Lolcats, the Internets day dream

Why do we make them? These funny pictures of cats with captions who's mane feature is bad grammar and poor spelling.

Do they serve a purpose other then our amusement? Nope.

 If we think of the internet as the sum total of human knowledge and experience, then that makes the lolcat, and other nonsensical internet memes the daydream of the internet, of the human mind as a whole. Makes you think, doesn't it dear reader, that maybe those cats should get a cheeseburger, and a cooky.

Vampires, they just won't die!

Twilight, Dracula, Nosferatu! What is the enduring obsession with immortal bloodsucking albinos with big teeth? What part of the human psyche does this twisted nightmarish image of a human/bat hybrid appeal to? And where does the pitiful excuse for film and writing, known as Twilight fit into all of this? Humans baffle me, but this is in a league all it's own...

Facebook, the village of billions.

A recent study found that the average number of Facbook friends, is around 150, which is interesting because the most people that a person can maintain meaningful relationships with, is around 150. This is because the average size of villages and tribes through most of human history, was 150. Another interesting thing, is that people (my self included) complain that Facebook is destroying peoples privacy, which it is, but for most of human history, privacy was a non existent thing, villages were so small that every one new every one else's business. Privacy is a modern invention, that Facebook is uninventing. The key difference though, is that once it's out there, it's out there, note like a real village, where once some new piece of gossip comes about people forget about the last thing. Now some comment you made years ago, can prevent you from getting a job. Some unremembered comment made while more then a little drunk can haunt you for years. So, dear reader, while you commenting on a friends comment about a comment, think twice, and remember, the village is watching, the village sees all, knows all, and it never forgets.

 

Thoughts on Piracy, the Internet Variety.

Internet piracy is a pervasive crime these days. Probably one of the more common. But, unlike just about any other, it actually helps the victims.

the Swiss government finds that people who download things online without paying for them actually end up spending more money than people who don’t. This applies to consumers of music, television, and video games. Piracy pays, apparently.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2011/12/05/swiss-government-study-finds-internet-downloads-increase-sales/


So why, exactly, are the penalty's so steep? My thoughts are this, it is an old way, fighting against a new way. Change pushing against stagnation. The old fighting against the new. If I were so inclined, dear reader, I would be willing to bet that within 20 years (probably a lot less), it will be a crime the equivalent of a parking ticket, or possibly not even a crime.

Zombies, they just wont stay dead

Zombies... Where to start? I suppose where it start's, the grave. How is it that the idea of a reanimated mindless corps who's only motive is to eat people has become so very, very popular? Does it have to do with our fear of death? Fear of the dead? Fear of getting eaten? Fear of that which has no fear? I think that it is probably all of the above, combined with just a bit of morbid curiosity. Though that does raid yet another question, why is the Resident Evil series so popular? I wonder what Freud would make of a video series featuring sex and walking corpses. 'Tis strange when you think about it, is it not? Zombies, mutants, viruses, evil robots, who could imagine the crazy things that Hollywood regularly dreams up? Think about that, dear reader, and hope you never mete a rather decayed individual with a craving for your deliciously delectable grey matter.

Science Fiction, The Present, The Past, And The Future.

If you look at the first science fiction books, and the effects they had, and the real world inventions they inspired, I am quite sure you will be amazed. Ever notice the similarity between SkyNet and cloud computing? How about the similarity between a Star Trek communicator and a cellphone? 

Or, reaching back to the great grandfather of sci-fi, The War Of The World by H.G. Wells, it was the first book to ever depict aliens as hostile invaders, it depicted chemical weaponry well before it's use in WWI, it even depicted lasers decades before one was every made. Science fiction authors frequently imagine the future, and though they tend to be way of in the broad strokes (for instance, we have yet to have returned to the moon as was depicted in 2001 Space Odyssey), but they have a remarkable tendency to be quite correct with regards to the technology, now weather the story’s of the writers inspire the inventors, or inventor comes up with the idea on his own, I can't say. What I can say is that if half of history's profits were as accurate as science fiction writers at predicting the future, the world should have been destroyed a thousand times over by now.

Honer to Dishonored: A review of Dishonored

I just recently competed my second play-through of the new first person steal/action game Dishonored, and I have to say, wow. I have played a stealth games, I have played first person games, I have played action games, and I have played games that were a combination of all of the above. This game, is better then all of them. The game play was superb, the story was quite good, and stealth aspect to it was superbly implemented. My only two complaints about it are that the graphics could have been a bit better, running at max settings it was about 3 years behind in that regard. The other was that the AI could have been a bit smarter (I'm mean, look up one in a while!), there were parts where I could have tap danced across a ledge or lighting fixture. But other then these relatively minor complaints, it is quite good, certainly one of the best stealth games on the market.

Console games VS. PC games

For around 40 years console games have dominated the video game market. But in the last 20 or so years, a new contender has been gaining an ever increasing share of the the market. That contender is the PC. At first PC games couldn't really compete with consoles. In the mid 90's home computers capable of competing with the consoles were available, but were still fare more expensive then consoles. When the last generation of consoles were launched, PC's and consoles were equally matched. Now five or six years later, the scales have tipped in the PC's favor in terms of price and performance. With the price staying the same, and the performance going up. Consoles however, are doing the exact opposite. Their prices are slowly going down, and their performance is staying the same (for now at least, there will of course be a short spike when the next generation of consoles launch). So, I ask you dear reader, why do we keep shelling out our hard earned dollars on consoles, and console games, when great games, and cheap hardware exist for the PC?

Is text talk degrading the English language?

Is text talk degrading the English language? You may here people saying that what amounts to a miniature language consisting almost entirely of acronyms can't be good for the English language.

I disagree. English in it's modern form is essentially an amalgamation of various dialects of Spanish, French, German, Russian, Chinese, Japanese just about every language an English speaker has come into contact with has in some way or another been incorporated into the soup that is English. Imagine, if you took and English speaker from the middle ages, and dropped them into modern times, they would essentially have to learn an entirely new language, the same is probably true for some one from just 200 years ago. Some of you might say that English hasn't had to contend with all these acronyms before. You would be wrong, for the past hundred or so years, various governments and company’s have been abbreviating the various ungainly names of things (IBM, FBI, DARPA, etc.), so abbreviating commonly used words and phrases is the next logical step. So how prey tell can one degrade a language, that is in a perpetual state of change? And with that thought, dear reader, I bid you a hearty ttyl.

Does tv make your stupid?

If you google this question, you will find 165,000,000 results, and each with a different answer. My take on the subject, is this, it will if you let it. But what won't? Too much of a good thing is just that, too much of a good thing. If you eat too much chocolate you will get sick, play a video game too much and your thumbs will cramp, watch too much tv and your brain will decide to go on a vacation. Everything in moderation or so the saying goes. Now if you will excuse me dear reader, my favorite tv show just came one.

Why I don't like E-readers.

As you will recall, at the end of my post titled “Why I don't like tablets”, I said that my dislike of E-readers would be for another post. This is that post. And, without further adieu, my dislike of E-readers is quite simple. I dislike them because they reduce books to a computer file, something to be lost, or deleted. Say your E-reader was lost, stolen, or broken, what would happen to your books? Would you still have them? I know what your going to say, but the website I got them from will replace them, or that paper books can get stolen or damaged to. Well, first off, what if said website goes bust? Who will replace your books then? And how, short of a fire, or flood, does an entire library of books get destroyed. And I don't think I have heard of a thief steeling a copy of Twilight... And if you can manage to loose that many paper books all at once, you have worse problems then some missing books. Not to mention that the brick and morter book store is going extinct as a result. Which aside from the loss of jobs fore the people that worked at them, there is the loss of yet another place where people can meet by coincidence, and discuss similar interests. Before long, the only places people will be able to do something similar to that is ether on the ineternet, in noisy coffee shops, or in clubs (assuming you live in a place where coffee shops are (yes there are a few such increasingly rare places)). And that, is a sad thing, no matter how you look upon technology. This concludes the above post.

The internet

The internet, in all of our minds that word leads to one thing, wikipedia defines the internet as

a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite (often called TCP/IP, although not all applications use TCP) to serve billions of users worldwide.

Though most of you probably think of it as where facebook dwells. But it is so very much more then facebook, email, and youtube. To get into detail about how the interenet works, how it has woven it's way into our lives would take several books, not a single blog post. So I will leave you with a question that should hopefully point your mind in the right direction to find more questions and answers about the simingly omnipotent internet. What made it, and continues to make it, so very very popular and usefull?

Why I don't like tablets.

There are many reasons, so I will start with the first that comes to mind. At first you might see an advantage in that they are extremely portable. But then so was the netbook. What killed that off is that their keyboard and screen where too small. With tablets, the keyboard is only as big as the screen, and if you're typing on one, at least half of the screen is covered up by your hands. Then there is the limited processing power, nonexistent ability to upgrade them so that you have to spend $200+ if you want a faster one. And here is the real kicker, there one advantage is that they can be used as an e-reader. I despise e-readers with the white hot intensity of a thousand suns, but that is a rant for another post. Until then, dear reader, adieu.

First of what will more likely be many.

Hey there humans, one of my teachers is haveing me make this for class. So here it is. More to come latter. Until then, adios and a harty orevwa!