Big Ups and Fuck Yous - December 2016

Ho, ho, ho, and the other hos, too.

November 2016 BUAFY January 2017

§ December 31, 2016

Big ups to the Spongebros Smashreddit. The Smash Brothers community is a festering scumhive of bad memes and bad sports, the fetishisation over players who have dedicated far too much of their time to a few particular video games being matched only by the banality of its fans attempting to recreate such feats, because it is all virtual, and you earn little credit from outside the hive for the skill of your innately imbalanced character. Naturally the endgoal of such a hive is Spongebros, a bad site for memelords. Rock on, Sponge.

Fuck you to feature creep, which is adding features into a product beyond the original scope of that product. "ell gee -" alright, quiet down. I know what you're going to say - that it sounds like a good idea to add in more features into a product, bloated and confusing beyond what anybody would find rational. Alright, I'll play your game. Open up a program you've never seen before and see how long it takes you to perform a basic task, like making a circle in GIMP, or editing a point in Inkscape. Fucking hard, isn't it? If at any point in time a user has to read the manual to figure out how your product works, you've failed as a designer. Feature creep, you see, adds in complexity, and complexity leads to confusion, and confusion leads to users abandoning your project, and abandoned users means abandoned developers, which leads to your place in history getting smaller and smaller. Feature creep means with every update, there's a brand new bugs, and with new bugs lead to new crashes, and when it doesn't crash it works a little slower than the last time, a little less efficient, and with a little more CPU time. Update after update leads to once speedy programs being worthless on old computers, and old users coming back to old programs and finding them borderline impossible to use. It destroys the original vision of the product - you will notice that Firefox has gone from a Web browser to a clusterfuck of contrasting ideals, trying to be the note-taker, news reader, chat client, and service-as-a-software-substitute all in one package, leading to a memory footprint that has not gone unnoticed. Some will say that these are temporary problems; that a user can ignore the faults, learn the program, and use the features when they have to. They will say that it's better to have something and not need it. I agree, only to a point. A user should never be obliged to ignore the failings of a program. A user should learn the program, but if they have been using it for over a day and they still don't know everything, then the design is a clusterfuck. Using it for over a month without knowing everything means something has gone seriously wrong. And it is better to have something rather than need it, and this is why we install several programs that are very, very good at what they do, such as Xed, having a spell-checker and syntax highlighter, and not much else. It is very, very good at editing text, and works fast, efficiently, and idiot-proof because of this. Libreoffice is awful at editing text, having added in so much crap that it's stopped being a text editor and became a publishing Shub-Niggurath - I'm especially amused at the "Insert audio/video" feature, because that's exactly what I need for my printed-out tax return. You can see the alleged text editor at this here hyperlink, opening up every toolbar, and though you can say that I deliberately made it look at shitty as possible, the point is that no program should have the capability to look this bad, because if a program looks like THAT, then something has gone very, very wrong in the design process. Even if you're trying to compete with somebody else in the race to be the most bloated, least well-designed program in the world, it's a race to the bottom, because your competitor is just as wrong as you are for having released a program that suffers from all the ills of the design world. The "principle of least surprise" is too fancy a word for these programs, because for somebody who has already learned how to use these programs, in their dull, mindless haze of manuals and trial-and-error, like it was a bad video game where the only reward was being skilled at something that you're only using because there are no better alternatives available that have a better mixture of features-to-sense, because this is an imperfect world, and this imperfect world gives us programs like VLC which have turned from a simple video player into a clusterfuck of everything that could possibly do with videos and audio (and I'm especially amused that a "video" player also supports audio formats, not understanding that the term "audio" is distinct from "video"), including "video effects", where you can apply things like rotation, colour shifting, logos, atmospheric lights, and watermarks, all of which should have been made in the fucking editing stage, because we have clearly lost all sanity when it comes to people who are too disinterested, and too inept, to understand that there is a little voice in your head that tells you that there is a time to stop, and when you add in the capability to edit videos in your video player, then it is clear that you are so deranged that there is nothing to stop you from adding in everything that could possibly relate to videos, and that each and every one of the over one hundred menus in the "all" options menu, where even the "simple" menu consists of six toolbars that are only of interest to those who have gotten so deep into your program that they may never come out, are made all the more painful by the fact that your Wiki was deleted, you have no manual, and if you did you still wouldn't be able to access it because it's all online, you crazy, degenerate, motherfuckers! When the table of contents, the table of contents, for the GIMP manual takes up ten full monitor screens, where an external guidebook titled "GIMP for absolute beginners", written four years ago, with four years worth of features missing, has over 352 pages worth of content, and the entire manual takes up seven and a half megabytes without images, then something has gone seriously, seriously wrong. It does not matter at this point if you want to be a competitor to Photoshop, because Photoshop was wrong for having this much garbage, too. The alleged notion of being photo manupulation software has been clusterfucked into being the program for absolutely everything to do with images and image editing and creating, destroying the original vision and creating a bloated, slow, resource-hogging abomination of the open-source community, saved only by its usefulness for those who actually bite the bullet and spend the months it takes to pore over its every detail, because this is not an intuitive program, and something as simple as drawing a fucking triangle requires knowing how to rotate a selection, cutting it in half, and filling it in with a paint bucket. A triangle. A basic fucking shape, and you have to go through the whole rigamorale of thinking out-side-the-box and applying Euclidian geometric principles to drawing one of the most fundamental shapes that could possbly exist on Earth. Holy fucking shit on a brick, I am outraged. I'm incensed. I'm physically sweating by how fucking retarded these design principles are. Which human being thought this was rational, that you could keep adding and adding and adding in shit that is only of use to the edgiest of edge cases, while neglecting basic functions like drawing a triangle? But here's the thing. Here's the really funny thing. You know what's funnier, than not being able to draw a traingle? Take a guess. A wild guess. That's right: Drawing a FUCKING SQUIRCLE. Let me reiterate, in all-caps (though I use them almost never), because this is important: YOU CANNOT DRAW A SQUIRCLE IN GIMP. Do you know just how many websites use squircles? I could brag all fucking day about squircles. They're one of the best and most useful shapes out there, being big without being aggressive, and having the best of both worlds between squares and circles. And you know what GIMP can't do out of the box? DRAW ONE. HOLY FUCK. So here's what you have to do to draw a squircle in GIMP. Yeah, let me give you a tutorial, because GIMP sure doesn't. Alright, so draw a square. You have to find the button that says to draw a square first, out of the three windows that occur when you start the thing up. Oh, yeah, GIMP didn't support single window mode until the newest release. YOU DENSE MOTHERFUCKERS. Who the flying fuck thought that it was more important to have the capability to accidentally drag off every single tab off the screen and create a new window with it before they thought that it was better to create a fucking TRIANGLE. A TRIANGLE. HOLY FUCK. Who designed this? This has to be the warning sign that the reptillians have invaded the Earth and are infiltrating our open-source projects, but failing horrendously because they do not understand what it's like to have a human brain, because they are not human, and neither are the people who designed this fucking abomination of a program. Holy. Fucking. Shit. On. A. Brick. Fictional. Christ. Almighty. FUCK. But enough about that. Do you know how to draw a squircle in GIMP? The fundamental building block of the Web? Would you? Do you? Huh? Alright, let me teach you. Draw a square. Oh, you have to hold shift, too, because THAT'S SO FUCKING OBVIOUS GIMP. Okay, now you go into the toolbar menu - and at this point you already fucking failed, because having to go into an alt menu for something as fundamental and common as drawing a SQUIRCLE shows that you just don't give a fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck. Alright, which one? Well take a fucking guess, because there's no SQUIRCLE button. Now if you had the brain of a super-genius from space, then you'd correctly guess the "select" menu, as opposed to the "selection" menu, but like I said, space is mysterious, and the FUCKING REPTILLIANS DESIGNED THIS HOLY FUCK. So which one of these lovely buttons, all sixteen of them, make a squircle? Don't even try to guess, because Moon Man isn't here to save you with his Moon Logic, because this is not a program for the sane, happy people on Planet Earth, with their primitive brains and their little eyes being unable to physically comprehend what is being put in front of them, because GIMP is a five-dimensional time cube, and there are some things that mankind will never be able to ever understand, just due to the fundament laws of reality, and GIMP is that very same five-deimensional time cube that governs our lives and dictates what goes on in the universe, because there is nothing that won't stop the most sadistic, yet mentally inept person from designing this interface. The button? Feather. FEATHER. FEATHERFEATHERFEATHERFEATHERFEATHERFEATHERFEATHERFEATHERFEATHERFEATHERFEATHERFEATHERFEATHERFEATHERFEATHERFEATHER. A FUCKING FEATHER. Alright alright, I'm getting off my rocker now, because this is like getting hit in the head with a fucking brick the revelation is so huge. So you click on it, you see ANOTHER WINDOW, and guess what you do with it? Perhaps there is a slider where you can gracefully choose how much to squircle the square? Complete with a preview function? Nope! Fuck you, ahahahaha! You just have to wildly guess how many pixels to shave off the borders of the square, because YES GIMP WE CAN COMPLETELY PREDICT SUCH A THING LIKE THAT. FUCK. So once you do that, you just have to fill it in with the paint tool, which GRACEFULLY BY THE LOVE OF ALL OUR THEORETICAL GODS, works like you expect it to. Alright, so how do I apply a border to this squircle, like a gradient? FUCK IF I KNOW. So congratulations on your fucking squircle. You were playing along, weren't you? I hope so, because this is madness. Madness, madness, madness. I have to wonder just how this happened, just what the fuck type of cosmic events occured to make the development of GIMP so brain-dead retarded, and yet somehow manage to come to fruition. It's beyond my understanding. It's fucking... incredible. That's really all I have to say. Fucking incredible. And don't even get me started on Krita - I haven't even touched that cunt, because I know it's going to be Hell on Earth the moment I try to understand what the fuck is going on in there. It's worse than learning a new language, because at least with something like that, you just have to memorise words and understand how they fit into things. Flash cards and boom bop you're fucking done. But with a bloated-ass program like I'm seeing in front of my two eyes, you have to actually comprehend it. Understand how it works on every possible level, because one mistake, one digit out of place, and the whole fucking kit goes boom, and the rest of your project, too. And if you haven't learned how to fix your mistakes, you're fucked. You can add in all the resolution, print sizes, colour standards, and arbitrary templates you want, but if I can't make a pretty picture in ten minutes, then your product is shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit. Remember when you could open up Microsoft Paint (and don't blame me for this, because we were all six-year-olds at the time) and just scrub paint with it? You could make entire album covers with that shit, if you were good enough. It did one thing and did it really well: painted basic shit. Of course it lacked even fundamental features like cropping or even transparency, but it was set out to be dead simple and it ended up doing that. Am I saying that everything should be like Microsoft Paint? Of course not - we always need more advanced tools. But the tools have to be simple to use and understand that there is a limit to what you put in, and how you should put it in, unlike GIMP and VLC, those fucks. Of course, Linux is still vulnerable to this, because it's fucking bloated at this point, unlike something like FreeBSD, but it's still a good-ass operating system that runs well and these petty bloat complaints are only of interest to nerds and computer scientists, and I'm not them, so I'm not bitching about Linux. I will bitch about Ubuntu featuring a Web search function in the search bar that's supposed to search files and apps, because that led to the Amazon spyware debacle, which is why I never use vanilla Ubuntu, and only a derivitive of Debian or Ubuntu. I have to admire the Linux philosophy, actually, of coming with the bare necessities and leaving the user to install programs as needed, as opposed to clumping together a bunch of vaguely useful shit alltogether, which is what Windows and OS X does, which is why they're unstable, buggy, hard-to-use pieces of shit. Granted, Linux is hard to use, because you have to use a command line for even basic shit, and thus necessitates using Stackexchange too fucking much. I'm not forgiving Linux for this. But I am saying that it's much easier and much more sensible to learn than with something like... GIMP. So to sum, feature creep is what happens when you throw caution to the wind, make a series of bad design decisions, and decide that instead of creating programs that have one function and do them really incredibly well, you should shove them in with as much shit as possible and leave the user to be frustrated, lost, and confused with everything they try to do with them. Mastering these programs are an errand for fools, much like it is a fools errand to shove in features into this software. While it is true there may be useful features lurking around even simple programs, like with Xed having syntax highlighting and the ability to customise the font and colours, these do not distract from the overall philosophy that the program comes with, such as "edit text". It actually enhances the ability to edit text, because dark colours and proper font selection increases printing versatility, and allow you to work for longer, more comfortably, and with more combatibility between systems. Syntax highlighting is sensible, too, because if you are on a Linux distribution it is natural that you are expected to look at source once in a while, even if it is just out of banal curiosity. It's a damn good program, and one I need no replacement for, unlike Libreoffice, though I only use that because of its formatting functions and not the useless other shit it brings to the table and spills off it and feeds to the dog. There is a practicality to carrying both a pistol and a rifle when you go hunting, but when you carry three guns, two knives, two types of ammo, and a grenade, then there is a serious problem in your hunting philosophy. It's better to have something and not need it, but not to carry the entire kitchen sink with you, and it takes discipline, and professionalism, to determine what must be cut, and what must be remained. Because, as we all know, perfection is not when there is nothing left to add, but nothing left to remove. And the enemy of feature creep is subtraction, and the enemy of our enemy is our friend. So when you do take a look at your projects, please, for the sake of fuck, show some common fucking sense and think to yourself: "If I was lost and alone and only had an hour to learn everything there is to learn about this program, could I do it?" And if the answer is no, it's time to take a butcher's knife to the program and understand that you have to cut off even features you really, really, like. You have to have one clear vision, one clear sentence, or endgoal, when it comes to a product, and base all your decisions around it. For instance, a good video player might have a vision statement like "We are THE fastest, most intuitive VIDEO player". The entire development team would work around this philosophy. Does it make the player faster? More intuitive? If not, throw it out. Subtitle support? Keep it in - the users need to understand the video. Audio support? Throw it out - we play videos, not audio, and it adds it too much bloat. Should we support this really obscure codec? Does it add value to the majority of users? No? Throw it out. Should we add in video editing features, like VLC, to keep up with VLC? Fuck no. VLC is doing wrong. We're fast, and we PLAY videos. Should we add in seamless playback? Yeah, that's intuitive. How about the ability to pick up where a user left off? That's intuitive, keep it in. How about including a bunch of themes? Are they fast? Are they intuitive? If they are, make one of them the default and throw out the rest. You see, it's really, really easy to stick to a philosophy if you just have that guiding statement, that one philosophy, that everybody lives their life by. And it takes discipline to live up to this, too. To learn more about how to avoid the plague of feature creep, and to avoid the hideous examples of GIMP and VLC, then check out the following links. I started out with "How We're All Haunted By The Feature Creep" (archive), which gives many helpful examples of companies that avoid feature creep, and those that do, and why it's terrible, to put it lightly. It's well-written, I would say. I then went on to "Feature Creep: What Causes It & How To Avoid It" (archive), which was a more business-oriented approach to things, with a variety of helpful links to help you learn even more, and a bunch of graphs and practical examples as to why you should avoid it. There's also "ProductStrategyMeansSayingNo.com" (archive), which is especially charming because they feature cute furries, as opposed to human scrubs. Sadly the archive there is broken due to a lack of Javascript support or whatever tech is powering the page, but I'm keeping it in there because I really can't be arsed to remove it, and I have to stay ahead of the curve of my competitors, too, otherwise I might lose relevance in this feature-rich world. Plus, it's tradition - can't get rid of the old ways, because they're always right, and have never steered us wrong! The final article would be "Feature Presentation" (archive), which I haven't read, but it's vaguely and tangentially related to what I have to say, so I'm throwing it in anyway because if I don't, somebody else will do it sooner, and losing market share at the expense of customer satisfaction is always a good thing. Beyond all of that, I really don't have much more to say about the topic. Not to say that I didn't say a lot, even though I feel I could have gotten my point across much better should I have the time and the space to do so, but given that there is only so much one can really say about a topic, then I guess it makes proper sense to say it, because not saying it means that not saying it ends up not being said, and if you can say it you should, otherwise it's terrible, and you just end up tired. But I guess feature creep will just have to end up as a subject for another day, another tavern, another time, another harsh truth, in the end of the eye of God and the Glimmers of the Cosmos He Made, Glory Be To Him And His Beligierents. Oh, there is one more thing: saying "no" to feature creep prevents longass articles like this. Happy new year!

§ December 30, 2016

Big ups to GameFAQs, or as I've always called it, Game Fucks. Yes, you have permission to laugh at my blatantly poor pun - because in the immortal words of Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso: "It's a stretch". The idea that people would dedicate some portion of their lives exclusively and exhaustively to detailing all the uppers, downers, ins, outs, around, and other relative directions of a video game, and then publish it anonymously on a website with enough detail and enough bells and whistles to make them look good, is incredible. Even in the age of Wikia, we still see GameFAQs being used to provide information on games in a single-page format, showcasing a level of expertise that one individual can provide when the anonymous, collective sources that is the Internet fails. This is especially useful when it comes to obscure games like "Tales of Game's Presents Chef Boyardee's Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden, Chapter 1 of the Hoopz Barkley SaGa" (archive), which is one of the best satiricisation of video games and Web culture you will ever play. Even with exhaustive wikis, such as with most visual novels, GameFAQs is there to provide the EZPZ spoiler-free walkthroughs (though if I'm looking up things on GameFAQs, I've already viewed every spoiler there is) for you to fuck your preferred anime girlfriend. They also hosted a "Best. Game. Ever." poll (archive), and you know it's serious when they Bring. Out. Periods. Remember when I was saying that an individual can be smarter than the anonymous Web? Well, Undertale won that poll. Truth be told, I was actually glad it won, so that Melee wouldn't win and people would stop sucking Ocarina of Time's collective cock, because overpraising Nintendo games is to a Nintendo fan what praying is to a Muslim - innately a waste of time, but you gotta do it! Or else you'll be killed!

Fuck you to that Tales of Game's Presents Chef Boyardee's Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden, Chapter 1 of the Hoopz Barkley SaGa GameFAQ as listed above, but only because of the obnoxious copyright disclaimer at the bottom. There's a potent combination of retardation in the disclaimer there, such as suggesting that "stealing" is equivalent to "copying", which at the very basic definition, are two totally different things, because copying is infinite whereas stealing applies to resources that are actually scarce, as opposed to artifically scarce like you're trying to impose. The idea that anybody would want to profit off of your game guide of Tales of Game's Presents Chef Boyardee's Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden, Chapter 1 of the Hoopz Barkley SaGa, is just plain silly. You are also under the misguided impression that plagarism is a crime, which is what you're confusing as copyright infringement at best, and don't even have a single consideration for a fair use doctrine where hosting your work is legal so long as it's being commented on. It also implies that your right to get credit for a work outweighs the right of other people to share it. To protest, I'm hosting a copy of your GameFAQ on my Web blog, as well as your infringing Foo Fighters quote right below it, you hypocritical cunt. Oh, and also this one. You're both cunts.

§ December 29, 2016

Big ups to this article by those naughty centrists at Common Dreams, saying "President-Reject: Don't Say His Name" (archive), saying that The Troll feeds off the attention he gets, and by shunning him, we lower his power. I'm not a particularly political man, as the issues are simple to anybody who has a fucking brain, so I will not inundate you with things you may have already heard before. I will say that, given the climate that The Troll fosters in the United States, being an excellent place to live if you're a billionaire and you can fuck right off if you aren't, it is deserved punishment to strip him of the recognition he has gained by a populace to ignorant to see through his racist, facist, lies - ironic how the same lower-class people who support him are those who fail to realise he's part of the oligarchy they despise. So if you are going to provide some discourse, blindingly obvious discourse if you are not lacking the aforementioned brain, then don't give him anymore credit by invoking he who has now been declared nameless.

Fuck you to the brilliant United States Representatives, who have decided to pass a bill allowing police to demand tracking chips embedded in people (archive). Gentlemen, we all must pay the piper and come to terms with who we are. It does us no good to live in bodies we are uncomfortable with. Ever since we are young, we aspire to be certain people, and the pressures of the world forces us to change for the worst, waiting in silence for the time where our people may be liberated. Having been inspired by the recent death of one such individual, I must come clean: I am a microchip. And I must live my entire life with that knowledge. In all seriousness, I don't even need to comment on this article, given how fucking psychotic it is. Let's allow the government to physically insert tracking devices into our bodies! At any time! Forever! Who will fall under this vague definition of "mental disability"? Convicted prisoners, where instead of the proven and effective methods of having a lighter touch and focusing on rehabilitation (such as in Canada, Norway, and other cold countries where re-offending rates are the lowest in the world), you will shame them into becoming career criminals? Perhaps it will be for those just barely autistic enough to be diagnosed as such, further dehumanising those who need support most? I can predict a science fiction story where an entire caste system is based around those who are either "chipped", or "born free", or whatever terms I'll shove into this theoretical story that I'll never publish, because science fiction is for the realm of the nerds, and yours truly is too cool for school (and that). Perhaps the Senate will be so kind as to veto this bill. And perhaps I'll buy one lottery ticket and become a millionaire.

§ December 28, 2016

Big ups to "EZScape", who makes """"""""high quality"""""""" speedrunning-related videos, and I always enjoy these BUAFYs because it means I can justify bumming around on Youtube instead of reading, I don't know, Noam Chungus. While speedrunning has gotten popular as a way for core gamers to waste time looking at the cool sights and sounds, getting their dick blown clean off at how often their favourite video games (themselves just computer programs taken to their logical extremes) get manipulated into doing strange things. I'm proud to see the interest, because speedrunning shows that in the first place, no program is perfect, and the bugs within them range from either minor, to holy-shit-fix-this-now-worthy, and speedruns exploit them all for the sake of - in the words of many a runner - fast. It renews interest in games on the programming side of things, looking at them not as magical works of art, but with the discerning lense of people who understand the amount of work, effort, and volity that goes into the creation of the games, as well as the efforts of those who spend their time mastering them for the entertainment of others. While there are many instances of playing games that doesn't benefit the watcher much beyond simple entertainment, such as the legendary dearth of Let's Plays, speedruns can actually cause a person to think about the fundamental mechanics of games and their design, exposing them to worlds that they would have never been interested in before. It's a gateway, and seeing easily-accessible content like this being made is a good thing for sustaining interest in computer science. I also admire his candid talk regarding his Runescape addiction, taking an honest look at the goods and bads of video games, and the lifestyle that causes people to get addicted to them. While a keen interest in games causes people like yours truly to actually care about computers beyond the magic box that makes things work, that same keen interest caused yours truly to waste years of his life playing them for hours on end, to the point where games I gave up long ago still infest my dreams. So thanks for getting past it and switching your interests to something healthier. From challenge runs to speedruns, it's been a long time coming.

Fuck you to the concept of a "sale", which is not a foreign word in another language, but is in fact pronounced... like itself. It's like stale, but without the T. Today's linguistics lesson is brought to you by the Mime Academy - to sign up, just click the invisible advertisments to your side! If you can't see them, then you're clearly not a mime, and don't deserve to be. I hope these invisible mime advertisements make me real-world dollars, because I can't ever patronise a sale if I don't have money to sale it up. The interesting thing about a sale is that, in exchange for selling more of a thing, you get it for cheaper. There was a time when Zellers (rest in peace) tried to market EVERYTHING as on sale. But that didn't work, because in the eyes of the public anything that didn't have an obnoxious sticker on it is too expensive for their tastes, because the public is a collective monkey, and they have the intelligence of a monkey's ass. You would think that in an environment where everything is cheaper than the rest of the competition, such as with Walmart and their famous bullying to be the cheapest and most malicious store (hidden behind branding, of course) being the world's most successful store because of the cheapness, nobody would have to hoist sales, because everything is so cheap that any extra sales are unecessary. Sadly, as we learned with Zellers (which was actually shitty to begin with), people like the illusion of "saving", when they are actually spending more than if they had simply bought nothing. It gets especially ludicrous with online storefronts. "Save 90% on this indie game that doesn't have the self-respect to charge more than twenty bucks for a project that spent months in development!" Wow, thanks for giving me permission to spend less money on your artificially scarce goods that can be redistributed forever and for free infinitely due to the magics of the Internet and are only being sold for a price because our real-world developers need money to eat as opposed to this being a utopia where people can have whatever they want for free in the theoretical post-resource world. So basically I'm suggesting you make your work public domain, but if you do sell it, sell that fucker high. "That'll never work, Froge", said Froge, because I'm talking to myself. "You already did that, and nobody bought your product". It turns out that having no advertising and no connections while silently plopping a game onto itch.io for fourty bucks was a terrible idea for sales. I guess I'll just fuck off back to Github so I can scrub rum money off of whatever the fuck is going on over there, along with the rest of the Unrecognised Talent Gang.

§ December 27, 2016

Big ups to the Dolphin emulator, for its truly excellent variety of control schemes you can force onto it. For those of you who are stuck with your poor old consoles, in your standard resolution and your poor controllers and your tiny displays, I feel bad for you. Either you are ignorant of the modern wonders of emulation, too "good" for the oppressive copyright laws which keep you in inferior circumstances, or are just in it for the nostalgia - and at this point I can't help you, poor lost soul. I suppose you may be forced into it due to those hard-to-emulate games that either won't run well on your PC, or won't run well at all, at which case I may only feel for you, and pray that you earn enough money to buy better hardware, and earn enough time to see these problems be squashed. Dolphin, you see, has a very extensive customisable control system that lets you, among other things, be able to control Gamecube games with your mouse, if the mouse was made of butter and biased to the right side for some awful reason. The best way I can describe these games is like shitty Doom, but without the weaponry that shoots everything in a cone so long as you aim within the same building as the enemy. But at the very least, shitty Doom is possible, as is such other brilliant hacks as controlling the entire game with a 20-button-mouse, because there is a little voice in your head that tells you to stop, and these people simply ignore it. I recall one example where somebody entered a Smash Brothers tournament using a Wii Remote with a fishing rod attached to it, and everytime he taunted he reeled in the rod. Speed, crazy bastard.

Fuck you to websites which reject my bountiful disposable e-mails, such as your sharklasers.com and what have you, and instead entice me to use my exclusive e-mail addresses for their piece of shit services that arbitrarily decided that a certain address was not worth using. I have to wonder what type of website thinks they're so important that they're the prime target for ne'er-do-wells and other malicious individuals, like yours truly shady-as-all-hell, that they have to blacklist entire e-mail addresses for the sake of theoretically eliminating the theoretical spam from their theoretically important website, like they were facing the 8chan epidemic of ads selling child porn, or the regular child porn on that site, or the rest of the porn. Have I mentioned I don't go on 8chan anymore? I understand full well that people who have so little honour and self-respect for themselves end up creating robots that crawl the web, made exclusively to piss people off, though given that I only found your website on Page 4 of a DuckDuckGo search, you theoretical bastard, I doubt that you're a prime target for whatever shit is brewing out of the boils of the Web. All you've done is slightly inconvenience me by not giving me the honour to sign up for your website in the first place, requiring me to make an account to access your content. Oh, wait, that's an even bigger issue. Fuck you for that, too.

§ December 26, 2016

Big ups to Fan Fiction Friday, an archive of the worst of the worst that the Internet has to offer, all being dissected and publicly executed by the kind folks at the former blog formerly known as Topless Robot, sadly having been executed itself at the very end of 2015, which was a sure sign of the clusterfuck that would befall us the following year. Now I'm not your comics-carrying waifu-fucking robot-whoring nerd that caters to the audience of the former blog formerly known as Topless Robot, but when I see an establishment write such glorious headlines as "Guy Who Likes Erotic Brony Art Pisses off Guy Who’s Marrying a Pony Toy" (archive), then I become a patron of that establishment. It only took a small dive into Hell to realise the site's second greatest achievement: Garfield's Royal Rescue (archive). What Mr. Bricken did, before the company sold out due to not being profitable (oh those poor, naive, fools...) was take questionably legal fanfiction and shove it into the public consciousness and rip on it, a bit like Mystery Science Theater for those of us with more obscure taste, every week, as we slowly see his mind turn on itself as the world suffers with him. Unfortunately the site is a bit of a clusterfuck, and could even disappear at any given moment, but taking a gander at the far end of the Fanfiction tag will lead you to a good deal of riches indeed. And despair. Or arousal, if you're one of the Strange People.

Fuck you to the website "I know what you download", which takes BitTorrent traffic and highlights it to the public, without regard for public safety. While I am saying "fuck you" to the website for divising such a service, and outright refusing (archive) to take down information on request (kind of like how Wikileaks outed thousands of Saudi Arabians [archive], potentially leading them to execution by the dictatorship which only stands because of Islam). Sentence break because that was a lot of information to envelop. I am not upset that it exists, as the TorrentFreak article I just linked states that such a service has existed in the past, and already exists in the private empires of copyright vultures. I am informally telling the website operators to give a blowjob to a cactus because of their intentions - saying explicitly that it's a demonstration of their abilities for "rightsholders, advertising platforms, law-enforcement and international organizations", all of which show that the operators don't give a single shit about the universal human right to free culture. Basically, they're working for their oppressors, and they can rightfully fuck off because of this. You can imagine what such a tool can mean for anybody who gets their hands on it - and it'll be easier to see who's on it, thanks to the website being unencrypted, using CloudFlare to tell Tor users to fuck themselves, and already subjects to the philosophy of "fuck you, got mine", which is the only philosophy that the cowardly and morally bankrupt operators allow. Companies, friends, and everybody who you don't want looking at it, only needs your IP address to see everything that you've downloaded. I am highlighting this, principally, to show it is exceptionally hard to stay private online, and you must take the proper precautions to avoid leaving a permenant record of all that you do on it. You can start, once again, with Privacytools.io. And it bears repeating: use a VPN. That way you ruin those who hurt you.

§ December 25, 2016

Reading the frog on Christmas Day? God, you're pathetic.

I guess the rest of us cool individuals are getting free shit while you're stuck here. Ho ho ho, and the rest as well.

§ December 24, 2016

Merry Slickmass, go home.

§ December 23, 2016

Big ups to this article about casual homophobia and racism in DOTA 2 (archive). Actually, I wouldn't read that article - it's truly terribly written. "The thread is roughly representative of the normal sentiments expressed in the more vocal parts of our community", which has so many qualifiers that it loses the point entirely. Bloody hell, mate. If you have a thing to say, then fucking well say it, instead of dressing it up in a statement so inoffensive that the only people who will care at that point is your mum. I would say this article is of a decent writing ability regarding the intricacies of this topic at hand especially considering the subject matter and the controversies within so long as those subtracting of those most vocal of the community being conversed with is not of a negative experience and regards this written piece with animosity. I could have said "at least it's not shit", but that wouldn't meet the minimum amount of big words needed to sound smart, as opposed to being smart. I have no idea what the linked blog post is trying to say, as the definition of a blogger is writing for hours and not actually saying anything (sorry), but it provides an interesting starting point with which to write about slurs in online games. Is it too hard to be a decent person and not say we got "raped" after we lost, or to not call me a faggot, nigger, rat, or what have you? No. That was an easy question to answer.

Fuck you to Amazon, for their psychotic interview practices (archive), though given that Amazon is the Walmart of Walmart, having such little self-respect and so much desperation to volunteer at an establishment that treats you like the wage slave you are... means you're a wage slave. So Amazon makes you install a rootkit on your computer, which gives them control over absolutely everything on your PC, mouse included. If somebody I didn't know plugged in a USB drive into my computer, I'd smash them against the wall for even trying to tamper with the thing, so long as my truly massive muscles don't weaken out on me after lifting two hundred kilogram deadweights. Doing so willingly shows, as the author puts it, a normalisation of privacy invasion that expresses, more than anything, the shifting amount of leeway we give to malicious companies just for the sake of our convenience, because 99% of people just don't care, and the 1% will exploit that. It's also the idea that somebody would willingly do this to somebody else which expresses the fundamental problem of humanity, which is that injustices, small as are rationalised to the person committing them, exist because to refuse would be damaging to that person. This has been compounded by many millions of people committing many millions of small injustices by companies which know, and don't do anything to fix this, because it doesn't affect their bottom dollar of that delicious, sense-enhancing, syrupy sweet green abrosia of all life on Earth that is money. It's also a simulation of the cold, mechanical, soulless efficiency of dictatorial governments, how the thinking, feeling, human beings who work for them are so numb to their evil acts that they don't even care about them anymore. Now that companies have the power of governments, we must choose to stop supporting them by any means, because the only way a government may last is with the consent of its people, and a company lasts only with their money.

§ December 22, 2016

Big ups to this LEGO Minifigure, which is a phrase that I will be sure to imprint upon everybody who even dares to touch a LEGO-brand LEGO set or whatever marketing shilling the company wants to imprint on me despite stealing their entire idea from somebody else. Sorry, Hilary "Harry" Fisher Page, but self-locking bricks aren't your idea anymore! I especially like this image of the Church of LEGO, where some poor old sod goes inside and prepares to be converted from whatever cheap religion he has, while his poor daughter stares in wonder at the floor made of cat piss. You'd be forgiven for thinking that's in one of those exotic vaguely-Asian stores where everything is in English, but it turns out it's in Toronto. So chalk that up to three good things that came out of Ontario. Now who is that mysterious man in the yellow suit? Is he perhaps a veteran of the Iraq War, spending his days as a theme park mascot to reconnect with the populace that he both simulatenously betrayed and fought for? Is he perhaps an old cancer patient, trying to find some joy in entertaining the world that they will soon leave behind for the dark void ahead? Of course not. It's Banana Guy. Mother. Fucking. Banana Guy. That's the most rediculous fucking thing I've seen from a LEGO set since Spooky Boy and Dog Show Winner. Who at LEGO took a look at their lineup and thought to themselves, "Oh yeah, we need some asshole in a banana suit. And give him sunglasses and a 'fuck me' grin". Imagine being such an uninteresting human being that you are defined by the article of clothing that you choose to wear. He doesn't even have his own theme song! Sing us a song, you're the banana man... Sing us a song, all ripe...

Fuck you to today's macaroni and cheese recipe, and the resulting mess turning into a bland and unappealing thing. If anybody may offer me some advice on how not to make my white sauce taste like flour, wasting three hundred grams of cheese in the process of trying to make it taste like something, please tell me, because my family is tired of eating what is less inspiring than if I just gave them noodles and butter. "Oh, what's all this then?" somebody says while coming out of the McDonald's that we all decided to eat out at because everybody thought I was a fucking idiot for wasting a dollar's worth of my most expensive cheese on what I fully well expected to taste better than toilet water, my grandma hiding her smug satisfaction at remaining the best chef in the family even though I'm damn determined to make sure that I usurp her honestly precarious throne, given that she still uses frozen products whenever she invites us for dinner, which is all the time, because gathering the family together is to her what finding a vein is to a heroin addict. "Froge is posting a personal topic instead of something important? What's the ruddy use in even following this joint?" I have no idea why I have stereotypical British thugs following me around all the time, but I will say that I will always strive to make either the most insightful or the most intriguing work, even if it doesn't mean much to you personally. Basically I'm saying my macaroni is more interesting than what 99% of people can ever offer. And that's pretty pathetic on your part. Now back to looking at oviposition porn while I hope nobody notices the reflection in my monocle. Oviposition is the gentleman's fetish, after all.

§ December 21, 2016

Happy Winter Solstice gentlebronies and pegasisters! Are you perhaps ready for the Winter Wrap Up and all the tidings therein? Can't be celebrating any Christian holidays around these parts, because that might encourage the Church to get some funny ideas about their place in our secular society. Don't want any fairy tales popping up in our good atheist household, because that would bring discredit to our entire humanist philosophy. Consider this my early Solstice present! To myself, of course. The rest of my family is forced into an irreligious Christmas, because everybody shops at the last minute and my proposal to switch the date would have led to four days too soon for those scrubs. So consider myself hooped when it comes to the other days. Hooray!

In lieu of today's fuck you, please enjoy the Seasons EP from Griffin Village, which is a celebration of horse love through the seasons. And you thought I was just being silly with the horse business before. You IDIOT.

§ December 20, 2016

Big ups to TASVideos.org, which is your one-stop site for TASes, and the videos regarding such. If you happen to be ignorant of what a TAS is, as you are always ignorant until I say otherwise, it stands for "Tool assisted speedrun". Now if you happen to be ignorant of what a speedrun is, it stands for... well, what does it stand for? Superiorly Played Electronic Entertainment Deemed Rediculously Under Needed? No, that's just a silly acronym, when the real virtues that a speedrun stands for is the abuse of video games in all their forms, treating them like the volatile and underutilised pieces of work they are, exploiting them to the point where a game is being played so far beyond the designers original intentions that the designers become worthless, and the player take over to advance the mechanics and create a new meta for speedrunnig tech. To put it lightly, speedruns is like wavedashing in Melee - you don't have to use the techniques if you're playing casually, but you have the option to, and it's a wonder it even works at all, even if it is a cumbersome accident. A TAS then, a Tool Assisted Speedrun, is when you use emulation software to control the game in a way that humans literally cannot do, a simple example pressing the "shoot" button at the maximum frame rate the game allows, like binding the mouse wheel to "fire" in Counter-Strike. It's different from cheating in that you can technically perform the inputs on real hardware, but good fucking luck finding anybody who perform 180 frame-perfect button presses every frame on four controllers simultaneously. Talk is cheap, though, and the best bet for understanding this truly incredible discipline is to watch something like the Aria of Sorrow run, and prepare to have your dick blown off within the first two minutes. I wish to thank TASVideos for hosting this wonderful repository that all gamers may learn from, and ask them to implement HTTPS, those gits.

Fuck you to DOTA 2's latest patch, "Seven" (archive)............. which has shown that Valve has become a parody of itself, much in the same way that Team Fortress 2 has, or Counter-Strike has... for the past five years... I'm guessing I'm late to the bandwagon, aren't I? Valve has never been famous for good game design. Oh wait, the retards are coming out from the bushes, so let me reword this. Valve has never been famous for understandable game design. What Valve does is add in so much shit (that they don't make) to their multiplayer games in an effort to boost their profits, addict their users (or in business terms, "enhance player engagement"), and artifically enhance the lifetime of their games without any regard to the fundamental principle of game design that states if you're playing a game for three hundred hours and you still don't understand the entirety of it, there is a problem. It's not like the game of chess where you can pick up the principles in a literal half-hour and the rest is just facing opponents - it's a situation where you actively have to devote hours upon hours upon hours of your time in order to understanding the basics of what the game has to offer. Like, do me a favour and try to understand what the Divine Rapier (archive) is on about, or even just those patch notes I linked you. If you haven't already been addicted to DOTA 2, then even these basic descriptions under "recommended heroes" are as impregnable as your mom. There is something seriously wrong here when strategy for a basic item becomes unreadable past the point when any sane man would have given up and played something simpler, like Quake, or finding the Higgs boson, or your mom. What Valve has done is created an ecosystem that is so far beyond rational thought, so far beyond what any designer worth his salt would consider reasonable, that when they add in features like levels on top of levels, or a backpack so you can have an inventory in your inventory, or so many different patches to so many different items that the game design document cannot be discerned from a blind idiot throwing stats at a wall, despite the insistence of their blind idiot fans that it somehow "works together" and isn't just an arbitrary change from one unsolicited meta to another, no longer creating a game but creating a perpetual beta where anything goes and the rules don't matter and nothing else does except for whatever novelty keeps the masses playing and the cash flow going... it's a disgrace to the entire industry. I am seriously in awe at the type of person who is interested in "Roshan attack range increased from 128 to 150", and what other type of borderline autistic interests they possess, in order to go over these games with such a passion that ends up leading to nothing at all the moment you leave Valve's ecosystem. I am willing to bet real-world physical money that I could take a man off the street with nothing but TV Tropes and a copy of Game Maker, give him a month to create a video game, and the result will still come out more coherent and well-designed that what Valve has accomplished with this absolute clusterfuck that I have seen before me. I know this is a really dense and long paragraph filled with shock and awe, but I am in shock and awe, and the density is well deserved. Fucking, fucking, hell.

§ December 19, 2016

What's up everybody, this is my speedrun of the next two days of BUAFYs. I'm playing Neocities for the PC. Let's do this shit.

§ December 18, 2016

WOOSH!

§ December 17, 2016

Big ups to Nina Paley, for her extremely persuasive and enticing video about the cancer that is copyright. While creators have been under the misguided impression that copyright protects their work, what it does is instead ensures that their work will never be shared unless somebody asks permission first, which is contrary to the entire ideal of art, which is meant to be viewed - often without the permission of the viewer. We have a situation where a lot of information goes in, where the most aggressively copyrighted and trademarked brands are the ones which are distributed to an unconsenting populace, and yet they are not permitted to share that information because the companies controlling the media (and not the artists themselves) will use the blunt weapon that is the law to strike down creativity. Copyright is censorship, simply - it is not a tool used to protect artists, because artists don't need copyright to share their work and make a profit in both money and attention. It's a tool used by companies in order to stifle anything that might cost them a red cent, or to destroy dissenting opinions and use of their work, as is the case with the Royal Dutch Shell gripe site (archive), where the company wanted to censor opinions unfavourable to them. What copyright has done is ruin our culture by causing us to ask for permission from the very same companies that contribute to that culture, in order for us to endulge in our fundamental right to that culture. It's a malicious system set up by governments that have shown nothing but cowardice, failing to protect the rights of the individual in favour of maintaining the status quo of the oligarchy. It's a long-ass video, but please - give me three minutes, and it will change your perspective. Ignore the comments; I'd tell you they're made by dumbasses, but it's on YouTube, so that's a given.

Fuck you to YouTube, and SPEAKING OF WHICH, consider this your daily reminder to never visit the main page of the site, unless you want to bear witness to the worst of the worst of what our online culture has to offer. Forgive me if any of this information is incorrect, as YouTube is giving me the French YouTube, despite me not being in France, so good job there. You have the entire gamut from intellectually vapid gawking of novelty attractions and pusillanimous purveying of nonstimulating audiovideos, and should you have trouble reading that sentence, then you are indeed the type of person that YouTube prays will waste their time consuming what prolefeed (and I swear I'm not exaggerating when I use that term) is being shipped off to you. I hope that "TRY NOT TO LAUGH or GRIN - Funny Kids Fails Compilation 2016 Part 8" by "Life Awesome" changes the life of every single robot that farmed its seventy million views. I'm sure YouTube is very proud of themselves for featuring such hilarious content as "BEST Savage moments | Vine Compilation", with the most broad use of "comedy" since Woody Allen showed up (I'm coming for you, you bespectacled fuck). I have to wonder what little self-respect somebody has to create a thing, putting under the great banner of gaming, in its proud and troublesome fourty-year history, like "FGTEEV Mario plays SUPER MARIO RUN! Spyro Dragon Kills Bowser + Boom Boom Battle (iOS App Game #1)". These are all real titles that you can view right now, which has cemented YouTube's transformation from the Mecca of the Web, to the History Channel of it: shocking content created solely to farm views from an audience they disrespect, where nobody within the company has the balls or the motivation to take a step back and do anything better with the limitless potential of the hundreds of millions of dollars, viewers, and potential to change the world that they offer. The Chans now look better than YouTube does, being a stark contrast of the way the Web works now: the lowest of mainstream culture coming at odds with a massive counter-culture that sees it from the outside looking in, and tries its best to be as far away from the mainstream as it possibly can be, as it causes them to physically recoil in disgust. May the next few years come swiftly by, so I may see the result of a Web that just stopped caring.

§ December 16, 2016

Rather than continue the thinly-veiled guise of posting a BUAFY a day late and pretending it occured a day early, mostly used to piss off anybody who might be tracking my browsing habits, I decided to nuke the kitt and call this one a loss. Oh well! What a good streak it was.

§ December 15, 2016

Big ups to the band "All Time Low". I have never heard of your music, nor have I heard of you. What limited music I have heard of is in a culture that I am not a part of, and is music that I would often not listen to on my own time. You would have passed through my life unaltered, neither a bastion of hatred nor a sigil of what it meant to be an artist. Would have, if not for your guitarist throwing out a pick at a concert, causing my friend to string it religiously around their neck. Your music stopped them from killing themselves. Thank you.

Fuck you to Apple, for whose commercials can be summed up as "fuck blind people". If you own a television, you poor fuck, you may have seen them. An all-white background featuring the mandatory racially diverse cast without doing anything to celebrate diversity among generic licensed music doing things with their iThing, because the same company which employs slavery (archive) really cares about you as a human being. It's your generic corporate swill passed off as something of benefit, entirely uninspired and yet with the special cuntiness of thinking they're better than you. "Buy our shit!" they say to us, as advertisements do. "It'll make you cool!". Yes, Apple, being a part of the same group of people who buy into brands without any consideration of what those brands stand for, being a part of the same normie society which lies complacent in the ills that they bring, is so fucking cool. Especially when everybody and their mother already has an iThing - it's so cool to be like everyone else! I suppose it's a blessing that Apple doesn't describe what the hell they're selling, so that those with bad eyes won't even be able to hear what's what. Descriptive voice-overs? What a horror! No, let's put in more children, because the easiest way to get a customer is to addict them while they're young.

§ December 14, 2016

Big ups to Good Old Games, for making it piss-easy to download DRM-free games and then have them uploaded to The Pirate Bay without having to deal with the hassle of having a barely-legible Russian crack filled with dubstep and hundred gigabyte installations, only to realise you forgot to turn on English and then have to reinstall the whole lot over again. You may get the impression that piracy is a bit of a pisser, given how you have to go through the whole rigamarole of following basic instructions, as opposed to the Millenial generation which will give up within five seconds if their apps don't install with one button press, defeating the idea that a computer is something more powerful than just a toy for babies to play with and be entitled to whenever something doesn't work their way, which makes Windows' success paradoxical hahaha computer discourse. Although Good Old Games rejected my Good New Game for unspecified reasons despite universal praise from everybody who played it, as opposed to those two-dozen or so people who I sent copies to and didn't, those bastards. But I will admit that hosting files which make it super easy to spread is, on the whole, the thing the gaming industry needs most right now. We have a right to free culture, and for every Valve out there which wants to take it away from us, I'm happy to see we have some old capitalist rebels who would like us to indulge in it.

Fuck you to Neocities for failing to implement HTTPS in their websites. "What?" you say while sneaking back out of the shadows - and good of you to realise that light makes you visible, though I must say the sneakery is out of place given your tactical position. "You already bitched about this before! What business do you have going backsies?". Well my fat fuck, the interesting thing is that Neocities is going to gift us global encryption for 2017, three years after it started being a really fucking big deal. "Happy new year!" it seems to say, because fundamental privacy is only something that may be gifted on special occasions, like a vaccine or a boyfriend. This is like when a program fails to implement new features for the sake of "backwards compatibility", failing to realise that one does not drive the same car for thirty years because it has a cigarette lighter. That's why you download patches: to put in the features you want so everybody else doesn't have to suffer with the same inane and barely-functional bullshit because of the people who are still designing their websites to support Internet Explorer, turning them into monstrous blobs that throw the middle finger to every country which doesn't have the same bandwidth as South Korea. Failing to support fundamental encryption for the sake of support a few laggards is what is known as a "Justin Trudeau" - being a massive pussy. Most of all, I'm tired of having to manually type Neocities URLs every time just so I can get encryption. You're giving me arthritis, you twats!

§ December 13, 2016

Big ups to The Backloggery, which is a proprietary service-as-a-software substitute with a web team that doesn't care about updates, doesn't use encryption, has a sparse and yet somehow bewildering website design, has truly limited features for what a Web App should be, and is pretty much just filling out paperwork for all that it does. "Gee, Froge", you say whilst sneaking out of the shadows. Why the hell are you talking to me if you're posed like a cat burglar? What the hell is wrong with you? Do you even have any respect for the fine art of burglary? Get out of here. Scoot your boot. "THAT SOUNDS TERRIBLE YOU CUNT," and you run away. Well it is terrible. But you know what comes out of terrible things? Potential! Yes, the potential for an clone of this website for backlogging and archiving games you've played, but where the staff knows what they're doing, is too grand to pass up. Granted you can get the same essential experience by using a spreadsheet, but then you miss out on that sweet, sweet advertising revenue aesthetics. Why aren't I doing something like that? I'm giving the idea away for free. If nobody takes it, I'm going to be so mad.

Fuck you to search engines which rank "froghand" lower than competitors which have absolutely not a thing to do with me. I must admit that, as of late, it's been getting harder and harder to just sit down and write. There's a few reasons for this: the acquisiion of new types of media, the respects given to myself through constant improvement, the organisation of work and pleasure around the pagan holidays, and the lack of means to earn back all the time I get through sleeping. Yeah, the funniest thing is that sleeping is my biggest issue nowadays, which I suppose is natural given how I've improved my weight gain from a kilogram to two whole kilograms (so now I may pick up my fat little cat). It's easy enough to just talk about a thing; I do that every day in my journals and in reality. The hard part is both shipping it off to an audience in an interesting way, and to come up with new things to talk about that aren't repeats. I said before my job is a thousand ideas a year. Well, I've been talking for seven months now, and I'm starting to realise just how difficult that is. And every day I have to justify to myself, with my meager audience and my lack of means to promote myself, that even though I've been doing this a long time, it's still the best thing for me at this moment. Getting rid of it would be getting rid of a part of myself. To have my work, well-written and well-deserved to be read, with no criticisms to guide me but my own harshness, not be exposed to an audience when I need it most, is a needless burden upon me. Perhaps it is time to bite the bullet and be more proactive with my advertising.

§ December 12, 2016

Big ups to that particular way that furries and other such "kawaii" denizens of the net type, where they could burst into a roleplay at any given time and all of a sudden talk about their favourite fetishes and yuri anime. Don't pretend that you don't know what I'm talking about when I say that *quick hacking of the throat* ^///^ omggg it's so kyoot :'3c they could just come in and eat you uppp~ ^ω^ like the gay babies they are :3 nawr! Sorry that I caused my entire audience to age thirty years with one sentence (aruff), but I'm highlighting it because, above all else, it's a culture. I admit that being a pothead or a nazi is technically a "culture", but I'm highlighting this one because it's a symptom of a trend that has been overtaking the web; namely, the thrashing against traditional mannerisms and just going off the deep end into the land of the effeminate cutes. I really do mean "effeminate" - I had to crutch while writing that dialogue from a gay crossdressing fursuiter's blog, because I literally do not have the talent to make something like that out of the ether, which is pretty pathetic considering how much of a furry fuck I myself am (this must be how black people feel when a white guy says nigga). Ever since 2010, in no small part to that horse cartoon being a thing, men have been shying away from traditional gender roles of being "manly", and there has been a significant culture that chooses instead to be themselves and enjoy such things as being straight while still enjoying a gay cross-dressing fursuiter's blog, or girly anime and cartoons that doesn't need any justification to be watched. While these cultures have always existed in some form, it's only most recently that this demographic has made such an impact on the Web, and it's the appropiation of this furry-speak that most represents what's happening right now. It's shameless, often silly, and is completely distinctive from anything else online. I'd much rather have conversations sprinkled with catfaces and tildes than those where every other word makes it sound like you want to kill yourself, in this post-edgeronic world, because at least then I may know I'm with my... brood.

Fuck you to the Working Group of the HTTP/2 protocol for deciding to not require encryption for the Web (archive). The complaints are two-fold: cost, politics, necessity. It's financially free, just like HTTPS today, so there's the act of computing cost. Granted, a thing like Tor which is much more secure by design, would be impracticle for forcing the entire Web into, and even impracticle for certain everyday tasks like browsing resource-intensive websites. For standard Web encryption, the dissidents are right to say there's no impact when doing regular browsing. The second one is politics, where one bloke was saying that the Working Group was following an agenda (archive) when it comes to forcing encryption, which is like Iran saying that the First World is denouncing stoning "for political purposes". The fact is that we live in a dangerous world, and the reason it's become political is because the right information in the wrong hands can become a major political force, which is why we need to encrypt information to ensure that never happens. But the biggest problem with this argument, this feat of magical thinking, is that you don't get to decide what you need to be private. I like telling this story (archive), just because it's a powerful one: back in 1851, Amsterdam had a public repository of all sorts of information. Full name, address, profession, your parents, and so on. All of this would be bad enough if it got into the wrong hands, but even more sinister is another field which, though seemingly innocent at the time, turned into a disaster when the Nazis invaded the Netherlands in 1940. The religion field. 80% of all of Amsterdam's Jews were killed by the Nazis because of this information, and it would have shot up to 100% had a good deal of the registry not been destroyed in a rebellious arson. 80,000 people died because of what you would consider to be innocent, or in the words of the Working Group, "has no need for encryption". When your information is out there and in the clear for anybody to take control of - and it has been proven time and time again that our governments, corporations, and even individuals have the means and the ability to - then you don't get a single say in how that information is being dessiminated. There are several countries around the world that would punish you for looking at my blog. Execute me for who I am. And for there to even be a possibility for somebody to be harmed because of something that they didn't think needed protecting, and yet doing nothing to prevent that harm? That's just malicious.

§ December 11, 2016

Big ups to this short little web video about your gay son living in 1959, though I recommend it less because it's a gay thing and more because it's a message of choosing to be proud of where you end up as. While I won't say that every position deserves to be admired as something to be proud of - like those individuals who think that being a McDonald's manager is something to be proud of beyond a brief stop in the timeline of life (sidenote: I take both interest and shame in knowing that McDonald's will stil be relevant in a hundred years time, as it has been for the past fifty) - I will say that it is necessary to take pride in whatever menial job you end up doing, as to learn all that you can given the limited experiences you're in, is part of developing the character and the discipline to succeed with all your personal projects. If you do happen to be gay, or at least on the gay spectrum like ~~yours truly~~ (the squiggles represent the gay agenda), then perhaps this short will mean something more to you. Its message of "don't sneak" seems a little optimistic, as any youngster who even shows a hint of personality outside the, forgive the buzzwords, heteronormative conjecture, is subjected to the harshest of criticisms by your peers and by your parents. And given how these are the people that are most influential to a child, thinking of any other lifestyle than to simply hide as much of yourself as you can is just not an option. It's food for thought, simply. But I will say that being able to express my innate bisexuality is a privilege that I never get outside my close circle of friends. It's hard to be honest under those conditions.

Fuck you to Forbes, which forces users to turn off (archive) their adblock in order to access content that was doing us a favour and hiding behind a "fuck you" screen, lest we accidentally click on something from Forbes. I have yet to see any convincing argument as to why the greatest plague of the Web, beyond nazism and evangelists, should continue to exist when everybody in the world has the privilege to, with a single extension, remove it from their lives forever, to never again be burdened with higher data costs, slower page loading speed, auto-playing audio and video, and malware. Oh yes! Little known fact: advertisements can contain malware, like the kind immediately served by Forbes (archive) when somebody turns off their blocker. For the superior Linux Connoisseur, this doesn't matter (obligatory XKCD link [archive]), beyond being a brief annoyance. For the rest of the world, like peasants at the clergy, an ad-blocker has actual security considerations, being able to stop companies from tracking you and being able to upload such nasty things onto your machine. Actually, those are good for everybody. So use a bloody ad-blocker already.

§ December 10, 2016

Big ups to the Raised by Narcissists subreddit, your go-to support group for dealing with abusive parents in their entire spectrum of scumbaggery. While the website is dense with abbreviations and a sort of in-speak that will make the following "fuck you" look very hypocritical, one must ignore the ramblings of in-house lingo in order to understand the core of the message. This obscure subreddit highlights one of the most important functions of social media, and Reddit in particular: creating a place for similar people to get together and help each other out. It's the justification for their entire being. We're living on one big Web dream, looking out towards the expanse of limitless comfort, luxury, novelty, and more, and whenever the new meme infects this calming anarchy, it's blaring the alarm and waking us up to the mundane reality we live in - thoughtless in its construction, and filled with thoughtless people. When a website stoops to being the blandest and most milquetoast gathering place for every individual to come by and make their impact, with no quality standards whatsoever, we get exactly what we set out to make: a shoppping mall, where the least interesting members of society spend their days, buying wares that rarely matter, and living out their time in boredom and not grace. The Web deserves more places where people with similar background and troubled pasts can get together and share their experiences, and to have it all displayed publicly so that anybody may understand a slice of the culture that they were forced to grow up in. It's therapy and it's a showcase of the worst of the world, and to get rid of the opportunity for little slices of the Web like this in order to fill it up with more dank memes, is a disservice to its capability. Every generation kills their father, it seems; this generation is helping to kill the Web.

Fuck you to the Ethereum Project, which is an excellent example of a website which looks very good, but says absolutely nothing about what it stands for - an allegory for the mainstream media, enticingly. "Kickstart a project with a trustless crowdsale" what the utter fuck? Have you ever talked to somebody for a good, long while, and yet still couldn't remember a single thing about what they said? How about for a short while, but their speech was so dense with babble that you have to constantly ask what they're talking about, but still never get anywhere? Of course not! You're just a basement dwelling nerd looking over the table of the cool kids club as you wonder what it'll take to be just like them. Well, I'll tell you: cook your own meals every day, exercise as often as you can, do as much reading and learning as you may, devote time to doing what you like, sleep a lot, and do all that you can for the best interest of society. "Oh, gee," you say, appearing right behind me as I comically arch my back and skitter away. You said something else, but then I was too far away for me to hear you, so I'm going to say "isn't that just being a good person in general". Félicitations [translator note: félicitation means blowjob]! You discovered the secret to being cool - being the most solid and dependable person in your social group so that when everybody else fucks off, you're the only one people can rely on to get the job done. Unlike this website, which had one chance to entice me as to what the fuck it's on about, and yet completely and utterly failed. I hereby award you the "trying too hard" demerit, which will be awarded to you indefinitely until something even worse comes along. Rest in peace, you buzzword-riddled fuck.

§ December 09, 2016

Big ups to the picture book Frederick, which is a small little thing, not worth reviewing due to its length, and yet affords with it a dignity and a message that is so rare to see in children's books that it has become an example for me to live by. Not that I write for children; it should be blatantly obvious by now that there are many thousands of fucks I have to give. I do, however, write for those who most need it. Those who need examples on how to be great, how to give back to the world, why it's important, and how to start. And though there isn't any magic bullet - just many hundreds of days worth of self-doubt and needless self-reflection until you decide to make something of yourself out of the ether - I provide many bullets worth of beauty and all that is good in the world. After all, my job is coming up with a thousand ideas a year - seven hundred for the BUAFYs, a few hundred more for the articles. To this extent, I must simplify things, and Frederick is an example of how to allow children, as well as adults tired of complicated writing, to absorb what you have to say. It's an allegory, featuring some little mice and rocks pasted onto a white background, about the arts and its place in culture, how people don't appreciate it until it's all they have, and it says all this in a way that anybody can understand. In a world where most children's media is just an attempt to imprint on them the newest brands so they can get their parents to buy into its products, this book from 1967 is a refreshing oddity. It's a thing of beauty, really. I must recommend it.

Fuck you to those establishments who take advantage of the online addictions of young people (archive), gambling in particular. I admit I have a bone to pick with the gambling scene. Not because of any retarded religious restriction or because I still have some moralfaggotry left in me, saying that things are a moral wrong without coming up with practical reasons as to why that is. Shockingly, and by "shockingly" I mean somewhat obvious, gambling has always been one of the most enticing and addicting forms of entertainment out there, taking perfectly innocent games and applying real-world consequences to them for the benefit of those rich enough to run the games. It's profiteering off of human greed, much like drugs profiteer off misery, or weapons makers profit off war. It's the libertarian ideal that people should be allowed to damage themselves if they may choose, without any government intervention whatsoever, and as we all know this social darwinism is the building block of fascism, E.G. letting people die isn't good for the world. Gambling addictions aren't lethal, even given the potential to be in the case of malnourishment or seizures, but it is severely damaging in terms of money, time, and social status lost because of it. Society has a vested interest in taking formerly productive people out of the virtual casinos and back into the real world, where they may live healthily yet again, much more so than if they let them wallow away in the dull miasma of addiction. This is especially true for our children, and given the unprecedented access to all sorts of online gambling endeavours, including Valve's complicit acceptance in letting tens of thousands of young men gamble using their virtual currency (even though their entire operation is based on addicting people), the lack of regulation only continues to harm this vulnerable group. In sum, nobody deserves to be harmed if we may stop it, and those who disagree are truly selfish people.

§ December 08, 2016

Big ups to those individuals who dedicate their work to the public domain, being brave enough to not accept any expectation of profit from their work whatsoever, so that they may allow anybody, without restrictions or any burden at all, to enjoy it so long as they may live, and so long as their descendants may live. It is the most generous thing that an artist can do, allowing anybody to transform their work, to share it, display it, comment on it, and be used forever. They leave behind a legacy, where their work is not made exclusively to promote their life here on Earth, but because they well and truly understand that they are going to die. In doing so, they leave behind a gift for the future generations, where they may indulge in their work and never be a victim of our broken copyright system, or any other system that takes away the fundamental human right to culture, and ensures that nobody may take their liberty away from them. The definition of legacy is to use your limited hundred years in order to make somebody else's hundred years a lot better than it would have. When you see somebody like me dedicate all their work to the public commons, even when individual practical sense says that I should have licensed it under something which would ensure me some stream of profit... it's because I care more about you than I do about me. I'll always find a way to survive, but when it comes to somebody who already has the privilege to survive and to enjoy their time alive, I don't want them to ever feel like they are doing something wrong, or have to be burdened with following arbitrary terms, or face the threat of somebody else telling them that they can't do something because somebody else doesn't like how they're using a thing that they made, then that's something I can't stand. That's why I want copyright, in blunt terms, dead. It damages everything that it touches. Will it be an inconvenience for artists who profit off their work? We have to understand: you are not better than the rest of us. The arts will always find a way to survive, using the other laws that exist to protect unfair trade (such as contract, trademark, patent, and moral law), and using techniques to prevent premature distribution of in-progress work (such as watermarking, source obfusciation, and even DRM so long as these are never applied to a finished product). But when the artist puts themselves over the rest of us? It's dishonouring the culture that they choose to leave behind. And it's a grim bloody fable when our culture is damaged because of them.

Fuck you to this post-truth world (archive), as exemplified by Gamergate and the Trump scene, the former setting the precedent for the latter, both hate groups in nuanced ways, and it's times like there where I can honestly say I am most proud to not belong to the United States. Yes I'm talking about politics, now sit your ass down because nothing else is on the menu today. Ignoring the realities of a country in favour of showcasing a viewpoint that is beneficial to a party is one of the fundamental aspects of fascism, where the truth is ignored when its inconvenient, and the party only expresses a viewpoint that is favourable to them, pandering to their audience to gain a ferocious base that will lash out at anybody who tries to inform them of the reality of the world, and not as they percieve it. When people talk about disenfranchisement, removing the ability to vote, they talk primarily of those who are so far outside reality, and so far inside a filter bubble where they are told that every lie, no matter how outrageous, is a truth, then they talk persuasively indeed, as when the actions go outside a filter bubble, such as those that exist with social and print media and the rest of the Web, then they affect the real world. The articles focuses in-depth on how hate mobs, masked by disinformation and being so broad as to entice almost anybody, stop being just another gear in the Internet Hate Machine, and become a very real, and very pressing problem. Anybody who feels the need to harass specific targets to showcase their point of view, so long as these individuals don't deserve the harassment (as is not the case with those "alt-right" folks, where "alt-right" is just a weasle word for racism, and so must be denounced at every opportunity), is probably not a good person, and does not deserve to have their opinions honoured. It is important to note that, even though most media prides itself on being unbiased, some viewpoints are completely and one hundred percent unacceptable in today's society. And we must ensure that these viewpoints are not allowed to be spread, lest our free speech privileges be abused to cause as much harm as has existed in the United States, so long as it has existed.

§ December 07, 2016

Big ups to a Vinesauce LSD: Dream Emulator stream, and also the bloke who hacked together the edit who is incidentalLy whoring for subscribers, but given that YouTube is the Red Light District to what other whores go to in order to whore with the other whores, I won't whore a complaint about the whoring, and I whoreheartedly and whoresomely approve of such whoring (you can probably tell it's an Ænglisc word). I'm not bringing it up because it's particularly hilarious or insightful or even because the game itself is any good beyond some brief intrigue and an art college dissertation. You can get all of those anywhere, except for the dissertation, costing a week of indentured servitude and about twenty cups of shitty coffee, as it's all shitty (just lost all my nordic followers). I bring it up because at some point during the stream, Vinny says, offhandedly, that if you write down all your dreams in a little thing, then you'll eventually start lucid dreaming, E.G. being able to control them consciously. I wish to state that my efforts have been working, in some small way, as of late, and it is a privilege to enjoy what untouched creativity exists there. Even an offhand comment on something that you are enjoying because you have little better to do and without the willpower to make something great, can provide some great benefit to you if you make the most out of it.

Fuck you to websites which require you to use Twitter to ask for customer support, as opposed to, a bloody e-mail address or a phone number, those obviously obsolete technologies those. I was originally going to call out Discord for this, but its support page actually has an e-mail form buried away, but I'm not linking it because if it isn't the most obvious thing to find, your website is made wrong (as is the entire program, actually). I'd like to invent a program that spams companies with the same shitty memes they peddle to their customers, in the same way I'd like to invent a brand of tape that doesn't stick to fur: can't be arsed. Why is the march of progress marching backwards, when we are removing features in the quest for the most unecessarily new thing? First we got rid of voice chat with the phone, and now that you're on Twitter, we got rid of the means to write out things in detail. Granted, e-mail is useful because the government spies on all phone calls (and there is nothing you can do to stop this outside of a dedicated VOIP app, like Signal), where you can just encrypt e-mail and it's bosh. Taking a massive step backwards and having all your communications in the scope of two sentences at the most, being available to the public for all to see and for Twitter to harvest, is wrong on the basic principles of ensuring the best for your customers. If you force your customer to use an account outside of the service you provide in order to get help for that service, I do not need to say that you are doing it really, extraordinarily wrong, showing that you're so inept at handling your business that you need to outsource it to another company. Incidentally, I just invented Kitter, where you send tweets (now called either clits or kits depending on your Kitter level) out to other Neocities others. "Isn't that just a comment board -" shut up, I'm patenting it!

§ December 06, 2016

Big ups to this DJbooth article about reference tracks (archive). As it turns out, nobody writes their own music! Somebody else does. And then they send it to a bunch of corporate drones, who then ships it off to the asshole lucky enough to have the privilege to get paid for doing work that they didn't do. Quick question: if artists don't create their own music, why do we pay them? "To perform, dumbshit". And that's my point: if I wanted Rihanna to perform for me some fanfiction or whatever, then why can I not pay her to do that? "Because she's famous". If she is famous for performing work, but she does not perform what I ask her to, then why is she? "Because she performs what she wants". Then why do we pay her at all? I assure you it's not because of the quality of her music - it's all garbage, to put it in terms that deserve no more specifics. Alright, I know why, but it's the curse of knowledge. The same intelligence level of people who unironically enjoy Family Guy, Duck Dynasty, and whatever knockoff of American Idol is on nowadays, are the same people who will happily listen to whatever garbage crosses their doorstep without any thought whatsoever. I like calling them proles, but in the story they were being manipulated by the government, but we all know the government is owned by big business political discourse. It strikes me as a symptom of a stupid culture, as in a culture that prides itself on actively shunning intelligence, when an artist that doesn't do the majority of the work gains the majority of the benefit, such as the editors on a film working much harder on much more challenging work than the actor who has to work for a few weeks in a low-effort job (exceptions exist). It's almost like it was a classist hierarchy.

Fuck you to the extraordinarily stupid comments on such sites as YouTube, and I sure am glad you can remove them with every YouTube add-on out there. I originally bitched about comments before, though I must apologise that I can't find it (hey now's a good time to e-mail me and not just get dicks in my inbox), meaning that I can't find a clever throwback phrase or a reference or what have you to arbitrarily increase the size of this paragraph and make it even more unreadable for the sake of bolstering my resume by filling it out with word counts with the assumption that what I say actually matters. I don't mind the retards hanging around Internet sites offering up their unsolicited opinions on terrible work - it's less competition if they don't start blogs over here. Yes, it's a cruel mentality, but if somebody is well into adulthood and has wasted their lives doing nothing creative at all, spending what little time they have in the day consuming media that doesn't offer them anything but a brief distraction, offering comments that nobody will ever remember, will ever care about, then I honestly don't want them in my sight. Anybody who is serious about being an artist will not be dissuaded from my aggression - I face such retards eery day, and their opinions mean nothing to me, just as others may think I am retarded (but we all know that can't be truuuu), and my opinions mean nothing to them. It increases the quality of the arts the less people who go into it that aren't serious, and the collective good of our culture is far more important than the individuals modest right to their feelings, so long as the offending person harms them in order to improve their work. Good medicine tastes bitter, after all.

§ December 05, 2016

Big ups to the Wikipedia article "Parity of zero", which is the most thorough and well-constructed treatment of the most boring and inane topic I have seen, aside from some of the roads that the site has one there. I suppose it's not in my place to judge - if there are people out there who devote their lives specifically for finding citations for roads that only a small percentage of that country's population will ever visit, then I would much rather have them on Wikipedia than out in the general public, as I can only imagine how estranged both their social skills and their intimate fetishes are. It must not also be in my right to call a subject such as the parity of zero "boring", when I know that those same people who edit road articles are those editing these article, so I'm sure they find it as fucking riveting as I do Japanese furry art. To the article's credit, this whole subject is useless in everyday life, except to make married people fight, and that's just mean. Should I be making fun of a subject that I barely understand and will never effect me in any way whatsoever? Probably not - but I'm sure that there is somebody out there who is writing me a very stern comment about how I insulted their favourite number mathematical concept, and then swiftly deleted it, which must happen to many thousand people many thousands times of day to my blog, because nobody is writing me, and not because I'm legendarily unpopular. It's going to be really funny once I do get famous and all this bitching is for nothing.

Fuck you to my own two hands, for baking with them some of the most awful cookies I've made this year (impressive!). "Aren't cookies for those with a soul", a young heathen from the shadows asked, afraid of my heavenly glow. Well, there is nothing more holy than baking your own means of life, which is unfortunate because I have to tape two religious texts to my shoes lest anybody think I'm doing a paganistic ritual. They were insidious semicircles, soft at the outset, getting harder and harder as time went on, and in such great numbers that any serious assault could only be met with great prejudice. How did they taste? Irrelevent, due to the sheer amount of sugar that went into them - and as we learned from Maus (among other lessons), sugar burns your throat. It also pumps your stomach in a non-sexual way, lending the victim to cause mild anguish over an extended period of time, and I'm describing this as an SCP article because I don't want to give the false impression that I'm human. And after playing a video game that has the contradiction of being both boring and engaging (oh, "addicting" is what it's called), I was out of commission. But none of this matters, because I did the BUAFYs anyway. A paradox! Yes.

§ December 04, 2016

Big ups to the article "Why Some Video Games are in Danger of Disappearing Forever" (archive). For those distinguished gentlemen who took one look at the "publication", with an extremely generous use of the term, and then recoiled their mouse away from the link at the idea that they would ever patronise the worst of the worst of the mainstream Internet, I am with you. There is an archive page directly across that link, and I assure you that the K which must not be Named will never see a dollar from your click, should you decide to view the archive. But as to why I would even browse such an establishment, well, I wasn't. I was browsing the emulation scene looking for the progress on Xbox emulators (spoiler: there is none), and I came across this article because of that, due to somebody who was brave enough to put on a hazard suit and face the wasteland. I must remind you that, even for the worst of the worst of the world, a stopped clock (archive) is right twice a day. Even the dumbest, most ignorant piece of shit may say something profound if they have the good fortune to (we must wonder why heather doesn't start a real blog). This is an example, detailing the importance of protecting our media for the digital age as our physical media rots to the ages, with an industry is so vehemently against its own culture, refusing to release source code, refusing to release secrets, and refusing to allow gamers to indulge in the work that they consume, that it is a wonder how anything survives at all. While I had previous remarks on art only needing to be a "good enough" copy, because its less about the physical construction of the thing as it is the overall message, those remarks do not apply to a digital, interactive medium, where everything must be perfect in order to allow future generations to enjoy it - in all its glitches, exploits, and quirks - in the exact same way, and to carry on our proud heritage of modding and breaking apart games forever. It is a young medium. Let us ensure it never grows old.

Fuck you to a recent video game I have downloaded, may its name be censored to protect my shit taste, that was only thirty gigabytes in length, needed fifty to install, but required a hundred in order to actually install the thing. Finally, after an hours-long nap, I can think of something to rightfully complain about! This isn't your ordinary blog for random bullshit. No, dear - this is a dignified blog. I'm not familiar with what dark magic occurs behind the scenes of executables, and this statement immediately discounts anything I may say regarding the notion, but it seems to me that downloading something that requires twice as much disk space as was advertised to me as needing, is dishonest, meaning I had to throw out the entire file because of my tiny, tiny hard drive. I would say I feel some remorse for the loss, but really, I don't. Any game that doesn't bother to compress itself to fit on a laptop is not a game that's worthy of my respect, clashing with my minimalist lifestyle and refusal to bow down to the unrelenting feature creep of new technology. Now if you excuse me, I'll be hosting a rousing game of Super Smash Brothers 64. Which arbitrary collection of pixels do you associate with your entire lifestyle? Is it the one that's at the bottom of the tier list, or the one that actually wins?

§ December 03, 2016

Big ups to the /r/outrun, for showing me the error of my ways, and determining that what I have actually decreed to be "vaporwave week" should have actually been "outrun week", even though it would have led to some ambiguity with the verb lacking a noun. Outrun what? Shall we outrun our feels, for fear that they may change us, or will we outrun away from this blog so you don't have to read my ramblings further? You're like a sheep, you know, in that you listen to somebody without any thought at all, so me telling you to outrun the heck away from here, would be disasterous for my advertising revenue of zero dollars. How do I know you're a sheep? Because you're listening to the opinions of a fucking froge. Regardless, outrun is a circlejerk genre of aesthetics which prides itself on absorbing the 80s like a cultural sponge, much like Absolut Vodka was back in the 90s, except with far less shilling. If you like vaporwave, you'll like outrun, please imagine this in a Billy Mays voice. Now let's see, what else can I compliment today? Perhaps my blog icons which were the same as last months? Jesus christ, four days without an aesthetic change? It's almost like this website never changes at all (note: this joke was funnier when the website was all pink).

Fuck you to websites which fail to compress their images, and thus forcing me to download the equivalent of a generously compressed Macklemore song in order to view their unsolicited opinions about Israel. I often ask myself, when coming to the idea of what uploaded images should be to the user. If I upload a gay furry orgy 30 megabytes in size, then that's a big strain on the end of the user. If I losslessly compress that to about 28 megabytes, it's better than nothing, but that's still the size of a shitty indie game, and I assure you that the orgy will be far less entertaining. However, if I were to compress it using something like Imgult, or may Chaos smite me, a .jpg conversion, then I could get it down to six megabytes or even less! However, there is the tradeoff of certain details in the image being removed, such as smooth gradients being replaced with a convincing dither, having the colour palette being reduced, and stripping out redundant data. The quality will go unnoticed by the great majority of people, and the space gained will reduce the burden of everybody who ever views that image, making it a fair trade-off. At the same time, if we are to upload works, then are we not obliged to provide the best quality, so we may archive it on the Web forever? We must understand that all data ever made is compressed in some format, from television to movies to music, and the idea of practical lossless indulgance is a very recent one. We also must understand that not everything that gets uploaded deserves to be saved for the ages, unless it means something to somebody personally. A lot of people will say that bandwidth gets cheaper all the time, but that's like saying that the VHS is obsolete when there are dozens of countries which still rely on it for video. I am in favour of compressing our media down to its absolute lowest, because if we are going to archive the Web, then we need a hell of a lot of space to do it, and the modest loss in quality is more than made up for the means to store up to six times as much media. Nobody needs to see the Mona Lisa exactly as it appears in real life - real life will still exist for her, and the Web exists for us.

§ December 02, 2016

Big ups to MC Ricky D, also known as Richard Stallman (a joke is always funny told the second time), for his small article (archive) on copyright as it stands in relation to the past and present. It's simple and illuminating and tells us a lot about our culture, about how our governments do not consider our culture a fundamental right of all humans, but instead a right only lent to us, piecemeal, given the permission of the corporate interests which allow the culture to spread. I recall an example in No Logo (an incredible depressing book you may wish to read) where companies would send out cease-and-desist letters to Web 1.0 webpages that used song lyrics on their websites. The owners of these pages, these little pieces of our culture, were teenagers trying to express their artistic vision, and had no infringing content on their sites at all. To assume that such companies care one bit about us, is a massive mistake to make, and the only way to stand up to such oppression is to not use the products of any enemy of culture, and especially not to buy from them (so basically pirate everything and you'll be fighting the man, man). It's interesting to see Stallman advocate, not for the abolition of copyright, but for a ten-year period of its existence since the date of publication. It makes sense that he contrasts favourably an article or a piece of art to a software, because the principle issue with software is that it's opaque, while analogue art may be copied freely, and only protected by the arbitrary monopolies as decreed by the man, man, upwards of 200 years in Mexico. So what I'm saying is that copyright law is a lazy hack that does nothing to protect the underlying issues that are supposed to be fixed by it, such as competitors claiming others work for their own, and failing to allow an artist to make a profit off of their labour. Other laws could be implemented to make up for this deficiency without applying the blunt hammer of copyright, but as we see, Mexico enjoys copyright vultures harassing teenagers and sending them threatening letters at the cost of legal action (fuck Mexico!).

Fuck you to Microsoft Windows, for recognising that a 7-Zip file does, in fact, belong to a 7-Zip created archive, but when you use the "web service" (which is actually just a webpage listing referral links that doesn't do dick to explain whatever the file is, and what a good program is to use it), it doesn't list 7-Zip as one of the available programs you can use to unarchive it. You fucking what mate? 7-Zip invents the file format, and you know that it invented it, but you don't list the program that continues to be the best option for utilising that format in? I would say that it's due to Microsoft creating a conspiracy to stamp out open-source software in favour of only allowing proprietary ones that further reduce the control of the user over their PC (oh wait), but I'm guessing that it's due to a Microsoft code monkey skiddie unpaid intern unlicensed piecework subcontractor engineer dropping the ball and not being able to look up programs on the Microsoft Branded Internet that didn't fit the arbitrary requirements of the Microsoft Branded Specification Sheet for Acceptable Programs and their Afforded Usage in Microsoft Branded Materials and other such Specifications. Given that this is the company who thought that the Xbone was a good business investment, I don't doubt that they're the type to think Winrar is making a comeback. There's actually a subreddit devoted for people who paid for the license, but it's more of an assassination market if anything.

§ December 01, 2016

Big ups to Wine for Linux, which allows me to fuck with Microsoft's hellish installation procedures and let me install such programs on Linux, tucked away in a virtual C drive on Linux, quarenteed on Linux from the rest of the sensible Linux operating system on Linux, though as a downside introducing all the shittiest parts of Winblows with it (you know you're far gone when you're unironically saying "Winblows") on Linux. Sadly, I was unable to get Hotline Miami to work on Linux, and since I can't be arsed to get an on Linux version from a developer that didn't bother to open-source the Linux game on Linux, despite Quake having done so in a model that still allows it to make a profit by allowing all of the code to be studied, but removing core data files like maps, data packs, music, and anything that you would expect to make run on Linux. It's not that hard to be ethical on Linux! For instance, it would have been really easy on Linux to share some of the code for the "door" object, which would tell me why I always got stuck in them. Or how about the "dog" object which causes their AI to simply stop functioning? You can't say it's a feature when your source code tells all! On Linux. I'm hoping if I say "on Linux" enough, some poor nutter will make a game exclusive to the platform. Sadly, Window's legendary status as a gaming platform despite only earning that reputation through having a monopoly on exclusive drivers and renderers sometime in the 2000s, now being less and less relevant to anybody who actually gives a shit about their computer. Seems to me the only reason Microsoft is still relevant is because the Linux community isn't trying to take over on their territory, despite having several compelling reasons to make them switch. This must be how the Indus Valley Civilisation fell. If you're not killing everybody else, you're losing.

Fuck you to the current cultural trend (note: this is what you bring up if you have jack shit to talk about) of post-ironically showcasing depressing things into a casual nature. There used to be an ancient cultural trend of memento mori, which is reminding you of the seriousness of death, in order to keep yourself humble, wary, and disciplined enough to make the most out of your life until your inevitable, and often untimely, dissolution from this mortal coil. Nowadays, talking about death is as commonplace as it is unimpactful. I'm not an old geezer, but when somebody talks to me and I ask them "what's good my boy?" and they say "nothing is good, every day is a living hell", then it brings a damper to otherwise innocent discourse. What's especially insidious about this current trend is that it doesn't bring to light anything insightful or important about the topics of which you talk about, like saying that you casually have crippling depression does nothing for those who actually have it, or making suicide jokes unwarranted cheapens the impact of actual suicide. When you get to the point where you talk about death on a daily basis without showcasing any sense of self-awareness of the thing, like a character in a poorly-written film trying to be "edgy" or "hip" instead of actually being those thigns, then it shows that you aren't confident enough in yourself to be sincere, so you have to attempt in vain to make other people uncomfortable to the point where anything you say ends up being disregarded as one cosmic joke, the difference being that nobody laughs. It's conversations like these which make you want to walk into the nearest airport, buy a plane ticket to Nevada, and blow up the Las Vegas strip in an explosion full of more guts and gore and gibs than a slaughterhouse on McDonalds Monopoly Week, and destablise the entire United States culture in one firey lights show, the dull echoes of the screams lighting up the otherwise mangled cheers of the peaceful denisens below, as you embrace your last goodbye to our unjust Chaos, and let the file engulf your skin, the sweet release of death bringing you closer to your victims. Oh, and happy holidays!

November 2016 BUAFY January 2017

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September 2016

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May 2016

Every day is an atheist holiday! Froghand.

Today's page was updated on 2017-01-01 and created on 2016-12-02!

Oh jeez oh man it's almost the end of this shitshow.