April 2009
15 posts
on parenting, aging, and 'alternate timelines'
jeremy: “i really like your asteroids story, because i’m the same age as your father was at that time—i’m 34 now, which makes me sad, but, you know, you deal with it. every year, you deal with it.”
me: “someday i’m going to be older than my dad, who is just, like, perpetually 35.”
jeremy: “but i can see myself, if i had gone ahead and gotten married to the girl i was dating in college, i would’ve, you know, gone on to live a, probably, more constructive life than i have now, had a good job, not write about video games and, you know, i would’ve… i would’ve maybe played some old video games out of nostalgia, but really not kept up. and this year, i would be looking at bionic commando, and i would be saying to my child, ‘do you know what this is? this is bionic commando! but look how good it looks!’”
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Using your cell phone to apartment-hunt
“The evolution of real estate is towards mobile, and we need to make it easier for people to search for properties while they’re on the go,” says Rob Cross of Trulia. Indeed: the last time I scoured a city for an apartment, I did it on foot. I marched up to apartment buildings that had the landlords’ office numbers taped up in the front window; I called from outside each building. Ultimately, I did find an apartment in a neighborhood I liked, but by using Craigslist.
Unfortunately, most iPhone apartment-hunting software scores dismally on the 5-star app scale. It’s a shame, too, because a lot of these new apps use the iPhone’s GPS to search for nearby vacancies.
So I tweeted my plight. “What are the best iPhone apps,” I asked the ether, “for apartment-hunting?”
Six hours later, this guy tweeted back. “build a query of your criteria on craigs and then grab the rss of it!” he suggested.
I marched my browser over to Craigslist. I started small: I searched for all Chicago apartments — any neighborhood — under $1300/mo. (It sounds steep, but $1300/mo will rent a home a million billion jillion times the size of my current San Francisco apartment, which is, ahem, priced similarly.) Anyway, that query generates this link: http://chicago.craigslist.org/search/apa?query=&minAsk=min&maxAsk=1300&bedrooms=
Scrolling to the bottom of the screen, there’s an RSS icon, which links to a feed unique to just this particular query. If I grab the link location, I end up with this ugly RSS url: http://chicago.craigslist.org/search/apa?query=&minAsk=min&maxAsk=1300&bedrooms=&format=rss
So I plug that URL into bit.ly, which yields a new link: http://bit.ly/2V2Srg (I know this part sounds like overkill, but it’s necessary for the next step!)
Here is the tricky secret: you will arrive at Google Reader’s mobile feedreader if you preface any (er, almost any) feed link with http://www.google.com/reader/m/view/feed/.
In this case, when I visit http://www.google.com/reader/m/view/feed/http://bit.ly/2V2Srg from my phone, I get an up-to-date, mobile-friendly RSS feed of every Chicago apartment priced under $1300. (It turns out that, for whatever reason, you can’t ‘double-bit.ly’ that final feed, so tinyurl it or whatever instead, like so: http://tinyurl.com/chhowv) And bookmark that shit!
Ultimately, I will end up with several links on my iPhone’s dashboard, with each up-to-date mobile feed representing a different Craigslist neighborhood search. Hot!
Reblog with the story of your first kiss.
I was in junior high, I think. And he’d just asked me to go to some dance. He was new to the school district, so he didn’t know I was a dork. He was sort of gross, but he was pale and he had strawberry-blonde hair, which I liked. Right before the dance, he told everyone I’d given him a blow job.
Oh, also, there’s my longtime friend Mark. In the third grade, I pinned him down during recess as all the girls chanted, “Lips! Lips! Lips! Lips!” He wriggled and writhed. I kissed him on the cheek instead of the lips, then let him go. He ran away screaming.
I think this story is totally cute… for being about physical or sexual assault, anyway.
(via lococommotion)
slutty girl freshman year.
IT WAS MAGICAL
long haired green eyed italian guy my freshman year in college….he tried to steal my soul, thankfully i was able to save myself.
I was drunk and barely remember it. woohoo
It was with my first boyfriend Fred. It was actually really nice! Not awkward.
