I suppose earlier generations had to sit through all this huffing and puffing with the invention of television, the phone, cinema, radio, the car, the bicycle, printing, the wheel and so on, but you would think we would learn the way these things work, which is this:
1) everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;
2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;
3) anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.
Apply this list to movies, rock music, word processors and mobile phones to work out how old you are.
Douglas Adams, “How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet”, Sunday Times, 1999-08-29
May 11, 2011
QotD: The instinctive reaction to progress
May 8, 2011
Can you tell the difference between Apple fans and cult members?
An amusing comparison from PC World:
Some tech fanboys and fangirls become so lost in the technology of their choice that it becomes a big part of their identity. Cult members do something similar, only with a spiritual belief system or philisophical concept.
Covering tech for as long as we have (and reading our message boards), we can’t help but notice that tech fanboys and girls sometimes talk like those people who wear purple capes and Nike tennis shoes, or who drink the grape Kool-Aid and then go to sleep.
To make the point, we’ve assembled here a group of quotes, some of which are from tech fan boys and fan girls while others are from real cult members. Can you tell the difference? We’ll give you the answers at the bottom of the page. Good luck (you’ll need it)!
May 6, 2011
Rookie NDP MPs already triggering change in parliamentary procedure
From an email conversation with Jon, my former virtual landlord:
In other news, you heard about the proposal to change parliamentary procedures to accommodate the new Diaper Dippers? MPs will now be able to vote with —
- Aye
- Nay
- Like OMG, whatever.
I want to be a teenage MP — it’s like winning a lottery! I take it that these kids will get their $150K+ annual salary whether they attend parliament or not, correct? Or is an MP’s pay based on some sort of performance criteria?
I can’t believe I just asked that.
ROTLMAO.
May 3, 2011
How to referee a philosophical discussion
April 29, 2011
QotD: The NFL draft is “The Oscars for Straight Men”
Some comedian once called the NFL Draft “The Oscars for Straight Men,” and there is something to that label. While everyone will “grade” the teams’ drafts, and fans will argue and kibitz about who their team should have drafted, there are no definitive winners or losers. One of the more ridiculous aspects of the day is how every team claims to have gotten the players they wanted or rated highest. Just once, it would be thrilling to hear a general manager come out and say, “Look, we know he’s a reach, but all of the guys we rated highest were picked already, the coach and head scout got into a screaming match, the clock was ticking down and so I flipped a coin. Knowing his pain-in-the-tush agent, he’s probably going to hold out most of training camp, anyway.”
Jim Geraghty, “Why Is the Draft So Engrossing to NFL Fans?”, National Review, 2011-04-29
April 28, 2011
Just for you efficiency fans
The world’s least efficient machine:
More information about this modern day wonder here.
April 27, 2011
The xkcd Guide to Making People Feel Old
Original here.
April 23, 2011
A neat way to address software piracy
I still find it hard to believe that Cracked, of all the media entities from the pre-internet era, is worth visiting (and linking to). However, this is good stuff:
The [Arkham Asylum] developers included a little bit of extra code to detect when the game has been pirated, a common tactic used to track a company’s losses or simply mess with cheap people. The game is mostly unchanged when hacked, with one seemingly minor exception: Batman’s glider cape is hilariously unusable and has the aerodynamics of a piece of cardboard riddled with bullet holes.
It’s not that the cape is faulty, apparently; it’s simply that your version of Batman doesn’t know how to use it. Instead of gliding from one surface to another, Batman simply opens his wings over and over like a total ass-clown, causing him to lose altitude and fall down. It’s like you’re being forced to play with the pudgy Batman copycat from the beginning of The Dark Knight.
All the other gadgets still work, so you can always fight your way across the level on foot, right? Well, yeah, except that without the glider cape you’ll be completely stranded in a certain room — you know, the one filled with poisonous gas. That’s right, in the pirated version of Arkham Asylum, the always-prepared Dark Knight is such an useless idiot that he gets himself killed due to his shitty cape.
This trick gets misconstrued a lot as a simple game glitch, so you have people like this guy asking what’s wrong with his game at the official Eidos message board … only for the forum administrator to explain the situation and tell him: “It’s not a bug in the game’s code, it’s a bug in your moral code [punk].“
Is this where the “ponygirl” fetish got started?
One of a series of “WTF?” postings at How to be a Retronaut may show the origin of the “ponygirl” fetish. (I would advise you not to Google Image Search for that . . . unless that’s what you are interested in):
April 17, 2011
Ilkka lets his anti-pedestrian flag fly
Ilkka is usually a pedestrian/public transit rider, so it’s quite a surprise when he looks at the world from the driver’s perspective:
It’s always good to see things from the other guy’s perspective, and today we went on errand to the city on a car, very different from my usual public transit and pedestrian viewpoint. I understand not just the complaints of drivers much better now, but also the notion of “high cost of free parking”. I thought it was absurd how the city of Toronto, by allowing curbside parking, effectively turns its perfectly good four-lane streets into narrow two-lane bottlenecks that massively throttle the traffic. And then all those freaking pedestrians crossing the streets wherever they feel like, something I basically never do. It actually wouldn’t be a bad idea to impose a law that not only is it never a crime to hit a pedestrian who is on the street anywhere else than the sidewalk or a crosswalk, but the city would actually pay a small reward for this service to society, bit like the “kill money” bounty that hunters traditionally get for putting down pests. The problem of pedestrians running around in the traffic would vanish within a week.
I think he’s kidding . . .
April 15, 2011
April 14, 2011
“We have engineered a massive, unstoppable Essex. We should all be in jail”
In this time of abject apologies of all sorts for historic wrongs, it’s time for England — East Anglia in particular — to acknowledge the sins of their past:
As David Cameron told Pakistan that its current balls-out craziness was actually the fault of the British empire, experts pointed to the giant, stupid, disgusting country founded by some people from East Anglia.
Julian Cook, author of America: What the Fuck Were We Thinking?, said: “When Harwich-born Christopher Jones captained the Mayflower in 1620 he began a process that would lead ultimately to genocide, the Ku Klux Klan and Grey’s Anatomy.
“Thanks to him and his insane passengers, the way was paved for a nation of heavily armed toddlers led around by an ever-changing roll-call of religious maniacs, grubby conmen and dead-eyed celebrities.
“It doesn’t understand anything more than 15 minutes old — except creationism — and is littered with strip malls and heavily branded cheese pumps.
“We have engineered a massive, unstoppable Essex. We should all be in jail.”
H/T to Johnathan Pearce for the link.
Scott Feschuk is one of those “ethnic voters” for the Harper photo-op
Scott Feschuk is delighted to have the opportunity to have his photo taken with the prime minister. He’s overjoyed:
What a moment.
I never thought that I — a regular, ordinary Canadian — would get the chance to have my photo taken with the Prime Minister of Canada.
But as luck and crass political calculation would have it, he’s eager to be seen with me! All I have to do is attire myself in such a manner as to flamboyantly display my heritage, thereby rendering me a subhuman prop that Stephen Harper can exploit to woo more of my kind.
Needless to say, I’m in.
As is true of much national folklore garb, it can take quite a while to get into my ethnic costume. Each item has been carefully selected to represent a historic and sacred element relating to my suitably exotic but non-threatening culture.
Join me, won’t you, as I get dressed.
I think I can speak for all of us about our deep gratitude that this blog post is not illustrated.
It’s also nice to see that the Conservatives have not yet figured out how to avoid handing their opponents such wonderful opportunities for mockery.
Original tempest-in-an-ethnic-teapot here. 680News reported yesterday that the staffer who wrote the letter is no longer working for the candidate.
April 8, 2011
QotD: the international double standard
A long time ago we had a president who was doing a chubby intern.
And some Americans got uptight about it.
And we were told by Europeans everywhere ‘Relax, it’s just sex. He’s the leader of the country, they have mistresses, it happens get over it you uptight prudes.’
So now with Silvio Berlusconi having sex with underage prostitutes and orgies and I don’t know what-all I guess that makes Europe — and Italy in particular — about eighteen times more sophisticated [1] than us hicks in the United States and so-on and so-forth.
Y’all must be so proud.
[1] Sarcasm.
Brian Dunbar, “Sophisticated Europe”, Space for Commerce, by Brian Dunbar, 2011-04-07
April 7, 2011
Friend of Randian cultists afraid to say what he really means
The victim of Objectivist intimidation is poor little P.J. O’Rourke, who has to be very careful how he reviews Atlas Shrugged:
Atlas shrugged. And so did I.
The movie version of Ayn Rand’s novel treats its source material with such formal, reverent ceremoniousness that the uninitiated will feel they’ve wandered without a guide into the midst of the elaborate and interminable rituals of some obscure exotic tribe.
Meanwhile, members of that tribe of “Atlas Shrugged” fans will be wondering why director Paul Johansson doesn’t knock it off with the incantations, sacraments and recitations of liturgy and cut to the human sacrifice.
But that’s about as far as he dares to go, risking retribution from Randian cultists. Oh, wait . . . he does go a tiny bit further towards martyrdom after all:
But I will not pan “Atlas Shrugged.” I don’t have the guts. If you associate with Randians — and I do — saying anything critical about Ayn Rand is almost as scary as saying anything critical to Ayn Rand. What’s more, given how protective Randians are of Rand, I’m not sure she’s dead.
The woman is a force. But, let us not forget, she’s a force for good. Millions of people have read “Atlas Shruggged” and been brought around to common sense, never mind that the author and her characters don’t exhibit much of it. Ayn Rand, perhaps better than anyone in the 20th century, understood that the individual self-seeking we call an evil actually stands in noble contrast to the real evil of self-seeking collectives. (A rather Randian sentence.) It’s easy to make fun of Rand for being a simplistic philosopher, bombastic writer and — I’m just saying — crazy old bat. But the 20th century was no joke. A hundred years, from Bolsheviks to Al Qaeda, were spent proving Ayn Rand right.
