end. But with this, with all this–the effect it’s having on the rest of the family, the investigations, the autopsy, the floating rumors of possible murder instead of suicide that will probably remain regardless of the findings of the authorities–it has ultimately and definitively proven to me what horrible consequences there are to ending one’s life. And in the depths, in the deepest depths of any wretchedness I might experience, I could never willfully and intentionally inflict such harm on the people I care about. The death of my great uncle has made me realize all this. And I suppose that this realization is the greatest gift he could have ever given me.

It’s pretty sad when my free time is actually busier than my work time.

Work is keeping me occupied enough. It’s pretty steady but I am treading water, not really getting behind or making much progress. But when it comes to my free time, I am getting woefully behind. There are so many things that I want to do in my free time that I don’t know where to begin. I am far, far behind in my blog reading–I’ve already abandoned all hope of catching up there–and I have literally thousands of bookmarked articles on The Huffington Post and Towleroad that I need to get around to reading. I’ve been wanting to resume work on some D&D material I’ve been thinking about, as well as some musical projects I’ve been turning over in my mind. I’ve got a book or two that I’ve been trying to make time to finish reading, plus I need to compile all my old stuff from the old blogs before they are lost forever. And don’t get me started on basic housework. And Christmas shopping. Ugh, seems every time I turn around the list just gets longer and longer.

The fact that, as of late, I’ve turned into an object of desire for a great many people is doing nothing to help me work my way down the list. In fact it may be the reason why I’ve gotten so behind–too busy enjoying all the flirtation and all the attention. I reckon it’s a good problem to have…

I’m going to have to open up bidding on my leisure time to contractors in order to get everything covered!

This seal, which forms an acrostic of V I T R I O L, would have been useful back when I blogged under that other old alias of mine.

Unrelated to the previous post…