There’s lots of ways to rent textbooks, and hopefully more digital options, because seriously, Coursesmart.com is awful. The online version contains intrusive watermarks and horrid proprietary formatting. You can’t copy and paste normally, when you use the copy/paste commands on the interface there’s random spaces inserted in the text, you can only print 10 pages at time, and when you click “next page” you end up at the bottom of the next page rather than the top.
To get an offline version of the book you have to use proprietary software and formats once again. Watermarked, time-limited PDFs are neither complex nor expensive to automate, so why stick with the shitsoft?
Oh, and there’s this failure of the digital medium. “Actual size” doesn’t work well particularly when you can zoom in and out of text and images. So, which is right?
Neither! Or either! Or both, if you change the zoom level and your resolution and the size of your monitor works for the demonstration!
I’m not sure who’s to blame, whether it’s a person or a group of programmers, but whoever decided years ago that AOL Instant Messenger is so important a new message window should always pop up and take control must be killed.
It’s been 13 years now since AIM was intially released. I know it’s expected for it to have sucked back then, afterall, it’s AOL. It’s been long enough to NOT do this. But no, despite all the version changes, despite total overhauls of protocols, despite “Triton”, despite the fact now there’s one unified IM window…god help you if you leave AIM on without something already open, because when you’re on a Team Fortress 2 hot streak, when you and Sandvich are destroying everyone assaulting your base, someone will send you a message.
AIM will decide nothing, NOTHING is more important than it is, and it will force any fullscreen app to close and take control of the keyboard.
Whoever made this decision must now be killed, and if I ever experience the joys of time travel, I will use it to prevent this decision from ever being made. Granted, depending on your theory of time travel and time the fact I’m typing this may mean I won’t ever do it, but causality can suck it I say.
Today’s ironic statement is courtesy of myemohairstyles.com.
Emo boys and emo girls try to be unique and comfortable in society with one’s self by expressing their individuality and self-expression through the emo hairstyles adopted.
They’re different, just like everyone else! Once again I state, “I hate hipsters.”
God damn it, another Saturday Night Live movie. Don’t they remember how poorly this went in the 90s? Aside from an okay Pat movie, you can’t make movies out of a 5 minute bit. In fact, you shouldn’t be making 5 minute bits generally, because they’re dragging on too damn long again.
Nothing over 3 minutes unless it’s really, REALLY funny. Like it makes people who aren’t Jimmy Fallon start corpsing.
That said, MacGruber bits are 20-30 seconds long. They’re funny for exactly that long. I’ve seen 30 second commercials that were already too damn long. Let’s do the math really quick, okay?
5 minute sketch converted to 90 minutes, that’s an 1800% length increase, and it ends up being very, very unfunny to outright shitty right around the 300 percent mark. 30 seconds to 90 minutes? 18,000 percent increase. If MacGruber stops being funny at 200%, and gets bad at 300%…
Well, you can do the math from here, because I’m probably doing this all wrong to begin with, but the answer is clearly the kind of suck the ends the world. You think the black hole the LHC can make is scary? Wait until MacGruber. Rumor is it was, in fact, where all that CERN funding went since they haven’t been able to get enough collisions to form a Higgs-Boson.
When they pay you $100 million for scientific research, it’s easy to think that movie’s a good idea!
But much like yawning, you’re about to have an evolutionary trigger hit.
I hate when I think about breathing, and it switches over from involuntary to voluntary, and I have to think about doing it until a little time passes and I forget, so it goes back to my medulla.
You’re thinking about it now aren’t you? Now you’re having to do it yourself, I bet you’re taking more sparse, deeper breaths than normal too.
Sorry.
And writing this doesn’t help the process either for me, but since it just happened…well, not much option but to whinge about it. That’s what I do, I get annoyed, I whinge for all to see.
Watch some Lady Gaga, you’ll forget quick enough. Then you’ll see a Lady Gaga video and think about breathing, and it all starts over. I think that might be when we die. When we’re out of memories that don’t make us think about breathing. We can’t switch it off, we fall asleep, and bam, dead in 10. Until then…
It’s not that self-insert books are rare, self-insert fanfic is common, and lots of companies make audiobooks with someone’s name as the main character.
This, though…they have at least two vampire books. I’m guessing somewhere around ten, in reality. When did vampires get ruined, again? I know there was the original movie jump from terrifying demonic things to charming evil, but when did they become the omnipotent heroes who can do anything but they’re GENTLE WITH ME OMG SO PERFECT?
Is this even necessary, really? Isn’t the whole thing about Twilight that Bella is so completely personalityless (and Edward and Jacob for that matter), that you simply step right into her shoes? Even her name is just a term of endearment.
A bill amendment in the senate was voted on to remove funding from Haliburton, Blackwater, and other companies contracting overseas if they require mandatory binding arbitration for absolutely anything that goes wrong. No chance of litigation, trial, anything, just arbitration. Arbitration is already known to go very much in favor of the company, seeing as they pay the bills. It’s bad enough on civil suits, but this is applying it to criminal issues.
Like rape.
In fact that is, specifically, what brought this vote up.
Three years ago, because that”s how long getting past the arbitration clause has taken, Jamie Leigh Jones was, allegedly, I still have to say allegedly legally but it’s kinda “fucking duh”, gang-raped by her co-workers at KBR/Haliburton, in Baghdad. Her contract declared this to be “personal injury arising in the workplace.” That includes the part where she was stuffed into a shipping crate afterwards.
Now that alone is pretty outrageous, and the fact they tried to say it was contractually bound to arbitration moreso. Not like Haliburton is considered a company of good guys, right? But it goes on from there.
Senator Al Franken (I love saying that) put in a bill to withdraw funding from companies with those clauses. The vote passed 70-28-2. Two abstentions, 70 yay, 28 nay.
28 people voted that what happened should never go to trial, effectively. That companies with mandatory arbitration clauses deserve government contracts, regardless of the truly serious crimes happening.
They voted that hey, if you’re raped, that’s too bad, and a company representative will decide what happens to you and the assailants. If anything. They can just fire the victim for false claims against the company without seeing any evidence either way, and they’re completely free of accountability. Isn’t that wonderful?
So, 28 senators, all men, all Republican, have voted that rape is just fine with them, because the free market said so. Notorious assholes John Ensign, Mitch McConnel, Jon Kyl, and David Vitter all are included on the list of nays.
How crazy is that? Michele Bachmann supported the amendment in the house. So out of touch, this is a real quote of hers. “I am so proud to be from the state of Minnesota. We’re the workingest state in the country, and the reason why we are, we have more people that are working longer hours.We have people that are working two jobs.” Yet she realizes that mandatory arbitration is a bad idea.
I don’t get too political here for the most part (though it’s not hard to guess I lean way left, by any means). I can usually just laugh at death panels and the other lies going around.
Today, thanks to a sign I just saw at the “tea party march” down DC way, I have to make a political post. And it’s going to have some seriously offensive content. Fortunately, some of these people are just stupid, like the one holding a sign covered in stars that said
“I am not a Terroist [sic], Socialist or Extreemist [sic]. I am a PATRIOT.”
Really, they did put in a lot of effort. A circle of stars, nice color work, just uh…well, not so much with the spelling. And right now I’m looking at someone walking with a “Fair Tax” flag (now that I could write plenty about later). He’s holding it backwards. And there’s signs saying “Who is John Galt?” from the objectivists who forget someone has to scrub the toilets, to quote Frank Fontaine. The standard implication Obama is a Nazi, via a sign saying “Got Swastika?” Most of the time, we can just be amused by these signs. And an interview with a woman who said “We have some people in talk radio that are tellin’ us the truth!”
This time, one sign really concerned me.
“Obama,
We have waken[sic] up to your evil plans to destroy our country. Take your racist, un-American *ACORN* group and arrogent[sic] wife back to your own country and strip their rights away.”
Now granted, there were plenty of insane signs as always, but something about this one just really gets my attention, probably the racist undercurrent combined with general Beckian (Comma Glennian) batshittery.
“We have waken[sic] up to your evil plans to destroy our country.”
Now honestly, I’ve never been a fan of say, GW. But I don’t remember people in such large, visible numbers declaring he had evil plans to destroy the country. Was he fucking up? Sure. Were members of his administration war profiteers? You bet. But did he have an “evil plan to destroy the country”? No, he really didn’t. He just was shitty at the job.
Now how in the world have people come to the conclusion Obama’s got active, malevolent intent? What would be the point, even, of actively destroying the US if he even had that ability?
I hear a lot of “take the country back.” From what? Who? I heard a claim of Obama’s secret government, and cries of socialism (and frankly, as someone who’s just fine with some socialism, we’re nowhere close to it anyway, seeing as the government doesn’t control any means of production).
Let’s just visit the next piece of the quote.
“Take your racist, un-American *ACORN* group and arrogent[sic] wife back to your own country and strip their rights away.”
Oh.
I guess that fits with the self-contradictory “Muslim Marxist” claim. Not that Marxism and religion match, or that Obama is Muslim. Or that ACORN is un-American, even. I’d dare say any group which gets more voters to the polls is pretty damn American on either side. But, since ACORN has a tendency to push minorities to the polls, they helped change the balance of power. And as for his arrogant wife and own country…well, if the scary black man really is from Kenya (despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary), we can send him away! It’ll be okay, and take his wife too, she’s another negro. Obviously that means she’s not American, because if she was, she wouldn’t be getting uppity, because let’s face it, that’s the word they’re wanting to use.
Oh, and the whole of ACORN. We don’t need those darkies in the US either. I used to wonder why the hatred for an organization that encourages voting. I don’t now.
Just what rights have been stripped away, anyway? Over the last eight years old white conservative men have given us DHS, the PATRIOT act, warrant-less wire tapping, torture, and a suspension of habeus corpus. That was all under the watch of George W. Bush. Some of those programs have ended already, thus restoring our rights since President Obama’s election.
The nasty underbelly has shown itself, and it’s racism, plain and simple. From claims the president isn’t born in the US (A claim that people had the decency to leave alone when it came to John McCain, despite having been born to US parents in Panama because they understood a US parent makes him a natural born citizen), to that he’s a Muslim (fine if he is, we don’t have a religious test to hold office, but he’s not), to overtly racist propaganda.
This one came from Doctor David McKalip. A Tea Party activist, Beckian extraordinaire, and member of American Medical Association’s house of delegates. I’m sticking this one under a thumbnail because holy shit, it’s vitriolic, racist, and pretty damn shocking.
This is where we are as a nation. A group that’s had power for 30 years, effectively, has finally been totally put out of power and has shown its true colors. Ad hominem attack, overt racism, panic and lies.
When Barack got elected, I thought “wow, we really HAVE made it somewhere. Racism is still there, but I think it really might not be the problem it used to be.”
I was wrong.
Am I saying everyone against health care reform is racist? Absolutely not. Am I saying everyone who was against the stimulus package, or other policies from the administration is racist? Certainly not.
But it’s become very, very clear a large amount of the people fighting are, even in congress, where you can’t get most of the Republicans to say “Barack Obama is constitutionally eligible to be president” even. At best, they’re playing to an extremist base. At worst, they are that base, and this shit has to end. Now.
Sure, there’s all the flagging options, but really, when a post is just insulting there’s no good option, all you have is “Spam/Overpost.”
Craigslist needs a button labeled “Fuck you!” Might not be bad in the personals section, admittedly, when you have your incredibly unappealing individuals demanding perfection, but mostly it’s needed for the jobs section, particularly the creative ones. Let me provide an example post of why it’s needed.
“We are a small local firm seeking a couple research assistants to help with the editing and revising of textbooks, which will be published shortly. The subject matter is varied, but the current project deals with emerging threats and homeland security.
This is an unpaid position, but a credit will be awarded to those who contribute and this is a definite resume builder. The schedule is very flexible and the only requirements are excellent writing skills and a laptop.
Interested? Let’s talk.”
“Do our work for free! We’ll put your name in small print in return, where it’ll never be seen and we’ll take all the credit for your research.”
“Fuck you!”
See how that works? It’s cathartic, and I think if someone get hammered with the “Fuck you!” button, they’ll quickly come to understand there’s something about their offer that doesn’t jive with the market.
Cox commercials are certainly known for being shitty. Low budget, misleading, usually starring the wife of whoever was around (this is completely true, historically Cox Commercials have used the wife of someone). Lately Cox has made an effort to have a budget, license some really really shitty indie songs, and be appealing.
Now they just have stupidity on a higher budget.
I just saw a commercial that said “Dish Network’s commercial may tell you “come on, get happy”, but what they don’t tell you is they’ve raised their prices for the last nine years. But Cox gives you hundreds of channels and no extra charge for high definition!” The latter is a lie, as you’re forced to pay for a more expensive cable box (7 dollars worth, in fact, which is the price of most additional tiers). However, that’s not important.
“We’re describing the price raises of the competitor, but we’re not going to actually talk about prices even though we used “but” to indicate a comparison.”
This might have something to do with the fact Cox has also raised prices for the last nine years, and dish network has those same hundreds of channels.
Once again, fuck marketers and their abuse of all common sense, as in reality the commercial should be “Dish network raises their prices! But so do we! So you’re screwed no matter what!”
