…is not a fucking laptop!
Tag Archive for 'rant'
In an attempt to halt the furry-fication of my workstation wallpaper, I have my screensaver kick in early and leave any assailants at a login screen. Today I returned from a meeting, only to find that as I tried logging in, Vista, as a part of our network policy, persisted in asking me to change my password. Now. Not tomorrow, not five minutes from now. Now.
How do you change your password you ask? Choose ‘Change User’, which automatically logs you out, only for you to then log back in so that you can change your password. “But won’t that cause any open applications to close?” you ask. Yes, it will. “But isn’t that like extending the middle finger to the user, rather than protecting his data?” you ask. Yes, yes it is. And I may be mistaken, but I swear I heard a gleeful cackling as it did so.
Of course, when Vista was done hurling my sacred and precious user data into the sun, it promptly changed the resolution to 640×480, asking me for a new password. I relinquished one, and was reinserted into the hell that is Vista. I immediately tried changing the resolution and setting my primary/secondary monitors back to their original order, but couldn’t. Blink. Blinketi-blink. 2×24” at 640×480; live with it.
So I restarted. Again.
Thanks Microsoft.
PS: And this isn’t mentioning the times the login screen has been black with a cursor on top. Vista loves playing ‘guess a course of action, fucker’ with me. I wish the feeling was mutual, that would really raise my quality of life.
PPS: “Windows 7 is coming, it’ll make everything better.” Dude, I doubt it. I really do.
I just spent the last half hour running through the Killzone 2 demo, a game for which I had previously been looking forward to quite a bit, going so far as to even pre-order it. However, after this playthrough, I’ve had to cancel my pre-order, which serves as a good prelude to this entry.
Killzone 2 is already getting plenty of accolades for its graphics, and even for its gameplay. It currently holds an impressive score of 90 on Metacritic and is sure to sell in the millions. Congratualtions to everyone who worked on it, I’m sure it will entertain many and hopefully break well more than even.
And I don’t mean to be the cynical prick trying to bring down this apparent masterpiece, but…
In the case against intelligent design, I say it’s time we stop worrying about the appendix — that wretched evolutionary deadend — and start focusing in on what must surely be the single most retarded piece of code in our collective reptilian brains; Kinetosis.
Or, in the common tongue: ‘motion sickness’.
Rikke and I both use Google Reader and its share items freely, not only with each other, but in my case also with the general public. As it turns out, the new ‘Friend’s Shared Items’ is being scorned by a range of people, one of who even goes so far as to say it has ‘RUINED CHRISTMAS’ for him and his family.
These are things that, in this brave new world of the ‘consumer content provider’, would increase all our combined standards(s) of living(s) substantially:
- Being able to sort out ‘HDR’ images on Flickr, like for instance this one, or this one or hey, even this one. Yes yes, it ‘can be done better’, but that’s not the point. The point is, it shouldn’t be done at all. That or a license should be required.
- Sorting out AMV’s on YouTube. Yes, Anime Music Video’s… The idea is kinda good; the general implementation? Not so much. Don’t believe me? Try searching for “AMV Linkin Park”. That should land you about 28.000 results! Twenty Eight Thousand! (for kicks, try spelling it “linking park amv”, and see the results jump up by a few thousand… what does that tell you?) Now I love me some angsty teen hybrid rap/metal (I do, check my last.fm), and despite their latest album being largely worthless, I can see the chemistry between that and big bouncing manga tits, flying robots and swarming missiles. But enough, is enough, and really, can you call it a ‘music video’ if it’s a random serious of clips out of sync with the music?.
- Sorting out ‘fan trailers’ on YouTube. Yes, it would seem YouTube has become the defacto hang-around for teens with all too much time on their hands. A quick search on YouTube digs up a cool 20.000 fan trailers=, as it would happen, I did a quick survey, and out of those 20.000 fan trailers, 19.998 are actively dangerous for the human mind to observe… Scary stuff.
Yes, I could add ‘ – amv –“fan trailer” –hdr’ to all my searches online, but what I’m talking about here is much larger than that. We are on the brink of a global catastrophe, ladies and gentlemen.
I’m talking about an international effort, through the UN even, to finally get to the root of this problem. Forget about M– or AO-rated games, this is serious business, because this isn’t just corrupting the youth of today (as if the youth hasn’t always managed to corrupt itself; it’s called ‘evolution’), this is actively wasting everyone’s time. And surely, that must be worth getting to the root of.
A funny sidenote is, and you can try this at home, if you change the sorting of the search results on YouTube, you’ll see that the number of results change. The default is ‘sort by relevance’, which gives us the 28.000 Linkin Park AMV’s. Now try sorting by ‘date added’… It drops to 15.100!… How can there by nearly twice the number of videos under ‘relevance’ as there is when sorted by date?! What in the hell is going on at YouTube? (scrape here for answer)
Regardless, I hope the world has heard my plea, otherwise I’ll have to resort to a little thing I like to call intensive carpet bombing, with extreme prejudice.
Have a good day.
So Technorati redesigned recently. Generally speaking I’m not much of a fan of the candy-drop look, but I in particular cannot fathom why they would add a ticker, which inelegantly flickers across the top of the site, displaying tags (such as, and I quote: “free porn”).
Very helpful… No wait, that other thing… Yes.
I too thought we killed the Marquee tag, and no I don’t generally have much use for Technorati, but when I do finally go there I don’t want to be distracted by a damn ticker! So I threw together a very simple stylesheet and put it on userstyles.org, which, if you’ve got Stylish extension or Greasemonkey installed, you can go right ahead and install without a hitch.
I’m not going to link to it, but if you’re following Soprano’s and you haven’t seen last nights episode, you might want to not read Cinematical today, where they pretty much spoil the shit out of it. Thanks a lot.
Update: It’s changed now, though it still carries a picture which will hint at the spoiler…
Why is it, that people are a-fuzzin’ and a-cussin’ over the quality of digital music, but no one says a peep about the abhorrent quality of most online audiobooks. I was just looking through my audiobook library, and all are 24 to 32kbps!
Even with fantastic narrators like Joss Ackland — who does a wonderful Heart of Darkness — all soul is sucked from their voices; and for what? To save bandwidth? Bah, humbug! It’s not as if audiobooks aren’t already insanely expensive as it is, so at least give us the quality we deserve.
Now, I could be wrong, but since I only have audiobooks from Audible and iTS (which is Audible), I’m going to go right ahead and blame Audible for not doing their job properly.
Ultimately, I end up getting stuck on most audiobooks, simply because I can’t deal with having to spend hours on end in 24kbps-land.
Kataku posts nearly 45 entries a day! That is insane! Who the hell has the time to read that many entries?!
I need someone to filter through Kotaku and post the 2 – 3 news-worthy posts they have. And please, please stop posting about game-related paper craft. Nobody cares.
A shame really, as Kotaku, like Joystiq, which is also up there with 22 some posts a day! Newsflash: There can’t possible be 22 interesting things happening in the world of film every day!
Same goes for Whedonesque and the other top-posters, really.
What the title says. I’m a massive Bourne fan, and their stinkin’ trailer site is teh blows (again!). Great; thanks Yahoo. Please; pass the baton to Apple, they know what they’re doing.
Either way, that’s one exclusive trailer. So exclusive in fact that I can’t watch it…
Update: Despite everyone writing in to tell me that it works, I can assure you that it still doesn’t work. And this is not the first time a trailer decides not to play for me on Yahoo’s site.
Update: At work now, on a Windows machine. Still doesn’t work. I’m wondering if they’re blocking countries on the IP. Usually things like that are listed on the page, but I see nothing…
Dear Audible, the woman who speaks the intro for your audiobooks should never be allowed to talk, ever again. Thank you.
I love how, when you want to take your iPod with you, and it’s docked, and you check to see if the icon is on the desktop, and it’s not, but the iPod is still ‘Do not disconnect’, but you can’t eject it, so you take it anyway, and then there is no music on it… At all… Like the files are still there, but the index is gone, and so you just realized that you have to fill it up with 30GB of music again, which takes hours to do… But you’re off to work, and you only have time to write a short incoherent rant?
Thanks iPod. Thanks.
Update: Well, I reconnected my iPod, ejected it and ehm… Now it works again. So ahhh… I’ll be over here, shutting up.
It’s a good thing Viacom has thrown around their weight and forced NBC’s Conan off of Youtube; after all, how else would I ruin my near-perfect hearing, if I didn’t have the absolutely horrendous audio compression on this otherwise quite funny quantum physics clip with Carrey, Conan and the guy on the drums…?
And another thing! Can my rants be any more weird?!
I hate hate hate that Cinematical and Joystiq posts always start with an ‘introductory paragraph’. It’s like they have a certain post– and word-count they need to hit every day, and the result is too much bla-bla-blaing.
Never before was there as good a reason to pirate movies as the (really really bad) anti-piracy ads I have to sit through when I’ve bought an original DVD.
Amen!
Thanks Alice
PS: Entirely unrelated, but have a listen to Kraftwerk as played by 8-bit controllers.
Thank you Kottke (and in turn Gruber) for showing everyone how to disable the ‘Snap Preview’s that have been popping up everywhere.
Update: Jeremy has a good entry summing up some of my own thoughts and providing some stuff I hadn’t seen before as well.
So I’m looking at Symphony, a new CMS of sorts, and I almost choke on my own spit as I read their header. I’m sorry guys, but I’m going to have to call you on your hyperbole:
Bull. Shit.
Rikke and I paid good money to see Land of the Dead yesterday. What a pile of steaming goat dung. Suspending disbelief, yes. Suspending all sense of logic, no. Surprisingly the reviews have been fairly kind to it, which I just don’t get. So I went to IMDB and checked out what the geeks had to say, which by and large was as pointless as the movie itself.
Listen up IMDB nerds: There is no scathing social commentary in LotD, which hasn’t already been seen several times over in Romero’s own movies! Furthermore, the characters are painfully shallow, to the point of being little better than cardboard cutouts. Zombies that communicate, have a leader and use guns?… I want to strangle someone.