misc

- Livejournal is down apparently ONLY FOR ME, maybe it's a UK thing, but it's been down for more than a day now. Ignore that, Livejournal managed to find some yarn to replace the string the old women had stolen from their server. Ignore that ignore that, the little old ladies apparently needed some yarn as well as some string.

- there needs to be a Capcom Vs. Marvel style side scrolling fighting game called "BBC Vs. FOX".
imagine the matchups: Paxman Vs. Bill O'Rly, Geraldo Vs. Kate Adie, Victoria Coren Vs. Glenn Beck, Director General of the BBC Vs. Rupert Murdoch. It would be awesome.

- I'm surprised I haven't seen this character concept used: Hipster Ariel as an actual fantasy setting character. She left the ocean because it was too mainstream, but now travels the land in a wheel chair made out of $fantasysetting tech because of her well known views about legs (or possibly she has some problem with morphing spells that would give her legs). Possibly a spellcaster because physics is also too mainstream for her (though she liked Conjugation spells before they became popular) but could also be a silver hoard style barbarian, mowing down other hipsters with her spikey war-chair.

Dear Hegemonizing Corporate Swarm Named "Google"

Son, I am disappoint.

Once upon a time you chose "don't be evil" as the motto for you hegemonizing corporate swarm, and we laughed and fell in love with you a little, felt that you were a useful check and balance against your fellow hegemonizing corporate swarm Microsoft. Because we thought you got the joke with us, that when we talk about Microsoft being "evil" we really meant that M$ is fucking stupid: IE was a creature borne of a belief that building a working web browser was less important than just building a web browser as quickly as possible with as little aforethought as you could get away with, leading to a program that was the software equivalent of just smashing your hard drive with a big rock.

It's stupidity that was the problem, the same goes for Clippy and Microsoft Bob, the memory creep problem in XP, every little annoying and pointless pop up warning, every click through needed to even see the contents of our hard drives, and the eldritch abomination spoken of by that furious arab Abdul Alhazred in the Necronomicon as "VISTA". Stupid stupid and stupid again were each and every mistake, and suffice to say that with enough of these stupid moments, the average windows user started to take the little stupidities that M$ threw at us personally, started to view them as "evil".

And in a way the reason why we thought you got the whole evil/stupid dichotomy was because for the most part your products have been well made, the algorithms generally well thought out; the code efficient.

Except there's been quite large holes in that perception of late – there's the mild annoyance that you've shifted to a policy of having google giving the results for the more commonly used spelling for a term, rather than the original system for error correction where you'd show me the results for what I actually typed and give me a single quite click away from a possibly more likely term – which might sometimes be the correct spelling for what I meant to type, but often wasn't.

This is stupid.

Then we had the Google Buzz fiasco, where you had this preconceived notion of how people would want to use an existing service which they used in a very specific way. And the Algorithms involved in that were well made from a strictly technical stand point, the code was still efficient.

But it was stupid.

Now we have this G+ bullshit. Not just the mass deletion of people's G+ account AND the various other bits of Google related cloud services, but shit like Warren Ellis complains about here regarding the automatic importing of new contacts when you set up a new account. All the problems involved this time are the result of complex and technically well written algorithms and coding that (like with Buzz and the googel searches) you've implemented in G+ in an effort to (like Microsoft Bob) make using your products "easier".

But it's really really stupid, and it's precisely the same sort of stupid that cropped up the last couple of times as well, and that stupidity is specifically this:

You are good at writing algorithms, you are a genius at coding, but Google; you don't seem to get that your algorithms and code are far too stupid to ever grasp the vexities and complexities of the human heart.

After all, what would a mere algorithm know about the love of a parent for their child which, in their postpartum glow, leads to them giving their children weird names like Moonshine Sparkle Bunny or William Shatner? What would a code, no matter how sublimely written and free segfaults, know of the angst and pathos of affection turned sour and the hate and recriminations that can lay between seperated couples? How many of the databases underpinning your cloud operations ever even kissed a woman? I would bet none of them.

Google, to keep to your motto, you have to understand that it's not merely enough to be "not evil", it's not enough to be full conversant with current versions of java, python, XML and CSS sheets:

You must also be smart enough to be fully fluent in the scripting language of the human heart; aware of the all too human foibles and multi-faceted yearnings that make us who and what we are rather than the limited spread sheet boxes that you wish to fit us into, and smart enough to realise that we can never be anything else but what are, and will never fit into the algorithmically simple boxes you have constructed for us.

And until you understand that, you will be both stupid and evil and your hegemony will continue to be limited, because without love you cannot grasp the magic of friendship which allows us to act as groups and become greater than the mere sum of our parts.

Welp, looks like I'm running out of room, Best wishes to you and the subsidaries, yours Sincerely,

Fridgepunk.