Passwords

// Revert With Me, Won’t You?

By Alex Aloise .
02.06.10 // Passwords

Today they lock people off your desktop and protect your emails. They hide your bank statements and, most importantly, your porn addiction.

But think back to being a kid.

Close your eyes and remember the days when a password was actually a gateway to a tangible world that was, until that point, just out of your reach. By simply uttering a few key words or making a subtle, yet profound, signal with your hands you instantly gained access to a place few were ever able to experience.

The lack of knowledge about a password could make or break your social status. Maybe you wanted to hang out in that amazing treehouse in the woods. Unless you knew the password, you were doomed to a life of being mocked from above by its inhabitants.

The right or wrong password could determine where you sat in the cafeteria. Eating your crust-less PB&J at the right table could turn every bite into edible nirvana. Conversely, if you weren’t privy to the right information, well then you may as well have just gone outside and ate dirt while hanging by a wedgie off the monkey bars.

The right password would make you feel better about yourself. You would walk around beaming. Your mom would say, “Alex?” (my mom would, anyway), “Why are YOU so happy?” Little did she know that your world had just blown wide open, all because you knew “Sabre-Tooth Tiger.”

Life was simply more exciting as a kid in a world of passwords. It’s a type of excitement that’s sorely missed in adult life. I’m going to change that. I’m going to revert to living my life the way I did when I was 7. I’m going to build a fort. My kitchen will have a password. My office will have a secret knock. If you want me to drive you somewhere then you’d better know the right handshake or else find another ride, buttmuncher.

People will drive themselves insane trying to get inside my world. Friends and co-workers will cry themselves to sleep at night trying to break down the walls of my hidden universe. It’s going to be, for lack of a better word, epic.

So please, join me, if only for a day. You might stir up some frustrations at home or get yourself a stern talkin’ to from a superior, but in the end it will be all worth it. As they storm off, huffing and/or puffing about that “stupid goddamned password” you can look at them with a proud smirk, knowing what they’re missing out on, like a kid from above in an amazing treehouse.

View Comments / Feb 06.10 / Passwords / by Alex Aloise

// I’m really good at keeping other people’s secrets.

By Julie Matheny .
02.05.10 // Passwords

I mean, really good.  Not just “I’m thinking about breaking up someone” good.  I’m talking abortions here. Seriously.  I’m like a safe.  A Roe-v-Wade approved safe.

But when it comes to my own secrets, I cannot keep any of them.
Anything you want to know, I’ll tell you.
Yes, I do find Paul Reiser attractive.
I fear needles, spiders, and dry feet.
My parents have an old friend named Bob who has always been like my grandfather. Except that he’s is a retired therapist to whom I tell everything.  I’m afraid that when he dies I will not know how to take charge in the workplace, learn how to control bouts of “catastrophic thinking”, or work through any unresolved issues surrounding the mysterious death of my French poodle, Pepper.

Also, I have a recurring dream that a rabid raccoon/cat hybrid attacks me anytime I try to get close to a very large house that has all of my friends and family inside.

All of that for free, and I don’t even know you.

Up until now, the only secret I’ve been able to keep is my email password.  And that’s because no one has ever asked me for it.
Unfortunately, this is probably all about to change.

I’ve started talking in my sleep.  And I’m not talking gibberish, either.  I’m talking real, full-on, articulate sentences.  Things I’ve said recently include but are not limited to:

“I really think you should just go orange on Gchat”
“Hey, you look like someone falling in an 80s music video”
and, my personal favorite:
“Lets just carve the pumpkin already.”

Thank God none of these mutterings are important, because I can’t remember saying any of them.  So talking in my sleep is fine – for now.  Right now, there’s nothing going on in my life – or inbox – that I’d be that upset to reveal.  But I’m only 24.  I have my entire life ahead of me.  And various boring studies and less boring Lifetime Original Movies have shown that the older you get, the more secrets you harbor.

So what happens when my life becomes complicated?
What happens when I have real secrets to keep?
What happens if I become a spy too busy and fucked up from job-related psychological torture to have a normal relationship and so I simulate intimacy by having meaningless random sex with awful people and spend the night in their beds and tell them my secret agent email password in my sleep which leads to the sabotage of an important mission that could save one hundred lives, five to ten of which were seriously important to the national security of a handful of war-torn countries?

Full stop.

I awoke this morning to my boyfriend hugging the far side of the bed.  This position always scares me, as it likely means I have said or done something super weird and alienating.  This morning was no exception.

“Sorry…last night you kicked me in the shin, started breathing really heavily like you were running away from something, and then curled up into a ball,” he says, not even phased.
This could mean one of two things.  I was either being attacked by (another) rabid raccoon in my sleep, or my spy training has already begun.

Can they do that? Train me without knowing it?
I should really pay more attention when I watch The Bourne Identity drunk again.

Moral of the story is this:  give me your passwords.  I’ll keep them safe.
Just don’t ever ask me for mine.

View Comments / Feb 05.10 / Passwords / by Julie Matheny

// “Password” is my Safeword

By Jake Dubs .
02.05.10 // Passwords

To prevent things from getting out of control during your next BDSM sess, here’s an arsenal of 25 other good ones:

Poppycock

Ow

Paleolithic

Rat feces

Gravy train

Booger

Mickey

Grandma

Murphy’s Law

Goat-ass

Sally sells shiny seashells by the seashore

Women’s Lib Movement

Oh-nooooooo!

Golda Meir

Prem Nagar, India

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze

Boomshakalaka

Syphilis

Patrick Swayze

Hamiltonian-Federalist Jeffersonian-Republican Alignment

Gertrude Stein

Fart

Go fuck yourself, master

No, stop

Blommit

…Good luck.

View Comments / Feb 05.10 / Passwords / by Jake Dubs

// THE MOST POWERFUL PASSWORDS IN THE WORLD

By Jordan Childs .
02.05.10 // Passwords

View Comments / Feb 05.10 / Passwords / by Jordan Childs

// Passwords

By Elektrovideo .
02.04.10 // Passwords

Do you ever wonder what it would be like if you died

and your loved ones were forced to try and guess all of

your passwords so that they would be able to access and

deactivate your on-line life that was still existing and

bringing them pain every time that Facebook callously

suggested to them that they “reconnect” with you, because

even as advanced and intuitive as Facebook is – it’s really

just a fucking computer and while a computer may be able

to process “zero” it can surely never grasp something as

abstract as death and grievance? I do. And that is why,

for the record, all of my passwords are now:

INDIGOGIRLS69. (case sensitive – thx!)

View Comments / Feb 04.10 / Passwords / by Elektrovideo

// Lady Parts

By Raquel Gimenez .
02.04.10 // Passwords

My first introduction to passwords was around the age of 13. E-mail was a relatively new phenomenon. It was laborious and slow – as was the Internet. Still, it was exciting and new and everyone was doing it, so of course I had an e-mail account (Used primarily to write my grandparents).

At 13 a young girl only thinks about one thing. Frenching. In contrast, young boys pretty much only think about boobs, and viewing as many pairs as they possibly can. Something I have never particular understood because I see them every day, but I digress. In my pursuit of my first french, I was far too willing to please my astonishingly hormonal group of little male friends. I was a prude, so get your head out of the gutter – but they weren’t. To this day, the stories I retell about them never cease to creep out my adult friends. This one is no exception.

Peer pressure is a bitch, and frenching was my life’s ultimate fulfillment at 13, so if giving in brought me closer to achieving the ultimate fairy-tale first lip-lock, well then damn-it, I was giving in.

One said 13 year old boy was particularly curious. He had a love of boobs like no other male I have encountered before or since.

To him, the invention of the internet was like a fine treasure trove of lady parts…each new discovery more exhilarating than the next. This boy also frequently called me to chat – an exciting thing for a girl who spent ages 0-11 as a complete and hopeless tomboy. So when this young man with his long eye lashes and frequent phone calls asked for my e-mail password, I gave it to him. In my sweet and simple prudish mind, obsessed with pouty boy lips I thought, ‘What does it matter? E-mail is for writing Grandma.’

Wrong. Homeboy had no less than 110 full-frontal pornographic images downloaded to my archaic e-mail account within 24 hours. Guess how I found out? My mom. That’s right, my mom found them. The poor woman must have thought her youngest child was an oversexed aboriginal of a little girl. I think there comes a time in every mother’s life when she expects to find contraband lady pictures her son has stowed away somewhere. She’s resigned to it. This is not true of a mother of three girls. What had become of her baby? Boys mother, boys.

Naturally, back in the day you had to view every single file before you could make it go away, and of course, every e-mail took forever to open and close. Yup, my mom spent the better part of a day perusing porn.

All that, and I didn’t even get frenched till high school.

View Comments / Feb 04.10 / Passwords / by Raquel Gimenez

// A password is the ultimate symbol of trust.

By Ben Cheney .
02.04.10 // Passwords

My wife and I dated for 2+ years before I awkwardly proposed to her on a beach in the dark in the dead of winter in front of some late night kayakers.  We were tight, like a well knit pot holder, best friends who trusted each other, for the most part.  I say for the most part for a very specific reason, she withheld information from me.  To her this information was the last secret she had, one final shred of privacy.  To me it represented ultimate trust.

I wanted to know her passwords and she wouldn’t give them to me.

I never had any intentions of abusing this information, much less using it at all.  I was only into it for the symbolism.  Revealing one’s passwords is like opening your hospital gown to a stranger, giving someone total access to your cold, naked body for thorough inspection.  It is total exposure.

Trusting someone enough to give them access to your entire digital life is pretty heavy.  Not only do you trust the privileged not to abuse this power, but you trust that, no matter what they may come across, they will still look at you in the same loving way.

I will never forget the moment my wife opened her hospital gown for me.  It was natural and beautiful.  And damn she looked good.

View Comments / Feb 04.10 / Passwords / by Ben Cheney

// Password to Oz was broom

By Tristan Smith .
02.02.10 // Passwords

The trouble with finding success is that once you find it, if it doesn’t live up to your expectations, things get tough, fast.

Let me try again: it’s easy to work hard, really hard, when there’s some shining horizon that, although appearing unreachable, is so sweet in your imagination that to not work towards would be silly. It’s out there. You run towards it. You run as fast and as hard as you possibly can.

And if by some miracle you arrive, well then, I hope it’s a real sunset, or it really is paved with gold. Light reflecting off pollution doesn’t cut it. And once you’ve gotten everything you ever wanted, then what? What happens if arriving just reveals that the thing you were running towards, it just isn’t that good. You’re not happy. You’re not bathed in light and love. The water running down your back is still cold, still silty and brackish. Do you stop running? Do you set your sites on another sunset a little farther away, one you read about once? Or do you stop. Quit running. Running sucks. Hurts your lungs and legs. Hard to have a good conversation while you’re running. No one likes you. You’re sweaty and out of breath and your shoes stink from all the miles.

Analogy exhausted. But the feelings are right. If you work towards an end you believe to be great, and you reach that end, and it disappoints, what is the next move?

I do not know.

View Comments / Feb 02.10 / Passwords / by Tristan Smith

// Unbreakable

By Charles Hodges .
02.01.10 // Passwords

In today’s online world, you simply cannot be too safe about protecting your identity.  Hackers, pedophiles and insurance salesman will go to great lengths to obtain you or your family’s personal information.  With this information they will siphon personal wealth from your bank account, stalk your daughter on facebook or call you to see if you own a boat, motorcycle or are thinking about an adding a pool, respectively.

While keeping a safe password for your digital identity isn’t the only thing you should do to protect yourself, it’s a great way to start.  It’s an area that people simply overlook.  You must abandon sealing your identity’s fate with the name of your pet, your birthday or your college mascot followed by your social security number.

You must get weirder.  Like really weird.  Like so weird that there is no way from piecing together elements of your life anyone will ever be able to guess your password.  That being said, I’ve got good news.

I can help.

Here are some formulas to create passwords that no one will be able to predict, guess or even come close to being able to fathom.

Multiply the numbers in the year of your birth and subtract that number of years of your age.  Find the antagonist of your favorite movie from when you were seven years old.  Know the name of your favorite salad dressing.

Following this formula, my password would be:  MarvAndHarryVinaigrette263

I was born in 1984.  I am 25.  When I was seven, my favorite movie was Home Alone.  I like vinaigrette.  Boom!  Try guessing that you Russian pieces of cyber shit.

Watch television until the time on your cable box has all the same numbers (you know like 5:55 or something like that).  Name your password after the product for whatever commercial is on television or comes on next.  Guess what would be the favorite sexual position of the first boss you ever had.  Then count the number of condiments in your refrigerator.

Mine would be: FreeCreditReport.ComReverseCowgirl11

My first job was at a tattoo parlor.  I have a lot of salsa.

Passwords are best when they are completely random.  Keeping with this theme, go to a coffee shop and listen to a stranger’s conversation.  Write down the first sentence that you hear that you think they wouldn’t want you to hear.  Then name your password after the first letter of every word in this sentence.  I actually did this.

This is what mine would have been: DATYTMFWAL?

I overheard a guy say, “Did Allison tell you that my frog was a lesbian?”  It was nice that it was an interrogative as the question mark gives added security.

If all of those fail to give you a password you like, you can always combine the three following things:  Your least favorite beverage.  Your biggest fear.  Your favorite athlete’s number.

Mine would be:  CitraPrison23
I hope this helps you.  I really do.  Because, in this world of faceless interactions, there is nothing worse than someone ruining your financial life or, even worse, someone changing your Facebook status to say that you have diarrhea.

God, protect us from each other.

View Comments / Feb 01.10 / Passwords / by Charles Hodges