Author Archives: Philip Berne

I love the show Game of Thrones on HBO. The show is fantastic. It’s one of the best shows to come along in a while. It’s exciting, sexy, complicated, and it has just a touch of fantasy thrown in, mainly to keep you guessing about the possibilities of what’s to come. In the first episodes of the first season, did you really expect to see dragons? But then that platinum blond Khaleesi woman steps out of the fire completely naked with a dragon on her shoulder and it was the probably the coolest thing I have ever seen on television. Wait, have you seen Game of Thrones? If you haven’t, you should subscribe to HBO right now so you can start watching.

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There is an alternate universe somewhere in which I am a lexicographer. I write dictionaries for a living. This is not the pipe dream of a grammar-obsessed former English teacher. Right out of grad school (Master’s in English), I turned down an opportunity to work for the Oxford English Dictionary. The job was for a specialist in Caribbean dialects of English. It sounded fantastic. The OED recruiters made clear this was not a stepping stone job for editors and writers. Being a lexicographer leads only to being a better, more experienced lexicographer. Instead, I took a job that involved writing and technology and pop culture, and my life was set on its course. But in an alternate world, I made a different choice and took the dictionary job, and now I sit in a dark apartment in Manhattan mumbling to myself about the horror of language on the Internet.

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Stop taking pictures of your food. You’re a lousy photographer, and I’m tired of looking at your photos. They are disgusting. While you may be excited about the delicious / unique / unfathomably fattening food you are about to consume, that does not mean you need to mark the occasion with an Instagram or Twitter post. Just don’t. Eat your 17 pound burger, or your pizza with a fried shrimp crust, or your bacon ice cream sundae, and keep it to yourself.

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Now, I’m mad. At first, it was funny. I definitely didn’t stay to the very end of the movie when I saw “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” in the theaters, but when I saw the movie at home, I saw the bonus scene at the end. The “stinger,” as it’s sometimes called. Roger Ebert called this the “Monk’s Reward,” because you need to have the patience of a monk to sit through the final credits for the payoff. But if you managed to make it through the scroll of names at the end of Ferris Bueller, Matthew Broderick appears on screen and tells the audience to go home. The movie’s over. Go home.

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People aren’t likely to tell you how bad your photos are, or how much your photo stream is boring them to tears. So I’m here to help. Not to help you, to help them, by teaching you which pictures you should not post. Following is a list of my absolute least favorite photos to see. Everything else is fair game. Beyond this list, feel free to shoot anything and everything that would make a good photo. But if it’s on my list, please stop. I’m begging you. I’ve had enough.

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At the end of the movie “The Grey,” everyone dies. Liam Neeson dies. That totally awesome moment in the trailer where he breaks some mini-bar bottles and tapes them to his fists, ready to do battle with the Alpha wolf? Two seconds later the credits roll, and the implication is clearly that he went down fighting. Oh, wait. SPOILER ALERT. Sorry, I should have said that at the very beginning.

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I have played Diablo III for dozens of hours. I have beaten the normal difficulty level with one of my “Heroes,” and I have made solid progress with a variety of characters representing each class. I came to the new sequel already a fan. I played through and beat Diablo II perhaps a dozen times, at nearly every difficulty level with every type of character. But now I’m done. I’m moving on. It finally hit me: Diablo III is the worst game I’ve ever played, for hours and hours and hours.

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I have tried them all. I have been using Pandora since the early days, and I pay for the premium Pandora service. I tried, for at least a month each and often more, all of the old guard of the streaming music services. Rhapsody. Napster. Slacker Radio. I owned a Zune HD, and subscribed to Zune, and when I bought my first Windows phone, I subscribed again to give it a second try. When Spotify got hot, I tried it for a while, sharing playlists and music. I have tried Rdio and Last.fm. I’ve spent time on Turntable. For a couple days, I even used Ping. But there is one online music service that is my favorite by far. I’ve been using it for almost a year, and it’s actually gotten better since I started. I listen at work on my desktop, on my smartphone while I’m exercising, and in my car on my stereo.

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One of my Facebook friends recently posted about her 20-year high school reunion. We went to the same high school, and she was a year ahead of me. I have perhaps a dozen other Facebook friends from my high school who were all in that same graduating class, but she was the only one who mentioned the reunion. This took me by surprise for a couple of reasons. First, I had forgotten that my own high school 20-year reunion will happen next year. For those readers who are now thinking about how old I am to be writing such a thing, trust me, you won’t feel so old when you get here.

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When Google sent BASE jumpers hurtling from a blimp as part of the first day Google I/O Keynote presentation, I was barely impressed. The jumpers were demonstrating the Project Glass wearable computer that Google is developing, and which I and just about all of my friends are lusting over. I had seen plenty of skydivers jumping with wearable cameras strapped to them. Then the Googlers landed, and another team started riding BMX bikes on the roof of the Moscone center, where the conference is being held. Yawn. Finally, climbers rappelled down the side of the building. Ho-hum. The point seemed to be that Google Glass was real, and that the glasses would not fall off your face as you fell onto San Francisco from a zeppelin. But then Google showed something that blew my mind.

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Paul Miller, a writer for the Web site The Verge, has famously quit the Internet. For a year. I say famously, because every writer from The Verge that I follow is completely obsessed with this topic. While this is a site that normally operates like a Band of Brothers and Sisters on social networks, the level of buzz that Miller's decision has garnered has been even more extreme. CNN covered this 'event' as news. Let me reiterate that I follow almost every writer from The Verge on Twitter, and I count quite a few of them as friends and the rest as respected colleagues. So I hope they'll take this gentle ribbing in stride. But I must say, quitting the Internet is silly.

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Since I joined Facebook, I have excised exactly 2 photos from my timeline at the request of my friends. The first was a photo of a friend who is now an up and coming actor. He's doing great work on the big screen, both here in the U.S. and in southeast Asia, and his popularity is starting to soar. We used to sing together in an a cappella group. Think "The Sing Off," but with more stubble and less talent. I posted a goofy looking picture of our old group, and I tagged all of us. Then I got an email from him asking me to remove his name.

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