useless 0x20

What *really* white people like

Having read Stuff White People Like for a while I felt it necessary to point out that a small subset of white people like things a bit different.  And by subset I mean tiny fraction of albinos.  No, I don't have pink eyes, shut the fuck up.

1. Dark. Seriously, what is it with the rest of you and the sun?  The sunlight, it burns us, precious.
2. Anime.  All anime characters look as weird as we do.  Pink hair?  Ha!  White looks normal now, fuckers.
3. Night.  Kind of goes along with the whole love of darkness. Also drawn shades, sunglasses, etc. Seriously, light just sucks.
4. Large fonts.
5. When people don't ask if I have pink eyes.  I really don't have pink eyes.  Shut up.
6. Along with #5: when people are smart enough to realize that ALL my hair is really white, yes, even the stuff covered by my clothes.  I don't have a magic motherfucking body hair system that changes colors based on whether or not it's clothed.  Seriously, fuck you for asking.

Will come up with more later.

Fanaticism is fun!

 

While reading this story at ArsTechnica I meandered down to the comments section and had a good chuckle.  Specifically at this:

this is at best a lame attempt to get apple to reveal their product road map for safari, at worst it's anti-apple propaganda.

Seriously.  It must be nice to be so entrenched in the Defense Force of your choice that a simple note from an e-commerce site that your vendor's browser lacks a feature available in every other  major browser (and some not so major).  So sorry for your persecution though.

I Hate (my) Blog

This song is pretty much awesome.

Bailing people out does not help them

There's an episode of Family Guy where Lois runs for Mayor of Quahog and tries to have an intelligent debate with Adam West.  Instead she quickly realizes that making blanket statements that 'feel good' makes voters happy.  This is perhaps a bit glib but then it is a comedy show.  All the same this kind of tactic works pretty well for politicians.  So I wasn't shocked, per se, when I heard that Hillary Clinton thinks we should freeze interest rates for five years and have a moratorium on home foreclosures for some period of time.  I mean, it's a shockingly stupid idea, but I was not shocked to hear it.  People in a tough spot love to hear that somebody's coming to rescue them.

I actually did a quick search to find some good articles on this topic (search here) which was neat.  Everything I saw was either a press release or an article detailing why this is such a terrible idea.  I feel better, natch.  This is a pretty representative article on what's going on here, although kind of short.

The bottom line is that lots of people made lots of mistakes.  Helping people who were really duped is definitely a good thing to do here, but I don't think they're actually the majority case.  I think a lot of people went in to some mortgages saying "ooh neat I can buy this house and deal with the payment reset in five years."  Well, five years later, yeah, you got screwed.  But that isn't my fault or the government's fault.  It's your fault for not planning.

Hillary vs. Obama

Hillary's stumping video seems to be designed to make your eyes and ears bleed.  It's just... terrible.  I actually couldn't watch it all the way through so I don't really know how it ends. Maybe an alien jumps out of her chest and devours whoever wrote that awful Jackson 5 sort-of-a-cover?

 

Aaaand then there's a legitimate candidate with an incredible video that actually uses footage from something he's doing. It pretty clearly depicts the inspirational power of Obama, something Hillary severely lacks.

I am terrible at internet presence

And I do mean that.  I don't do a good job of twittering or blogging or facebooking or whatever else on a regular basis.  I've been really heads down doing work stuff lately.  We've got a cool set of features going out, and I like to pretend that I'm peripherally involved in those too. :)

The Lego DeathStar has been on hold for way too long.  I'm finally not sick (though I was in variant stages of illness for all of January) so I hope to resume my work on it maybe this weekend if I can stop playing WoW for a while.  We'll see.

So much for boring life updates.

Can someone in Hollywood get with the fucking program?

I've been waiting to watch season 3 of Battlestar Galactica for.. well.. a long time.  It's been over and done with on TV for a year.  I've been waiting to get the DVDs for months.  I finally hear they're releasing ... on March 25th.  What the hell, guys?  I want to buy your show, I want to pay money for this, and you're making it really fucking hard.

Instead I'll be forced to download it and pre-order the discs if I want to see it in time for season 4.  Whatever, I don't care.  I *want* to pay for it *now* and you won't let me, and I'm not going to try recording it on my DVR anymore.  It's such a crippled piece of shit (thanks Comcast, and in turn the media conglomerates who wave pitchforks at you if you dare provide quality services and hardware with features I want) that it is useless to try.

I even looked on XBL to see if the show was up -- get with it NBC, jesus.  I was ready to buy this in MULTIPLE WAYS before downloading it.  I still bought it, but can you at least pretend to try to keep up with consumer demand?

Life's Little Challenges

(simon) i thought he would have grown up in the six years since i last spoke to him
(simon) as everyone else has
(wd) except for me.
(wd) let's be fair here
(simon) you've melowed!
(wd) I am still a petulent fourteen year old
(wd) the fuck I have
(wd) that sounds like a challenge

...

“The Republicans understand that, one, tax cuts are important and, two, fighting this war on terror is important,” [Bush] said. “I think these two issues are going to be the defining issues in who can best lead this country in a complicated world.”

I don't even know where to start with this... ludicrous on its face.

Mother is a bitch, gets publicity

This article about a mother selling her kid's car because she found alcohol in it really set me off.  The mother ran an ad talking up her being a "mean mom" and selling the car because she found alcohol.  Now she's getting praised heaped on her for doing it.

It sets me off not because kids should have alcohol in their car, but because the mother is being such a retarded self-aggrandizing bitch about the whole thing. Two things about her story bother me:

1) She believes that it wasn't the kid's booze but still sold his wheels:

The only critic is her son, who Hambleton says is "very, very unhappy" with the ad and claims the alcohol was left by a passenger.

Hambleton believes her son but has decided mercy isn't the best policy in this case. She says she set two rules when she bought the car at Thanksgiving: No booze, and always keep it locked.

So he loses his car because he didn't clean it properly (in her view, not mine, I bet he's full of it)?  That's ludicrous.  She's basically punishing him for what someone else was doing and his lack of cleanliness or paranoia.  What?  What if the kid was driving a friend home from a party so he didn't drive himself while intoxicated?  Let's see some details here.

Even so that wouldn't be a big deal and I don't think I would care except for...

2) She's keeping this ad up so she can get more supportive calls.

The car has been sold, but Hambleton says she will continue the ad for another week -- just for the feedback.

In that last sentence replace the word "feedback" with the word "praise" to get the true meaning of what's happening here.  She wants people to tell her how awesome she is, so she's continuing to run the ad.  Like I said, self-aggrandizing bitch.