Tag Archives: rant

Who do I boycott now? Piracy wins again.

Posted by Alex on

I am pretty pissed about this. I thought “surely there must be a reason to spend my hard earned money on a legit legal copy of a game.”

I bought Fallout 3 for my Playstation3. And it was FUCKING AWESOME!!!!!1 So I blew some more money purchasing a couple addons and they were approximately if not equally as awesome as the vanilla game. So I figured I would buy the other expansions, one of them being Point Lookout. Now I immagine other PS3ers with F3 know where this is going…

I can’t play Point Lookout. It doesn’t work. I spent the money, it installed and now I can’t play the game at all. It crashes, freezes, hangs, locks up, fails. I figured surely if it’s been published and available for a few months it has to at least work, right? FUCK NO! What a ridiculous assumption! Clearly I’ve done something horribly wrong, something so clearly amateur. The disk must be fatally scratched (nope), maybe I accidentally peed all over the PS3 (nope) or dropped it out of a moving vehicle during installation (nope again).

So I deleted everything; DLC data, Vanilla data, saves, porn, EVERYTHING. Start from scratch – This is what years of using Microsoft products have taught me. AND re-install in published order. Surely, somebody play-tested this product before releasing it into the paying customer base. Well apparently not; I’m only the latest customer to be fooled by Sony and/or Bethesda Softworks.

It still crashes. After spending the maximal amount of money on this product it will not work. Like getting that final light-bulb in your house and now the electricity just won’t turn on. Like getting that final touch of salt and pepper on a fine filet mignon and the entire meal turns to stone. Like winning a backstage pass to your favorite band and being kicked out of the stadium.

Except in those cases I could probably get my money back, or in the case of the restaurant just refuse to pay for stone when I ordered Mignon.

In this society, we exchange credits or money for goods and services. I gave Sony money, and not only have they failed to deliver the promised entertainment, but taken it away. And I’m not the only one! The forums are rife with complaints! And not a word from Sony or Bethesda.

All I want is to play some Fallout3, shoot some swamplurks and make some moonshine. What do I have to do, who do I have to give money to? You know what – I don’t have to part with money. I’ve already downloaded a cracked Game of the Year edition and installed it on my trusty Mac.

That’s right, piracy just works. If the product offered by pirates is a BETTER and more complete product than the one I can pay for, then the pirates win. The only way to fight piracy is to offer a better product.

Price Discrepancies

Posted by Alex on

I love the Internet. I’ve been using it since before Google and it just keeps getting better! I use it for everything I do, and even seek to use it more. One of the best parts about the Internet is shopping. It’s like regular shopping in a mall, but with all the vendors sitting in front of you at a table offering their wares and you don’t have to bargain hunt or shop around because the best price is right there in front of you! And of course, international shopping.

I recently bought a pen from France. Why France? Because Waterman doesn’t offer that product line in North America, let alone Canada. And just now I bought a music CD (Moving On by Myleene Klass) from Amazon UK. Before I dive into this diatribe I’d like to note Amazon’s cultural acknowledgment; The Canadian site will “Ship to this address”, the UK site will “Dispatch to this address” (how cute!), and the American one will “Drops mah shit off hear plz”. Now on to the rant.

Amazon Canada has the album, Amazon Amerikuh haz teh albem and the lowest price I can get is from the same damn company across the Atlantic… about seven thousand kilometers (4,300 stat. miles, 3,800 nautical miles) away. WTF? Continue reading →

Social Messaging

Posted by Alex on

Let’s pretend you’re not like me and actually want to talk to somebody. How then do you go about doing this? Do you put an ad on Television saying so? How about the radio, or Time Magazine?

That’s a rhetorical question. Of course you don’t use such public mediums for a private conversation. You call them on your cell phone while riding the bus of course! Or better yet, write on their FaceBook Wall. Because somehow that’s different. Continue reading →

Microwave Timer

Posted by Alex on

The timer on my microwave is cofused. When I enter 33, it runs for 33 seconds. 67, it runs for 67 seconds. 94, it runs for 94 seconds. 99, 99 seconds. Notice a pattern? I think that it would be great if the device kept this neato pattern, because I like seconds. They’re pretty long anyways. So what comes after 99? 99+1 = 60. 100 means 60 seconds. If I wanted 60 seconds, I would enter 60, not 100.

Stupid microwave.

The Phone

Posted by Alex on

I hate telephones. They’re a continuous on-demand invasion into my private time. They’re impersonal, anonymous, and interrogative. They are the signallers of doom. Whenever my phone rings, something bad has happened, or I’m in trouble. To top it off, it rings when I’m doing something where answering the phone is awkward, inconvenient or really damn rude.

Continue reading →

Vista

Posted by Alex on

Alright… I did it. I put the Vista disc in and did the install thing. It took a long time. The first thing I noticed: Nothing. No choices! No customization other than timezone. There wasn’t any obvious click here to fix buttons. Yes, I am alluding to the fact that Vista is broken upon installation.

Okay, I’m extremely critical and biased… but I’ll try to be fair.

Continue reading →

Advertising?

Posted by Alex on

Sometimes I read about some kind of bizarre practice some organizations engage in, called advertising. People get all bent out of shape about how many advertisements our youth are exposed to, the message of the adverts, the conditioning… The Internet of course is supposedly rife with them, just teeming with malicious little data mining parasite advertisements. And once in a while some advert publisher pushes the Wrong Stuff on some site. Do you think I’d find out?

Continue reading →

Linux Story

Posted by Alex on
Windows is a Pile of Crap

First, it doesn’t install right — It wrote over my boot loader with some crap-encrusted near-sighted Windows-Only thing. It’s useless, how do I access Linux with this? So I needed to boot with a forensic Linux disk and reconstruct a less-than-useless bootloader: Grub

There goes about half an hour. Continue reading →