Shyzer.com

EDIT: Ha, the Mariners are on a two game losing streak now. The Shyzer Curse strikes again!

How in the name of all things Holy do the Seattle Mariners have the 5th best record in baseball? (Fun Fact: The five highest ranked teams are in the American League. They might as well just let the National League start using aluminum bats and softballs.)

How is this possible? Are more than 15 teams on any given night getting losses added to their standings? I can see it now, the Nationals and Pirates are playing, the umps look into the stands to see only 18 people left (two of which are actually dead), and so they call the game and both teams take a loss thanks in part to their massive sucktitude. Is this a new rule that nobody told me about, because that’s about the only way I could see a scenario unfolding where the Mariners are where they are in the standings.

Richie Sexson’s batting average is the price of a Quarter Pounder, Ichiro is punching himself in the face, Jose Vidro is grounding into double plays despite hitting the ball to the warning track, the starting rotation has a combined ERA of 74 million, and nobody’s reminded King Felix that he’s the second coming of Christ. How in the hell is this team one of the better ranked teams in baseball? I’m serious here, I’m looking at the standings and adding up all the losses and wins, because I think somebody screwed up and just gave a bunch of teams a few extra notches in the L word category for no reason.

But fret not, my Seattle brethren, for we all know what is about to happen. The Mariners might even win a few more games before then, but come mid-July, our almost eerily naturally timed summer swoon will take place, the team will lose 90 out of 91 games (their lone win coming when George Steinbrenner eats the entire Yankees pitching staff in a fit of rage), and next summer we’ll be hearing our team name early in the draft! Don’t get me wrong, I still love the Mariners, following them with my same frenzied lust as always and watching most of their games on MLB.tv (the third greatest invention ever, behind the clapper and motorized toothbrushes. It’s actually about as reliable as those two as well.), but this is a horribly constructed baseball team that is even perplexing the fellas over at USSM. Dumb pure luck should no more be expected to last than that time I was Facebook God for a few hours (you know, I still don’t think I’ve told that story on here…) and any Mariners fan who is actually kidding themselves into thinking we have a shot at making the playoffs needs to spend a few hours with Ichiro in Cleveland.

That quote is never going to get old.

Thank you God for YouTube.

In case you can’t figure out what’s going on in the video above, apparently a “Lady Friend” approached this guy and offered him a fun time. When he refused, she made a play to swipe his cell phone and then proceeded to kick the crap out of him. The best part is when he retaliates with a flying kick and some flailing arms ninja-style.

One benefit to listening to NPR and surfing Digg throughout the day is that you stumble across all sorts of cool little sites and applications. From desktop sticky notes to live updates on where the cheapest drinks in town are to websites that will call you and remind you to pick up milk on the way home.

A lot of the sites are dependent on social interaction though. People sign up for the accounts, share their info, location, actions, or whatever else the service curtails to, and in return the benefits are that they are able to interact with all their friends who are also using the service, making it easy to communicate and coordinate. But that raises one small question.

Who the hell is using this stuff? Because I sure as hell know it’s none of my friends.

For instance, you’ve got Twitter. It’s basically a glorified AIM Away Message, making it one of the less helpful of all the Web 2.0 startups you’ve got out there. But nonetheless, you’ve got millions of people who can either IM or text message Twitter to change their away message and at the same time, you can just surf around looking at other people’s away messages. So every few minutes, you get text messages letting you know that Paul just ordered another rounds at O’Rileys or Sally just put some muffins in the oven.

Riveting, huh?

I guess I just don’t get the point of this. Even with sites like Dodgeball, I don’t see why people use them so much. Basically, you text your location to the website simply so that the website can update your map and tell other people where you are. When I was living in Columbia or Spartanburg or Newcastle, I had heaps of friends in the areas and even still, there were only a few local joints we all hung out at. If I needed to get in touch with somebody or meet up with them, I could either A) Walk to the pub we usually frequented or B) call them to see where they were. Why get a third party involved in the interaction?

I see that a lot of people using these services live in big cities, like New York or San Fran or the likes. Do people really have that many friends they keep up with that they need real time practical GPS accurate tracking of them? Or is this just yet another fad where people can stalk others for no reason other…well, ok, stalking is kind of fun. But still, why bother updating your own profile then?

Of course, my favorite new startup site is Going.com, which allows you to update your current bar location via text messages. Why? So that your friends can buy you a beer while they’re sitting at home.

Now that’s my kind of friend. *winks towards the giant, frosty mug on the sidebar.*

Eat it, New York Times. You can have your fancy crossword puzzle. I’ll take this weird game that is the bastard child of what I believe to be Sudoku and Saki.

This “game” goes from Super Easy to I Need A Drink in about 5 minutes, so just stick with it.

I’m not sure what’s more awesome; the fact that I didn’t edit that block of text below one bit or the fact that nobody will believe me when I say that.

The Mariners were clearly not thrilled with the detour before opening a three-game series against the Chicago Cubs on Tuesday.

“To tell the truth, I’m not excited to go to Cleveland, but we have to,” Ichiro said through an interpreter. “If I ever saw myself saying I’m excited going to Cleveland, I’d punch myself in the face, because I’m lying.”

[via USSMariner]

So what’s the proper solution to knee pains that crop up for absolutely no reason and continue to linger for weeks on end despite no rigorous activity on my part? Because if the answer is to drink heavily every night until the pain subsides, I am all over that.

Yeah, so Jericho’s back. Officially. They’ve got it slated as a seven or eight episode mid-season replacement, but if the initial Fall schedule goes poorly, it could be back as soon as October. If the ratings are good, CBS has promised to pick it up for a full season and yet if the ratings are bad, the show’s main writer has said they’ll be able to wrap it up and end it instead of leaving us with yet another unbearable cliffhanger.

But this post isn’t meant to bask in the glow of the awesomeness that is the Internet grassroots campaign that saved one of my favorite shows. No, wait…yeah. Yeah, it is. But because I love you, I’ll just keep this short and funny. So, you can either click the more link below or go directly to the source in order to read two of the best “could have happened” conversations ever.

(more…)

I’ve officially migrated to using a Mac full time now, more out of it being the best computer I have by far than anything else, and as a result I’ve gotten into doing things that I never did before. Like using RSS feeds, which is a huge shift from my previously held stance on them.

Long story short, I downloaded Vienna today, added all of my daily reads to it, and then decided to add all of my own sites to it just to check out how my posts look in an RSS reader. AND GUESS WHICH SITE HAS A BAD RSS FEED?!

Look Shyzer, I love you. I really do. You’re my favorite, and please don’t repeat that to Hey, It’s Free or Facebook Talk. All that’ll do is make for a really awkward family reunion, then Learn To Cheat will start drinking since he thinks nobody likes him and before you know it, all of your bastard cousins will show up and demand to know why I even bother to renew them every year. So just do me a favor and stop acting like a punk ass and just start to work like you’re supposed to. Come on, you know I take good care of you. Think about all of those poor little orphan sites that would kill to be in your shoes, like Circle of Jerks. He doesn’t even have a proper layout anymore! You want to end up like that?

See, that’s what I thought. So get your act together and start flying straight or else I’m so gonna send you to your room and not let you talk to Google anymore.

What day is it? Saturday night? Perfect, then that means it’s time to copy Angela and do a Thirteen Thursday. Apparently this week’s topic is 13 things that annoy me off, which is great because I can easily think of 13 things that fall into said category.

1. When I look through my inbox and see starred e-mails from a month ago that I never responded to.
2. When I download a video file only to be told none of the previous 832,316 codec files I’ve downloaded will play the clip.
3. When people ask me if I’ve seen a video or joke on the Internet that I saw back in 1998.
4. When the ending to a great book sucks ass.
5. Not being able to finish a New York Times crossword puzzle. Watching Wordplay didn’t help any, it only made me want to fly to their yearly convention and punch somebody in the face.
6. When I climb under the covers, get snug in my bed, and then realize that the remote control is on the other side of the room.
7. Getting pwned in Starcraft over and over by Koreans who do nothing but play the game all day.
8. When I see my favorite song on somebody else’s playlist. That’s my song, dammit. How dare they!
9. Paying my student loan and looking that the cost of graduate school.
10. Hearing my cell phone ring. And yet I would kill your mom for an iPhone. Go figure.
11. Being asked why I didn’t shave this morning. I don’t ask you why you used a lawnmower on your hair or if your blind preschool daughter dressed you, so don’t imply that I’m a bum simply because I don’t find the act of dragging a razor blade against my skin pleasurable.
12. Spending an hour and a half cooking a meal just for 20 minutes of enjoyment.
13. How much luck is involved in everything.

Maybe one day I’ll actually do this on the proper day. Yeah, probably not.

One of the few message boards where I nerd it up is full of nothing but webmasters who basically make their living from running some of the most popular websites on the net. Of course, I just surf around and soak up whatever bits of information I can gather from them, but one of the cool things is sometimes you run across a new site that one of them is starting.

KO Hit.net is such a site.

Basically, some guy in Europe decided he could make money just by hosting an ass load of music that people could download for free. I know there are a lot of sites like that out there, but far too many of them are in Russian (which I guess isn’t a problem for Fellner anymore), or contain tons of porn advertisements or even spyware and viruses. But KO Hit doesn’t have any of that and it’s a heck of a lot easier to use compared to booting up Limewire when you just want to download one song.

The search feature is a little wacky, but it works best if you just type in the artist’s name and then find the song from there. You can even listen to the songs first before downloading them, which helps when you have no idea what the name is of the song you want.

So check out KO Hit if you feel your iPod’s been a little bland lately. Of course…uh….you know, you should only download songs that you already legally own and whatnot. Because if there’s one thing we here at Shyzer Industries won’t stand for, it’s stealing. Well that and allowing Bob Costas on TV.

Man, he’s such a douche.