Big Ups and Fuck Yous - September 2016

LYNCH THE FUCKING CLOWN.

August 2016 BUAFY October 2016

§ September 30, 2016

Big ups to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. If you haven't heard of the organisation which is one of the only steps stopping your government (and it doesn't matter which government) from shitting up the beautiful anarchy that is the Internet, then you owe it to yourself to follow their actions and prepare to shit yourself with the constant displays of malice and stupidity that the EFF documents. When it comes to finding ignorance in the world, and how bad things happen because of the trivial, stupid actions of uninterested people, only two websites fill the dread. One is Richard Stallman's website, and the other is the EFF Deeplinks Blog. I don't like feeling bad, you see. But I do it anyway. To feel bad is to admit that the world is imperfect, and only when you admit that the world is imperfect can you begin to fix it.

Fuck you to the Internet of Things, which can be described as physical objects with no business being connected to the Internet... being connected to the Internet. It's all fun and games, being able to change your lightbulb colours like The Sims, or get YouTube on your television, or be able to have Justin Bieber playing in every room in your house while you're taking a shit, or whatever the stereotypical rich and lazy American does with their immutable twenty-four hours a day (and it's always Americans, unless it's rich and lazy Russians). A simple criticism is calling it the Internet of (Hackable) Things, and this is damn true, because having botnets with regular computers are bad enough without having your other electronics fall victim to it, let alone public security cameras and electronic infrastructure. The reckless use of the Internet in every aspect of our lives, no matter how benign, is not the use of dark magic to make everything we do more efficent and convenient. It's instead trusting your life to the malicious Gods who are controlling the computers behind that hardware, who won't publish what data they're collecting from your home, and who they're selling it to - and you can be certain that your government will be paying handsomely for that data. I've also said before how using service-as-a-software-substitutes means that you don't own a fucking thing on that substitute. The company lends it to you, and can revoke it at any time for any reason, destroying your lifes work in an instant. Now the company not just lends you the software, but also the hardware, meaning that they can brick your physical devices at any time, as is the case with an entire house. Imagine having a future where your house and car can be shut down by whoever has access - whether its a government, law enforcement, the company, a foreign national, or some random asshole with a laptop. You'd be helpless, simply, and it makes the ramblings of Luddites seem like sane knowledge. You would say that this would never happen, but seriously. The vast majority of people live through their lives completely oblivious to the society that controls them. They live, they die, and they do nothing. Don't believe their justifications - if they haven't done anything remarkable, haven't changed the world for somebody, haven't gone above and beyond to deliberate make the lives of others as best as they can be, then they deserve to die forgotten, no matter who they are. These people do not care about what happens to them. They will happily accept the Internet of Things, and they will submit their faulty faith to the rest of us.

§ September 29, 2016

Big ups to Project Gutenberg, a collection of fresh books free for anybody to use for any reason, but not every single book on Earth is on there, because if somebody wants to keep making money off "The Fault in our Stars", then they probably stopped caring about books a long time ago. Creating an archive of the world's information, as unecessary as some of the subjects might be (I still don't know what the fresh fuck heraldry is all about), is a noble endeavour, as with the chaff comes the wheat, but I don't know a single thing about wheat, much like heraldry. Providing high-quality e-books on all different subjects, and this is sounding like a bank advertisement, it makes it easy for lazy scrubs like us to pop in and download some comfy public domain work, which we can then print out and burn as a symbol of our newfound and newly forgotten knowledge. It's a bloody shame that their most popular section only indicates 17,000 downloads. You'd think that more people would be interested in "Pride and Prejudice" after "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" came out, which featured almost no zombies and was frankly a bullshit story. Fuck you, Seth Smith. Not for your lazy novel coasting off of other people's ideas, but for being named "Seth Smith".

Fuck you to Neocities' truly arcane method of CAPTCHA verification. Listen mates, I understand that you have to cut the wheat from the chaff (how many times can I use this metaphor?) and stop robots from coming in, in favour of letting in the slave labour from CAPTCHA farms, but can you provide a better verification test than random gibberish on inkblots? To top it off, you happen to be using Google, who will track whoever's IP address is connected to every site with a RECAPTCHA on it and then sell that to advertisers who would be very happy to know if you're on a domestic abuse victim's site. I like the ones on Emuparadise myself - they're just words with a few lines on it. Here it's like a panda jizzed on it and then wrote letters in the jizz. No hate mate, just a complaint.

§ September 28, 2016

I suppose this month was an "all me" month, wasn't it? A coincidence how my hard work propelled me into the top 100 Neocities blogs, only to demonstrate the many times which I haven't been working hard with this BUAFY section showcasing how I couldn't bother to write four hundred words based on whatever opinion I had wailing in my head. So why isn't that? Well, having ran my own little Terry Fox Run (which is an actual thing and not a Canadian pipe dream), I found myself with the mental space of a drugged dental patient and the body of a machine that suffered a few too many overclocked volts. I wasn't in any space to do anything, so I slept for twelve bloody hours, a massive waste of time that didn't even make my legs feel better. I regret this, to be sure, but I don't regret having put more effort into exercise than the walking runners, so I suppose that's my personal milestone even if I have to hang a BUAFY by its shirt with a nail.

§ September 27, 2016

Big ups to the "Thinking about Philosophy" blog for posting a transcription of the tape that plays when a man captures a sex slave and forces them to kneel. What you have here isn't the ramblings of a horror movie character trying to get a rise out of an audience - you have the bona fide ramblings of an actual rapist, serial killer, zoophile, and torturer. The transcript is nothing you can't handle - it's just words after all, and the worst thing I've ever read was a tutorial on how to shove a live worm down your male urethra, so there's your frame of reference. That said, the criminal state of mind is innately a disappointing one, and this is a necessary thing for you to read. Even if it causes you more discomfort, or anger, or despair, than anything you're used to, it is necessary. It is necessary because ignorance of a topic does nothing to help you deal with that topic. If you turn a blind eye to the bad things in the world, you will not be inspired to better yourself so such bad things do not happen to you. You won't want to understand our legal system to understand how things are done. And you won't understand the clear line drawn between fantasy and reality when you don't see your fantasies, as dark as they are, acted out with real people, and with real pain. And after you're done that, you can read this article about the circumstances of the tape's existence. There's nothing more to say about this. The thing speaks for itself.

Fuck you to Valve Software, and I say this as the person who wrote his famous novel-length Valve diatribe that I pimped on Reddit and got banned from 3 different subreddits, had twelve people tell me I was shadowbanned instead of reading the thing, and only had one person confirm that they actually clicked the link to complain that the page was red. I then had to inform them that it was probably because they were colourblind. I hope I wasn't the guy to break the news with an article I wrote during a six-day haze which Richard Stallman said was full of rage. You know, maybe I shouldn't have called it "Valve Shitware", but that was the first thing I thought of, and 99% of the time my first thought is the best thought so I'm happy with that standard. I guess= it's apt, seeing as I was installing Steam to try out Team Fortress 2 again, but you know what, I realised that Team Fortress 2 is kind of boring, having that Runescape or Pokemon Mystery Dungeon quality of having the potential to be fun, but it just isn't there. Long story short the combat gets monotonous really quickly, not being fast-paced enough to have that hardcore Quake quality, but still having unecessary slowness to multiple areas, especially with the arbitrary respawn times, which could have been solved with better map design but Valve doesn't fucking care. Right, what was this section for? The download page for Steam used to advertise a "1.5MB" download, then download 150 more in updates. Now it doesn't, but for three glorious years, Valve misled customers like Konami misled The Phantom Pain customers. Thanks again for showing the Valve business philosophy - an empire built on a series of half-truths.

§ September 26, 2016

Big ups to Bill Watterson, the man who drew Calvin and Hobbes and so is automatically better than 99% of the population, for his speech to the poor saps at Kenya Kenyon University, detailing in detail why it's worth it to do what you must in order to live, because to do otherwise is to live in quiet desperation. He talks at length about his life as a cartoonist, in that he develops a playful and curios mentality that so many people fail to do, and as a result of which learns and knows more than almost anybody does in his entire life. The work he put into cartooning before he got his big break didn't show that he was desperate, but because he knew it was what he wanted to do. The work that you do otherwise, on your real job, is work that is slowly killing you of all your potential to be great, just like the work that your fellow detainees are doing. It's a simple speech, and a short one, though one worth reading. Bloody Hell, I'm featuring it.

Fuck you to AVG Antvirus, for continuing the general industry trend of being idiot-proof, and so used by idiots. I had already displayed my annoyances with the virus way back in the tender annals of three weeks ago, for annoying me with pop-ups even after I had told it to only talk to me once every three days. It wouldn't let me disable pop ups unless I paid for it, which I think is the definition of ransomware, and it wouldn't even do what I told it to. The last straw was when it detected something was suspicious, and wouldn't even let me decide for myself if it was suspicious. Is there seriously no option to add an exception to files in your software? Do you think that your users are such idiots that they can't make a conscious decision for themselves to allow a file to run on their own computer? I'm not even mad, but AVG... you're the virus here. Congratulations. You played yourself.

§ September 25, 2016

Big ups to Todd (pause) in the Shadows, for his constant efforts to make popular music less shit, but will always completely and utterly fail, because popular music will always be shit so long as the average individual has the intelligence of a twelve-year-old. Todd isn't a revolutionary reviewer, nor is he insightful. He doesn't bring up points that could act as food for thought, instead choosing to insult his victims instead of giving concrete reasons as to why they're bad. Most of his reviews can be resolved in one minute by asking "do you like this song" and telling us to come to our own conclusions, because the lack of information he gives us doesn't make for a very persuasive channel. And no, I don't know why his YouTube username is Carlos10k+9. I bring him up simply because it's fun to watch some random asshole bitch about things that everybody hates, and Todd (pause) in the Shadows has a large enough breadth to make the material he covers feel fresh. Just as well, it's always fascinating to learn just what is happening in the United States, which is the world's cultural garbage dump, just going to diss 300 million people like it's nothing. Congratulation Todd (pause) in the Shadows - for being just above the shit threshold to get a shout-out.

Fuck you to Cloudflare, and this is the last straw. I am So Mad that I cannot even contain my barely-contained anger. I am the beast that the builder creates when the golems fail, when the gun loses its barrel and the blast of a thousand tons of molten steel is not enough to kill the monolithic plague budding across our city like the scales of a snake shedding on the world and smothering its inhabatants like it does ourselves. This is the last straw, and though I've been bitching, this is the last straw. Those degenerate skinks slinking through our turf turned tail and decided to block my favourite porn site. Fuck you Cloudflare, for being an enemy of the Froghand Faphand, and may you find me outside your office taking a big piss or throwing toilet paper at your door or I don't know I don't even know where the fuck your located I am just So Mad right now. This is the last straw. It's the FUCKING LA

§ September 24, 2016

Big ups to the Brony Music Archive, a YouTube channel which is probably run by one poor sod who has to deal with both the best and the worst of what six years of horse music can bring. "Oh, Froge's a brony now? You know how furries are, always hopping on the new fad like a dog on a twat". I don't know what business you have coming into my house and making bestiality jokes, but it's a bad business. Contrary to normie belief, the brony fandom was one of the most significant ones in the development of Web culture, creating a community which sent the clear message that it's okay for grown-ass men to like cartoons, which always had that stigma of being a children's medium even more than anime did. It was an Internet revolution, bringing with it a culture of artists and musicians that dominated the web, not like a cancer, but like a mutation, changing all that it touched to be a little bit lighter and softer. If anything, I would credit them for making furries popular in the eyes of people who wouldn't otherwise consider it - it's only a small jump from horse fan to furry fuck (source: former horse fan, now furry fuck). The channel's efforts to perserve a proud horse history, a history which means a great deal to a great deal of people, is admirable - and here's praying that YouTube doesn't nuke it as part of it's maximum fun penalties.

Fuck you to Lexar flash drives for including in their drives a proprietary encryption program which claims to protect its users files, and yet we can never be certain that this is the case because it's closed-source and with no documentation. In what appears to be an act of a business partnership instead of altruism, as the feature is barely advertised and is dumped onto the drive with no presentation, they have taken the bold first step of introducing idiot-proof encryption to the public, and so is safely deleted by anybody smarter than an idiot. The program in question is EncryptStick (TRADEMARKED), and I suggest you look at that website for a good laugh. Say, Lexar, you know you can just shove 7-Zip onto your drives and not have to pay a single fucking cent? I think it would improve the value of your products about five times more than "military-grade encryption" ever would. At the very least, you'd be capturing the hearts of tech geeks; you know, the people who are most likely to buy a shit ton of flash drives. Food for thought.

§ September 23, 2016

Big ups to the Icelandic Pirate Party, which is currently hovering in popularity between Brexit voters. I've talked so much about the benefits of free culture that I don't even need to. Free media for everyone forever is an ideal that we should strive for equality alone - the only way you can be against this idea is if you're selfish enough to believe that your privilege to make something is greater than society's privilege to learn from what you make. The Pirate Party seeks to insitute a government that people deserve - transparent, direct, uncensored, and with the means to abolish our monopolistic copyright law. The more pirates that are elected to world parliaments, the more secure the Web will be from interference, allowing it to be the bastion of liberty that we deserve. Everybody cheer them on and hope that they win! But don't pray, as God hates your guts.

Fuck you to YouTube for their new "thing"... a "thing" which pays rewards to users for flagging videos that don't meet YouTube's censorship guidelines, encouraging them to form vigilante bands which gain more and more power to commit mass murder of videos and comments, making them prime targets for harassment from the channels they flag and the lives they destroy. The program is eerily similar to North Korean prisons, where the victims are encouraged to rat on their inmates for actual human food, and I find it fucking astounding that "talk to YouTube staff" is considered a perk, and not the basic standard for all customer service in every field of business that has ever existed, let alone a staff that controls the world's video information and deletes it on a regular and arbitrary basis. The "Fuck you" is just a formality. I could replace this entry with "YouTube has 98% dislikes on their own video, everybody look at the freak." Not a bad fucking idea, seeing as adding my own small opinion onto what is the mountain of shit burying the S.S. Diarrhea, sinking it to the garbage dump of the Internet. The problem with that is that, despite everybody and their mother saying that YouTube sucks more dick than the fellatio tag on gelbooru, nobody has the balls to go out and find a new platform - which is especially annoying seeing as its natural monopoly makes it the only place I have to look at videos with. So fuck you to YouTube, and fuck you to content creators who bitch about it and don't bother to take their business somewhere else. There's a great opportunity out there from some asshole with a server farm to host the new Liveleak, and nobody out there is hustling to make it happen.

§ September 22, 2016

Big ups to dril, a Twitter account which still does not justify Twitter's existence, but is a pristine corn cob in the shit of the service. The outset of this account appears to suffer from YouTuber Syndrome, where if you scream enough random bullshit at the screen, somebody will laugh, though that initial diagnoses would lead you to be incorrect, and have your medical license nuked for making up fake conditions, you idiot. You fucking idiot. The secret of dril is such that everything he says, he says it as part of the completely normal lifestyle of a mentally fucked up character, such as how people ask him to fuck the flag and they won't even let HIM fuck the flag. The way he delivers the jokes seems like what any bloke on Tumblr could do, high off codeine. Instead, dril takes the style and uses it deliberately to evoke emotion, with a well placed period used to signal a punchline, or a random jumbling of capital letters to signal a tone that is either serious, sarcastic, or expasperated depending on the context. He is the deconstruction of the expectation of comedy, not saying things to subvert our expectations, but to instead act as part of a journey through the ill mind of dril. Either that or I can say boners because I'm reading too much into things.

Fuck you to me, and it takes a big man like me to say this, but I've been acting like a complete dumbass these past few days. For all that I talk about video games and their addictive properties, you would think that I would take more seriously the truly massive wastes of time certain online multiplayer games has given me, and that I would be smarted than to fall into such a trap. Well, I guess I'm not. I've been staying up until the long hours of the morning playing video games, or rather one specific one I'd rather not name and just have it scrubbed out entirely from my life, and doing nothing but that. I would work, come home, and play and barely eat or do anything - the only times I got around writing were either right before I started, or at four in the morning updating a blog out of fear of me abandoning this four-month long legacy I've built. I'm at the point in my life where I can't afford to waste my time on things that, though pleasurable in the short term, become damaging to my mind, body, and conviction when I fail to be reasonable with what I'm playing. It shames me that this hamster wheel of thinking about a game and then playing it and doing nothing else with your time, making excuses all the way through, used to be me as a teenager for months on end. I don't want to fall back into it... and I suppose I just needed to say this and keep leaving a legacy for myself, so I can look back on this post in the BUAFYs and think "I'm glad I'm past that". Well, first I need to get past it, and now that I've washed my hands of this trouble, I need to understand that you'll never get another chance at the life you live, and I'm not going to spend it poorly.

§ September 21, 2016

Big ups to Evan Miller, for their article about learning the C programming language as a first language and I can tell your eyes are glazing over so have some tits. The article is not so much about languages as it is about mastery of a skill. Living in a world that prioritises the easy job, brought on computers and machinery which have made almost every job much easier than it would be otherwise, there is an increasing amount of workers who don't know as much about their field as they could, and as a result suffer from being as useful as the very best in their discipline. The article makes a good point - while you can always dig downwards and truly understand the breadth of your, you'll never be able to do that if you're content with the surface level of your discipline, which is the difference between a musician who follows sheet music, and a musician who composes their own work. It's easy to use a computer and live your entire life not knowing what it does, but when you understand the fundamentals of memory, how a hard drive works, what a processor does, how a computer accepts input, what the operating system is actually doing, and how a graphics card actually renders things, then you begin to understand how much potential these little machines have to be tricked the fuck out, and going the next step and learning a language like C allows you to trick it the fuck out. While it's true you don't need to understand the very deepest aspects of how a computer works, such as each and ever transistor that exists on a circuit board, going deep enough to be able to manipulate something while not going deep enough to make your knowledge useless and impractical makes you a much better manipulator of that thing. Whether it's your computer, your instrument, or your programming ability - mastering something makes you a god among the mortals who settled for less, and makes you irreplacable in a world which focuses on the cheap.

Fuck you to the overzealous administrators of several online multiplayer games, which I've previously compared to the guards in the Standford prison experiment. Ten minute ago in a private message, but that bloody counts. The role works in theory - keep chucklefucks out and let the good times role. Actually, that's a false premise - good times lead to banishment. If you're anything more than the milquetoast type of player who enjoys poncing about the most vanilla experience of a video game, the same type of toast that completes the objective instead of trying to taunt kill snipers, then you are a ponce, and deserve to be labelled as such. The administration, a word too generous for their use, hoards their ponce army under their belt, and bashes anybody who disobeys their benevolent orders into submission by typing like your mom after you play hentai over the living room speakers. The presence of a group of individuals who gained favour with the server owner and with little oversight beyond the owner is perhaps the greatest argument against an aristocracy - as such privileges are not earned, but granted at the head of whoever gets best on the owner's graces. They embody the no fun allowed mindset, robbing the enjoyment of another player at little benefit to themselves, even though you would think that letting a player have a good time on your server would be beneficial for your player numbers. Any dipshit who is universally despised by the playerbase will be swiftly voted out of the server, and to have the admins kick them out without trial is an insult to the intelligence of the community. I would recommend that all game developers create their own crack team of mods, and have them represent both the development team and the entire game. That will remove the problem of having your players be screwed over by other players, create a globalised set of rules that everybody can agree to and not be arbitrary on a server by server basis, and force them into a position where they represent your professional business and not just a hobby group, leading them to have much stricter standards. What I'm saying is that admins should take the Runescape approach - a few global rules, admins who are dead until you need them, and a way to report dipshits. Games are meant to be played the way the player wants to play them, and so long as we have a select group of people who want to stop the players from having fun, then the otherwise brilliant base of a video game will be murkied in the fear that they'll be kicked out at an instant.

§ September 20, 2016

Big ups to Neocities, for its truly, truly idiot-proof form of backing up your website. You go to your edit page, you click on the "download entire site" button, and there's a local copy all for you. In a world where we can never be certain whether or not our entire life will be deleted by some bored millenial on Twitter who got offended over a one-off joke about Ghostbusters or whatever is pissing people off nowadays, it is reassuring to know that you have control over what you make. Imagine if all of my work just disappeared tomorrow - it would be a damn shame, and if I had no copies, it would be lost forever, and that would be tragic.

Fuck you to my graphics card, may its name be protected for its grace, and as a result of which is a worthless complaint to you, for rendering text like smudged ink written by a bored schoolteacher. The annoyance of this issue extents so far as to a few programs, mostly text editing and IM, though it is not for the far-reaching effects of the illigible thing that pisses me off but instead for it existing at all. I'm guessing this is a case of somebody failing at their job - whether it's the programmers of the programs or the programmers of the graphics card, I am interested in what the code of this failure is, and who fucked it up. Except I wouldn't be able to read it, because it's bloody blurry.

§ September 19, 2016

Big ups to Veracrypt, a piece of encryption software which is so beneath my notice that I only dedicated 5,000 words to it, though that was in the Pioneering era where I was getting all my shit together before I realised that security isn't sexy. Well, I'm bringing it back. It turns out that it has this feature in its encrypted system partition bootloader BIOS (wait come back) which lets you make the computer look like it's completely fucking frozen, until you secretly type in your password and PIM (not PIN) and wait for your operating system to display the brilliant, blistering boot screen. It's brilliant because you can set it up to say "Hard disk error" and have some idiot think your computer is broken, or "WHO UP CLICC LIKE" to set up real nigga hours. At this point, there's no input displayed on screen, so it's impossible for an adversary to know that you're expected to type in a password to continue - you type it in very carefully, wait and see if the thing boots, then restart it if it doesn't. If they figure out it's a fake screen, they don't have any input to know whether or not their cracking attempts are successful, what the cooldown is between attempts, what they're typing, and even if they're doing anything right at all. It's a devious feature, and one which I highly appreciate.

Fuck you to Maddie "et tu" Zug, for writing an article about being forced to, wait for it, use a standard test image which happens to feature a woman. Normally I wouldn't write about the whinings of an easily-offended woman, though given that my life is great, this was the worst thing I saw today. The article in question is a poorly-constructed diatribe about how using Lenna, a tastefully cropped picture of a Playboy model and one used to test algorithms since 1973, is sexist. The author gives no reasons as to why a picture of a woman showing only her face and bare shoulder is demeaning to similar women with faces and bare shoulders - probably because she's aware there are several problems with her assumption. The idea that using a picture of a woman to test algorithms is somehow demeaning is as absurd as saying using a television test pattern is demeaning to Native Americans. Her relation to Playboy is irrelevant, as she consented to model for the publication, and to suggest that being in Playboy makes you a bad person is slut shaming, to use an SJW term. The reason the cropped centerfold was used was because the programmers found it most convenient, and it became a silly tradition - unless you mean that owning Playboy makes you a bad person, which shows a prudishness that is almost cringeworthy. I would think that being a woman with a storied history in computer science, you would be proud of her contributions to your field, even if it was through blind luck. Instead, you have failed to convince me of anything more than you making a mountain out of a molehill, and I'm more entertained by jdevoy's comment, "We seem to live in world where some sad people seek out reasons to be offended", than I was this five-hundred world editorial that you were ostensibly paid for. It's articles like these popping up on Wikipedia that further dilute my trust in the site, and causes me to wonder just how reasonable its policy of neutrality really is.

§ September 18, 2016

Big ups to this article about "Why I Steal Movies... Even Ones I'm In", despite not making any distinction between legality and morality, nor stealing and copying. The article, and even some of the comments (holy shit!) states some of the brilliant points about why people download instead of buy. It's convenient, being free of copyright (or copyWRONG? banksy...) bullshit from companies who introduce arbitrary discrimination to customers based on their location. When you download your media, you own it - forever. You aren't lent it, and you aren't being told that you can only view it on certain devices on certain accounts on a certain lunar cycle and with the hair of the wolf. You can do whatever you want with your files. Convert it, copy it, back it up, destroy it. It's yours, all yours, and nobody can tell you otherwise. Piracy allows people, regardless of wealth, class, location, or other such social status, to enjoy the media that was spread to the world, without the arbitrary restrictions on how the world can enjoy it. Free, libre, forever. No bullshit from big business, just a culture built on spreading the good shit, and one deserving of our protection. Also see this article about stuffed toys of your pets. They're so cute!!!

Fuck you to the "Disney Vault", an artifical scarity plot made by Disney to stop their movies from being purchased except for every few years for the reasons of... I don't know. I honestly don't see the strategy here. I have absolutely no idea why Disney is stopping people from putting actual, physical cash into their cold, dead hands by stopping them from buying movies except for when they say so. If they're trying to jack up the price, that hasn't stopped Disneyland from being the "Mo$t Magi$al Pla$e $On$$ Ea$t$h $$$$dollar sign", and jacking up the price of their DVDs isn't out of character. All they're doing is promoting piracy of the works that they are literally stopping themselves from releasing, as if they had a say in who gets to view their movies in a world where torrentzeu.to exists. I'm guessing that Disney understands that their audience is soccer moms with limited income, so the artificial scarcity might make it more enticing for them to purchase. At the same time, I taught my soccer mom, dad, uncle, and cousins how to use Bittorrent, and I'm going to bet millions of tech-savvy kids are teaching their parents to do the same. I can't even muster up the energy to bitch about your hubris in regards to controlling the media; this plan was so dumb that all I can do is half-heartedly make fun of it. I think I'll just end this with "Di$ney", because I refuse to put more effort into my work than they did.

§ September 17, 2016

Big ups to the IRL - In Real Life short film for being the inspiration for AFK - Away from Keyboard to blatantly rip off the title of. In actuality, it is a short machinima about a young man addicted to World of Warcraft, the consequences of his actions, and how he eventally from it, as opposed to Away from Keyboard - Away from Keyboard, which is a long movie about real people that I didn't watch because it's so bloody long. In Real Life - In Real Life may strike you as emotionally manipulative, though manipulative works trigger your emotions before you even have a reason for your emotions to be triggered. It's the difference between feeling bad for a character because you know they made a bad choice, and feeling bad for them because the violins are playing. The man treats the work with dignity and honesty, not putting WoW on a pedestal nor a stake, but simply looking at his addiction after he realised he was addicted. It's a topic that every gamer should look at, and the sequel continues to elaborate. I understand there is a lot to hate about video games, and the longer you get into it, the worst your opinion gets of it. There is also a lot to like. And it's the pursuit of the latter and the destruction of the former which keeps me motivated for them.

Fuck you to the "Loot Crate", and in addition "Loot Gaming", "Loot Wear", and "Loot Anime", which will now cause me to think of "loot" as a fake word due to saturation, as if it appeared in a dictionary and everybody just decided to go with it. Featuring such famous fans as PewDiePie and The Game Theorists (I think that says it all, doesn't it?), this overpriced though mostly harmless bundle of random crap draws my wretched red eye for what it represents in our society. The Loot Crate is the end result of a culture which prizes the material good over the ideas that the good represents, as if we were entitled to worship the CD that music is printed on, or the paper that binds the book, as opposed to the meaningful content inside. The idea that you would spend fifty dollars a month to recieve a collection of novelty items as opposed to those of practicality shows how entitled we are to own things for the sake of it, not because we need those things, but because we have so much wealth we can spend it on what would otherwise be a massive waste of resources. The reduction of video games, anime, and other such mediums down to the most baseline and currently-popular franchises with no regard for those that are significant to the mediums is willfully ignoring the history of a proud culture in exchange for pandering to the most uninterested fan who, instead of expressing his sincere enjoyment of such work through his words, his work, and what he does, lacks the imagination to express his pride except through displaying the results of such pandering around his house. Encouraging people to flaunt their wealth in front of other people continues the negative stereotype that we have a need to "prove" ourselves to other people, as if we needed their permission to enjoy things, and that our personalities would suddenly collapse if scene kids didn't know that we were into Fallout and Deadpool. Granted, even I have some pictures around my humble home showing my waifus in cutie-poot positions. I do not, however, feel the need to reduce my entire identity to those pictures, and I do not use them to prove to random people how much of a "nerd" I am, as if if I lived and died off the things I own and not what those things mean to me as applied to the thought that went into why I felt the need to have them physically present in my home.

§ September 16, 2016

Big ups to Stonekettle Station, a name which sounds like a euthanism for testicles yet is distinct enough to not be used in a bad pun - Shrodinger's Nuts. That wasn't the entire reason for the feature only 90% of it, because there was another post made about Facebook and his removal about an opinion on 9/11 that wasn't about George Bush or the Jews. His commentary at the end, about how an honest opinion can be censored by Facebook, and yet blatant racism, terrorism, harassment, and conspiracy to commit crimes are allowed online on a daily basis - just like Twitter. This shows, better than anything, the hipocrisy of social media companies in how they choose to censor, and why social media deserves to be regulated - with its billions of users, billions of opinions, billions of news stories - with laws against arbitrary deletion of content, to prevent these injustices. A simple statement to Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and Google: set out clear rules for using your services and enforce them, or do not have any rules at all. Not doing either puts you in the same position as an oligarchy, where those who are favoured by the company and bring it profits are allowed to roam free, and those who are powerless are purged from the site. The line where a business becomes a private company and starts becoming a public issue is the line where that business has the power to harm millions of customers with the click of a button.

Fuck you to Slack, a service-as-a-software substitute and a prime example of how little of a shit most people give about their workstation. The Atlantic summed it up nicely as "sheltered, frantic, insider-y, un-turn-off-able, and impossible to purchase". When we talk about service as a software substitute, it's in reference to "software as a service" - a trend where you don't own the programs you're running, but they're instead rented to you through somebody else's computer, and you put all your data on their computer instead of yours. It's like a proprietary multiplayer game; when the servers are shut down, and they will be shut down, you can't play anymore. All the stats and the weps gonna be gone, just like your work when somebody like Slack decides to shut you down for whatever reason, making your data irretrievable because it's on somebody else's computer and you don't get a say in how it's run. When somebody has the ability to snoop on your data, and then destroy that data arbitrarily, it is not a good position for you to be in - strange how companies like Twitter and Facebook do this all the time and yet are still deadly popular, the sheep of the world congregating to the LCD hangouts at the whim of a benevolent God. The alternative, the sensible, private, and secure one, is to stop putting control of your work in the hands of companies like Slack, and to set up your infrastructure so that only you have the ability to control the programs you run. There are exceptions and manipulations to this rule, such as certain Internet-based endeavours specialising in privacy, though in general, don't trust the big men with a server farm.

§ September 15, 2016

Ding dong, welcome to heck. I had renovations done for five hours of my life that I will never get back. After that I played a video game that I did not have fun with, and by the time I stopped I was so pissed off and pissing sick that I had no opportunity to benefit either of us with some phoned-in excuse for an update. Yes, my house is falling apart, and it's bloody heck.

§ September 14, 2016

Big ups to The Atlantic, a publication which too often has its head in its ass, and yet cozily stays there at it spreads the gospel of whatever our society farts out. It's a distinctly American magazine; shitty articles about shitty politics laced between racism and iPhones. It's a publication for a generation that pretends to care about its country's problems while doing nothing to fix them. It is despite all of this that its anonymous words are written well, with opinion lying down them like vines on a statue, expressing points that aren't brilliant and are instead close enough to be a substitute. The crack cocaine of writing, if you will. Consider it addictive - I'm writing sloppy, and I guess work that's just good enough is work just good enough for me to work with. Consider this article about the new iPhone text messaging, or autoplaying video, or unemployed people. Boring, boring subjects, and yet written in that not-yet-cunty way that makes me give a shit. I shouldn't explain this, but if you make me give a shit, you won.

Fuck you to Apple, a company which I don't trash enough, and yet don't because it's beneath my notice to. They removed the headphone jack, and instead of looking at this like from the perspective of the ignorant masses who care less about them giving up their fundamental freedoms to a company who wants to develop a computing monopoly and more about them not being able to listen to music on that monopoly, and more of somebody who understand the implication of this decision. There is no practical reason to replace a standard present on almost every computer in the world, but the decision is about money, not practicality. Replacing the inexpensive headphone jack with a more expensive adapter and wireless earbud combo leads to big money for the producing company, as said company has already entrenched their users into an ecosystem they cannot switch from, and have made it clear that if they want to listen to music, they'll have to switch to a proprietary set of earbuds that cost $160, and are much more likely to be lost or damaged because of their lack of cord - the implication being you must buy a new pair faster than usual. All of this is topped off with Apple's patented connector port which it forces developers to pay a licensing fee to use, on a digital medium that can be used to enforce DRM unlike analog, and create an ecosystem that shuts down competing earbud products in order to divert more cash flow to Apple's tax havens. The more I look at the world, the more I realise how ignorant its beligerents are, and that going full Stallman is a reasonable option in this banal climate.

§ September 13, 2016

Big ups to the Fur Science project, which is the best thing to come out of Ontario since (edit: nothing good has ever come out of Ontario ever, except for my frog friend), which is a research expedition funded by Canadian taxpayers in order to study and raise awareness of the furry fandom and everything good that comes out of (edit: nothing good has ever come out of furries ever). Yes, friends, you bought this with your own hard-earned money! If you don't like it, bitch to your MP, and ask them why I can't own a Canadian. This project brings an air of legitimacy to a people who spend most of their time looking up "gay lucario" on porn sites and throwing darts to see which picture you get to jack off to on that particular day, by reducing the sterotypes surrounding furries and doing research and whatever else you do with a sociology degree (please no hackerino - wait, wrong degree). While the website is pretty much dead, being the government and all (The Implication being that the government is slow, in case you're as slow as the government), its hallmark publication is the Fur Science Furbook, a collection of hard statistics and evidence detailing what furries do, what they own, and why they exist. I swear to thee that it's not boring at all, and though the graphs have a bad case of Microsoft Word, it is one of the most informative documents on these innocent furs that you'll ever read. Now I better stop pimping them out, lest I end up like Comstock and glorify this culture at the expense of weebs.

Fuck you to the Linux Mint installation CD, which I assume is meant for people who aren't me and who happen to have a little more expertise in the finer areas of operating system design, or is either poorly designed. Say what you want about Windows - please do, as I do it all the time -, but the bloody thing is idiot proof. Plop in the CD, install the spyware, pray to Microsoft it gets accepted, and boop snoot you have a turd in your hard drive. The Linux Mint CD assumes that you're intimately familiar with the inner workings of over thirty filesystems for six different operating systems, which I assume is some prerequisite knowledge for learning how to install an empty partition. Come on, Minty. I know that coding for hardware is hard, but it's your bloody job to make things as easy as possible for people like me who are still using Windows to run emulators and shit. It shouldn't be hard to have an option to plop the OS into a partition that I already set up, unless this is one of those issues on Github that's been active for eight years because nobody knows how to commit to master.

§ September 12, 2016

Today I went the entire day without Internet. The next day, I found out that I needed to plug in a cord. Then it worked.

§ September 11, 2016

Big ups to Russian game crackers, for learning about this crazy new concept called "opimisiation", except it's spelt different there and pronounced different and with a different character set so it's actually a brand new word in Russian. Alright, you've heard the horror stories about video games with developers that just didn't care. 30GB uncompressed audio files for each and every language regardless of location, CPU cycles being taken up by random bullshit because the engine doesn't know how to selectively render things, RAM being worse than a traffic jam because the game is coded by bundling together different types of firewood, and aliens coming from the future to show us how to make games that take two new lines of graphics cards to run at even thirty frames. We can't all be like Kojima and create a miracle engine that will run on pretty much anything, unfortunate that he used it to create The Phantom Pain, a game that everybody thought was the best thing ever as opposed to an over-designed and nonsensically written mess that complicated even the most basic tasks to the point where you just gave up out of pity - as opposed to Ground Zeroes, which everybody called a "$40 demo", and not a $40 demo that knew the value of a tight game world and intuitive game design where you could go hog wild in a map that you were intimately familiar with and could exploit, as opposed to the geographic equivalent of Iceland. Anyway, the worst game had its filesizes nuked down to 60% of its original, so us on Stalinist metered connection don't have to worry about pissing off God and having our Internet shut down. Революция!

Fuck you to Bioshock Infinite, for having bloom that is so excessive that it physically hurts my eyes. I've been stuck in the first five minutes of gameplay for two hours just because I'm looking at this big, huge game world, and looking at all the little details that make it fall apart faster than Hulk Hogan's career (and even he has the distinction of killing Gawker). I expect to create an article about aesthetics in video games later down the line, so enough of that pretense, but I will say that when you take a world that looks like was modelled with Vaseline and spotlights, jacking up the brightness as much as you can is an annoying thing to do, especially when the rest of your game world is so dark that I had to turn my monitor up a bit (!). I thought that "Ultra" was supposed to make the game look better; the lowest settings look better than this, and you didn't even make the game look bad! All you did was remove some of the lighting effects and blur some textures. I remember modding TF2 on a toaster to look like the worst piece of shit you would have ever seen, with textures and models that would have looked dated in 1994. The lowest setting should not be the same shit you're pedelling, but just slightly worse; it's supposed to look like fucking shit so that anybody can run your game. But as we know, all games are coded out of string and firewood, and They Just Didn't Care to fix it, so I guess the toaster club is fucked worse than bread. In a toaster.

§ September 10, 2016

Big ups to Best Buy, entering which is an experience like that of having a harem of beautiful men at your feet, ready to serve whichever needs you have, until you bring up RAM and then they quietly sulk away. There's some catharsis, dropping that word like it isn't older than your mum, to seeing what technology trends are existing in this moment, and then predicting which ones will be obsolete within five years (I pray the all-in-one PC meme dies out), all showcased for you like the execution squad in a North Korean prison. I guess Microsoft is realising that they're becoming less and less relevant in the modern age, because they're pushing their marketing harder than American booze. You see the Office cards selling a year's worth of DRM, the $2000 Surface Books being sold for the same price as a monstrous desktop PC, and with about as much power as what you'd find in one half the price, and the vast amounts of Microsoft acessories that are as pleasant to use as OS X (famously described as having a cock in your asshole grow flaccid before slipping out), and you can tell that they're getting desperate. Beyond the worthless garbage like the entire headphone collection (either they're all shit or the audio sample is being played at 32kbps), there's actual useful, cheap stuff, like the printer ink and the security systems and the graphics cards and what isn't actually all that cheap so I guess I'm a dumbass. Imagine that - a retail store selling graphics cards and Apple products in the same building. That's like selling assault rifles at a flower shop - the interests are so far apart that it makes light look slow. If you work at Best Buy and you're reading this, you're not personally responsible for the quality of every single thing you sell in the store, so whatever the quality of the headphones are is beyond you. Please don't ban me like I was with China.

Fuck you to Logical Increments, a website which I formerly recommended, and still do despite its bleached asshole way of writing being bland and without character. Today's problematic - my apologies, that word is a cancer upon English - today's fuck you comes from the "operating system" section, which states that "A common practice is to pirate Windows for free. This is illegal and immoral. Lots of engineers spend many thousands of hours writing the software, and if you're going to use it, then you should compensate them for their work. Would you do your job for free?". For one, legality has nothing to do with what is responsible, as anybody who learned about segregation and slavery - both of which were completely legal and encouraged in their day - would know. Two, engineers already get compensated for their work by their fucking bosses. Are you expecting I mail them a $50,000 paycheque each year, or are their managers going to do their job and mail them the cheque? Three, they aren't doing their job for free, because they already get paid, and they get paid the same amount of money regardless of how many copies of Windows gets sold that month. They don't see a percentage of the profits, nor do they get any bonuses for the product being sold (as opposed to marketers and board officials, who may theoretically get a bonus for a successful campaign), so pirating Windows has next to no effect on their salary. While you could have made some sensible arguments, such as pirated Windows having more security holes, being an unstable experience, not having offical vendor support, being a bitch to install, voiding your warranty on your prebuilt, and security support from Microsoft being cut off at any time, you instead decided to go for the "piracy is bad" argument - and it's the same bullshit that pirates have heard a million times before, and will call you out on it a million and one. Like they say in baseball, or the 50 worst rap lines of all time article, three strikes - you're out.

§ September 9, 2016

Big ups to the Neocities Web editor, which I have given a reputation of being continually broken but as of late has been functional enough to be... usuable. The colours are back and so is a lot of the functionality, except for the keyboard shortcuts, which is still an act of chaos whether they'll work on any given session. I haven't gotten the bug where all of my work gets deleted in about a month, and I think we can consider the absence of this minor inconvenience a generally good thing. The syntax errors now only appear once every thousand lines instead of once every ten, thanks to somebody deleting the two extra zeroes. If I press "save", it actually saves. Fucking incredible, am I right? I wouldn't expect anything less from the brilliant Neocities developers, and it takes a lot of courage to get past their disabilities and make something great. Any sort of improvement, no matter how minor, deserves to be praised, because it gives us the illusion of control that a bunch of neckbeards actually listen to our needs instead of throwing shit at Github and seeing what the community arbitrarily decides to include.

Fuck you to the general antivirus trend of being an uppity little bugger and demanding all my attention with whatever sort of distractions it wants to push onto me, such as upgrading to a premium package (as we know, never pay for closed-source software), scanning web pages for malware (leaking your browsing history to the antivirus company), scanning your e-mails for spooky things, and pushing advertisements for their products on my beautiful and clean desktop. The unfortunate thing about this great antivirus industry, which the Tor developers have said is one big guessing game, is that there are no open-source antiviruses which are worth a damn. Perhaps this is because of Windows being the biggest net to cast when creating a virus, and as such the other platforms being resilient due to different architecture and general lack of interest, and as such they don't consider it worthy to make an open-source antivirus. While it's true that there are no vulnerabilities in Linux that have caused a massive virus to propagate like on Windows, it's a bit like the Twin Towers - you build it to last, and then some asshole makes it go woosh.

§ September 8, 2016

Big ups to the "The Nutshack" theme song, birthed out of the bastard child of bad acting and the cheapest animation you can find short of tweening a dick ride and uploading it to e621. Unlike the show itself, this title song is one of the best examples of so-bad-it's-good that you'll find out of anything published, with such classic gems as "The Nutshack" being repeated twenty times, and "Tito Dick 'Dickman', baby!", it is a song that is as dangerously catchy as it is dangerously cheesy. Better still is the variety of remixes made for it, which revives the old YouTube phenominon of random bullshit being made for the entertainment of similarily stupid individuals (don't judge 'till it's you), much like we see in the YouTube Poop art form - sadly bogged down by a lack of creativity in the poop scene. I'm especially partial to "Primal Nutshack" and "the nutshack theme but every time nutshack is said another instance of the nutshack theme is played " videos, which are the reasons this blog isn't on my résumé.

Fuck you to Firefox, and so Mozilla, for taking two years to remove the "Hello" feature - a tacked on web chat client that nobody asked for and was bundled in order to comply with the WebRTC standard. Naturally this featured proved wildly popular and influential in the world of Web browsers, leading to competitors such as Discord and Skype (both of which spy on you, but trying to get somebody to switch is like trying to get a fly to stop eating shit) to be run out of business and be replaced with a sign saying "Discord will always love you - farewell", except this actually happened to Torrentz and not Discord because this isn't the Bizarro world where Firefox introduces useful features like a 64-bit client and an extension interface that isn't trying to ape Chrome's. You don't get credit for slapping me in the face and then pledging not to slap me in the face - I'll just tell you to fuck off if you do it. Anyway, fuck off Hello. And to WebRTC for leaking your IP address.

§ September 7, 2016

Big ups to Canon, for having actual sensible driver downloads. Typically when you set up a printer, or a camera for the slave den, you have to go through some arcane bullshit of installing and reinstalling drivers from Windows in order to see which combination of ports and witchcraft makes the bloody device work. In this case, you look up the model and download the software and then use the saved time to jack off. Naturally this won't stop your printer from embedding tracking dots into your papers, or for the underlying software being closed-source and so could be sending your slave den footage to the entire world, but given the garbage dump that is corporate software, this is a dump with a few dollars bills in it.

Fuck you to Wikipedia's reliance on aggregate game scores as opposed to specific opinions of trusted game reviewers. Wikipedia is the go-to stop for information for most gamers with a Y in the middle, you see, and to assure this special group of special people that a game is either good or bad based on whether or not it recieves an arbitrary two-digit number that starts in "9" is a disservice to critics who spend months honing their craft in order to dissect why a game is important, and what makes it good. It is dishonest to chop down specific opinions into a spreadsheet of stars and numbers, and the esteemed editors at Wikipedia should know better than to substitute the brilliant prose of a well-constructed review, for the cheap and easily digestible data points of a scoring system that has little to no connection to the opinion of the reviewer.

§ September 6, 2016

Big ups to Bicycle playing cards, which has been passed down for time immemorable as the "Rolls Royce" of playing cards, by which I mean it was probably Penn Jillette who said it. It's easy to see the appeal of a shitty deck of cards. You have fifty two things (fifty four if you're a fucking clown), and you use those things for games. It's like LEGO with guns - and you can buy them for two dollars, unlike the social justice conspiracy with leggoes costing fifty dollars a banana boat. Bicycle cards take it a step further - they're as lubricated as your mum and so will never stick to each other. Their designs are inspired and for men of class, with their shop featuring way too many designs for card fetishists to jack off to. They have a texture that's comparable in pleasure to that of a young lady's cheek, and I assure you, you won't be handling a lady's cheek any time soon (unless you're in a relationship with your stuffed toy). If you see this brand poking around somewhere, I suggest replacing your old deck with it, unless you want to get shanked by a card game nerd.

Fuck you to my internet connection. I used to joke that there was a solar flare happening every time my connection dropped to dial-up speeds, but it turns out it's the fucking apocalypse, seeing as it's happening every three hours. This constant, arbitrary drain on my resources fucks up my productivity by making it impossible for me to download anything new, because Firefox will fail on me and the rest of my connections will go to shit as well. You would think that in a world where the Internet is the most vital piece of infrastructure there is, there would be zero excuse for this type of slapdash connectivity. But I guess the most important thing in the world isn't so important, seeing as I'm in a decent fucking country and I still have to deal with Australian fucking speeds.

§ September 5, 2016

Setting up a new PC takes time. This time was spent doing that instead of updating my blog.

§ September 4, 2016

Big ups to the Goldeneye 007 Dark License to Kill run of Silo, as compeleted by Adam Bozon in eight minutes and thirty seconds. "Am I having a fucking stroke?" you ask me, because words are hard to understand if they're not familiar ones. Let me put it in simple terms: you die instantly (unless it's the Klobb, which even in instant-kill mode takes two shots for you to die), your enemies take ten headshots to kill, the guards act like the most twitchy-fingered buggers known to AI, if there's air between you and their bullets, they are programmed specifically to hit you, and you have a time limit to complete the level that the runner completes three seconds before it explodes. These conditions are excessively unreasonable, and not even a tool-assisted speedrun can just do whatever the fuck it wants. Which is impressive for a genre which is notable for doing whatever the FUCK it wants. Watch and be amazed as the author uses perfect accuracy, luck manipulation, and the ability to blow up a computer monitor to complete this task that the community thought impossible for well over a decade. And then watch the Bunker 2 run, which makes my jaded old heart feel something for these fucked-up challenge gamers.

Fuck you to the Klobb the Super Smash Brothers 4 tier list, for placing Jigglypuff at dead last. Now listen. Listen. Listen. Listen. Realy listen. I liked Jigglypuff. Rant over, get out. In actuality, these tier lists are a symptom of the famous "playerbase principle", which is that no game design document survives contact with a playerbase. Yes, it might be a cool idea to have a slow but strong character whose mobility is outmatched by their strength, and yes it's cool to have a character which dominates the air, but when things stop being ideas and start being reality, your fundamental game mechanics pride themselves on characters who deal huge combos, have massive reach, and are excessively fast, and all the characters in the top tier slots fit those positions better than the others. These niches of having a floaty pink motherfucker with no reach in a fundamentally ground-based game doesn't work, because innate mechanics of the fighting game genre prioritise fast moves with no lag and a lot of reach, just like the mechanics of the first person shooter prioritise guns with high accuracy, range, and damage. It's a banal, banal genre, and any innovation in the fighting game genre will come so far out of left field that it's virtually unrecognisable from what came before it. Any catharsis in beating your opponent to all hell is lost when you realise that it's essentially a luck based game, where the correlation between your skill and the character you choose becomes meaningless when you're facing up against a character who perfectly "counters" yours, which removes pretty much any motivation for getting good when one player has an arbitrary advantage over another due to how the game works. And if you survive the odds and win against a disadvantage, congratulations - you're a fanboy. Enjoy your incredibly niche skillset in an environment where there are hundreds of people who will always be better than you, making the entire effort a big fucking waste of your life.

§ September 3, 2016

Big ups to thetoptens.com, which is less of a website and more of a recreation of the gladiator matches of old, where a bunch of hunks dick it out in an epic pissing contest for the entertainment of a rabid crowd of stupid people. Thetoptens is not a site of mercy, nor is it a site of discourse, but one where every opinion, big or small, is thrown to the wind in a wild gambit to see what sticks. There is little rationality, but is instead of composed of a bunch of bloodthirsty warriors who battle for supremecy against any topic, important or otherwise, to see which is TRULY deserving, of being crowned in the top ten slots. It's also the website that currently thinks Mac Miller is a better rapper than Macklemore. I understand their names both start with "Mac", but that's like saying that Knaan and the KKK are in KKKahoots. Shit just doesn't add up.

Fuck you to YouTube, and I'm fucking tired of talking about this website seeing as it's taking the spotlight away from other shitty websites, but don't tell me it doesn't deserve it. Alright, Froge, what are the charges? Is it hosting ISIS videos? Did it ban the Amazing Atheist? Is YouTube starting a lucrative lingerie venture, and threatening to shutdown Pornhub if they don't get a cut of the money? Actually, it's because they block videos from being watched if they go against copywrong, but don't actually take down the video page, so you have to wait until the entire page loads to get the "fuck you" slanty face. Thanks for nothing, YouTube. Not just about blocking the videos - you're a pussy-footing son-of-a-bitch for sucking the cock of copyright vultures, and that's old hat - but for wasting my time as you block them.

§ September 2, 2016

Big ups to the Sophos Naked Security blog, which is one of the most readable and relevent blogs for Web Sec you can read today. Remember when this blog was about Web security and privacy? Well, it turns out there's only so much you can talk about with that subject before you realise that it's essentially all the same shit, eventually internalising the knowledge as a passive expertise. Okay, imagine this: when you're driving your car (your electric car), do you consciously think about when you're moving the wheel, or when you're pushing the pedals? Of course not - it would be damn distracting. The same with online privacy. You're passively thinking about anonymising your accounts, using only open-source software, using decent fucking passwords and encrypting your shit with them, using Bittorrent correctly, and securing your physical things, too. And once you internalise all of that and gain the knowledge necessary to apply it in your life to the point where it becomes effortless to secure yourself from all angles, you stop thinking about them, and can't explain many of the topics you know without seeming redundant. In order to make the topic interesting, a topic which (without regard for technical details and specific edge cases) you can learn 80% of by reading privacytools.io and their recommended links, as well as the Install Gentoo Wiki (as well as my blog hahaha), you would have to go into increasingly niche subject areas that would be far beyond necessary functionality of a regular old nerd. So consider this the summary to my rational of why I'm focusing on my other interests, namely animation and video games. This blog will continue to give you the same quality information as before, just about different things. And as for Naked Security? It's not as good as mine, but it still is.

Fuck you to YouTube, for going big in all the wrong ways by taking money away from its users just because they expressed some opinions they didn't like. Naturally, this is censorship in its most insidious form - we won't remove your videos from you if you say something we don't like, but we'll take away all the money you would get from it, so be sure to only say things we want you to. It's a chilling effect, and people who try to say this isn't censorship because they aren't removing videos (such as Kotaku commentators, who are famed for their brilliant discourse) are those in favour of people who rely on YouTube as a job getting fucked over because YouTube doesn't like their opinions, as well as excusing further acts of censorship down the line. There are also those who excuse this by saying that Google (who owns YouTube) is a private enterprise, and so should do whatever they want with their service, without realising that it's home to over a billion users and that any restriction of free speech affects one-seventh of the world population. It's like saying the government can destroy printing presses because they own the land, and excusing the behaviour of the politicians who let that happen - the actions of Internet companies affect the world on a basis never before seen in history, and to excuse their behaviour because they are "private companies" is to ignore the reality of the world we live in, where companies like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube have expanded beyond simple websites and are now forces of nature that affect global culture. Only now, they have the power to remove whatever culture they like. The answer is as simple and brilliant as the rest of this summary video: either enact laws to force social media companies to uphold the fundamental freedom of speech, or watch as they control the world's information on an unprecedented basis.

§ September 1, 2016

Big ups to RebelTaxi, AKA Pan-Pizza, AKA the artist formerly known as RebelTaxi, for having some of the best editing I've ever seen on YouTube that wasn't a bootlegged copy of Cory in the House (in all seriousness that show is a pile of shit) The Boondocks. I remember a quote from Yahtzee, and I'm not giving him the shifty sands succ here, but it was never about having the best equipment or the most advantages that makes you the best artist, but the one which is most willing to work their bollocks off. "Fuck Yahtzee", you say. "Fuck you", I say. "If you want to set off and go develop some grand new thing, you don't need millions of dollars of capitalization. You need enough pizza and Diet Coke to stick in your refrigerator, a cheap PC to work on, and the dedication to go through with it," John Carmack says, who keeps showing up in the least expected places. And that's the scenario with the artist formerly known as RebelTaxi - he's working his bollocks off not just to make a shitty review blog (whoops), but to make a shitty review blog that is as visually impressive as it is filled with imagination. That's a lot to both, by the way. I get inspiration just looking at the bloke. Also, if the bloke is looking at this, goth girls are SHITTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT.

Fuck you to the Windows 10 Anniversary Update, which caused my PC to bluescreen for the first time in over a year. It didn't even let me appreciate the amount it fucked up with - it just showed the screen for half a second then booted my PC up again with a whining "beep!", like it was a robot being abused by a host that doesn't bother to clean out its fans. I guess Microsoft is trying to make me subtract points from all the good graces it got for those kickass emoji, eh? Now you may be thinking (and you should stop thinking, it's very dangerous), "couldn't it be your fault for fucking up your PC?" Well, let's count the points, which don't exist, and are a very silly idea. The first non-existent point is that, before I installed it, I was more stable than a Debian feature freeze. Afterwards, it crashed. That's enough evidence for one lifetime. Overall, is the emoji worth it? Hahaha. Yes.

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Today's page was updated on October 01, 2016!

ONE DAY WHILE ANDY WA- *THUD* *BRRRRZT*