Big Ups and Fuck Yous - November 2016

This is where I started to know what I was doing.

October 2016 BUAFY December 2016

§ November 30, 2016

Big ups to MC Ricky D, also known as Richard Stallman, for answering each and every one of his e-mails, even the ones which were sent out of a drunken pipe dream brought to lucidy from the bored ramblings of a /g/tard. There is a concept known as "underpromising and overdelivering", which states that you lower expectations and then do excellent work. I didn't say it was a good concept - after all, if you do excellent work, you should tell absolutely everybody you know and sell them that excellent work. What Mr. Stallman does is add a level of respect to the old, degenerate, delapidated medium of e-mail by ensuring that, at the least, it is sent to confirm a message. I have to wonder how many people are screenshotting his messages in order to make him look like a living meme (which i totally didn't call him blatant coughing)? But then I realise that the only people doing that are on /g/. And therefore have nothing better to do with their time and go on /g/. You may be asking me, "What's wrong with /g/", as you slurp a novelty slush drink using that horrible straw with a spoon at the end that you have to flip upwards in order to succ any of the residue at the bottom, you filthy animal, you. I would elaborate, but I saw an image of the Microsoft attempt to lock-in potential Linux adopters Bash Shell, followed by the words "Ubuntu is finished" (which is currently the #1 server distribution in the world). I think this shows more than anything the level of discourse you can expect on that site. At least we have the Monster Musume threads! Oh, it's dying. What about Katawa - oh. Never mind, it's all shit.

Fuck you to Best Buy for not giving me my weekly flier. You're the only reason I subscribe to my local newspaper you incompetent natters! How am I going to find material to bitch about if I can't see the new Google spyware, or Apple's attempts to manipulate millions of slaves into a walled garden, or the new smart TVs which violate your privacy in every concievable way, or the new DRM-mandated video games on consoles that don't respect your freedom and force you to sign up for insecure accounts for the most basic of operations, or the new home automation systems that allow remote exploits to shut down essential functions of your physical life because you decided to put your fucking door lock in the hands of the Web, one of the most insecure platforms alive today, and in the hands of a company who can do whatever they like to your home at any time, potentially shutting down the lives of hundreds of thousands of people? You're the only reason I get up in the morning, damn it! Alright, except for my harem of beautiful women. And my stuffed toy. And chess. And you. As a wise man once said: "Never mind, it's all shit".

§ November 29, 2016

Big ups to Geography Now, which teaches you all about the countries of the world in a way which isn't shit, and this is coming from the refined shit-detectors of yours truly. "Now hold on a minute", somebody says, wearing a polo shirt and slicked back hair and some greasy-ass shoes. Oh, hell. There's assholes, and then there's this asshole. "What does this have to do with vaporwave", you ask me while slurping through a novelty chocolate-coated silly straw. Did you not see my declaration that this week was "arbitrary vaporwave week"? This means that, not only was the designation arbitrary and was used mostly as a means to not have to update my RSS feed at the request of a reader (oh shit let that one slip didn't iiiii), it led into an art project which will be forgotten about within a week thus making the brief, blissful period of time where all the text was illegible depending on how the background colour cooperated seem like a brief pipe dream in that privileged few who actually bore witness to this event. The whole site is vaporwave. In fact, it's absurd to even call it that, as vaporwave is just a concept that exists in order to define specific aesthetics as, and this aesthetic is a bootleg of a video game which also bootlegged vaporwave. Everything is vaporwave. Vaporwave is, itself, arbitrary. It's impossible to create "real" vaporwave anymore because the definition has been stretched so far thin beyond its original meaning that even the blending of an intensely commercialised product like "The Simpsons" into an anti-commercial genre is considered to be vaporwave. Vaporwave is, above all else, remix culture, and it has been remixed to the point where it only exists in the form of what those remixers consider it to be. Have I answered your concerns, you greasy scrub? Oh, he left. Guess I'm the scrub now.

Fuck you to accessibility software which requires a payment to use. The examples of such are so plentiful that I don't need to list any in particular - and though it will be most persuasive for me to do so, if you are reading this, you are likely in no need at all for accessibility software. There's also an about 90% chance you're using a Windows thing (you poor bastard!), and that has a built-in narrarator, so you've already paid for your evil and should feel no qualms about using a slightly less evil screen reader. In the age of feature creep, most blatantly infected by the proprietary operating systems, and thrashed against by the Unix-like ones (what the fuck is Groove Music?), I suppose it's one feature that deserves to be shoved in. You know. The feature that makes the computer usable. While I'm not blind^{[citation NOT needed]}, the idea that the fundamental human right to equality is something that you have to pay for, with proprietary software no less, is a moral affront. A person who charges for accessibility software has no justification to doing so, unlike with material objects like personal assistance and dogs, as dogs are scarce, and people are disposable (edgy). When you have the means to create work that can be shared forever, exist forever, and change the lives of everyone forever, then putting artifical barriers, such as short-term financial game, over the long-term good of society, is simply selfish. Those most vulnerable in society deserve better than those privileged enough to ignore their inconveniences.

§ November 28, 2016

Big ups to "ElFamosoDemon", which sounds like what a random name generator would spurt out on its fiftieth attempt. Let's try not to make this about vaporwave this time; it's been a good few days, and though there has been a lot of bad, I've been cleaning out my closet trying to streamline my life to the point where I don't have to worry about so many unimportant things like my files, or what to read in the future, or what have you. Live in the moment, to be sure. To this end, please enjoy the smooth jams of a person who prides themself on remix culture, taking future funk tracks from across the globe and syncing them up to forgotten commercials and vintage anime - oh for fucks sakes. I'm just going to call this week "vaporwave week", because that's sure what it seems to be turning out to. I don't even have five other examples to look up to with the genre, and I can't even do that thing where people make discount Hotline Miami covers with the purple background and the cool text (you'll know it when you see it). Oh wait, I can just change my background. MEGA COOL.

Fuck you to whoever decided I couldn't animate gradients using CSS, and also not make it easy to do 3D text without one hell of a hack job that nobody deserves to be a part of. Now I have to use my bargain basement bottom-tier skills which will do nothing to make me employable in the job market. Is this the best I can do? Assuredly not - but it's good enough! To bog down a site with bullshit until it is perfect goes against the message of "did I do what I set out to do?", and what I set out to do was make some novelty. A big success!

§ November 27, 2016

Big ups to EVERYTHING IS TERRIBLE, which not just tells us that EVERYTHING IS TERRIBLE, but shows us that EVERYTHING IS TERRIBLE by bringing up old footage from the depths of Hell and then bringing it to our viewing pleasure. Hey, kids! Wait, I'm banned from kids. Hey, everybody over eighteen and are of completely legal age to be viewing this website as decreed arbitrarily by the moral guardians who decide that teenagers deserved to be infantilised even worse than what even younger children already are! Have you not gotten enough vaporwave lately? If so, fuck off. There can only be one shitty aesthetic-slinging cowboy around these parts, fella. Don't even think about slapping me with that anime; this is a man's realm, where baby anime like Lucky Star and Nichijou don't fly. Don't come back unless you bring at least three Space Dandies with you. Well, Everything is Terrible is on a quest to archive the worst that our culture has ever developed, and when you see what they offer, you'll understand why it deserved to be buried. Incidentally, they're also on a quest to build a giant pyramid made out of 20,000 Jerry Macguire VHS tapes (archive). That's right! They're killing Ryan Myriad using 20,000 very tired IRS slaves. Christ, that joke was a stretch.

Fuck you to Russia for banning Winnie the Pooh (archive). You're banning my fucking bears, you twats! I guess I could leave it at that, but I already made my shortest BUAFY with Tumblr calling me a fag, and I guess I have to add in SOME substance, or else the culture police might ban me for being a waste of bandwidth. Okay, what's up? Somebody drew Winnie the Pooh with a swastika? Sure, right, and I've seen Calvin and Hobbes porn - oh wait.^{[citation NOT needed]} To be honest, this whole story is so absurd, with the perfect mixture of overreaction, religious fundamentalism, and government overreach, that I can't even respond, as it's clear to me that all the countries out there which ban this cute and cuddly ball of fluff, are so vicious that I couldn't trust myself there, let alone trust the two thousand or so innocent plush toys (not the plushies!) that were brutally assassinated by Thai protestors (noo!). Alright, here's my response: any country which has to explicitly state, somewhere in its list of banned materials, that an image of "Winnie the Pooh adorning a swastika" is prohibited, is fucking insane, and deserves to be ridiculed. Everybody point and laugh at Russia! Unless you're in Russia. Then you'll just be executed. Or if you're outside of Russia, you'll be extradited. And tortured.

§ November 26, 2016

Big ups to vaporwave, for reminding me just what types of wreckage that our mainstream art scene can create, and what the counter-culture can do to turn it into something original. "oh Froge is doing a meme again", you snark dismissively as I hurriedly delete my reaction image folder. Well you know what, the joke is on you, because it's actually a really swell example of remix culture. "oh Froge is whining about culture again". Well, yes, that's what this blog is about. "oh". Yeah, that's right, sit down before I come over there and pick you up. I already talked about Simpsonwave some time back, about how the ability to take any two things, arbitrarily, and smash them together to make something of beauty, is a privlege that I never want to give up, and I never want to see taken away by copyright vultures who wouldn't understand art if it chopped their necks clean off. I could talk at length about how vaporwave is an anti-establishment satire of consumerist ideals blather blather modern art branding. The simple fact of it is that, objectively, it is a very interesting and extraordinary piss-take of the entirety of our culture, throwing together recognisable shapes, sounds, and icons in order to produce something that is so distorted to the point where the listening experience, and the viewing experience, becomes completely foreign. It's about smashing together shit and seeing what sticks, and is a cultural revolution in its own right. By all rights, vaporwave was never meant to be mainstream, as it was designed to parody everything that . And, subjectively, the music is just plain smooth. I recommend it, if for no other reason that getting into the culture will be one of the most novel experiences of your life. I recommend Beach Walk by Whitewoods. Please ignore the shitty memes in the YouTube recommendations. It's culture, too, but it's the lowest of all culture.

Fuck you to my truly awful chess skills, which has caused me to lose to the level 2 computer in DreamChess four out of five times, and the final time being a complete shitshow of every piece going to hell except for a pawn and two queens. More broadly, fuck the DreamChess engine for not letting me promote my damn pawn when it reached the edge of the map, causing me to think it buggered out and was against my one chance at victory. You see, chess has become somewhat of a meme at my workplace, where SOME asshole decided to include a Hawaiian chess set in the library, and now everybody is slacking their jacks trying to get a cut in. You'd think they could just buy a dollar store set from the dollar store the TWO DOLLAR store, and stop whoring away the good stone and scratching the felt off everything, but I guess we can't have nice things. The jokes on them, though - the ladies love it when they see a man of my stature teach them how to play. The Queen's Gambit? Panty magnet right there. Egyptian chess? You better believe I got that. I wish to apologise to my audience for boring them with such a normie subject.

§ November 25, 2016

Big ups to this old-ass advertisement from 1926 (archive), which is probably the best fifteen words which have ever been written in any language of all time. Alright, so I didn't look very hard (how many languages are there? three?), but you must admit, this is one of the most compelling short stories ever made, and it was thrown in a fucking newspaper advertisement! It has it all - intrigue, surprise, a rags-to-riches story, and the promise that you too can show the haters what-for. This little title has been shamelessly ripped off by so many second-rate marketers that it has lost all its meaning, but even its remnants of powers are notorious for making popular products whenever it appears. Now, let's curb our enthusiasm. We have to understand that, even back then, this spawned clickbait in a form that was never before seen. Is the original ad manipulative? No. It tells a story and it tells it well, and so long as the product does what it says, there's nothing wrong with trying to leave a lasting impression. Are the pussy boils that it spawned manipulative? Well, yes. We have to understand that all advertising, and all creative arts by extension, is an appeal to some form of human emotion, and these can be used for good or for bad. When you see something like Buzzfeed suck in clicks by the most bored of people, not caring one bit about their time or their enthusiasm, only being popular through people being just interested enough to glaze over a list that will do nothing to change their lives, then it is manipulative. The brilliance of the original ad was that it only appeared once - and never again, only imitated. When Buzzfeed does it hour after hour after hour, then it stops being a shining example of the power of language, and instead becomes an enterprise designed explicity to extract cash. Advertising is spreading an idea on somebody else's dollar. When you abuse the wrong ideas, it stops being special.

Fuck you to the Cemu emulator, which is a closed-source and copyrighted commercialised Wii U emulator, making it completely worthless to researchers and programming students, and closing the gates forever to anybody who might be interested in contributing to it. I've already talked about proprietary software. Actually, I've talked about it a lot. To repeat the redundant doesn't do much to help out my audience, now does it? The last thing, the very last thing, that emulation needs is for profiteering assholes to come along and devolve the state of the gaming scene by introducing restrictions on what people can and cannot do with the devices that they use to bring freedom to an otherwise non-free system. In other words, emulation breaks the handcuffs of console gaming. By putting new handcuffs on the emulation by making it so that nobody can verify its source code, nobody can contribute to it, and somebody is making money off of it at the expense of absolutely everybody who uses it, then it is not a project that should be supported. Is a man entitled to the sweat of his brow? Is a man entitled to work without pay? Gentlemen, I submit to you that a man who makes his profit by damaging an entire industry, damaging an entire culture, and damaging the already perilous, questionably-legal, and monopoly-driven emulation scene, is no true man, and is not entitled to make their money off the backs of those who are forced to use their product. And, in this case, it is indeed a product, as opposed to a piece of art that is built up over time, unlike the previously closed-source Dolphin, which I may now recommend as one of the best emulators in the world. I am praying that the Decaf Project will take its place as the premier Wii U emulator down the road, as nobody deserves to be at the mercy of people who do not show the minimum amount of respect for the scene that they are helping to destroy.

§ November 24, 2016

Big ups to the Hacksplaining, which teaches you all the fundamental concepts you need to join Anonymous and then bitch about terrorists and pedophiles, even though their most popular home bases are made exclusively of those groups. The good news is that it teaches you a bunch of different techiques to manipulate users into destroying their online lives, which is really good if you have a grandma with a fat bank account, and the old broad won't die soon enough for you to move out and buy a house with that tasty inheritance money, which of course will all be used defensively and without malice. The bad news is that you need an account to access more than four lessons. The good news is you can just lie, using Tor to lie even further, being a browser that is designed explicity to protect you from this blatant hacking. The bad news is that you'll probably want to be a skiddy and write up some 1337 hax and manipulate somebody into clicking on your shady as all fuck website, getting you quickly investigated by every government agency worth a heck. What I'm saying is, don't be a dumbass, and use this site responsibly, as if you don't, you will be mobbed deep by an even greater hacker. In this world, it's hack or get hacked, kid. Nothin personnell...

Fuck you to the Ubuntu makers, Canonical, for both putting spyware into their product (archive), and for attempting to censor (archive) an Electronic Frontier Foundation staffer for taking a stand against your spyware. Do you see what happens when you take the "free" out of open-source? What happens when you turn free sofware into a business, into an enterprise where anybody can benefit directly from the software in ways that is outside the interests of those who use it, undermines the entire concept of free software in the first place. To let a group like Canonical promote an operating system which is used by hundreds of servers across the world, and then act against the community interests by including spyware in their products, then it damages the reputation of all who attempt to run free software. We must remember that when a piece of software, a piece of work, stops being a gift to the community, and starts being a commodity to sell, piecemeal, to the user, then it is no longer truly free. It's debacles like this which will cause me to never support Canonicals in all their problems - because, like so many other companies, they just don't care about the user. Please sue me, Ubuntu lawyers. I want to see how you expect to deliver summons.

§ November 23, 2016

Big ups to the Wired article "Your Filter Bubble is Destroying Democracy" (archive). Listen now, I'm not going to bore you with unsolicited opinions, or petty politics, or the like. You've clicked on this blog for one reason, and that's to see a little man make fun of things far beyond his understanding. When it comes to the big things like Facebook being the sole source of news for tens of millions of people, or Google being the sole gatekeeper of Internet content for hundreds of millions of people, then it doesn't make any sense at all for me to say that our government has the obligation to force them to be neutral in whatever they present. When they say that they are private companies, it's not my right to counter that their influence has a massive influence on what the entirety of the world is exposed to, just like the "private" electric companies of old. And when I say that it is immoral to let these companies off the hook, when their entire business is based on tracking, profiling, and offending the least sensibilites of all their users, then what right do I have to continue on as I do? Clearly, you're here for the memes. Well, I'm going to give it to you. Dank. Uh. Lenny. Fucking sixty-nine and fat grandma or whatever. Are you laughing yet? If you don't laugh, I can't sell you advertising. Yiff. Please laugh.

Fuck you to Google Japan, which has decided for some arbitrary reason to have the website layout from 2008 and remove core features like the reverse image search. Now, granted, anybody who uses Google for anything beyond sheer desperation is a fucking idiot, and so must be taught that Google only uses you to harvest advertising revenue, selling your data to everybody and the government so they can stay in business, including everything you ever do online using their Web browser. It must be stated, though, that they do offer an acceptable reverse image search, which is good for looking up the most obscure of images (if anybody can source a lewd cat image, please e-mail me). To remove this from the Japanese is not only a shortsighted move, but a racist one. That's right: Google is racist! As a proud transracial Japanese man, I seeked to live in harmony with all the Google services, but seeing me be oppressed by a company that just doesn't care about the struggles of a minority... that really hurts. Fuck you, Google. Also I'm suing you for killing my mom, but I don't really care about that.

§ November 22, 2016

Big ups to the Krita project, an art program brought to you by KDE, which is one K away from being abducted by the United States and then tortured on suspected terrorism - oh wait, the KKK is legal in that country (what the fuck). Once in a great while, a project comes along and blows the free software community off its ass and makes the world seem like a clown town, while the peasants slave under their proprietary devices, and their Adobe-run service as a software substitutes, while the rest of us slurp free beer from the high heavens and then bask in the Stallman shrine, so we may be blessed by His foresight. The original such project was Linux, and after that came such legends as Debian, Blender, GIMP, VLC, Firefox, and Ubuntu - in no real order. Rarely does such a project with a level of professionalism never before seen comes along, and does it with so much class, and so much competency, that you wonder why companies with millions of dollars to their name can't do a better job. Krita works great, kicks ass, and looks good doing it, from its site design, to the way the program works, to its clear patronage of the arts - and you get all of this for free, forever! What could possibly be - "Froge!" you interrupt, catching me with my pants down and my belt around my neck. "Let's cut the bullshit, we all know you're only recommending it because of that bltaant yiffbait squirrel." Alright, fine, I wasn't originally down on it because it was designed by a guy who already made the KDE mascot and has two million DeviantArt views, and anybody with more than two thousand is an automatic target for the Froge League of Popufur Fursecutors, so he was only one Wikipedia article away from me writing a formal letter to the United Nations denouncing such blatant success. The joke's on him - his popularity doesn't mean shit on the boorus! Ah, e621, the great equaliser. Where shitty porn becomes the new dieties, and the most popufur of the popufur wallow in obscurity, where even He who made Krita will be swiftly lost to the sands of time. It could happen to you. Yes, you, Tyson. You're probably not reading this, but if you are, please give me money.

Fuck you to Apple Pay (archive), for inspiring a new generation to make horrible financial and privacy decisions. Now for those of you who are long-time viewers, and I mean really long time, having bought the Froge T-shirt from the one authorised reseller in Sweden, lurking the streets of that weird tunnel to Denmark, you would have known that I already made fun of this image (archive) for being the most millenial thing in the world. And for good reason - just take a bloody look at it! You're paying for off-brand coffee with your fucking iPhone by waving it over a magic money square made by a company which uses child slavery who earns less wages per day than the shitty fucking coffee you paid for, you dress-shirt wearing, looking-ass twat. Anybody who uses any form of digital payment which can be associated with you directly, as opposed to something like mixed Bitcoin in separate wallets, doesn't deserve the fate they get when that information ends up getting sold to third-parties, having every single thing you buy be tracked by Apple, your bank, and the government, which can be used to do whatever they want to you should they find you are purchasing things they don't like. Apple trying to lower as many barriers as they can to their infected populace shows that they continue to not give a shit about you, the consumer, and is trying to make sure that everything you ever buy goes through them, so that they can continue to manipulate you into using their services. It doesn't matter how convenient something is when it's putting all the power into a company which you have absolutely no reason to trust, and to give up the power of cash in exchange for the incredibly insecure fingerprint / cell phone combo further devalues our already stagnant economy.

§ November 21, 2016

Big ups to the Zero Punctuation review series. I suppose this one is for all you crayfish, because if you haven't already heard of this series, you've been living under a fucking rock. The man behind it, "Yahtzee" Croshaw, so named because of witness protection placing him in the United Federation of Hasbro for forming a furry defamation league in a country which treats tapping somebody's shoulder as a sign of terrorist affiliation, is a brilliant sod with enough points in a short enough of time to make watching each and every one of his videos an educational experience, both in learning how to form jokes that land, and in understanding just how shit so many things are. And so many people do, having that crack cocaine quality of "don't stop until you're dead", though apparantly because they just like to bitch about how in the pisser everything is. Frankly, I think that attitude misses the point of the series, which is to drag up whatever survives the furry firing squad and then praise it as a shining example of all that is not wrong with the world, before the next first-person shooter gets released, and the global suicide rate doubles. I'm pissed off that he never answered my e-mail asking to voice act in my game, which shows that he has the privlege to ignore compliments when I have to scrounge it up from underneath the fucking oven. It's also interesting to see how unique his style is, and how it enhances everything he says by making absurd pictures at the right time, which shows the value of a good hard analogy. Nobody has managed to ape his style, perhaps out of respect, or even fear, as whenever The Escapist has the balls to upload something not by Yahtzee, the troves of fanboys carpet-bomb it with downvotes and complain about "Yahtzee's channel" getting hacked. But there's a reason that it's made such a monopoly in its field - it's good. Really good. So good that even a man of my high standards is recommending it. The only complain I can make about it is that, even after ten fucking years of running the show, it still only comes out once a week. You'd think you'd have refined your workflow to the point where you could do twice a week, the madman! But I guess I'm a hypocrite to talk about this, only uploading three thousand words a day.

Fuck you to the Fitbit (archive). But before I go on, I would like to tell everybody that my conversion therapy worked wonders, I am now a happy straight man living in a healthy relationship with my wife and three kids, I have a steady desk job with a competent boss and a team that appreciates me, and with enough friends and community influence that I can die happy and in the comfort of everybody I ever loved. Also, God has shined His magic light onto the Earth, and turned everybody into good little Christians, stopping all wars forever and letting us live the rest of our days in the joyous streets of Happyville. Unfortunately, all of this has been undermined by an even more unlikely event: a United States senator saying something sensible, causing the last fourteen billion years to go into an existential crisis, turn itself inside out, and plopped us back to the present, where my bisexual ass is still cursing the non-existence of something which four billion people have deluded themselves into believing, because the world is fucking awful. Oh, right, the Fitbit. It's proprietary software that tracks and controls everything you could ever do for advertising purposes, and if this doesn't bother you, then I'll snort a big line of coke up my ass and go back to Happyville, where I can kill myself in a shower of butterflies and rainbows, letting them infest the world, and creating the Gay Apocalypse. It's like the regular apocalypse, only slightly more pastel.

§ November 20, 2016

Big ups to the PRISM-break website, which is a littie gauche in its clearly outdated government surveillance program that is absolutely not happening right not because it's been a few years since things have passed and only the evil private military companies give enough of a shit to do something about it, plunging the world into the Nuclear Holocaust, and providing the basis for the next Call of Duty: Menger Sponge Offensive or whatever the fuck. What this site does is gives you the tools you need to say "fuck you!" to the government, and passively hide in fear as the country you thought you could rely on is actually entirely against you by stealing every single communication you have ever made, and has the authority to abduct and torture you if they don't like what you're saying. Does it happen often? No. But it's the idea that it does happen which should give you reason to obfusciate everything that you say online. There's a lot of suggestions on that site, giving you a lot of options to choose between if another one shits the bed. While not a lot of them are perfect, like Tor being bloody slow for a lot of applications, and a VPN relying on a company that won't give up your data, does what it's supposed to, isn't being compromised by malicious passthroughs, and is encrypting all your data in a secure manner. In this day and age, being truly private is extremely difficult except for recluses like I, and even I have to venture forth out of my comfort zone and join some social networks in order to talk to people I respect. Will I tell you about those? Fuck no - and I'm ready to nuke the entire joint if things smell fishy. But when you have the knowledge and the tools to be as anonymous as you can while browsing the innately unanonymous Internet, then it goes a long way to protecting your interests as a person. And if all that fails? Wipe everything you can, shut down the computer, and don't go on for a very long time. They can't spy on you if you're not online.

Fuck you to the United Kingdom, for allowing the most extreme surveillance powers in the world (archive) to be passed into law. By the mercy of Neocities's poorly-implemented JavaScript, two legislative-related bitches in the span of two days? Now, I'm not a lawyer, at least not in the United Nations-recognised countires, but when it gets to the point where I'm talking about laws, you have to wonder: what may I do to change it? That's right, kids - domestic terrorism! Also write to your MP or whatever, maybe douse the letter in cat piss. There is nothing more dangerous to the fabric of society that the threat of censorship, because to not live in a society where you may speak freely about its ills, is the building blocks of totalarianism. By inducing chilling effects of the entire United Kingdom populace by giving the authorities broad powers (archive) to spy on anybody's communications at any time without a warrant, remove the encryption from encrypted Internet chats, spy on anybody's browsing history at any time, allow police to crack into anybody's computer whenever they feel like it, and open up and intercept anybody's physical mail, sends the clear message that, for anybody saying anything remotely controversial that the government does not like, the United Kingdom is not a safe place to be in. There is no free speech when all speech is monitored by the government who controls, and this affront to freedom continues to cement this country as one of the worst in the first world.

§ November 19, 2016

Big ups to Project Hamster, a manual time-tracking software that allows you to see just how much of your life is being wasted at any given moment, such as how much time you're spending jacking off, or looking articles on chess strategies when you haven't played in four years, or seeing how much time you're spending on trying to find the perfect program to optimise an image even though your setup is perfectly functional. The repository is messy (as is every Git repository), but all you need to know is that it's on Linux, it's in your package manager (or "app store" if you're confused as to the definition of a store), and it only works on Linux, because Windows users are already wasting their time removing viruses. Cheap shot? As cheap as Linux Mint (here's a nickle, buy yourself an operating system). Part of being a good person, and a gentlemen, is respecting time, which is why I devoted an article to the subject. When you take a good hard look at what you're doing, and see how much time you're wasting each day on irrelevent bullshit, then you start to realise just how precious of a commodity it is, and why you can't waste it. It's somethat that everybody should have, not just the more thoughtful, more dignified Linux user, though given how Windows programs rarely give a damn about the liberty of their users, I must apologise for your loss.

Fuck you to Valve's Steam Machines, which was fortunately declared dead last summer (archive). It's always nice to have an easy target for the BUAFYs, as me and Valve go way back, like one best friend giving another crack cocaine, profiting off the other's misery. You know that line of reasoning that states that companies shouldn't be held responsible for their users being addicted to their products, like how the government shouldn't regulate guns because those who use them will die anyway, or how welfare shouldn't exist because there are too many people abusing it? It turns out that social darwinism is a really bad idea, violating 400 years of basic political theory, causing individuals to cause extreme harm to themselves because society sat back and atlas shrugged. It must be stated that when a company starts to affect the health of the public, does nothing to stop the public from harming themselves, and decides to profit off the misery of the public, then it is no longer a private business, but a burden on the public commons, and to fail to regulate companies who fail to consider the health of their customers is to allow preventable injustice. It's fortunate then that Valve's attempt to increase their monopoly on misery by forcing gamers to use the proprietary, spying, DRM-enforcing, manipulative, and consumer-rights-destroying Steam, had completely crashed and burned. Them using a Linux distribution means nothing when the core of their software is not free, and everything must be done through Steam. It is not a PC, but a glorified console - make no mistake about it. And anybody who trusts Valve to act in their best interests is severely misguided about their history.

§ November 18, 2016

Big ups to the "8 PCs in a Bunker" post (archive), which details all the problems with digital handcuffs, and how they destroy the freedom of the user to buy software, own it, and use it in whatever way we may choose. It is a simple argument that we no longer own most of our software - it is lent to us piecemeal, where we are only given it so long as the company decides we may have it. It is insidious that, in a post-scarcity environment like the Internet, we are expected to pay for anything that anybody can get for free, forever, and the goal of a post-scarcity world is to make sure that nobody goes hungry, or hurt, or free of anything that they need or desire. It is paradise, simply, and to take away this paradise, the means for everybody to fill their plates, because somebody decides that they want their plates to have a little more than everybody else, is simply greedy. This post details why, in simple terms, and I don't need to elaborate more. Incidentally, I would like to thank the Conservative party, for passing an excellent law with the most restrictive anti-freedom provisions in the world (archive). I'm late to the party here, but I'm glad you guys, and you are always guys, are making bold new strides in encouraging digital terrorism by punishing the innocent. I guess that's what happens in a country where only two-thirds of the country vote in a first-past-the-post system. May the Trudeau legacy live forever, so we may actually live up to our fucking reputation.

Fuck you to Adobe Flash, which was, on the whole, a well and truly horrible idea for not only the Web, but the entire computing infrastructure, only finding limited applications in the uses of arts and pornography, and the rest taking over every website it infected, indebting content like a cancer until the user install the proprietary, insecure, spyware-ridden plugin, which was so notoriously shitty that the entire Internet was calling for its death (archive). Given that Adobe is a company that just doesn't give a fuck about its customers, culimnating in the infamous one hundred and fifty million user accounts being cracked and sold online (archive). It not only ruins the privacy of users by giving them unlimited access to everything on the machine, but also allows other parties to ruin their privacy by allowing them to track them across the web using flash cookies, which never go away unless you install add-ons which specifically target and remove them. Not to mention their garbage security practices, leaving hundreds of security vulnerabilities unpatched, including one for Photoshop that they wouldn't patch unless their users paid for it (archive). I feel bad for anybody stuck using their products, or for any proprietary product, because to make such good work on a platform that doesn't deserve it, does not sit well with me at all. In some way, I appreciate Adobe. If you ever want to know what not to be like, this is a good starting point.

§ November 17, 2016

Big ups to the entire visual novel genre, and it's BUAFYs like these which show you that I am severely out of ideas. Disregarding this Nazi propaganda that states to never show weakness (as one reads as casually as a djc fair into utilt into jab reset into djc uair into jab reset into djc uair into djc uair into djc uair), it is true that combing through materials tring to find something decent to put on this blog is largely unsuccessful, mostly because the topic is eithe too niche to care about, the topic doesn't lend itself to anything interesting to say, or it's actually not that worthy of praise at all. I don't stick to this formula rigidly, as the ability to alter the terms of things is a good one (perhaps presidental terms politics discourse ^trademarked). Right, I wish to thank visual novels for being a strange lot among genres. Who would have thought that adding music and storyboards to a screen would have so largely altered the impact of a piece of literature? The art is as conservative as the prose, requiring a lot of ideas to be put in a little space, for each and every line. It's a genre where you can bum around for six hours making small talk and not feel pressured into doing so, and considering that's the space of four Adam Sandler movies, the scope of such novels is staggering.

Fuck you to Tumblr, and I'm sure I've said this somewhere else, though given that I'm obliged to stick to it for the benefit of my associates like a police officer is obliged to beat up the negro menace to keep up appearances, it deserves it. What worse can you say about a website which recommends nothing more than memes that will die out within a month, fake-inspirational posts which require zero effort to digest and then purge from your life, the safest and blandest works of art which do nothing to push the boundaries of imagination, technical skill, or the social fabric, and blogs which deliberately partake in outrage culture in order to soullessly gain followers who are only interested in seeing other people get harassed, but only if it's outside the hugbox deliberately enforced by Tumblr never giving you opinions that might challenge your point of view. There is very little value in the thing, except for the most obscure and jaded artists on there - and even they may have fallen victim to this horrible culture that millenials created, and that companies exploit for profit. Oh, I didn't mention how it's designed to addict you by drip-feeding content, encouraging you to follow as many people as possible, and partaking in as much forgettable variety as possible to the point where you feel obliged to spend all your time on it. May you crash and burn, you miserable pile of shit.

§ November 16, 2016

Instead of a BUAFY, please instead fill the day out by listening to the "I Love You Rollergirl!" EP (Bandcamp link), which will be the theme music for the First Quarterly Froge Ball. Fun fact: I used the fourth track as the theme music for my first "serious" attempt at a video game, which was an effort to take the dying brick breaking genre, and make it new and novel - and actually, you know, good. It's lost to the ages, sadly, though I will have the three hundred times I had to listen to that track burned into my head forever.

And for those of you who are looking for a little more French House in their Future Funk, the Pony OC EP is still old but gold, which was the very first French House album I listened to on my own accord, and blew my mind in so many different ways that I still look back on these albums for inspiration around four (or five? or three? the mystery) years later. In essence, they defined French House for me, and in the absense of any artists in the genre worth a damn, I had to make do with the discount Keats Collective and the Happy Funk Band. I understand that you have no way to know why I like it so much, but I suppose I don't, either.

§ November 15, 2016

Big ups to the Donald Trump Final Response Megathread, which details an estimated five hundred reasons why he is one of the worst things to come out of North America since [fill in the blank, kids!]. "But Froge", you may be asking, with some incredulity. "Why are you talking about a man that nobody cares beyond being a laughing stock except for those within his cartoonish fantasy land where people not only believe that he has the capability to do any of these things on both a political and personal level, but that he will suddenly repair a country that has been so alienated from the rest of the world, that it will repair fourty years of being a fucking ponce?". Because what limited power he does have, he uses to ruin the lives of everybody he comes into contact with for no reason except for his own personal gain, winning an election through manipulating an uneducated populace, earning his living with a silver spoon in his mouth and backstabbing all his employees (with all of his actual business ventures crashing and burning), and has been sued over 3,500 times and is being federally investigated for fraud in a case that will go to trial very soon. He is a special type of failure, a failure that would normally be stuck in a Saturday morning cartoon, though I suppose the United States is, above all else, a cartoon, and he would be beneath me except as an example of what not to be. I wouldn't burden you with my opinions on him, but there is the little issue of the United States electing him as president! I know how it happened - he lied his way to the top, to put it in short terms. But I suppose that, for all my faith in humanity, there really are people so ignorant of what they asked for. Give the people what they want, and they get what they deserve.

Fuck you to e-books which can't be copied, as restricting materials that can be spread infinitely, for free, forever, for no other reason than in the vain hope that somebody else will purchase them, is greedy, as it diminishes our sharing culture and supports the classist ideas that materials that can be gained for free should be paid for. There's a system at my library (note: I own the library) where I can log into my account and then view an e-book or whatever, online, using some Javascript trickery stopping you from copying the thing (another reason to be against digital restrictions - it breeds shitty code). There is nothing stopping you from simply taking a screenshot of the pages, printing them out, re-scanning them, and turning the file into a .PDF, but I guess the founders of the system didn't realise how easy it is to break. When you get to the point where you spread materials that can be copied, but it takes a few extra steps to do so, then not letting your audience copy it, in simple terms, is selfish. There is no excuse, no rationality, behind not letting people partake in the culture which they have every right to partake in, and putting digital handcuffs on the people you wish to profit off of does nothing at all for your brand.

§ November 14, 2016

Big ups to the Toggle animated GIFs extension, Firefox only, because any other browser means you support proprietary spyware, and basically, you're a fucking idiot. Going to get so much hate mail for this, but you know what? Fuck Six Flags. I got coffee spilled on my crotch and a staff member ask me if I shat out my dick [froge note: this sentence is the worst thing I've ever written and I'm cutting it off here]. You know me (disclaimer: none of you know me), and I am a simple man who only requests the simplest things in life, like four thousand gigabytes worth of furry porn, and a small supercomputer that I only ever use to edit text files with, but when I get my game on? Oh, boy, you better believe I'm getting my game on. Who needs 4K when I'm running Wii games 16,000 pixels wide, on a screen 5% of that value? You can practically taste the Gay Luigi. But beyond all of this, I am very practical, and as such, demand little more but the quiet enjoyment of my life with my modest army of whores. So when I see some flashing .gif come up all over the place running through Hell, making the Internet unnavigatable due to my crippling ADHD and distraction from shiny things (perhaps I shouldn't have bought those nipple pasties), it really pays to see an extension that blocks all of it until you specifically demand the animation to play - so long as you go into the settings, because the developer thinks that pausing a gif on demand is a much more important feature than playing it on demand. It protects you from spooky animated images, animations which could give you a seizure, animations that distract you, and animations which are otherwise built to make your life a little less cohesive. It's a great thing, one which I highly recommend. Now go, and hug the site to death! Oh, I only got 100 views yesterday. Perhaps just hump its foot then.

Fuck you to Six Flags. So I was trying to get some coffee, right? And you know me, I'm an absolute slut for anything that's brown that doesn't come out of you, which is why I decorated my entire site brown to mark my personality. While I was trying to get into line for the Wheel of Death to fight my crippling fear of really big wheels and also some schizophrenia on the side, I was approached by Discount Wayne Brady the security guard, just minding my own business with my two sons and my gay best friend who I give piggyback rides to so nobody accused me of being racist, and Wayne Brady comes along and says I couldn't bring my coffee on the ride. You what mate? I sit on a fucking wheel, inside a sphere, for like ten minutes, and that's all that happens, and I can't slurp my gurt inside this attraction which you have arbitrarily decided I can't slurp gurt within? So my gay best friend was crying and my sons were kicking each other in the fucking balls, and Wayne Brady take out his stun gun and shoots me right in the solar plexus. The nerve! Fortunately my massively toned body and extraordinary conditioning means that they bounced harmlessly off, but the electrodes bounced off my massive brass balls and caused them to get light in my eyes, making me spill the coffee on my crotch. So Wayne Brady just laughed at me and walked away, and I was looking like a fucking idiot as my gay best friend tried to suck on my beautiful blonde hair for nutrients, and I had to bribe the kids by letting them play with the sword forged from the iron of the blood of all who oppose me, and then guess what? This asshole, discount Ryan Styles, looks at me at the ride concession stand, looks down at my massive, stained, brass balls, and asks "What, you shit out your dick now?". And I was so momentarily suprised, that when my kids burst into flames and my gay best friend ripped himself from my nurturing strands of flowing locks, somersaulted in front of me, and ripped off all his skin in one flowing motion, I didn't even notice he was discount Colin Mochrie. But when I came to, and I realised the assault on my honour that could only be rectified by bathing my sword forged from the iron of the blood of all who oppose me in the wombs of the widows of all those who oppose me, it was too late. The buzzer already rang four times, and Drew Carey gave thirty points to Wayne Brady for having the sheer gall to chalenge my manliness, I had already lost the round of Whose Line is it Anyway, and the entire scene faded to dust, as the audience laughs merrily, and my reality as I know it fades into blurred, static, ink blots of dogs barking, and mechanical elves having seizures, fading into stars, as the world turns, and the universe disappears, into the darkness.

§ November 13, 2016

Big ups to Vice Magazine (there's a sentence you'll never hear again) for their article on "The Value of Video Games That Aren’t 'Fun'" (archive). You too often see people, often well-reasoned and rational people, who insist that video games have one purpose, above all else, and that it must stick to this purpose without any other considerations whatsoever: that a game has to be "fun" in order to be worthwhile. It's a very juvenile stance, and yet it is counter-ituitive, because typically a game is "structured play", according to Wikipedia, and play usually involved fun. But let me explain why it's juvenile. It's juvenile because it equates the traditional board game, card game, and what have you with a full-fledged, fully-rendered, computer-generated program which has next to infinite possibilities for what goes on in it, and so comparing traditional games with the capabilities of electronic games is a complete misalignment, meaning that games have evolved past the necessity to be "fun" to be worthwhile. Fun is a temporary state of mind - once it leaves your brain, what are you left with? A memory of a good time, perhaps, but there is nothing within it that benefits you as a person. Indeed, fun is often addictive to the brain, giving you enjoyment, but making you demand enjoyment throughout your entire life (most social networks and app makers rely on this sense of enjoyment to manipulate you into using their services at all times). While it is worthwhile to study the art of making fun, to see how psychology works and what intuitive design entails, it is only one component of a wide and varied palette of experiences that is possible with video games, meaning that anybody who suggests that games should solely be fun, without regard for what the game is trying to accomplish on any other level, has put very little thought into games as a whole, and can hardly be considered knowledgeable about the subject. The article explains that not all games have to be fun - and in many cases, it's actually damaging. For "gamer games" like twitch shooters, RPGs, and arcade games, go ahead. There will always be room in the arts for games that are solely meant to be fun, and there's even room in "serious games" with big plots and heartwrench for some fun gameplay as well. But to shoehorn it in out of tradition? It's not a wise tradition.

Fuck you to the arbitrary and unselective qualities of image archives. There are a lot of image archival services these days, mostly used as jack-off material, let's not kid ourselves on this front. But it has multiple positive side effects which make them better for just porn, and are essential to the appreciation of the arts. They group images in a manner which is more intuitive and sensible than any I've ever seen before, allowing extensive use of tags, whitelists, and blacklists in order to narrow down whatever images you can possibly want, which very few other services do. This system allows for the discovery of new artists, terminology, body posture, artistic terms, and other such things which you would have never known about. Its depersonalised and highly-specific missions lend them to form communities that are both loyal and impersonal, partial to the means of appreciating, uploading, and curating new images, and creating one large gallery where anybody, without bias, can express themselves through the work of others. They are truly essential parts of the Internet, and where they fall, much of our culture does. It is because of this that it is important for these archives to develop high standards of quality, and high expectations for their contributors. The failure to do so means that there is a great deal of work being uploaded that never finds it audience, and so is only a footnote in their history.

§ November 12, 2016

Big ups to the .moe domain name, which, above all else, represents that the state of our Internet is that under weeaboo rule. I've had to do two BUAFYS today because I missed yesterday's and had to play catch up, because I didn't raise myself to be a lazy-bones, and I won't raise anybody else to be, so consider this a breather. Even though I don't need to breath, instead absorbing nutrients through my skin, I hereby declare that the .moe domain is a good idea and everybody should suckle on them until. I bet there's a division of companies like Facebook and Google devoted exclusively to nabbing as many typoes and domain name redirects of their names as they can, before some asshole takes it and puts furry porn on the websites they control. Imagine if somebody was using Google, and they accidentally found porn! Wouldn't that be shocking? Here's hoping for a .yiff domain in the future. You're all laughing now, but give it a decade, and I fucking guarentee that this will be a domain name. Froghand.yiff? Sign me the fuck up.

Fuck you to Mr. Roland Barthes, which is unfortunately a perfectly reasonable name and so I can't make fun of, for their essay "The Death of an Author" (archive for ants), and for encumbering it with so much dense academic babble, with so many differente theories from so many different fields, that reading it might as well have you be reading a high schooler's first philosophy essay. Now bear the heck in mind that I am by no means an anti-intellectual, and indeed, all that I come into contact with know I am a truly intelligent man with a brilliant outlook on life and so many interesting things to say on so many different topics that their inferior brains would have been prolish if not for my superior intellect and wonderful charm. If it wasn't obvious, I was taking the piss there, but the sentiment is true that it's a privilege to know things. However, it should be noted that the surest sign of intelligence is to teach big concepts to little people, and little people like me learned a great deal from very smart people, who talk simply and in ways that I can understand. When somebody like Mr. Barthes Simpson (alright, I can poke a little fun) comes along and make reading his work more exhausting in two pages than reading the entrie book of any of the authors he is referencing (disclaimer: I have never read any of these authors because nobody gives a shit about them). I can't even understand his central theory of the author's work only existing as the work, and not as what the author interprets it as, because I can't get past this bloody dense prose. Normally I'd be asking myself "am I too stupid for this?", but then I look at the past six months worth of criticisms and conversation, and I answer: "no".

§ November 11, 2016

Big ups to the website which I linked to yesterday, and if you clicked on it, then this entire paragraph is all for naught. I assume that 95% of those who did click on the link yesterday will continue to read it, because it's free content, all for you! I talk dearly about TorrentFreak, and though I have made every effort to ascertain I do not duplicate these BUAFYs, I understand that there is some slim chance I have already brought mention to sites like these, and if so, then I am sorry for not more deeply looking into the duplications. Why don't you go into the BUAFYs yourself, maybe click on some advertisements (note: this joke would be funnier if i ever had advertisements)! TorrentFreak is the Mecca for pirates everywhere, without the Islamic bullshit (whoops just got banned from twenty countries), where so many pirates make their daily pilgrimage to learn about the greed and retardation of copyright vultures everywhere, as well as the occasional good news, like when The Pirate Bay gets a new domain name and comes back online (AS THEY ALWAYS DO). The best feature about the website is that the staff doesn't present any opinions, nor do they incite their readership to do anything, unlike yours truly for the former, and yours truly for the latter if your lazy asses would be my personal army and dos dox the anti-gamergate neoliberal SJW jewish cuck menace or whatever garbage the chans are on about these days. The site is stronger for it, because some of the shit they cover is so rediculous they don't even need to give an opinion for it. A YouTuber is a hypocrite (archive), ranting at his fans for pirating his movie? Shocking!

Fuck you to Mayflash, for having some of the most obtuse driver advertising I have ever seen - but I don't deal with that too often, because I'm not a nerd. I enjoy the cheap shit that comes out of China, as there is no surer sign of how the global economy is going than how many random pieces of garbage you can get off eBay for fifty dollars. There is a difference, however, between the cheap novelty of partaking in Chinese Shit General (and not Chink Shit General, as I don't indulge in passive racism), and having to read poorly-translated and poorly-typeset instructions on how to get the hecking rumble feature working on my devices. When I was on Windows, their drivers said that it would "upgrade" the controller, but it didn't do a damn thing from what I can tell. When I installed the drivers for Linux, which they sepecifically said was for Linux, guess what I got? A bloody executable! And it didn't even work with Wine! The astounding thing is I didn't need any drivers at all - I pointed the adapter into Dolphin, and the whole kit worked out perfectly, rumble and all. I never got rumble on Windows, and this is supposed to be the OS for gamers? Ever since I switched to Linux, everything worked out perfectly for me, and with less configuration and with more intuitive commands that what competing operating systems offer, now only do I have the power I need to succeed, I can also configure my Linus Torvalds shrine to accept prayers from all over the world, and not just from the comfort of my prison cell. This message brought to you by the Free Software Foundation.

§ November 10, 2016

Big ups to the TV Tropes Sliding Scale of Western Animation Obscurity, commonly known as the "SISWAO", which will be the name of my Twilight Sparkle / Shining Armour fanfiction where they discover their intense and intimate passion for obscure programming languages. If you go on TV Tropes long enough, you will find all sorts of obscure shit on there, which so many people put so much work into and yet very, very few people actually get up and notice. It really makes you think about all the effort that goes into innocuous things, like a programmer having to code in a whole screen transition sequence into a video game just to make a simple screen wipe, or the hundreds of thousands of frames that go into an animated film, which you know somebody put their entire heart and soul into, and yet is completely ignored by the vast majority of people. To look at systems, not as the final result, but greater than the sum of their parts - like how all the limited, natural elements create our reality - gives you a lot of perspective on life, and teaches you to appreciate just how nuanced the world is. A bit like all these series, for instance. Seeing Persepolis being considered so obscure, one of the movies that make you appreciate just what animation can do for a serious topic, discounts all of the work that was put into it. Don't get me wrong - a lot of these shows won't change your life in any way, so them having such large articles, most likely as the result of one obsessed person, continues to show just how much work can go into something entirely worthless. The good news is that you get to experience things that so few people in the world have, like your own, special, private animation. But then, hiding something good from people is selfish, isn't it?

Fuck you to "Zachardy Fardon", and sweet beans on toast I am hitting a fake name oil vein this month. Zachardy Fardon sounds like the star of a shitty historical fiction novel where the main character can never love again until an angel comes along and says he can love... but every time he does, he has to kill himself! Also there's a subplot involving demons debating over what to do with Earth until God (whatever fucking god i don't know which awkward segue into archive) comes along and casts them out, making them join forces with the hero to storm Heaven and discover the true love was within him all along. What did Zachary "King of Darkness" Fardon do this time, beyond work for the USA, and thus become Zachary "The Man" Fardon? How about comparing KickassTorrents to a drug dealer (archive), saying that they are still liable for distributing materials which they "never touched". Except in this case, they never touched anything, linking to offsite materials - so I hope the United States is arguing that linking is illegal, because that would make them look like fucking idiots (historical note: two days ago the USA elected a man universally considered to be an incompetent racist, who won despite the opposition getting more popular votes. i am not making this up). The comparison to drugs is just as idiotic, because comparing materials which damage the user's livelihood, financial, and social status that is used exclusively to profit off of human misrery, with materials that enhance the lives of everybody who comes into contact with it, for free, forever, and distributed out of acts of charity and with no expectation of reciprocation whatsoever... do I need to finish this sentence? I think it's clear more than anything that Zachary "Fucking Idiot" Fardon just doesn't get it. Just like his country. Actually, just like most countries. What the fuck?

§ November 09, 2016

Big ups to the Missionary Church of Kopimism - finally, a religion we can get behind. The central tenants of the religion is not in any belief in dieties, but in belief in the much more worthy, much more generous, copying culture, remixing works, and spreading the results. Whether this is in the mundane acts of simply partaking in the "CTRL+C", "CTRL+V" traditions (which many of us do every day - you could be in a religion and not know it!), or more elaborate acts of data transferral across the holy Internet (archive), or actually meeting and choosing to copy things (archive), it is a proud tradition of free culture, one which all pirates should dedicate themselves to without fear of persecution. Unfortunately, it is a young religion, and so the chances to convert to it are slim. Too often websites are down, out of order, hijacked by spammers, or simply left to rot and abandon. There is a great deal of room for it to grow and spread amongst those who most need the discipline, and there is ample opportunity for somebody to take those ideas, and expand upon them, like all young religions are turned into. The closest thing to a definitive English site is the Canadian one (archive) - and there is no telling what got lost in translation. Sounds like a good project for me to pick up, eh?

Fuck you to nothing in particular tonight because I have nothing to complain about, and making a mountain out of a molehill does nothing to benefit us. Granted, it is a bit dishonest to take my ball and go home, leaving you with nothing, so I'll make a cap on how many times per month I get to do this. Thirty? Thirty-one? Good enough.

§ November 08, 2016

Big ups to Stephen Harper for looking just enough like Tonald Drump to make a joke that absolutely nobody picked up on (edit: this was funnier when this was published). Ladies and gentlemen (and my agendered friends who may or may not be reading this if they would scoot their boots and give me free views), it's pretty clear to me that I will soon be caught up in the next World War, drafted because of my impossibly huge muscles and abilities to make foreign bullets stop in mid-air and zoom into their shooters out of sheer force of will. Before I eventually die after a tactical nuclear triad on my grandma's house, I wish to give a few thanks before I go. I would like to thank all the furry artists who draw the cute little dragons getting gently fucked, making my life a little more lewd. Thank you to Mr. Stallman, Goden, Rowntree, Lessig, Watterson, and Enter for all being such inspirations to me, and to all my female artists, too many to list, for creating work that's worth a lifetime working on. Thank you to Neocities for letting me host this blog, and to the Tor Project for giving me some security. Thanks to The Pirate Bay, for always perservering through thick and thin, and for giving free culture to everyone. Thanks to my stuffed toy, for being there for me forever, for loving me more than anyone. Thanks to you, for caring about what I think. Alright, I'm not really being drafted, but I still have some shit to say, so let's leave this to die and let the good times go on.

Fuck you to websites that require accounts to log into, ensuring that access to the account can be revoked at any time for any reason (and that the user can't save their work if the servers go offline, or the network buggers out), discriminating against users who have poor Internet connections, and removing all sense of privacy from what is supposed to be a private browsing experience. I'm not talking about multiplayer games where accounts are required for the administration of servers and enforcing of rules, or services where you have to be online in order for them to function - I'm talking about things like digital restrictions management, educational applications that need an account for no good reason, single-player games that work offline but you have to be connected to the Internet in order to play (thanks, Steam! thanks, Valve!), and social networks that require you to login in order to browse posts, and not just submit to them. It's service as a software substitute, simply, and it's continuing the trend of attaching things to the Internet which have absolutely no right to be attached to. I wonder what good the Internet will be when its security has as many holes as your mom? I'm sure those users will regret their decisions, then.

§ November 07, 2016

Big ups to Wikivoyage , a "website" on this "Internet" fad (in three hundred years i will be the sole authoritative source on the matter), that is often used for its travel advice, also known as a "voyage". Hence the name, Wikivoyage. Also there's a wiki on it. That's why it has this name. Wikivoyage. Alright, now that I've spelled things out for you like the teacher to the young lad who enjoys fire extinguishers (really killing the fire entiguisher fandom here), I don't wish to waste your time any further with bum recommendations of things you probably already knew. So this website is good for travel - so what? Maybe next you'll tell me that KnowYourMeme is good for memes. The joke's on you! KnowYourMeme is actually a great source for artwork, kindly curated by its janitors, all for you (I especially enjoy the "pokemon" section, watching people trying to justify they're not furries). Similar to the Democratic Republic of KnowYourMeme, Wikivoyage is actually an excellent source for learning about the culture of a country, what to expect when looking at media from the country, and how to talk and be polite to people from that country. It has great articles about Japan, Sweden, Canada, North Korea, North Pole, Hell, Islamic State, My House (formerly a redirect to Hell), and whatever other shitty country, not only you might be interested in going to, but also where you are talking to people from (shout-outs to my two Swedish friends and my thirty four million Canadian ones). I especially like the bit where it implies that police are helpful, hahaha relevant societal commentary.

Fuck you to the absolutely useless reviews of applications on the Microogle App Repo, which is proof more than any that we cannot trust the average man on the street to have a good opinion about a thing, because they could have all the time and space in the world to type one out, and come up with nothing more than "good app, good app". The specific app stores, although calling them "stores" implies that you own your applications, which is absolutely not the case when the supplier can revoke access to them at any time, there are some caveats to this, such as English not being their first language (so as to why they aren't being displayed content in their language is beyond me), the interface being badly designed as to imply you have to write out any sort of review instead of just a star rating, and somebody wanting to share their opinion that the app was so good they have to say it for the world to hear. Beyond those, the complete lack of commnet curation or a literacy test that the store owners - you know what, I'm just going to call them "app lenders" - has every opportunity to institute, shows that they just don't care about the type of garbage that appears on their storefront. There really is no money in integrity... until your business stops being popular, and your reputation, the one thing that can make a business survive through anything, is so trashy that it does not a damn damn thing for you.

§ November 06, 2016

Big ups to the "Recommend me a Book" website, which is a site that gives you a page of a book without the title, author, or cover, and makes you decide whether or not you like it. Do you remember yesterday, where I said that I was making a book review as opposed to any actual content, content that makes you think, content that improves you as a person, content that means that you get up and want to change the world because of how angry you get? It turns out I didn't learn a thing! I guess I continue to not learn a thing, seeing as I'll only read the first word of each page before rushing down to find the title. If your book isn't on my list, then it ain't being read. I don't know what type of taste the creator of this site has, but given that one of the book was about somebody making a building out of adult diapers in what barely qualifies as a fetish, followed by a blatant disrespect for their employers, abusing a system that rewards them alone... not going to lie, it looks like shit taste. But you had Catch-22 in there! I've never read it, but I hear it's great, so that must mean it's true.

Fuck you to YouTube, which rewards a culture that promotes cyberbullying and the destruction of basic humanity (archive) for the sake of advertising revenue, and fuck those who exploit the immoral system for the sake of their own gain. There is a limit to what sort of work a human can allow themself to do before they become malicious - if you are going to do a voice role for a show whose principles you disagree with, it would do you well to take up that role, as somebody even less principled will speedily take your place, and that bastard isn't getting anywhere near your wallet! Owning a YouTube channel which does nothing more than insult, harass, and belittle other people who have done absolutely nothing to you, and have no power at all to stop you, means that you have so little respect for humanity that you take your interests above all else - and calling yourself "toxic" (archive) does not make you any more self-aware, nor any more ethical, than the elementary school bully who kicks your shins and suggests you deserve it. YouTube being complacent in this system means that not only are they allowing bullying to happen, but they are also exploiting it, meaning they have lost any right to call themselves a legitimate business. I wonder what this person will think of themselves in ten years? Twenty years? We can all take solace that they will become irrelevant as the years go by, and when they do grow up and mature, they will have to live with their poor decisions, so long as they may live.

§ November 05, 2016

Big ups to the Seth Godin book "The Dip" (archive), which is probably available at your local library, and would be available on The Pirate Bay if some asshole would bother to scan it. I'm not sure if you've noticed, but I've been writing a hell of a lot more these past few weeks - what used to be a standard of six lines for a BUAFY turned into twelve in just the course of a few months - first six lines, then eight, then ten, and whoop! Here we are! I always had the philosophy that, if your audience really cares what you're writing about, they'll read everything that you'll make, so long as it's of quality. Naturally, there's a limit, and I'm certain that my recent trend of fucking massive paragraphs in articles, in addition to massive BUAFY paragraphs, is pushing my luck a little. Right, about the book: it's a seventy-page romp with so much solid dick in it that it is absolutely revolutionary that you should go out and find a copy and have it change your perspective on your entire working life. It teaches you about the theoretical "dip" that all workers go through, the point in time where something really really hard occurs, and whether or not you should stick with the project or abandon it altogether. It's blue and short and small and has a little stick figure on it, and there's not much more to say beyond it shifting my philosophy a lot. There's also an addendum at the end thanking his audience for teaching him to "write less", and speaking of which, how many lines is this paragraph? Ten? We're writing less, mates!

Fuck you to the Linux Mint Backup Tool, which doesn't back things up and crashes when you try. I would think that if you provide a service to the people who use your product, you would at least make sure the product works. What can you do - remove a feature, the same way as you've been adding features for the past decade? Yeah, it's so hard to change software on an open-source model. Given how the previous paragraph was a book recommendation (protip: if you can't be arsed to do a review, just throw it in a BUAFY) and this one is a standard whine, you may be thinking I'm taking the day off. To which I say, thirty-two military snipers march down a lotus and into the crypt. That was complete nonsense, but it took effort to create, so never doubt my work ethic again.

§ November 04, 2016

Big ups to the "It Runs DOOM!" Tumblr blog (which the Tumblr company insists I just call "a tumblr", but I refuse to succumb to such branding), for partaking in the proud, famous cultural tradition that all wizards should partake in: getting DOOM to run on random shit even when it has absolutely no rights to. Alright, so this BUAFY isn't exactly talking about world politics here, but given that it took me literally an hour to write about it the last time I tackled a heavy subject, it helps me out by talking about what I know. You see, DOOM is one of the most important video games ever made, having developed the first-person-shooter into an art form, and setting the standard for what gaming would be for the next few years: gory, violent, with strange and obscure engines, and with raw badassery - from its development to its release to its community - the likes of which has never been seen before or since. On Christmas 1997 actually December 23 1997, its source code was released to the unruly masses, in a gift that was so astonishing that it caused the entire gaming industry to bow down towards the shrine of Id, and continue to never release their source code for anything ever again. This is a great industry! Unfortunately the code only runs on Linux, which was due to licensing issues and not as part of a ploy to make Linux popular in an era where nobody even owned a computer, let alone a Linux box. Some hackers then ported the game to the DOS gulag, and then decided to port it to other platforms, and then it all snowballed from there, to the point where your device is a piece of fucking garbage if it can't run DOOM. The blog chronicals all such known ports - and it is fascinating to see just what is possible with this bloody game.

Fuck you to the permanently offended and "a heteronormative conjecture", as one commentator put it before it was censored by the Gawker Trust and Safety Commission, Sophie Kleeman (which is not the name of a rejected Seinfeld character), for writing an article about a tweet (archive) from a gaming company that everybody will forget about in the amount of time it takes for you to buy a cup of coffee or whatever the hell Millenials are on about within the three or four seconds they gain perspective about their true life's purpose and wonder why the fucking hell they are so obsessed over consuming media that will literally never impact them beyond the few seconds it takes them to swipe their finger across a smartphone screen as if their lives were so meaningless that they have absoultely nothing better to do with their time than to consume feed from people who don't care about them and from companies who exploit them for profit, and also getting paid for it. Apparently tweeting "S my D" is sexist, which is indeed a heteronormative thing to say, as sucking dick is one of the only reasons why I would concievably go out and get a boyfriend, and yet don't do so because I still have stocks in sex toy companes and I don't want to get my head beat in with a comically oversized dildo. I would dignify this article commissioned blog post with a response, but anybody who contributes to outrage culture is either so bored with their lives that they having nothing better to do with it than to document the burblings of a company they would have never bought from regardless, or so malicious that they have such a lack of respect for people's opinions that they exploit them for ad revenue. It's above my notice and above your notice, and the only reason I made this BUAFY was to express how much I love dick.

§ November 03, 2016

No BUAFY today, as I ended up creating a lag by updating the November 02 BUAFY in the morning instead of at night. Rather than consistently update them in the morning, I decided to cut off today. Yes, it was a sacrifice, though a necessary one.

§ November 02, 2016

Big ups to Anna Coote for her fucking rediculous name and also for this article (archive) about the fetishisation of work. Incidentally, this article actually uses the word "fetishisation", and spells it correctly as well. I have never seen a word processor pick up on that word, which is right wank, because it's an excellent word and one I use often. But enough about me - let's kill you! The article brings up a lot of points about how our economy is supposed to make everything better for workers by automating the bad jobs and allowing the humans to partake in the better ones... and yet this isn't happening. But why? Because while the good jobs are given to those who are truly exceptional and have the skills that robots aren't necessary to automatic, the vast majority of people don't have these skills, and are stuck in the awkward position of not having the opportunity to take jobs that have now been automated, but instead having either jobs that pay so poorly and have so little security that they don't have an opportunity to advance a career (and are thus stuck in the lower-class slums). The sad thing is, despite some of the suggestions in the article being completely fucking rational and being implemented successfully in many countries, widely considered to be the best in the world (Nordic blokes, Switzerland, and the Canadians - a country's quality of life is proportional to how similar it is to Switzerland). A welfare system that allows people to develop new skills for the modern world without having to be constantly busy would greatly improve citizen's happiness and efficiency in the long term - but most people, and most governments, always focus on the short term, causing them to slowly and slowly sink into economic and societal ruin, just like the United Kingdom, United States, and even China. But, as I say, I don't claim to know everything about every subject, and so if I happen to be completely and utterly wrong about what I write, based off what I know today, then I am sorry, and you can feel free to ignore me about such politics.

Fuck you to the "powers that be" of the United States government, for giving us permission to take what we legally own, and allowing us to hack into it (archive). What an absurd statement - we need permission to alter what we own! The United States was always a backwards country, I suppose - a country of people afraid of terrorism when they do absolutely nothing to curb gun violence, a country that's hard on criminals and yet does nothing to stop them from re-offending, and a country with such fierce patriotism that it makes even religious groups seem tame, despite having done absolutely nothing to earn their pride, where the default state of existence for its citizens is slamming their heads against the wall because of their consistently retarded government - kind of like the United Kingdom. The plutocratic copyright laws of the United States has given the companies that I can't say directly run the country, but have such a big influence in its politics that a USA without interference from lobbyists would be as foreign to them as [any country they don't own], that it has given them free reign to do whatever the fuck they want to disrupt the natural human rights of indulging in the arts and culture that their citizens has created. It is malicious to me to see the government, who has the opportunity to change the law so that anybody can have any piece of media for free, forever, allow copyright vultures to lay waste to the cultural landscape, controlling and manipulating their customers to the point where they can copyright claim content that they don't own and still come out on top. It's fucking absurd to me. Absolutely fucking absurd. The idea that we need "permission" to partake in our rights is a bullshit one at that.

§ November 01, 2016

There was no BUAFY on this date - I actually fell asleep early! Granted, it doesn't look too good when I fall asleep instead of updating, though given how it's only been happening recently, I suppose I have to experiment to see how to prevent it.

October 2016 BUAFY December 2016

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November 2016 (we're here already!)

October 2016

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July 2016

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May 2016

It's green and black but never grey: Froghand.

Today's page was updated on 2016-12-01!

This is the breather month. Make the most of it while you can.