BUAFY 
July 2016Big Ups and Fuck Yous - June 2016
For thirty days, we grew a mighty beard.
§ June 30, 2016
Big ups to my great-great-grandfather who, in 1952, had the brilliant idea to purchase a set of books from a door-to-door salesman for $500. It was the Great Books of the Western World, so decreed by Encyclopedia Britannica, a set of. The books were never read by him or any of the members of my family, and I suppose that is reasonable giving that the very first book is a 200-page briefing on the history of American education, the decline of reading in Western society based on historical and political precedents, an 82-page rational as to the purpose of the set, and a handy guide on reading every one of the authors in the collection in just ten years, which is itself "inexhaustive", so I guess Grandpa underestimated his free time. The second and third books are a 2000-page compendium of topics discussed within the book, with essays and examples pertaining to each of the 102 different concepts within, themselves being enough to replace any one of the 443 works within. Britannica doesn't fuck around. The miracle is not just that this set exists, but that somebody bought it for the equivalent of $4,500, especially when my most famous family member is a poet in the 15th century. I'm glad though that he did end up buying it, so that when somebody asks me a condescending question like "did you even read Shakespear?", I can reply with "did you read Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals, or is that not in your library?", even though I would never do such a thing because my grandfather wasn't a bitch, and neither am I.
Fuck you to J.D. Salinger for blocking the publication of a fanfiction of "The Catcher in the Rye" fifty-nine years after it was published. Salinger, I know you were a senile old man right before you died (and it was a year before his death, too), but if I was a cranky ninety-year-old living in a nanny state which prides a monarchy before its people, I would just let it go. Now the most notable thing you've ever done in the 21st century was piss off a bunch of authors and got a line in Wikipedia saying you're a bitch (paraphrasing). I'm glad you did it though, not because I approve of your actions, but now I have something to think about eighty years down the line when I'm also a senile old man. I pray that at that point I don't make the same decision that you did, as it smells of pettiness more than it smells of old age.
§ June 29, 2016
Big ups to the Windows music player Foobar2000 for being one of the best programs I have ever seen on any platform (though it's closed source - why must you forsake me?). It's one of the fastest programs you'll ever see, launching in half a second even on the jankiest computers, as well as playing every song at an instant. When you go to iTunes and hear gaps between songs on an album, you begin to appreciate the little things like this "seamless playback", fuck I sound like a Walmart catalogue. The ability for you to trick out Foobar however you like is appreciated by most of its users, and even though I prefer the default interface (you stark raving mad cunt), knowing that somebody can make it look like a Windows 10 app just by installing a package is incredible. As a given, it also plays every format under the sun, even allowing plugins to hook you up with YouTube audio and get Midi playback if you need that. I call it a miracle program, but then again, there are few miracles in life. Just good luck and good intentions.
Fuck you to Buzzfeed, and though inciting outrage against a site which exists to soullessly steal advertising revenue through manipulating users into clicking on content they did not create without giving attribution for the content (just like Maddox said) is beneath me. It's like yelling at The Sun for being the worst thing to come out of Europe since the Black Plague (or Nazis - take your pick). It's filled with a bunch of morons who know they're doing moronic work but don't care because they have no other job prospects and not enough talent to make anything out of their "writing" careers, with "writing" written in so many air quotes you could put them together and recreate the Olympic Games Opening Ceremonies (will the committee sue me for trademark misuse? we'll find out! fucking cunts). But what's insulting to me in particular is that, among such other thought-provoking and culturally relevant topics such as "LOL", "OMG", and "FAIL", is "PRIDE". Clicking on it leads to such kind articles as "26 Books With LGBT Characters You Won't Be Able To Put Down", "15 Adorable Dogs Told Us What Pride Means To Them", and "49 Celebrities Came Together In This Powerful Tribute To The 49 Victims In Orlando". If you know a single thing about pinkwashing, then you'll understand that Buzzfeed has absolutely no interest in promoting the interests of our culture, and instead is using the systemic suffering of millions of people to make a profit instead of doing anything to improve their lives in the very same bigoted country they set up shop in. This is more insulting to me than being called a faggot on 4chan, because even that site is friendlier to gay men than Buzzfeed, and being reduced to a bullet point on a list of advertisement-friendly topics is a far worse fate than being fetishised, as 4chan has the decency to at least source the porn stars.
§ June 28, 2016
Big ups to this animated series called God, the Devil, and Bob for being one of the most mature animated series I have ever seen. For a show that has God, the Devil, and Bob as their main characters (title drop hat trick?), it doesn't do anything at all to parrot the religious aspects of it, and instead makes fun of it in a very subtle fashion - and to get mesasges that subtle without losing them at all is impressive for any writer, a bit like the Catcher in the Rye. It's a humanist show, because while God is a main character, he almost never causes problems, and never acts as a deus ex machina for the problems he does solves. The Devil does more, but it's always for comedy as opposed to a plot device, and making the Devil camp gay without being idless shows how good his voice actor is. The story instead focuses entirely on Bob, being a typical dunce to play off of these forces who have chosen him as humanity's last hope to save the universe, even though that ends up with him doing such mundane, hearty tasks like listening to his wife and talking to his daughter, teaching morals about how to make the world a better place without relying on religion as a crutch. To have a show with the dignity and morality that adult media deserves be broadcast at all is a small miracle, and to have it be forgotten just because it stars God as a main character (with dark skin and a blue T-shirt, no less) is a really undeserved fate. If you find a torrent, could you seed this show? It's one that really deserves to be viewed.
Fuck you to the current, dismal state of copyright law, where a statue which was developed for protecting artists has instead turned into a haven for copyright vultures to sue whoever they like if they even so much as use some of their "intellectual property" (an oxymoron, as ideas cannot be property, and to assume that one person owns the right to use ideas is an offense to our entire culture) without their permission. I've talked at length about this issue. I will continue to do so. But I am especially disappointed when I see YouTube bow down to coprorate interests with no regard to "fair use" (itself problematic, as for the public to have to ask permission to use work that was released to the public is absurd at best and malicious at worst), showing that they don't give a shit about the content creators which has given them their reputation for so many years. Now it's earning a new reputation - the shithole where clickbait lives, and where original content goes to die. It's the TMZ of websites. And it's a shame it has such a stranglehold on the Web.
§ June 27, 2016
Big ups to Achewood for inventing the concept of The Great Outdoor Fight. Achewood is like if Lucky Star had assholes instead of jailbait, was written by a plushophile, was drawn like Jack Kevorkian, directed by an alternate universe Woody Allen where he joined the Green Berets instead of going to therapy, and inspired by a Garfield crack fiction where Garfield saves the Queen of England while he fucks Kate Middleton and John comes in on a lasagna colored motorcycle (this exists). The idea of having a three-day competition where three thousand men enter in a bout to kill each other with their bare fists, ending with a jeep army mowing down the survivors until one man remains, sounds like it came out of the diary of a high-school boy who died young and left his impact on the world through a long and storied oral history of his life accomplishments. It's the most incredible thing I've seen this month, and it's actually funny, too. Achewood is the comic we are all indebted to (fuck all the rest), and even though his creator probably fucks Philip over the bed while he looks at Homestuck porn (send this to Chris and get a free McDonalds coupon!), it's one of the greatest webcomics you will ever read.
Fuck you to the FBI for forcing this little "anti-piracy warning" on these here compact discs, making the cover art look ugly and at times taking up over 5% of the total cover. It's ineffective, as is apparant by a quick search on the Pirate Bay, and in addition, is aesthetically ugly. A man who wants to nail a disk to the wall as a reminder of the dead plastic medium we evolved from will be unable to appreciate the full grandeur and creativity that is displayed on its label, as the FBI ruins it with its fuck-you badge and its fuck-you atittude. The same agency which is supposed to warn us of domestic terrorism is the same agency arresting teenagers for downloading copies of Nickleback off the Web. This is a great country, isn't it?
§ June 26, 2016
Big ups to Habitica for making a life management app that actually works for me. Watch the fucking throne, didn't you just say (exactly thirty days ago!) that Habitica was shit for invading its users privacy? I find your priorities strange, Froge. Are we perhaps seeing a new leaf? Well first of all, I think you should know, seeing as you're ME, and talking to myself is like talking to a banana. It's worthless. You can be silent and know the answers. Secondly, a broken clock is right twice a day, unless it's so broken that there is no salvaging it. Habitica is not at that point, and though it is a shame that its founders are greedy motherfuckers, let's go over what we know about OPSEC. One, if you ever give personal info about yourself to an online company, you lose the privacy game. Two, if you're not using the service through a proxy and Tor, you lose the anonymity game. And three, if you haven't disassociated your account from all your other accounts, then you're just waiting to be doxed and have everything you have written down there be given up to some random asshole. Habitica is a service which is just like a RPG, and it is both fun and enriching to be a part of it. Its founders? Fuck them in the ass. And you? Use it if you want, but don't get dumb. Or you can clone the service and make an open-source model with me. Your call.
Fuck you to the "new" style of websites which so plague our Web like the cancer which kills it. You know the style, don't you? The two-thousand pixel tall, scroll down to read a paragraph, scroll down to see some icons and more paragraphs, scroll down to see the founders, scroll down to see some pictures, scroll down to see some press releases, scroll down for some CSS effects... and then you get to the bottom. All of the information that could have been expressed by a few paragraphs on a single page have been sacrificed instead for prose which assumes that its users are so braindead that if they aren't constantly simulated by pretty pictures fading in from the sides with the bare minimum of words needed to make a sale, then they'll just fuck off and die out of boredom. Some examples? Habitica (the throne is mine!), Apple, Open Whisper, Magoosh, and everything else on "dtelepathy", Christ that name is retarded on the face of it. If you want good website design, you're looking at it. 100% content, descriptions of all the articles, no unecessary links, easy on the eyes, and everything you could possibly want is right in front of you in one place. Or you could go full Stallman - a fitting fate for a man near his end of days.
§ June 25, 2016
Big ups to Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney for causing me to spend nine hours of my life reading instead of doing literally anything else. Now wait a second, wouldn't this be a bad thing? After all, time is precious, and to have it wasted is what's known as a "bad thing". Well yes, except the astounding thing about Phoenix Wright is that those nine hours felt more like one hour. Now think about that. How do we compress time to be nine times as large as we make it out to be? Simple: it's a novel with excellent pacing, engaging plots, and a world which has dozens of different stories built around it. The praise it gets is deserved - and I don't even regret the time I spent on it.
Fuck you to Wikipedia for -- this sentence sounds absurd on the face of it. What, Froge? Are you betraying what you so dearly like? Are you perhaps turning the other cheek and preparing to hack the world's information? No, you fucking dumbass. I'm saying fuck you for not allowing me to make an account on Tor! Jesus Christ mates. I want to support the biggest deal of all time, edit a few links here and there, and you won't let me? That's cold, double-U. I know you're kind of a big deal, but so much you can't let me give back to the community? How are my boys in PRC supposed to give back, too? Oh wait, I'm banned there. Never mind, fuck the little bastards.
§ June 24, 2016
Big ups to the 8chan furry board (technically deep web - it's not indexed by Google!) for having a very cute mascot! The upside: fluffy and boyish, with lots of furbait, and a simple design for the 2010's - all qualities I like a lot. The downside: underaged and so you can't jack off to him. What a fitting design decision for a board full of pedophiles. It puts the rest of us law-abiding zoophiles to shame. To shame! You can't even enjoy a fart thread nowadays without running into some nerd drawing him with dicks. I'm glad I'm not German - they'd execute me for looking at dicks. Sidenote: the admin of e621 is German. Ask him what it's like to escape the Homeland to become a porn baron.
Fuck you to the continued existence of mainstream news sources, all of which existing for the sake of money and not spreading stories, except for those few channels that are government-owned or are publicly funded, and so have little obligation to sensationalise their content as they already get their funding. Despite the ability of "the news" (I like this Wikipedia article a lot) to spread ideas to whoever wants to tune in, being private companies with a lot of power, it's very hard to realise that they're not at all unbiased sources, as their priority is to survive another day to make revenue and thus enrichen (in cash and not knowledge) their presidents. The real news, and the real content, is from sources that don't expect to make a single nickle off of what they peddle. They have no debts to earn, and no obligations to pay, and as such cannot be corrupted. They can't tell you what to do if you don't take the money.
§ June 23, 2016
Big ups to every artist who shuns copyright laws and makes art about the franchises they like. Digital art, fanfiction, audio, animation, reviews, whatever. The state of copyright law nowadays is such that any company which wants to shut down, silence, and remove their truest fans simply because they used their content in a way which they aren't profiting off of (though you would think the good press would encourage them to buy more from you, and not less). This blatant copyright trolling, such as that which is epidemic on YouTube, is the quickest way to kill your fans and have them say nothing good about you ever again. But you artists who thrive in spite of that? You're going to change the world, and change the future of this generation, even if you have to strangle it from the plutocracy.
Fuck you to Microsoft Windows for only giving the user the ability to play audio if the CD is in the disk slot, not providing any functionality to allow users to copy off the files and store them to their PC. This subtle form of DRM does little to discourage the user to make the most out of music they paid for - it simply encourages them to distrust you, and to put their trust in a product which will allow them to use their media however they like, such as fre:ac, which features excellent lossless compression (FLAC 0 .oga) and some of the best lossy compression I've ever seen. Try the Ogg Vorbis encoder. -2 quality is a hoot!
§ June 22, 2016
Big ups to Snopes.com for showing me just how bad normie society can get. In the pages of Snopes you'll find the cancer which kills the Web: Facebook pages which spread misinformation for the sake of likes from strangers, tweets from dumb teenagers which manipulate images to forward a certain political agenda, urban legends which inspire fear instead of rationality, rumours spread out of a desire to assassinate character, and news stations which sensationalise stories instead of getting down to the truth. Put simply, Snopes displays the ignorance of humanity and its least intelligent beligerants, and you don't need big words to know that's fucked up.
Fuck you to YouTube for their continually broken alogrithms recommending me content I have absolutely no interest in. If your goal is to shove as much tasteless shit down the throats of tens of millions of viewers, The Sun already beat you to it. As to why you would recommend me something like "Epic or Fail LIVE!" by Ellen Degenerate shows that your users have as much attachment to your service as they do to a porn star in a porn video on pornhub.com (it's porn!). I don't care about Faggot deFaggos's latest video titled "Wow! I don't even know what to say..." shows that your users have the attention span of how long it takes for a controversy to be created, embellished in a four-minute video, and then forgotten about the next day. If I was ever interested in something like "Selena Gomez Carpool Karaoke", I would probably kill myself, because I would have to be one of the most depressed people on Earth to look at something like that and think "this is a worthy use of twelve minutes of my time". Even stupid shit like Vinesauce is better than that, because at least Vinesauce is self-aware enough to understand that they're all stupid, and that we're all enjoying a Punch and Judy show where Punch references shitty memes every two minutes while Judy laughs awkwardly. Without going in to the great amount of detail about the cultural void that is YouTube, I will say on the scale of Internet entertainment, YouTube is one step above Perez Hilton in terms of artistic merit.
§ June 21, 2016
Big ups to this Google Drive document (botnet warning, use Tor) for being an obscure, yet easy download for all of the Balloon Party compilation albums (well, the ones that matter). Back in 2012 or so, a lifetime in Internet years so lets just say forever, a whole bunch of horsefuckers got together and created an album of the best the brony fandom had to offer. Unfortunately the best turned out to be a bunch of Drum and Bass with poor singing. Still though, there are a great deal of hidden gems if you prune through the albums, and if you can get past the silliness of the whole thing, you'll find some music that might affect you like it did to me way back when. It's hard to see clearly when the magic gravy hits my rose goggles, but if feeling nostalgia involves sucking and fucking, so be it.
Fuck you to every website which descriminates against, or otherwise bans, Tor users and VPN users by disabling service to those with proxies, dynamic IPs, and those on the Tor network, such as 4chan and the 8chan furry board How am I suppose to jack it if I can't shitpost? What's even worse is those sites that refuse to allow you in to their service if they use Tor (look, Cloudflare, at your empire!), or bans those who use VPNs for some bullshit reason, such as those worried about "illegal activity". Hot tip, assholes: VPNs are used by people who want to do legal stuff without being spied on by any Tom, Dick, and Larry Butz who decides to look at their connection. To ban VPNs and Tor because they can be used for illegal activity is like banning encryption because terrorists use it. Terrorists will stil use VPNs, Tor, and encryption regardless of whether or not its illegal, just like they will social media regardless of what Americans want. The goal is to provide opportunities to keep our citizens safe, and banning legal systems used for legitimate purposes does nothing to stop the spread of those who would use them for evil.
§June 20, 2016
Big ups to Kickass Torrents (clearnet) for setting up an Onion site (darknet), allowing Tor users to access the site as anonymously as you can get online - the site operators don't know who's visiting, the users don't know where the site is located (assuming it's located where the clearnet servers aren't), and any spies would find it very difficult to understand what each party was doing at the time of connection. It's secure, it's private, and it's free from censorship. All website operators should set up an onion site, if they can, and they're not getting their webhosting from a service that doesn't even support HTTPS (oops).
Fuck you to Java for their continually backwards programming language design philosophy. Its reputation as the asshole of programming languages is well-deserved - it's slow, insecure, and demands backwards-compatibility for absolutely everything, even versions of the language that existed twenty-one years ago. For reference, Half-Life 1 came out a year after Java. Older versions are so full of bugs that its creators were sued by the Federal Trade Commission for not properly uninstalling those versions, which is especially shortsighted when you consider that this is one of the most fundamental things you're supposed to do when updating a program. If Google didn't make the retarded decision to use Java for everything in Android, then Java would be the beggar's language, used only for those too ignorant to upgrade to a sensible one, which also includes Google.
§ June 19, 2016
There were no updates on this day. I don't remember what happened (having written this on July 12, 2016), but it must have been my fault. I don't remember what happened yesterday, so as to what happened three weeks ago is beyond me.
§ June 18, 2016
Big ups to Veracrypt for being a simple way to encrypt a hard drive or a partition or a device or what have you, simple so long as you have the means and the ability to understand what this whole "encryption" business is all about, but then if you're reading this website, then you already know what it is. I pray that when I'm inevitably arrested for prostitution (don't judge 'till it's you), the feds won't get a single thing from my computer, as those who selectively enforce the law against individuals and not businesses who commit those same crimes do not deserve our gratitude, our fear, or even our respect. We are all equal under the law, unless you have the power to ignore it.
Fuck you to Google Drive for messing up my quick access toolbar in the Windows Explorer, wiping out all my custom folders and causing yours and the defaults to appear instead. Now I have to perform an extra click on the "My PC" tab just to access my documents, and when I access them fifty times a day, that annoyance adds up fast. Next time I install the botnet on my PC (and there won't be a next time, fortunate for you), have the decency to wipe your ass when you're done.
§ June 17, 2016
Big ups to portableapps.com for making it EZPZ to get Firefox working on any old computer, making it so that I don't have to use the Chrome Botnet in public, revealing all my browsing history to Google's servers so they can sell my data to advertisers and give the Americans the power to correlate my browsing history and my location together, making a disasterous combination. Also useful is the ability to install a bunch of programs which you can then tranfer to a host computer without issue, including Blender, if you ever needed a portable 3D modelling program for whatever reason, as well as the Bible, which is a worthless feature though still in there because freedom of speech lets you be wrong without being prosecuted.
Fuck you to David Fucking Einstein at SFgate for writing this article towing the anti-piracy party line and supporting the RIAA's monopolistic crusade. Blatant moralfaggotry of this calibre is beneath me, but I have nothing else to complain about, so the ironically named Mr. Einstein is taking the bullet today. Firstly, just because something is illegal doesn't mean it's right, much like the obscure Canadian law banning "crime comics" under moral issues, even though such laws kill free speech and were developed out of the mindless and unproven morality drama of the 1940's. Laws are most often developed to fit the interests of the coalitions making them, and not to benefit the people. Secondly, the RIAA is a bitch, and has declared war on anybody who might cost them a red cent, including twelve-year-olds (you're a cunt, Amy Weiss), fifteen-year-olds whose families was already sued, a family without a computer, and over thirty thousand other individuals, all of which an attempt to assert their power over their users, restrict their liberty in the name of money, and extract lawsuit money from the individuals who are already buying their procuts (and you can read into the Torrentfreak.com RIAA tag for more evidence of their scare tactics). They're declaring war against the Internet, which is a battle that, no matter which way you put it, you cannot win, as you will always be outnumbered, have individuals smarter and more mobile than you, and will outright fuck you up and everything you approve of if they don't like who you are (and indeed, they are one of the most hated groups on the Web). And as personal gripe, your writing style has a big ego without earning the right to have it be. Penn Jillette can be an asshole because he's smart enough to talk about his point of view in a rational way, and the people. You, Mr. Einstein, are an asshole because you have written about a subject you know nothing about, and your shit-eating prose does nothing to support your ignorant beliefs.
§ June 16, 2016
Big ups to that ONE Chilean who had the entirety of a tiddy anime downloaded and decided to keep seeding it out of the virtue of his heart. The torrent must have been eight years old, and the website said there were only two peers, so I guess I might as well plant a gun in my skull and kill myself with my thoughts because you can colour me impressed. I would like to thank this bloke for giving me the means to give myself a boner, as well as all you other seeders out there who pay it forward and spread the good word to your friends. Thanks also the Brazilian bloke for the birb tiddy novel, which I will now keep in my documents forever because I have about 300 hours worth of content I need to read. JUST.
Fuck you to Cloudflare for continuing the War on Tor. It's almost like you want people to hate your service, especially when you make them fill out Google Forced and Unpaid Labour CAPTCHAS multiple times per site visit, sometimes per request (looking at you BakaBT), wasting the time of the majority of users just to keep out the minority who probably doesn't give a shit about your tiddy anime site. I'm also giving a special fuck you for not providing reliable service for e621, meaning I have to wait up to thirty seconds per page just to view a comic (unless my ISP is being a whore and throttling me. you got no proof, bitch). I don't even like Zootopia that much (don't fursecute me), but I'm trying to pat my ass and patronise the arts by partaking in the fruits of my fan labourers, and this won't work so long as you fail to give me reliable service. I hope the first thing that everybody sees when they think of "CloudFlare" is "Retry for live site", and I'm proud of the amount of Google results for "fuck cloudflare"
§ June 15, 2016
Big ups to the Nintendo 64 for being one of the best games consoles of all time, even though the gaming hardware industry is an undersaturated hellhole (a rare breed!) and doesn't have much choice to go around with the consoles you pick. The evolution of common video games from only featuring 2D sprites to being able to bring 3D polygons to everybody with the money to afford a games console and not just a PC was so revolutionary that it's easy to forget just how much of an impact it made on the industry, seeing as 3D games are the default mode of thought when you think of "video games". It was also during this turbulent late 90's era that we forget the vicious wars between the schools of thought of the Nintendo 64 and the Sony PlayStation - one was devised to be a games console, for entertainment and not for showmanship, built with cartidges and conservative media to reflect that, and the other was looking towards the future, seeking to enhance games by giving them the power to make the most of their system, built with cutting-edge tech and Sony's newfangled optical disk. While Nintendo didn't win that particular war, their philosophy continues to this day, and the Nintendo 64 shows everything that Nintendo does right: good games, easy-to-mod, hard-to-break hardware, and the focus on the long term development of entertainment as opposed to the new and novel. When they got away from this philosophy with the GameCube (mini-disks were a poor compromise), it was a console that wasn't very appreciated, but they sure got their goat when the Nintendo DS came out. Nintendo is the only mainstream company that still focuses on long-term appreciation of the consumer, and though they aren't perfect (what's up with the war on emulators, mate?), you can see that they were still thinking about gaming way back when, and I appreciate them for not selling that out.
Fuck you to Twitter for being the distillation and distribution of what's wrong with our current media culture. It's a platform which rewards its users for putting in the least amount of effort, spreading the least amount of thought, and rewarding ideas that are designed to get as many followers as possible without having followers that actually care about what you say (but then that's every company, isn't it? having an alternate opinion is "risky" if you don't have a right set of stones). The result of these simple ideals are the ability to spread drama at extraordinarily fast rates by people who are too stupid to understand the topic before weighing in, because Twitter doesn't provide the ability to give opinions that matter (and opinions with examples) within the 140 character limit. It's a service that has been responsible for spreading libel at great speeds to people you don't care about and don't understand the issue from your point of view, and any attempts to educate them is technically difficult because of Twitter's character restrictions. I see little use for this platform outside a space for unimportant or otherwise ignorant thoughts, even though its users would never realise that because a person who would join Twitter as a social network probably doesn't care about the "social" or "networking" parts of that phrase.
§June 14, 2016
Big ups to K'naan for this article about self-censorship and the conflicting desire to be somebody, and be somebody great. He tells us that we all have something special inside of us that we have to share with the world, our own special gait, and thought not everybody would like it, and though your audience may not be who you would like it to be, we still have to be true to ourselves and write what we want to write instead of bowing down to people with interests very far outside your own. Even if it's risky, even if it's "unsafe", you'll never be satisfied with yourself if you're not making the world that you well and truly know is your own, and even if you end up ashamed of it later, you know that it was you in the moment. To be able to look at yourself and go "this is me, this is who I am", and be satisfied with that enough to share it with everybody else, is something that only the most special of people can do for me.
Fuck you to my data caps for making it very hard to download video games that I might want to try out. Even if I have a passing interest in a game, I still want to make sure it's something I'd enjoy playing before I keep it on my hard drive forever, and having the inability to turn and burn a game for fear of going over an artificial limit is something that makes it especially hard to deal with when you're certain that you'll enjoy a game but you don't have the physical capability to get it at a decent frame rate. I guess we're stuck torrenting off of public wifi and leaving the poor saps to deal with the consequences, because otherwise I'd be able to foot the bill (note: a VPN with peerblock will make it so that nobody can tell what's being downloading, making it seem like it's just some random asshole downloading some random asshole things).
§ June 13, 2016
Big ups to that random kid at the library who asked me what my book club passport was. You could tell she was foreign - the natives in my country don't care about the affairs of others, unless they have to get involved out of politeness or desperation or something. Apparantly she had to be thirteen to join and could only be a part of the Kids Club, so I guess I'm banned from KC for life. Whatever. I think it's great that she had the audacity to ask a stranger what their business was. You wouldn't find that from most people nowadays - young or old. Sidenote: the library must be lit AF if they have to put up posters saying "please don't abuse the librarians". What institution requires such a disclaimer? Would you ever see something like that in a restaraunt or at Home Depot? There must be something especially shady about a place where you can find toddlers learning math and 80-year-olds playing board games just a few metres from each other.
Fuck you to this janky-ass mouse which shorts out for no apparent reason and makes me play with its batteries every other day just to make sure the thing works like its supposed to. Every time I move my mouse a little bit upwards, it decides to go full MAPE (Mouse Ape) and not accept any mouse inputs, causing me to drag my tabs all over the place and making my computer beg for mercy, because apparantly Firefox is too delicate to handle creating a new window until it shits itself. I've never had a wired mouse go full APE, so I guess all wireless mouse have a victim complex and need to be spanked once in a while to get them to work.
§ June 12, 2016
Big ups to youtube-mp3.org for making it EZPZ to bootleg songs off of YouTube. Fun fact: YouTube's terms of service bans sites like this from operating, which they have exercised two weeks ago (pussies). I would think the ability to make YouTube more useful and not less would be on the priority list of a company which serves its users, but as we have seen, companies do not exist to serve their users. The ability to have download the entire discography of an indy artist for me to do whatever the fuck I want with, without getting the permission of Big Daddy Google, is a liberty that should be applied to all sites. I can tell you though, that if this site did not exist, my music collection would be cleaved in half.
Fuck you to The Gift Card Store for making me go through an inane process just to register a $50 gift card. Address, full name, phone number, and e-mail? What the fuck? I didn't realise I was signing up for a lease, mate. All you've done is wasted a half-hour of my time generating fake shit for your form. And you want me to answer eight different security questions to protect the cost of a cheap jacket? There's going to be eight different slots in your database solely dedicated to me putting "dicksdicksdicksdicksdicks" in there, and you brought that shame on yourself.
§ June 11, 2016
Big ups to Matt Groening and his comic book series Life in Hell. It's rare to see such a simply drawn comic have such an emotion impact on me, but I suppose I am drawn to simply drawn things, now aren't I? Life is Hell depicts life as it is for many people - Hell, as seen through the eyes of Matt and his own relatable little life, relatable to the silent majority of corpses who life in this half-hearted void between who they want to be and who they are. It talks about the truths of life, such as abusive parents, abusive bosses, and abuse to yourself, and talks about these in ways that pretty much everybody has lived for, not censoring any of the topics for a mainstream audience, because to do so would be a disservice to his audience which is so far beneath the mainstream that they suck on scum to survive. How he went from this series to The Simpsons is beyond me, because while The Simpsons is one of the most influential TV shows ever, teaching cartoons that it's okay to be mature and not shy away from big subjects (as well as inventing dozens of tropes and codifying the adult cartoon genre), but it still looks squeaky clean compared to Life in Hell. There's next to no chance of him recapturing those rebellious comics of his young life, but the idea that he could develop such a bleak and effective portrait of growing up shows that he still has some magic left in him. When will he use it?
Fuck you to Tesla for their blatant on-board DRM, which involves paying nine thousand dollars for the software to stop arbitrarily restricting how much charge the battery can hold. The idea that a company can include features that already exist on the product and cripple their capability until they get a payment is a dishonest idea, for it shows that these companies do not exist to serve their users, but instead exist to extract profit from them by any means necessary. No snowflake ever felt responsible for an avalanche, and the only way to get companies to stop pulling this shit is to stop buying their products. Want an electric car? Buy a Honda Fit EV, or some other non-Tesla vehicle.
§ June 10, 2016
Big ups to fre:ac audio converter and the .ogg (Vorbis) audio format for making my music collection 90% less big while having an audio quality that's theoretically the same as what it was before (unless you happen to have a great speaker system). I always had a fetish for small files, and this furthers that mentality by leting me fit Thrift Shop onto a floppy disk, not that I have the capability to procure neither an adapter nor a disk.
Fuck you to Donald Trump for inspiring a new generation of bullies and racists, teaching kids that they're defective because of the way they're born, and letting scumbag students spread your hate speech by teaching them that it's okay on any level to harass anybody the same way you harass your targets. This is what happens when you treat politics like a game to be capitalised off of for fame and profit, and not the legitimate system of free choice that it is, because when news companies give the spotlight to dumbasses who get them more views, and not the candidates who talk about ways to change a country which is broken on almost every fundamental level (education, healthcare, security, government), you start to wonder about the rippling effects of a media culture which prioritises the wrong things at the wrong time.
§ June 9, 2016
Big ups to whoever drew this bookmark from my library and never got credit for it. It's actually really cool (but you don't get to see it because that might be a liability!) because you can tell the artist put a lot of effort into the character designs, colouring, composition, and overall atmosphere of the piece even if it is three hundred centimeters squared. Even if it's for a book club aimed at kids (fuck, the librarian said I could join, and she didn't look senile so what do I know? men don't wanna read, then that's their problem), I think it's really cool that the artist didn't phone it in and produce something that panders to that demographic, instead making something that can be appreciated by pretty much anybody. I'm happy to be the type of person that can appreciate the effort of inconsequential things, because to be able to do that instead of glancing over them shows I'm doing something right. Also I'm pretty sure they got paid for it, because if the library can pay for sixteen original paintings of flowers, they can probably pay for a bookmark.
Fuck you to Ptolemy (the earth is the center of the universe guy) for understanding that it is "plausbile to suppose the heavens immobile and the earth turning on the same axis from west to east very nearly one revolution a day" (source: Ptolemy's Almagest Book 1), and therefore coming very close to the Copernican model we knew full well today. But you gave it all up because you couldn't explain how the Earth would move that fast! We could have skipped twelve hundred years of bumming around with your geocentric model, and even if it was an accident, that's pretty impressive to fuck up that badly for so long.
§ June 8, 2016
Big ups to the animated show Rick and Morty for being one of the funniest things I've seen in a long time. It's rare to see a cartoon actually make use of its medium (like Tex Avery said, you can do anything in a cartoon) by capitalising on their character and set design, as well as the many subtleties of detail they put into their animation which sets it apart from slopped-together trite like Family Guy (which makes South Park look like Akira in comparison). While it's a letter of praise to animation in general, it's also one of the more mature shows you'll ever see, not like South Park for being thought-provoking, or early Simpsons for averting all of the expected cartoon "tropes" (I can't say that word without sounding like a skinny white dude) but in its own world for being able to treat their own characters like shit and always manage to provide context for why that is (Rick is a sociopath, Jerry is an idiot, et cetera) without causing the same pain to the audience. As to why it's funny, it might be the over-the-top nature of the show where you never expect things to happen but you still believe it could happen in the context of the story, which is really impressive for a show set in the 2010's (present-day!). Kickass has a torrent, so you can check it out if you want (and there are no really bad episodes in Season 1, just ones that aren't as good).
Fuck you to everybody who slangs insults without giving some justification for their opinion. I get it - I slang insults on a daily basis, but I'm taking the piss 50% of the time, and the other half I try to give some reasons as to how I feel, even if that means reading between the lines. For instance how I called this guy Erikat Shills, it was mostly taking the piss because his name isn't Erikat Shills and was a corruption of his Reddit username (sidenote: I was told to fuck off by an /r/tf2 mod an hour after making an account), but also because if you're working for Valve and have to justify your company's actions, you might be a shill. People who ask you if you're retarded without giving a reason as to why you're retarded does nothing to benefit you, and to not give a justification as to why they feel that way is one of the most worthless things they can do to a person. It's the sign of a toxic individual who insults you out of malice and not out of a desire to improve (even Benjamin Franklin was told off hard as a child; sometimes good medicine tastes bitter), and also a sign of somebody without the maturity or the smarts to talk with you about what you're interested in. Consequently, this is why I don't join most online communities anymore - too many people confuse maturity with doling out the most vicious words they can without any context or deservation.
§ June 7, 2016
Big ups to Winston Rowntree and his webcomic Subnormality. There are only a few pieces of art that you will ever see that will change your worldview, as it is a stubborn thing to change if not get rid of altogether. The topics it talks about is relevant to absolutely everyone, as to show the way that humans are by contrasting them with elements that can't possibly exist appeals to both the man who wishes the world were, and the man who sees it as it is, much like Calvin and Hobbes. The start is a bit of a nascent trip through the author's mind, with some opinions that were eventually shaped to be more effective. But still, you could see the potential, and you understand its a good series of comics. After the hundreth, you learn that morals come not only through stories, but through the interactions between a set of characters with enough differing personality that you can learn a lot from them, even if the stories are so silly (or serious) that they could never happen in real life, and are still relatable regardless. And that's when it becomes a great comic. After the two hundreth, you start to realise how little you have seen about the world, and how much you have to see and experience and be a part of. You begin to put aside your biases and your worldview and all of the things you thought you knew in favour for the pursuit of finding a world where you can never be certain if it is as you have thought it was, and to make somebody think so much about themselves using words and pictures without talking down to you or manipulating your emotions... it's something that deserves to be looked at. It's hard to recommend any one comic as the sum of "holy shit", but my favourite is the one about the groceries, and the one-act play that is the formula of human injustice.
Fuck you to Know Your Meme for wasting my time with all of le dank memes. But don't think of this like I did with Tumblr, as if you're on KYM for anything other than a cheap thrill, you're using the site in an ineffective way. Every single time I need to look up some meme, I end up browsing the KYM image galleries for thirty minutes. It's funny, but that's the problem. It's too funny to be used as a serious reference for memes (though we know how that turned out), and it's too stupid to recommend to anybody as a website. The good thing about KYM is that it's filled with users who have seen everything the Web has to offer, and can make some insights as to whether or not some controversy or drama will last, if the comments section would actually load for you.
§ June 6, 2016
Big ups to this Black Eyed Peas tribute video, for a few reasons. The first being that it happens to be a really nicely mixed video, especially considering the limited amount of footage and tools that were available in 2007. It's impressive to see how well the footage syncs up with the music when you're assembling a whole video piecemeal (lip syncing is off, but we forgive the little things). The second is more for what it represents, and if you were a fan of the Black Eyed Peas back in the day, maybe before 2010, you'd know what I was talking about. The Black Eyed Peas have always been polarising, with some of their best work drowned out by a series of dreadful pop hits and will.i.am's inability to write lyrics on his life, but can overall be described as a guilty pleasure for those of us nostalgic for the 2000's. People who were fond of the Black Eyed Peas tend to remember them at their best, whatever that means to you, and even fans of their newer work like The END (which actually was pretty good on a melodic level) can't defend the blatant selling out (link for a discussion of the term) of the group's members today, such as pandering to whatever beats are "in" right now and writing the most pointless lyrics they ever had (and that's impressive considering some of their pop hits). To know that the Black Eyed Peas actually had fans that cared about their music and would make little tributes to them is a privilege they shouldn't have thrown away, even if they are more successful in the eyes of the lowest common denominator. I guess all we can do is go back to a time where their most true fans were willing to support their actions.
Fuck you to Google Books for not letting me download books from my library, even if I was the one who uploaded the bloody .pdf. This blatant DRM is one of the reasons why we shouldn't support Google's attempts to build a media empire, as if you can't even trust them with a book that you uploaded from your own device, that they don't even sell, without having them lock it into your account forever, then why would you ever trust them with your money and your privacy? Another fuck you for not letting me search books on the desktop app, even though you let me search it on the mobile app. Inconsistency, ho!
§ June 5, 2016
Big ups to CrowbCat for making quality videos showcasing the silliness of our gaming culture, and how gaming companies, and sometimes their users, do stupid and hypocritical things for the sake of business, publicity, money, et cetera. Men learn by example, and CrowbCat manages to teach a hell of a lot about our industry by not even adding in any commentary to his videos. It's just like Uncle Tom's Cabin - "Is it necessary to utter one’s ideas about slavery? Show it, that’s enough." Yeah rich coming from me, but I'm not talking about slavery here. While his magnum opus is "I would really prefer if you'd be quiet", my personal favourite is the one about the OUYA. Oh God, war flashbacks...
Fuck you to Good old Games, also known as GOG, for rejecting my video game without giving any reason as to why that is. I don't have the e-mail, as this was about a month ago I did this (threw it out of my mind, as it were), but the only reason I got was that it didn't meet their standards. The standards which you never displayed, cared to elaborate on, or bothered to talk about in any means. You said it was fun, which seems to have missed the entire point of the game I was peddling to you, even though it is fucking fun thank you very much. Your claims that your staff will talk to developers in a process is blatantly false, as I had e-mailed the staff member who reviewed my game, and I didn't get a response even after two weeks. Two fucking weeks. I spent six hours every day for a month developing my game, and you didn't even have the gall to spend five minutes to talk with me about why you rejected me? Indie-friendly my asshole. One day when I get some scratch I'll upload it to my website so you can see just how "fun" it is, that is if you weren't rejecting me out of blatant censorship because I used some swear words like, "pornhub". Another question: why are you hiding your e-mails behind a contact form? Does your staff have some shit to hide? Any company which doesn't allow you to get in contact with individual members is a company that doesn't deserve to be trusted, as if they're too ashamed to admit they're working there, then they're not worthy of doing business with.
§ June 4, 2016
Big ups to all the store clerks and janitors who bother to say hello to their customers. We live in a world segregated by our interests and our connections; if you're not a part of somebody else's clique, don't bother talking to them. But people like you who bite the bullet and still try to talk to us are a type of people who try to make a connection to somebody else, and making connections is one of the most valuable things you can do today. If you're running a bum job that you don't get enough respect for, maybe you can make the most of it and give a sincere greeting to whoever comes by you. They'll appreciate it more than you know.
Fuck you to everyone who changed a life and then decides to ignore who you changed. I remember some occassions where I knew some artists who I like - a lot. Something about their work, and I'm being vague on purpose, made me look at the world in a new way, a new sense of beauty. Inspired me to create new things, brand new ideas about aliens and salamanders and romance and characters that really do care about each other. There was something special about their idealism and the way they looked at the world in this cool, geeky way that affected me in a personal way. They even made it into the likes section of my tumblr more than anybody else - and for a man as picky and unimpressed as me, that's something worth sharing. It was until I was blocked from them for no reason that I could discern that I learned that it is impossible for some people to accept the actual impact that they can have on the world, and that's shameful to me, because to change my life and then ignore all the ways I wanted to express myself to you is a waste of potential. We could have had a great partnership, eh? I guess it wasn't meant to be.
§ June 3, 2016
Big ups to Penn Jilette for fostering a personality that manages to be forceful and unapologetic while still being able to convince you of things that you never thought of before - and in some cases, ideas that you thought were drilled into your head so far that it might have never been dislodged. A man who is able to do that is a man that deserves to be commended, and most of all, learnt from.
Fuck you to all the writers out there who are so cocksure in their opinions that they never bother to seek out an alternate one. The quickest way to corrupt a youth is to put them with like-minded individuals, said Nietzsche, and the quickest way to corrupt your mind is to actively avoid what you dislike. To put yourself in an echo chamber is one of the most dangerous things an artist can do, as to remove the entirety of the human experience in favour of the experience that you decide to acknowledge is screwing over your fans by only showing them the opinions of an ignorant and childish man, and not a man who has developed their worldview through hard work and research. Rich coming from me, I know. But I'll always give a fair reason for my opinions, even if they're wrong, even if they're biased.
§ June 2, 2016
Big ups to those horsefuckers in 2011 for pretty much bombing the Internet in one of the biggest cultural movements that that the underground Web has ever seen, better known as bronies toady, and not zoophiles (they did that ten years earlier). Two brony shout-outs in a row? Better flame me for appreciating a fandom that I'm not even in. The idea that people can enjoy what they want to and be a part of like-minded individuals have always existed in an undeveloped from across the Web, but the horse explosion set the table by allowing everybody to feel the same way, which is representative of our niche-based and anti-mainstream society today. The impact of bronies on the Web at large cannot be overstated, and if a New Philosopher comes along and writes a thesis about it, then I'll be very happy that somebody has condensed our thoughts into a collective volumes.
Fuck you to the entire country of South Korea for banning pornography. Good job on destroying the artistic and personal liberty of your people for moral values, you overreactive cunts. I thought that putting morality above freedom was for dictatorships like your northern neighbor. This fuck you is for every country which refuses to allow its people to express their bodies in whatever way they want, but South Korea took it a step further by banning artistic depictions of porn, which you can prove by using a South Korean proxy and going to any booru. Are you all so pussimilarious that you're afraid of seeing humans fuck? Grow up you goddamn infants.
§ June 1, 2016
Big ups to TheMysteriousMrEnter for being one of my biggest influences. Against a constant stream of YouTube fuckery, trolling from the ED Degenerates, and a reputation for being an angry person (if he was I wouldn't be watching him), he taught me so many ways about how to be a better artist that it would be very hard to describe them all. He takes the time to not only justify his opinions, but to do so in an informative way, teaching me more about subjects like the school system and false rape accusations than I would have ever learned from actual experts. Along that, he also knows when to be silly and tear apart a culturally irrelevant animated show, which also teaches you the basics of how not to be a failed artist. If we had more people like him around, then we'd all be more appreciative of all the media we consume. If you want to be somebody in life, you can't go wrong by watching his reviews (even the brony ones, which aren't as stupid as they seem at face value). One of my personal favourites would be his review of Courage's "The Mask". Made me cry, at the very least.
Fuck you to the continually broken Neocities website editor. Let's write off some hot-button issues: copying doesn't work unless you highlight and drag the text, and pasting only works if you right-click. If your text wraps around the screen at a certain length, the web browser will get stuck in a Javascript loop. Keyboard shortcuts sometimes fail for no reason at all, even if they worked fine in that very session. Your text editor will throw up errors for links even if it's valid syntax, and it only provides the most basic suggestions as to what's wrong with your code. Thanks a lot. I'm a few more crashes away from using Notepad.
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June 2016 (we're here already!)
He won't let you down: Froghand.
Today's page was updated on July 12, 2016!
Take my shirt and just wipe off all the... sweat! sweat!
