It has been a good run, but I'm switching to Tumblr: http://virindi.tumblr.com/.

TPB AFK: The Pirate Bay Away From Keyboard full movie.

Re-watched Hot Coffee. Amazing documentary about how seemingly intelligent people are so easily fooled by Corporate PR - to their own severe detriment.

Corporate PR: woman spills coffee on herself while driving and sues McDonalds for millions! Court system broken!
What really happened: McDonalds had been warned 700 times that their coffee was too hot and their cups too shit - keeping coffee hot increases its shelf life and cheap cups also increase profits. An old lady (who wasn't driving) had the cheap cup disintegrate in her lap from the heat of the coffee and spill on her lap. Here's the picture of her burns: http://imgur.com/IQh5Cyu. She only won medical bills + $400,000.

The documentary carries on with example after example, and then shows that because so many people (read: asshole idiots) were so easily fooled by Corporate PR that now Civil Lawsuits are no longer a way to force Corporations to refrain from their general asshattery or can be used as a victim to seek justice.

New bike = tighter pants.

I love how children's reactions to situations are basically what we do as adults in our minds.

Home from team camp. Mt. Diablo and Mt. Hamilton, the latter a seven hour day. Two month off season is not making things easy. Racing starts next weekend and I'm still getting my shit together.

The enemy's gate is down.

"So do you ever think about me? Because I've been thinking about you way more than I should."
"No, not really."

In quiet moments of reflection, the Capitalist searches his soul, the depths of his true being, for answers to the essential questions of life and meaning...
"There must be some way to restrict access to oxygen so I can commodity it."

Headline: "North Korea Under Martial Law."

I laughed.

"They shot a golden retriever into space and it made me sad."
"Just think of it as intergalactic fetch."

Shut down Rel Por last night. Feeling like complete shit today. Not related.

Ccccrrriinnnngggeeee at that dude in the audience.

Finished all of my law school applications. Applied to UC Irvine, Hastings, Davis, University of Washington, Lewis & Clark (Portland), Pacific McGeorge, Santa Clara (San Jose), and University of Illinois.

I expect to get into Santa Clara and Pacific McGeorge, the rest are up in the air. My LSAT is high enough for them to consider me, but not high enough to be guaranteed. It's all going to come down to how impressive they feel my personal statement is.

Zero Dark Thirty plot spoiler: Osama Bin Laden dies at the end.

In all seriousness though, removed from historical context the movie is absolutely fantastic. Unfortunately this is reality and we can't quite do that... Throughout it one is rooting for torture as a necessary evil, rooting for the CIA, and rooting for the Navy Seals. This is achieved by Bigelow's stereotypical bucketing of all the Middle East hate as typical one-dimensional bullshit through forcing the closed-minded American perspective on the audience.

I could go on and on, but I'll leave it at even though I left the theater thinking the US Military produced the movie I'm happy it isn't as offensive as the new Batman movie is.

The guy who wrote and directed Primer (greatest low budget film of all time - $7,000) has a new movie coming out: Upstream Color.

Saw a super friendly lost dog on my ride today. Checked its collar and knew the street it lived on to about four miles away. Attached my spare tube to its collar as a leash and took it home. I rock.

Lance Armstrong represents everything that's wrong with society today. He lied his way to the top, he collected hundreds of millions of dollars by cheating, he bullied and threatened anyone who got in his way, and now he stages a public relations "confession" on Oprah that smacks of yet more manipulation of the public eye. It's all so pathetic it makes me want to vomit.

Rest of the article.

I just found a paper I wrote in 2009 entitled, "History, Power, and Society". In it I argue what makes a good work of historical scholarship and why history is important.

Rereading it I'm pretty impressed by myself and depressed that it, in all likelihood, represents the peak of my intellectual progress. I'll post it to the right in a couple of days.

After spending probably forty hours on the most promising version of my personal statement I decided it's absolutely horrible and god-awful boring. I've thrown it in the trash and am starting a new one.

Must squeeze water from rocks...

I love eating shit. I'm just disappointed it tastes bad.

Thirteen years and counting, getting new gear never gets old.

"I just found out there is speed dating at comic-con."
"Both those things are for losers."

At first glance I dismissed Dredd (2012) as a horrible, cheap sequel to an already horrible movie. Kept hearing chatter about it and decided to watch it, turns out it is one of the best movies of 2012 and easily the most underrated.

It's a low-budget action film that is humble and doesn't try to go over the top. Simple plot, none of that save the world bullshit. Also, it utilizes stylized CGI rather than going for sub-par realism and looking like shit, which makes this film incredibly beautiful at times.

Spent the morning reading about Southeast Asian "traditional" medicine and other mass society gibberish nonsense contributing to the poaching and extinction of many animals I admire. I equate that region to being what the US would be like if we killed everyone off except for those who populate the Southern States... and made a billion of them.

James Peck's Washington's China is all too relevant right now. My morning sucked.

No words.

My future wife will probably do something like this to me.

Find me a color rainbow god that suits your gentle eyes.

Emma still has serious motor function problems with her lower body, but thankfully she isn't fully paralyzed anymore. It's been just over two months now and her recovery has slowed quite a bit over the past three weeks. Watching her closely and just now trying to encourage some minor mobility.

My LSAT scores came in two days early, did exactly as I thought I would. Good enough to get into the schools I had originally hoped for, but not quite good enough to get into the best schools in the country. If only I had just remained calm and not panicked in that final section... Best not to dwell too much.

I've drank a lot of coffee today and have written three versions of my personal statement. One reads like a resume, another is just plain bad and not worth discussing more than that, and the third like Doctor Manhattan from The Watchmen.

Sunlight would be nice even though it's midnight.

Totally understand and agree with the need for bureaucracies, but making them mandatory while being inefficient and counter-intuitive... Slit my wrist now please.

LSAT results coming in just a few more days, sent out my requests for Letters of Recommendations, and browsing through different schools LSAT/GPA medians on accepted students... Empty feeling in my stomach and getting some heavy anxiety, just want this next month to be over right now.

New Year's Resolution: do more push-ups, refrain from drinking a liter of spiced tea per day, get a tattoo, stop listening to Katy Perry, and have sex with the love of my life, Elizabeth Lambert.

Went from getting five-six hours of sleep per night during the off-season to nine-ten right now. Miles make me tired.

Decent version of Tame Impala.

Gone out every night for the past eight days. So tired.

Last time I ride any Winter base with cross riders. Ninety miles with 5000ft of climbing and averaged 20mph. Holy fuck I've never suffered that much in December.

These sandpaper gloves make it hurt to have fun.

Saw The Hobbit last night. Fucking Peter Jackson is making kids movies now.

So happy about the new no-skirts law in Swaziland. Now I will for sure be able to stop raping women!

Between shifts, the dishwasher studies the intricacies of dialectical materialism. It turns out that thanks to his efforts, the dirty dishes have been accumulating value for his boss to invest in more dishes. The stuff about the dictatorship of the proletariat is more perplexing, but the party theorists reassure him that it makes perfect sense to them.

Under their direction, he joins his fellow dishwashers in a risky coup d'etat. Afterwards, he is distraught to find himself still in the kitchen, washing dishes for party bureaucrats. The bureaucrats reassure him that they will eventually wither away.

I dunno about you guys, but I love Christmas!

A bunch of kids were murdered in Connecticut, and now it seems all everyone wants to talk about is guns and gun control. I'm going to ignore the obvious hypocrisy about this as the US is bombing the shit out of innocent people in Yemen, Afghanistan, and Pakistan and just shake my head in disgust that this is the top issue when total economic collapse is still ever present - even more so as fucking Obama is using his popularity amongst asshole idiots to start pushing for austerity and coming for their social security under the bullshit pretense of "compromise".

As for gun control dealing with gun violence, it's just another band-aid solution to the inevitable atomisation, alienation, poverty, and the complete absence of hope that comes with capitalism and will continue to manifest itself with massacres, riots, or suicides.

"Listen, you've got a weird voice and are kind've annoying. We want you to go over to these guys and talk about Jesus."

Trying not to be a gossipy bitch.

All day team building camp in the SF Headlands today. Rain, wind, cold. Absolutely exhausted. Just happy we weren't boated out to the middle of the bay and told to swim for shore.

I just fucking cry inside whenever I see Obama supporters and apologists.

"Nothing Can Justify Torture": An Interview With Noam Chomsky on Obama's Human Rights Record.

Man, I fucking love this guy. Punk rock.

Been riding a lot lately and feeling really good about it. As long as my knee holds strong this is going to be my best year yet.

Pro aspirations are of course resurfacing, think my subconscious is pretty keen and upset that everyday on the bike becomes closer and closer to my last. Oh well.

"What've you got in mind?"
"How about a sudden, unexpected moment of truth?"

Rode the roads in Sausalito today, absolutely gorgeous. Tall trees, thick brush, small roads, constant meandering everywhere I went. Best riding I've ever done in the States.