From bad to worst:
Carl Orff — Carmina Burana: O Fortuna
009 Sound System — Dreamscape
Clint Mansell — Lux Aeterna

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the members of the Party are convinced all the restrictions are for their own good, and all their thinking processes are convoluted, just like Apple fanboys accept the restrictions, wait and pay for each new feature passively, etc. Their perception of reality is distorted.

They look down on those who are not members of the Party (Apple fanboys tend to believe they are part of an elite), yet the proles are actually more free!

Apple’s communication is also quite similar to the Party, in the way that it is incoherent (“there is no iPhone 4 antenna issue, but we will provide a free fix for it”) yet completely accepted.

Production is always higher, just like every Apple announcement is a revolution, and every new product was a success. The latter reminds me of the historical blindness: fanboys erase Apple’s previous failures (technical and commercial) from their minds, and we’ve always been at war with Eastasia.

Steve Jobs once said “Freedom from porn”, which will remind of “Freedom is slavery”.

Steve Jobs is viewed as an immortal genius by fanboys; Big Brother is the immortal leader of the Party. Without Steve Jobs, there is no Apple; there is no Party without Big Brother. There is a very strong cult of personality, and you know what it usually leads to.

Whenever I say that poker is pure luck, poker fans usually get quite mad¹ about it, but can’t even start a proper explanation on how it isn’t. That’s the only stuff I found after quite some effort searching the web:

1. You don’t understand poker
2. “Skilled” players win over “unskilled” players or randomized players
3. The same players come at the top of tournaments

I couldn’t find anyone explaining what the “skill” was exactly. Weird, uh?
My responses to these sorry-ass explanations:

1. It is a very simple game after you remove all the vocabulary cruft and other useless talk. That’s why idiots like it: it’s simple yet they it makes them feel intelligent.
2. These kind of studies are cited as scientific evidence that poker is not pure luck. Unsurprisingly, poker fans don’t understand much how science works. Some players are better at estimating odds, i.e. luck. A random player does not consider the odds. “Skilled” players are either stupid (they consider odds but they are not aware of it) or very intelligent but evil (they exploit the stupidity of others). A “perfect” human (or… a robot) could always have the exact odds at hand, and chose a safe strategy to win on the long run.
3. That’s actually the most used argument. That’s just because all the others are idiots, who get influenced and don’t know it’s just a game of odds.

The sad fact is, anyone can write a bot to play online poker and win not much, but regularly. That’s why online poker sites try to block bots, by using closed-source clients and closed protocols, and monitoring how many tables someone is trying to play at once.

Even if you consider estimating odds is a skill, it’s just a fucking boring skill. I’d rather play FarmVille.

1. and I really enjoy that

A bit I encountered that infuriated me:

Created w/ Audacity @ 16bit/44.1kHz.
Ripped using an Ortofon 2m Blue Cartridge mounted on a Music Hall MMF 2.2 with Acrylic Platter and Pro-Ject Speed Box. Sent through a Marantz PM5003 Integrated Amp w/ the units Pre-amp into the line in port on my MacBook Pro.

We see that very expensive and high-quality equipment is used to send everything to an absolutely crappy laptop sound card. It’s like eating caviar in a plate of vomit. What the fuck? And a good sound card would cost less than ten percent of all this stuff. WHAT. THE. FUCK.

But what is the most significant with this mac faggot is the use of my. Like all macfags, he uses my like my iPhone that I love so much I stuff it in my ass every day, my “unibody” MacBook Pro, my shiny iPad that is shiny, etc.

Ripped using an Ortofon 2m Blue Cartridge mounted on a Music Hall MMF 2.2 with Acrylic Platter and Ø Pro-Ject Speed Box. Sent through a Marantz PM5003 Integrated Amp w/ the units Pre-amp into the line in port on my MacBook Pro.

KILL ALL MACFAGS.

Today, I discovered crabcore.

It’s extremely bad, and so fucking gay. Shitty stupid moves (looks like the retarded child of nu-metal and tecktonik). Auto-Tune. AUTO-TUNE?! AUTO-TUNE in my post-hardcore? Clearly, Hitler has to raise from the dead and burn every last one of these bands.

They’re tagged post-hardcore on Last.fm, and that alone made me die a little inside.

To sum up, it’s the nu-metal of post-hardcore. Hence the title.

This movie is both incoherent and improbable. And it’s not just overrated, it’s one of the worst movies I have ever seen.
It constantly switches between Hindi and English without any logic. The subtitles are hard to read and at a weird position. There is even scatological humor.

Racist, western-centered

It very insulting towards India and Indians – just read all the angry Indians leaving comments on IMDB. The best (or worst) part is when the American tourists leave $100 to Jamal after they realize he robbed them. “Here is a piece of real America.”

The Millionaire Game

A lot of questions wouldn’t be asked on the Indian show but more likely on the American show.
The host is very rude; the audience seems to like that. Oh well, I guess Indians are just assholes.
The hosts seems to own the show and if the player answers wrong he loses all. This is not the case in the real game. Oh and… the game isn’t broadcast live.
While he did know the answers to some questions, he answers at least one out of pure luck. What was the point of that? And how stupid is the “it is written” line!

The Police

First we have to believe the police will actually do something because someone is suspected of cheating at a TV game. Then they torture the guy (yeah, it’s India, all Indians are retarded pigs, remember) and ask him the questions after the torture, not before. And then they start believing him right away.

But it’s a fairytale!

The real fairytale is that two ugly, homeless and poor Indian boys grow up without any disease or skin problem, and learn how to read and speak fluent English. One of them actually ends up with a legal, paying job (not a great one, but still a something any homeless would dream of). Getting a job and staying alive is the fairytale, but it just magically happens without explanation.

The girl is a whore

She refuses to go with him the first time, and she explicitly states that’s because they have nowhere to go, no money, etc. Well, he has a job. Why couldn’t she go? No, in fact she prefers the wealthy pig. But when Jamal is going to become a millionaire… she escapes (oh and she magically learns how to drive). Yes, the girl is a gold digger. What a love story. Also, why Salim does not escape but instead choses to die in a bath of money?

The only good part was the first one, with the (underpaid) child actors. Please, do not pay to watch this movie.

I often read that Windows boots faster than Linux.

Although I don’t have the impression it’s true on my only dual-boot computer (this laptop even starts Apache+MySQL on Linux, and it’s XP, not the slower Vista), the fact is that when Windows displays the desktop, the boot isn’t finished at all. It will be completely unusable for minutes while when you see the Linux (or BSD, etc., pardon me for the shortcut) desktop, it will be completely read in seconds.
In short, Microsoft is lying to your face when they show you the Windows desktop. Well, wouldn’t be the first time; it’s like when they display 4GB (or more) of RAM but only use up to 3.5.

As I don’t boot Windows often, it’s more likely to be ten minutes than five, because the anti-virus and Windows have to run updates. I’m not kidding when I say ten minutes. I don’t understand how it can be so bad. And I don’t have any of the vendor-installed crap; it’s a custom Windows install with only the vital stuff.

Hibernating works really bad on both Windows and Linux; sleeping is OK on both. And well, Linux is more reactive after a wakeup than Windows, and again I can’t understand why.

However sleeping drains a lot of battery and you need to reboot your Windows often anyway to fix security holes. With Linux you don’t need to reboot most of the time, and there are way less critical fixes. Windows even forces you to reboot (you have like 30 seconds to click No, and screw you if you’re away).

Today I listened to Shocknina.

It fucking sucks.

Is this a pathetic attempt to make industrial fans buy Shakira albums?

By the way, Ayria still sucks but at least it’s listenable.

Yes, worse than Horton Hears a Woo!.

I don’t know where to start. Almost everything sucks. The only good thing is that it lasts only 98 minutes.

The robots are not realistic; they look like humans. It’s fine when Disney’s animals just look like humans, and it pleases their furry-fetish fanbase, but they could have made some sort of effort this time.
The discussions between the two main robots are completely unrealistic. They aren’t able to communicate efficiently, they have “robotic voices” (what a cliché) that suffer from the Kenny Dilemma: you don’t understand what he says, but it gets old; and sometimes you understand because the story needed it. But let’s ignore that and pretend it’s fun and kids might like it.
Their meeting looked like a bad remake of the Tarzan/Jane meeting. Still on their behavior: WALL·E sleeps. They “kiss” and hold hands. There is no robotic traits at all. They could have at least added some robotic characteristics…
Oh, and why on Earth a robot has to display blinking eyes on a screen?

The visuals are not impressive. Robots are easy to modelize (especially WALL·E‘s friend: no textures needed), backgrounds are very simple, and the humans were very lazily done (the plot helps, and the only good-looking human you will see is not a 3D rendering, it’s a real actor).

Talking of the plot. How come humans are able to build state-of-the-art maintenance-free spaceships to get out of their earth full of garbage, but can’t clean it, or just throw the garbage on another planet?). Oh, and they spend their time eating and throwing a lot of garbage in space too. This doesn’t differ from the usual “humans are bad” line of Disney’s, but this time it’s plain stupid.
One joke that was almost funny but was very typical: WALL·E throws a diamond ring and keeps the box.

It’s bad and ridiculous. Not as bad an ridiculous as Fight Club, though. And it’s not that boring. But don’t pay to watch a bad movie patently done by lazy people.

So I thought, why not watch Transformers? It has robots, it should at least be enjoyable for that. Well, no, not even that part is good. Here is my review.

There’s a hot chick, who is going out with a football player, him being condescending to a sort-of-nerd-but-still-good-looking guy (because we don’t want to show ugly people in a movie), her defending him, then drawn to him by the events that will happen. Never seen before.

Oh, and there’s techno-gibberish. One more or less incorrect (i.e. I’ve seen far worse) use of the term firewall, and the parts with the “hacker” is just laughable. Oh yeah, and the Pentagon allows high-schoolers inside, without even checking if they have some sort of storage device on them. Right. The high-school girl who saw what every NSA’s scientists didn’t see has an annoying accent, and her friend the hacker is an annoying, disgusting, stereotypical, fat black man. Don’t forget to add the cross-platform unstoppable computer virus propagating through magic to the mix.

There’s even a part with marines. An the Mexican guy from Prison Break, speaking Spanish (it was supposed to be funny, I think). One of the marines has a wife and a new-born baby he hasn’t seen in person yet. Why do we need to see this? Oh right, to care about him; the others marines’ lives are worthless. He will hence survive and have his five minutes of glory in the action (but not much more).

The hero (the one who will eventually get in the pants of the hot chick) tries to hide a truck and three cars in his backyard. And yet another set of stupid, overlong, painful and unfunny scenes. Oh yeah, and our stupid hero is afraid his parents are going to freak out because of the damage. Just think one second for fucking sake: what is more important, the end of the world or a few crushed flowers?

But still, it could have been half enjoyable if the robots were cool, with cool combats, etc. Bummer.
The robots don’t look like robots, they look like big robotized trolls. It seems the animators didn’t bother creating new kinds of body movements and just took them from some older movie that had big monsters in it. Continuing on the CGI effects, they’re lame and the filmmakers are obviously ashamed of them as the “transformations” are played very fast in a very short window of time, so that you can’t see how bad they are. Most of the time they don’t even show you the full scene but only closeups, maybe to hide some incoherence. There’s even parts where they transform completely off-screen. They weren’t even able to do something good with a simple cube (yes, there’s also a cube). I’m happy I didn’t pay anything to watch this crap.

Oh, and I watched it in 1080p on a big screen, so don’t tell me it’s a thing you have to see in a huge room – full of people eating pop corn and children crying – to enjoy it.

To sum up: overlong, painfully unfunny, boring and uncool epic failure.