Losing someone close to the holidays is always difficult. The same is true for the loss of my beloved websites. Oink was always so giving around this time of year. You could download as much as you wanted and it was no problem. Oink didn’t even want anything back. But the worst part about losing friends like these if you have to go back and start hanging with friends you ditched when you met you better and cooler friends. The first phone call is always awkward as you reach out to those old friends who are slow and unreliable. Those old friends like to pull stupid pranks too. Like just when you think you’re downloading a movie that hasn’t been released in theatres yet, it turns out this friend renamed the most depraved porn you can imagine Juno or I’m Not There.

I just want to have every album, movie and television program I can think of at a moment’s notice and I don’t want to pay anything. But lawyers keep shitting on my party and shutting down sites that help me achieve this dream. Though it may feel like they’re winning a few battles, the war is ultimately a futile one. Okay, they want to make money, fair enough. Rather than fighting the most powerful marketing tool ever invented they should get with start rolling with the punches and realize there are plenty of lucrative ways to make money outside of selling CDs and tickets to movies. It’s old school thinking and it’s going to be dead soon. Companies can either smarten up or risk perishing themselves. If that mostly unfounded proclamation doesn’t change anyone’s mind, could you just change your ways out of pity for me? I’m running out of friends fast and I’m starting to get lonely. My hard drive won’t fill itself.

Occult Supplies and 24 hour Computer Repair read the sign in the window. I entered and there were various items like shrunken heads, eyes of newts and severed hands in jars of formaldehyde all over the place. The shelves there were filled various evil texts like The Necronomicon and The Catcher in the Rye. Behind the counter is one of the weird kids that I went to high school with who dressed in black and hung out by the tennis courts.

“Sure, we’ll take look at it and get right back to you,” he said. “We’ll even give you a loaner laptop so you can work on the editor’s letter in the meantime. There’s just one thing that’s kind of weird about it… no matter how hungry you are and no matter how much your stomach growls, don’t eat around it after midnight.”

“Sure thing,” I replied, stuffing the rather clunkylooking machine in my knapsack. “See ya tomorrow…” I said, as I ran out the door.

The loaner was slower than evolution. I couldn’t type a complete sentence without getting that spinning color wheel. I decided I couldn’t work on the cursed machine anymore. Frustrated, I did what I always do when I’m working and hit an impasse; I make nachos then go to sleep. I noticed it was well after midnight but I figured what the hell. I’ve never been very good at following rules so why should I start now?

I awoke with an artery-blocking mixture of sour cream and six kinds of cheese on my shirt and the feeling that I was not alone in the room. In the corner there stood a solitary figure in a purple robe.

“Guy, you really picked the wrong place to break into. I own nothing except a large stack of promo CDs that don’t even have the album art. If you leave right now, I won’t call the cops.”

It was then he drew a giant metal hook and came at me. I reached for the nearest object, the laptop, and used it to defend a blow that surely would have given me an unnecessary new orifice. With the hook now firmly stuck in the laptop, I was able to wrestle it away from the figure in purple. I pulled the hook out of the laptop’s casing and just starting wailing on my attacker. I hit him. Then again. And again. Then everything just went kind of black. I open my eyes and it’s morning.

“Oh thank God, ” I thought. “It was only a horrible dream! This is what happens when you eat spicy food before you go to bed”

I returned to the store the next day and the clerk smugly said, “Sorry, but we were unable to fix your computer. You lost everything and it’ll cost more to fix it than it would be to buy a new one.

That’ll be $200 for diagnosing the problem“

“Nooooooooo, ” I screamed to the heavens as I handed over the loaner. He immediately flipped it over and there was a giant gash on it that could have only been made by a giant metal hook.

“Sorry,” he said again “but there’s no way I can give you your damage deposit back.”

“Noooooooooo!”

One alarming trend I’ve come across in recent years is amateur nude photographic self-portraits. Cindy Sherman these photos ain’t. They’re characterized by being poorly lit, with an obtrusive flash, and the subject usually has a dumb look on their face. Frighteningly, it’s not just the camwhores and college girls gone wild doing this. It’s women you know. Women with husbands and boyfriends, women with parents and grandparents, girls next door and girls upstairs.

This is a relatively new phenomenon. I’m pretty confident there weren’t people in the 1800s taking their clothes off, holding pinhole cameras in front of really shiny sheets of copper and waiting eight hours for a photo to develop. Call it a weird conflux of digital technology and the cult of celebrity. What it boils down to is we have large groups of people who are so starved for attention they’ll take nude photos of themselves with their cameras and share them with the general public.

It starts with a casual shot that maybe, even accidentally, shows a little too much cleavage. It’s a slippery slope from there. Before you know it, it’s shirt up, tits out, snap, upload. Then bam! Some pervo sees the photo and it’s right click, save as to his hard drive. Experts say the only way to truly ensure that data can’t be recovered from a hard drive is to take a sledgehammer to it. Are you prepared to hunt down every single perv with an internet connection and take a sledgehammer to their computer?

We tell people that smoking pot leads to heroin, that having a drink leads to alcoholism, that having a cigarette leads to lung cancer and that having sex leads to STDs. Why aren’t we educating people that taking bad and revealing photos of oneself with their camera and posting them on internet leads to a life of shame?

I write this not to pass judgment, but to educate and encourage future generations to think carefully before publishing nude pics online. Always keep in mind that amateur nude photographic self-portraits are a lot like a loonie: once it leaves the mint, it’s in circulation forever. But unlike a loonie, when an amateur nude pic finds its way into the sewers of the internet, it just changes hands more rapidly. Consider yourself warned.

Who wants to leave the house anyways? Outside is overrated. It’s cold, it’s wet, it’s gray and it’s depressing out there. Inside is warm, dry and I have a TV that’s capable of reproducing 29 billion colours, which makes me happy (if for some reason I want to see gray, the television can show 3000 different shades of it). On those sad days when I do leave the house, I spend most of my time trying to impress people with how many lines of resolution my TV has—1080 if you were wondering—as this is important stuff that people want to know. I’d invite these people to come over and watch Batman Begins in HD but I’d rather leave them in awe with the hard numbers. I know what the women are thinking. “Oh sure, you can go over to the guy’s place and his plasma screen measures 60 inches diagonally and people’s pores are the size of your fist. And the surround sound system… Oh the surround sound. It’s like being surrounded by a choir of angels. But we all know he only got all that shit because he’s lousy in the sack.”

Speaking of sack, I moved my bed into the living room. The rationale behind this is simple. You have to bolt the TV to the wall while beds are comparatively mobile. Now that my bed is in front of the TV, I’ve found that I don’t ever need to leave it, save the occasional bathroom or snack break. I have wireless internet and a cell phone so I don’t even need to go to work. I can get food delivered. I can even pay a nurse to come over to sponge bath me and change the sheets so I don’t get bedsores. Sure I’ve gained 30 pounds and the only phone calls I get are from collection agencies but it’s worth it. These HBO box sets won’t watch themselves.

Before I go any further, this sentence right here is the one where I give the obligatory disclaimer that I don’t watch porn. I’m not one of “those guys” and I was only doing this so you don’t have to. The film in question was a reality-television inspired work that revolved around a girl with an oversized posterior. Spoiler alert: There’s no parade. So we’re talking about a fetish porno for the guy who’s so into porn he needs to have it on his iPod. So we’re looking at a doubly small audience here, right?

Not so. To give you an idea of how popular it was, at the time I was downloading Ass Parade along with 20 other people, which isn’t a lot. But a mere eight people were downloading the video iPod version of King Kong. So this is either a raging endorsement to the popularity of iPod porno or a total condemnation of Peter Jackson’s latest cinematic effort. So get ready. The private will become public. Stuff that should be kept in the home office, at the bottom of your stack of DVDs or in the third drawer of your dresser underneath the sweatshirt that my grandmother got me for my birthday is about to burst into the streets.

The coolest thing you can do with technology is stuff that you’re not supposed to do with it. I think it’s safe to say that Steve Jobs probably didn’t have this in mind when he unleashed this product on an unsuspecting public. After millions of years of evolution we’ve finally reached the apex: the ability to watch a 30-minute porno while riding the bus to work. So enjoy. But please, not when you’re anywhere near me, degenerate.

So I’m sending emails on my phone to people overseas. One of these people overseas happens to live in the Middle East in a country that’s really hard to find on a map. He emails me back and tells me to download this free program called Skype so we can talk. I’m skeptical but I comply. Sure enough, this program transforms my computer into a phone that lets you make free long distance calls. We talked for like 45 minutes. The first 15 were me going “wow, I can’t believe this works” and not much else. So now my phone is a computer and my computer is a phone. If you think I’m going to quote Green Day lyrics right now you’re sadly mistaken.

Now I’m watching UK Satellite television and stumble across a show called Babecast XXX. It’s one of those shows that try and get desperate men to call in for phone sex with one of the beautiful strippers on the screen. During the day I think they have astrologists instead of strippers. What makes this different from what we have over here is there’s a box and a number you can text and have your message appear on the screen. The messages read like “ordr me abt as if i was ther pls humillat me” or “pls prss yr breasts agnst the camera.” And the great part is the women would respond to the messages. The XXX is a bit misleading in the name of the channel as it’s more like medium level-core sexual activities. The British are a little bit ahead of us so I think it’s safe to assume that British smut peddlers and perverts are the most technologically advanced people on the planet. They deserve props for bastardizing the text message.

Until you’ve sat on a porch sending and receiving emails on your cell phone as you use a wireless signal to use your laptop as a phone to chat with a friend on the other side of the planet while you send text messages with your cell phone (that’s actually good for talking on) to astrologists or strippers on a British satellite channel all at the same time… well then you just haven’t really lived. So I may not be tech savvy and yeah, I can’t explain to you how any of this stuff works. But the more you think about it “magic” doesn’t seem like that stupid an answer.