Jenka Gurfinkel writes:
It’s like stills from the third act of a Roland Emmerich movie, except it’s not. This is the future, now. Decry globalization all you want, but to me this is the true significance of the word. A tragedy in a place of no real political or economic interest, can literally overnight mobilize the aid and compassion of the entire world. According to TechCrunch, within just a few hours of the earthquake the Obama administration set up a special number and got the major U.S. carriers on board to allow people to very easily donate $10 to the Red Cross to help with the relief effort. By January 14th, 2 days after the earthquake, the program had raised over $5 million from over a half million different mobile phone users, with donations said to be coming in at the rate of $200,000 each hour. Haitian-born musician Wyclef Jean’s Yele Haiti Foundation has also been running its own text donation drive, and by Thursday had raised another $1 million, According to ABC News. Albe Angel, founder and CEO of Give On the Go, the company helping process the Yele Haiti donations, said, “Never has so much money been raised for relief so soon after a disaster. This is a watershed moment. It’s historic.”
It’s also intensely futuristic. Six years ago, when natural disaster struck Indonesia, what’s happening in 2010, in the support effort for Haiti simply did not exist. Even by 2008, text donations raised by charities only amounted to $1 million total. Yele Haiti got that in one day.
- Jenka Gurfinkel, The Cyberpunk Future of… Now
by mooeytie (Ask me anything on formspring.me)
What am I, a retroactive inspiration machine? Not only does your question lack any useful context, it also puts the onus on me to make anything worth reading out of it. Then you have the gall to lay down a word count stricture whose articulation not only strains the boundaries of grammatical good taste, but takes more words to express than the initial question itself, compounding the insult.
With all the strife, struggle and conflict rampant in the world, the thousands upon thousands of unresolved moral, scientific, spiritual and Pokemon-related questions still outstanding within the broad, vibrant scope of human existence, your utter failure to pluck one gem from the richly veined mine of our collective unconscious – one glistening fruit from the verdant, glistening leaves of the Tree of Life – belies not merely your apathetic surrender to the web’s inevitable, entropic descent into literary hell, on par with vitamin supplement package copy and snots anonymously wiped above men’s room urinals, but also your belligerent, misanthropic need to transfer your psychological burden of unfathomably sad reliance on strangers to imbue your daily life with tiny ejaculatory bursts of false meaning onto me, in the hopes that I might find fodder with which to temporarily slow your otherwise careening trajectory into an alarmingly looming middle age and ignominious decline into an obscurity made only slightly less bleak by fond remembrances of childhood – buttressed though they may be by the fog of time and the hopeless optimism of wishful thinking and self deception.
That’s only 250 words. Happy?
Ask me anything at formspring.me
Go to the supermarket and buy some bittersweet baking chocolate, then take a giant bite and choke it down. If you sneeze, you can blame the proportion of chocolate liquor (not “liqueur”). If not, then it’s something particular to the list of ingredients in Hershey’s Special Dark (which is chock full of weirdass, fake chocolate extras and preservatives). Compare the Special Dark label to the regular Hershey’s chocolate label and try isolating it that way.
If none of the above leads to an explanation, you’re a mutant freak and / or lying to me and / or it is psychosomatic.
