my smartphone's menus are hilariously intense.

it always makes me oddly sad when my mom calls when i'm in the middle of a meeting or class or something, because to reject the call, i have to hit this comically huge, bright red "REJECT" button right underneath this picture:

google chrome extensions are better than everything

so i started using chrome about six months ago, when my firefox became so bloated with (admittedly) awesome plugins that it took netscape-era amounts of time to load.  oddly enough, when i uninstalled all but like five plugins, firefox still insisted on sucking.  thus, enter chrome.  now i have a batmobile's worth of plugins for chrome, including some fiendishly awesome ones (shareaholic, rememberthemilk, gmail+, and chromedbird) and chrome's performance doesn't seem to be effected at all, even when i have like 10 tabs open (which is always).  seems that separate-process-for-each-tab was a great idea after all.

that said, i wouldn't recommend running a post-2006 FPS game with graphics maxed out while minimizing a 10-tab chrome window in the background.  shit goes down.

anyway, time to go eat thai food.  more lightning typing in the future!

speaking of the future: jetpacks?

introductions are in order

blog, meet ben.  ben, meet blog.  it's been awhile.  welcome back to the internet of opinions.

i had a lot of feelings this summer.  most of these feelings were had driving from pullman to canton to kent to nashville to canton to cambridge to sharon to kent to canton to pullman.  7000 more miles to my name.

i'm sort of implying through my tense use above that my summer is over.  not nearly; however, the part where i drive around in a car and do fucking awesome things is likely over.  and that's not necessarily a bad thing, because as usual, all the travelling was a great experience and gave me some always-necessary and valuable perspective on life that's just not possible to get when you're always in the same place, doing the same thing, even if that place is pullman (awesome!) and that thing is teaching and playing music at bars and eating thai food and having great friends (awesome!).

there have been so many great and noteworthy moments in the last month or two that to do my usual picture-posting-storytelling-thing would result in my absolutely leaving 95% of the coolness out.  so i won't.  in related news, as i've no doubt mentioned before, i now share almost all of my articles, photos, and videos and such via facebook.  i know it's not everyone's favorite platform, but the fact is that almost all my real-life friends are on there and i have the fuck-yeah-tastic shareaholic plugin for chrome which lets me share with everyone in one click.  so friend me if you haven't already, because facebook's going to be where the action is.  this blog is just going to be where the rambling, semi-coherent madness is.

and on that note, bye for five seconds!

i've already posted this elsewhere, but...

...it's amazing, so whatever.

Wilco - Country Disappeared - A Take Away Show from La Blogotheque on Vimeo.

some more mixtapes coming EXTREMELY SOON

by which i mean the next few weeks.

the only thing that ever made people read this blog in the first place (the mixtapes) will resume shortly.  i didn't actually get anything written today, as i spent most of the day figuring out how to wrap up my 110 course (i really want to get back in the swing of writing, but i figure that not getting fired for just not teaching my class is more important).  but.  i have been listening to a lot of new good (the new mike doughty) and bad (phoenix) music.  and a lot of that has ended up in a huge fucking folder called "mix" out of which i hope to develop a few new mixes.  so keep your eyes peeled (and if you are an insect or something that doesn't have eyelids, just take my suggestion figuratively, and keep looking at this blog).