You really gotta wonder who on those marketing teams suddenly goes "So, what if we make people’s hair smell like lemons?" and everyone nods in agreement instead of blasting them to the Moon.
It all sounds fine and dandy until you get that brilliant idea of a shampoo in your eyes. It only burns twice as much as regular kind, but don’t worry, that’s just the citrus freshness doing its job!
My dad finally got fed up with having me around. Apparently I haven’t been pulling my weight around the house so he’s gonna pull me from college and in the next week I’m to get a job and start looking into a place to stay. I don’t know how long I’ll be able to stay on here, hopefully I can afford Internet at my new place. Otheriwse, well, farewell to everyone (zero) that reads this blog. Who knows when I’ll be back.
Edit: If you didn’t get it, April Fools.
In fact, screw the politeness. It doesn’t suck. Suck was years ago. It’s freakin’ shit. Pure raw shit. Humanity’s creativity has been going down the drain for years and nobody cares. This applies to everything, but I wanna keep it brief, so I’ll take it out on TV. The new trend with TV seems to rehash everything old and washed away that’s been done to death, but… sprinkle it with DRAMA! It’s like they’re trying to shove reality shows into everything. It sucks. Heroes? Superheroes with drama! Simpsons? Comedy with drama! Shark? Lawyers with drama!
Oh, and that’s another thing. These days it’s all about crime. Let’s take every single job vaguely related with crime, and completely make them take over everyone else in a completely non-sensical manner. You have policemen, detectives, lawyers, investigators, negotiators, security personnel, antropologists… solve a crime all on their own. Oh, and don’t forget: sprinkle it with drama!
Dear FOX Portugal, the following shows suck:
- Bones
- Close to Home
- Cold Case
- Desperate Housewives
- E-Ring
- Heroes
- Invasion
- John Doe
- King of the Hill
- Law & Order
- Lost
- O.C.
- Reunion
- Shark
- Six Feet Under
- Standoff
- Surface
- The Dead Zone
- The Unit
- Tru Calling
(…)
Also, you suck for killing the following shows:
- Futurama
- Simpsons
Seriously, I’m fed up with your second-ass crime shows that just keep coming and coming which are basically some lame-ass person who is an asshat single-handedly solving crimes and bossing people around while still dealing with the ever-constant menace of family/love/friend/etc. drama! And the crimes are just more and more fucked up! They’re pratically a milimeter away from pedophilism. And in the meantime, the one funny crime show you’ve put on, Boston Legal, gets tossed away to some crazy AM schedule!
Also, Lost, WTF. Seriously, WTF.
Dear Cartoon Network, the following shows suck:
- Ben 10
- Class of 3000
- Juniper Lee
- King Arthur’s Disasters
- Robotboy
Also, you suck for killing the following shows:
- Courage the Cowardly Dog
- Dexter’s Laboratory
- Ed, Edd and Eddy
- Johnny Bravo
- Samurai Jack
(…)
Quit giving us more new shit cartoons with more new shit episodes when perfectly good shows keep getting canned or turned into shit. Quit kicking off the few good directors you have left just because Shitty McBarfPants will do a cheaper job!
Ah yes, golf. Sport of… rich bastards and big suits. I’ve always been more of a mini-golf kinda guy. It’s simpler and it’s got crazy obstacles to get around. It relies on timing and angles rather than being able to hit a long one.
Yet, somehow, I got addicted to a golf game. I blame my friend Zeor for this. Albatross18 is one of your traditional asian MMO games. You got your cutesy avatars, you got your purchasable items, and you’ve got huge servers with ranking. But instead of weapons and roleplaying, it’s got… golf. It’s crazy. And it’s fun. And I love it. Maybe it’s all the wacky character animations, the vast plentiful courses, or just the fact that I don’t totally suck at it. That and the zany hats. Gotta love’em.
If you feel like trying it, here’s a trailer of the upcoming Revolution (new swag) for you to enjoy:
More and more I find people using comboboxes for navigation. It’s silly. It’s ridiculous. It’s probably the only thing abnormally wrong about the Penny Arcade site. In any case, comboboxes aren’t even really comboboxes, they’re just compact listboxes! In any case, comboboxes are meant for forms. They’re meant for selecting one time out of many. Stop using them as archives, indexes, lists, menus and what not. If you use them because the full list takes up too much space, use a freaking frame or iframe, or just use the CSS equivalent of a popup menu or such. Or just put it somewhere where you have space and link to it. Why? I’ll give you three:
1. JavaScript: Well ok I don’t mind JavaScript, but it can hinder users a lot in this case. Here you are using a javascript-based combobox for what’s virtually a list of links. If for some reason your code isn’t cross-browser or people disable it, whoop, there goes half your usability. Not to mention if you have one of those auto-jump comboboxes (that jump to the link as soon as you select it), you’re gonna annoy everyone that accidentally selects an option.
2. It’s a UI component, not a page: For this matter, you can’t view all the items at once, you can’t search through the combobox and you’ll have a hard time getting it to fit both with the website design and the standard UI for whichever OS is being used.
3. No control: Since a combobox doesn’t have links, users can’t click on multiple options. They can’t open links in new windows. They can’t copy the link address straight from the list. And so on. That’s User Usability 101 right there, and you’re making a mockery out of it!
And this angers me! I mean, I understand they don’t need shortcuts in the Programs folder because they have their dedicated Games Explorer ones. Yet developers still forget to create shortcuts in the Games Explorer! Stuff like the Readme, Launcher, Websites, Extras and other such that we used to have with the good old Programs folder. Come on, get a grip.
So I went off to watch the Simpsons movie today. Now, we’ve all seen Simpsons. The TV show. The moral start. The golden middle. The declining present… so clearly, expectations for the movie were mixed. Though FOX has been pimping the crap out of the movie with tons of trailers, photos, videos, games, popular character creator, elaborate site and what not.
So, is the Simpsons Movie good? Yes. It’s good. Possibly even really good. It’s not really good movie-wise, but it’s really good Simpsons-wise. It’s enjoyable. It’s funny. It looks good. It definitely shows what Simpsons is (or at least, should be) all about.
One thing I think is that they really took a risk was at making the movie focused at the Simpsons audience. I mean, the movie might still be good if you’ve never watched Simpsons, but there’s definitely a lot more to be earned if you have. A lot more jokes that’ll seem a lot funnier or make a lot more sense. Though given the extent of the movie, it’s probably a good thing that they did. That way they could spend all the time they wanted making the movie funny. They also took the time to make sure all the known Springfield characters make a joke (or show up) at least once, showing they didn’t forget any. It also makes you realize just how huge Springfield really is.
Now, the main point of the movie is, of course, the humour. It’s Simpsons. It’s all about the funny. And the humour is definitely much better than the one from the TV series as of late. It’s a mix of crude, unexpected, clever, sophisticated, political, american and mindless humour. So they’ll be sure to please everyone even if not everyone will get all the jokes. As an example of this is one of the jokes in the beginning which you’ve probably seen in the trailer. Homer is trying to hammer a nail in the roof and puts his finger over it, so you immediately expect him to hit his finger as tradition dictates. Yet, PLOT TWIST, he hits his eye instead! Also followed by Homer’s retort “I’ll teach you to laugh at something that’s funny” as opposed to the traditional “I’ll show you funny”. There’s a lot of this kind of thing throughout the movie and it’s lovely.
I might as well warn you that if you’ve seen the trailer, you’ll already have seen most of the jokes from the first half of the movie. They might be out of context and not have the full set-up so they’ll still be funny, but it’ll still feel odd. Though at least the trailer made sure to not give away the plot or anything like that so you’ll still enjoy it.
The production values are also very good. They’re obviously better than the TV show, but they’re still damn good. At first I was a bit warey of the 2D/3D mesh they did to keep the Simpsons style in a more modern setting, which seemed a bit tacky at first. But they make full use of it with all sorts of camera angles, special effects and make all of Springfield (and more!) look much nicer. The sound is also very nice, with the music keeping in with the Simpsons style and still changing according to the setting, with the theme still everlasting. The voice acting is also as good as always, with all of the original cast having done their best to make the characters in the movie seem that bit more lively than in the TV series.
Now, for the rest. It obviously can’t be all that good. The story is nothing extraordinary. It fills its role of having all the movie requirements like action, drama, humour, romance, suspense, etc. But it’s nothing breathtaking. But then again, plots were never the Simpsons’ strongpoint. Without spoiling anything, the plot and characterization focus more on the Simpons. Obviously, it’s their movie. But Springfield and extras all still do what they’re supposed to, each having a role in the movie either plot-dependent or just comic-relief. Luckily the show isn’t all about Homer, with every Simpsons character having an important role and Homer, while still his stupid loafy self, still manages to surprise us all.The first half of the movie will be mostly lots of humour and set up of the plot, while the second half will have all the unveiling, drama, romance, twists and whatever’s left, still with the occasional humour.
In the end, it’s no classic, but it’s got tons of humour, characters, guest characters and a fitting plot. It’s Simpsons any way you look at it, and you should enjoy it as such.
Protip: It only ends after the Credits.
You know what they are. That thing Microsoft introduced with Windows XP or so. How any folder with at least one image (or audio or video file. You can apply this generalization to all the following times I use this term) is immediatly classified as an “image folder” and gets attached all those useless tasks, special view options and what not.
Don’t get me wrong. I understand that if people have a folder full of images, it’s probably strictly for images, and they might find a thumbnail-view handy, as well as all the extra picture info like size, camera type and what not. But not everything that has an image is an image folder.
I like to keep a simple clean standard view. A Details view with columns for the common info like Name, Type, Size and Date Modified, all sized to make full use of my large resolution. It’s all I need and I like it. I might customize the view for other folders if I need, by myself. But Windows won’t let me have that. It’ll turn any folder into an image folder without my consent, resetting my standard settings and causing me havoc since whenever I open the folder, I have to get used to a completely different view.
To add to that, as handy as extra file info is, it only slows down Windows more as it queries all the extra info just to display the folder’s contents, since Windows only caches thumbnails. Plus, all these folder types are linked. If I try to change the view settings myself in one of these folders, chances are it’ll affect several other completely unrelated folders. Even bigger chances are it’ll quickly forget about them and re-apply it’s default view for “image folders”. Worse even, these view settings now also apply to the smaller Open/Save dialogs in which they mostly don’t even fit in.
This leads to a Little Annoyance. A Little Annoyance is, by my view, worse than a Large Annoyance, because you avoid the latter the minute you run into it. With a Little Annoyance, you cope with it, live with it, slowly dragging you down until it eventually grows into a Large Annoyance anyways and you avoid it completely. Navigating a file system is vital to any user, and the more this is clogged, the worse. I cannot avoid such a vital task without having to resort to something like typing the whole file path myself, and if I wanted to do that I’d switch to Linux.
Do us all a favour and go jump off a cliff.
