Petulant if cathartic bitchfesting about anything that happens to be knocking around in me ol’ noggin.
I’m not deleting my Facebook account. At least, not yet.
The latest outrage about the Cambridge Analytica scandal is as valid as it is belated — Facebook has been running unethical social experiments on and making available en mass whatever data we’re compelled to feed it since forever.
Those “Log in with Facebook” sign in options you see on sites around the internet — just don’t do it! Nor any other third party service like Yahoo!, Twitter, Google, etc. for that matter. But Facebook is the most capricious.
So I fulfilled my destiny and gave Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi not a watch so much as a long (2.5 hours), concerned stare. And it is with sad disappointment that I must say it continues what’s become a trend in this saga of sucking mightily; which, in and of itself, wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t shitting all over something of priceless sentimental value.
Continue reading Death by Disney / Losing Star Wars to The Dark Side
The Christmas season – now barely held at bay by the monsters of Halloween lest it begin after the smoke of Independence Day clears – is a stressful time of year for many people. I’m not one of those people. But even I feel a palpable sense of relief on Christmas Day as though the Yule Log were a metaphor for a difficult bowel movement.
Between Thanksgiving and Christmas, there are mass migrations during some of the worst weather conditions of the year in order to reconnect with families, exchange gifts and open old wounds. Mix the blood sport of Black Friday and the impending deadline, guilt-driven, mass media drumming, last minute Christmas Eve shopping into this generalized manic-depressive social malaise and you’ve got a season of survival more so than that of celebration. Pa-rum pum pum pum! 🎶
But not for me. Continue reading Happy Humbuggery / Festivus For What’s Left Of Us
“Coward!”
The despairing citizen victims of Metropolis shout at Superman as he retreats from the battle with Kryptonian war criminals General Zod and his super-minions, Ursa and Non, that they put themselves directly in harms way of. Apparently too stupid to understand the situation, these dumb beasts chose to crowd a fight that was destroying the city around them rather than running for their lives. Zod and Ursa mock Superman – as well they ought – for making liabilities of the throngs of morons demanding and taking for granted that Superman will protect them as they willfully meander into this meat grinder like moths to a flame. And Superman’s reward for disappointing these ingrates with unreasonable expectations of and taking him for granted: disparagement for not being good enough to give enough.
It’s never enough.
Re-watching Superman II, I imagine an alternate ending to this scene playing out with Superman laying waste to all these deserving victims, Zod looking on initially with shocked horror as everyone is summarily incinerated by eye-lasers, iced by freeze-breath and crushed beneath jagged, broken slabs of their own beloved city, but then Zod’s expression turning to an understanding, even approving, smile. Superman might never be good enough no matter how hard he tries to be but he could certainly be bad enough just as he is.
I’m a freeloader. I like to use a lot free stuff. Seems like ever since Microsoft provided Internet Explorer for free in order to undercut (and eventually destroy) Netscape, a lot of fellow netizens have come to expect, even that they’re entitled to everything for free. Including being catered to while contributing absolutely nothing in return.
Among the many things I freeload are a lot of add-ons to extend Mozilla Firefox — the browser that rose from the ashes of Netscape. As a web developer, there are certain productivity tools that have become indispensable to me. They’re also frequently built by volunteers who choose to share the fruits of their labor and personal time investment. When this freeware happens to malfunction for whatever reason, I might be disappointed but I also understand that I use it as-is, having offered the maker no incentive whatsoever to pay any attention to my demands of them.
Earlier this last year, Firefox forewarned developers of a critical update that would essentially reinvent the browser: Firefox Quantum. It would also leave out many key technologies, especially the now legacy add-ons API that many of the tools I use were built on. So it was imperative that developers port their extensions using the new WebExtensions API. However, as the date of this impending Add-on-pocalypse™ approached, it began to sink in that these extensions I took for granted weren’t going to make the cut.
Some devs were explicit about their intention to let their projects die. The guy that thanklessly maintained Tab Groups put out a detailed statement with his final update listing all the fucks he no longer had to give and why. Others struggled to upgrade or create replacements, given the new API limitations. And a few features quietly ghosted away.
Continue reading Pearls Before Swine / The Value of Anonymous Reviewers and Freeloader Opinions
Press outlets should stop publishing the word “Trump” and instead replace it with “President of the United States”, “US President”, “POTUS”, “US Prez”, “#45” or some generic title reference pertaining to the office.
Continue reading Detrumping The President / How Real News Can Stop Promoting His Fake Brand
Few things appear more perplexing than a someone aware of and seeking recovery from narcissistic abuse in full-throated support of “unpresidented” Donald J. Trump, a man that a significant number of psychologists have been compelled beyond usual ethical constraints to point out the pattern of malignant narcissistic behavior of (behavior that could also be explained by drug use, dementia or syphilis). After all, wounded healers that we are have sought answers that we’ve sacrificed for to move beyond the suffering we happened to find ourselves in and many of us share what we’ve learned so that others might do the same. That any of us could or would become enamored with a prime textbook example of the very thing we struggle to liberate ourselves from seems beyond the pale. And yet it happens.
I’m not a natural born shopper. Perhaps I’m too cynical – perceiving adverts as little more than pretty lies by default, gross manipulations seeking to appeal to my most monkey impulses – or too neurotic – I will take the time to calculate the cost/weight ratio of food or factor in how effectively dog shit can be removed from shoe tread, variety presenting a kind of assessment hell – but, whatever the case, the imprint didn’t take to make me a good American consumer — the true measure of our public education system. So I’m dubious of any effort made by any sort of marketplace to either become or convince me that it already is my one-stop shopping destination. Amazon has become one of those things.
WASHINGTON — With the imminent meltdown of Donald Trump into an existential crisis over the paltry size of the his withered inauguration crowd – what he’s described as a “sea of love,” Senator Al Franken (D – MN) has reluctantly agreed to reassure the 45th president that he’s good enough, he’s smart enough and that people like him.
