Obama Yo' Mama

Furry and Otherkin misanthropy is Specieist

So your jaded but otherwise normal friend believes everyone in the world is worthless and stupid including himself; fair enough, he might even be right; god forbid asking him where he wants to go next with a philosophy like that, but still. If instead your pretentious but otherwise normal friend thinks he can excuse himself then all you're left with is to roll your eyes and look for a new friend. He's a jerk but you can't really call him out for anything besides being a jerk. Furries and Otherkin, meanwhile, have been known to take it a step further. They will not stop at misanthropy, nor at exempting themselves from misanthropic generalities. In fact they exempt themselves for a very peculiar reason: they do not identify themselves as human. From what they perceive to be a non-human vantage-point they feel more than qualified to harshly critique the human race. The best part is they usually demand to be taken seriously. So imagine what you would say to a real anthropomorph or otherwise nonhuman who would happily condemn the whole of your species to destruction and genocide for the sake of nature's fascinating but mindless automatons, and his own quaint, boring tribal existence. Or imagine you're black (if you aren't) and whitey has seen fit to remind you that ultimately your genetic predispositions inhibit you from ever being more than a subservient class. However you elect to respond to the one should be exactly suitable for the other. If you're not going to take these kind of people seriously than by all means laugh; they're hilarious... when they're powerless. But if you're going to take them seriously, take them personally; call them out for their bigotry. In the case of Otherkin and Furries you stand at least a chance of striking home, seeing as bigots and racists aren't anything those sorts of people ever suspect themselves to be. Intolerance is a famously bad word in their vocabulary, and it is of which they are eager to accuse their enemies. How they manage to ignore the blatant hypocrisy at work here, if it isn't a testament to the poo humankind is made of, certainly is evidence of our great imperfection.

Burnin' bridges

I'm not very good at keeping friends. Over the years I've lost touch with most all of the ones I had from childed, 'cause at the time I quite honestly preferred my solitude and videogames. But to lose three people I thought surely qualified as some of my best friends, over the space of just two years... well I hope I never get used to this feeling. Too fill everybody whose anybody whose reading this blarg in, for about the past four years I've been in touch with a small group of eight or so people around my age, over Skype. They're all incredible people, and it's been a privilege just to know them. They were always there for me when I was feelin' blue, like today, and they patiently put up with a lot of ungentlemanly behavior from me. But now it only feels like a few of us are left, despite the fact most of us are still around. Incredibly I don't believe this particular falling out was predominantly my fault, even if I doubtless played a big role. Even so, I'm the one whose been selfishly betrayed by the three people whose friendship I'd made the most investments in. When it came time to collect I was cheated my due, if you'll forgive such a vain parable. Friendship isn't just being there for someone when they're down and not any other time, and that's what those three forgot. For my part I've done far too much damage trying to make them see; damage that has proven to be irreparable. I'm not leaving; I still have some good friends there who I want to try harder to keep, so I guess it's not really burning bridges. Just... reducing my expectations to zero so that I'll always be pleasantly surprised by a certain few, for once.

Anyway, I wanted to let those few know that I'm sad, even if they aren't, and I still love them; really, truly, like brothers.

Sing da' song, children.

I HATE Microsoft

Windows Vista is the most unintuitive and nonsensical operating system I have ever been forced to rely on. I'm sick of having to look up instructions for everything I could ever want to do, only to find that what XP managed in a single buttonpress has become a convoluted adventure for no obvious reason. For instance, I'm a gamer. I like taking screenshots on the fly in some very fast-paced games. Doing so used to be easy: just press Home (prntscrn). But now my Vista laptop needs me to first press and hold the FN Key on the opposite end of the keyboard while simultaneously pressing Prntscrn. It's not that much slower, but those are still crucial seconds wasted in a rapidly changing game environment, and god forbid I actually need a few fingers on the actual controls meantime. Why, Microsoft? Why not just prntscrn? Did you change things around for the hell of it? It wouldn't be the only thing you arbitrarily fiddled with.

Take the layout. Now it only took me a few weeks to basically figure it out, and lot of what still buggers me is mostly phantom XP syndrome sending me every which way, but even when I'm on the ball it STILL feels like it's taking me longer to navigate to a place than I did in XP. But what was WRONG with XP's layout anyway that merited this drastic redesign? XP felt "causal", one thing led to another in a neat, intuitive progression. Navigating Vista feels a bit like hopscotch, if not teleportation. Relative to XP, nothing feels like it's really where it should be, and duplicate folders far apart from each other can cause great confusion. There are, for example, three folders called "Download" spread about, all of which are systemic. They handle different types of downloads, in a way Vista is happy to let you figure out on your own.

And I AM the administrator! I AM! I AM! I AM! There is NOBODY else using this computer. Nobody but me is registered to it! You don't need my PERMISSION to run a program, Vista! I am your master; I am ODERING you to run it; that's why I double-clicked! I know there are ways to make just about anything work on Vista the way you want; I've had to look up quite a few. But I hate people who say "Vista's great! You just need to know how to configure it/how to use it!" Screw... you... and I mean all of you, hard. You are the people who perpetuate the divide between nerds and normal people by making it necessary. The vast majority of people who use computers are NOT programmers or obsessive-compulsive freaks irresistibly drawn to research everything there is to know about anything we've ever heard of. I did NOT have to be taught how to use XP. I did NOT have to reconfigure XP. All I ever had to do was keep the viruses off, a task windows live performed admirably. What I want a nice fanboy or girl to tell me is whether theres' a make Vista good exe hidden somewhere that will reconfigure everything at once. Heck, I'd settle for a pretend to be XP button.

And there's the performance. Vista freezes more often than some clever ice metaphor. To it's credit it often recovers from its seizures, and quickly, which XP typically did not. But XP didn't typically freeze if it was taken care of. Vista freezes for a lot of things. If, for example I attempt to change the volume with the neat little touchpad adjuster while a program is running, that's almost sure to cause it to freeze. Running a program while several windows are open is very likely to cause a freeze, even if it's just windows media player. An important thing to remember when dealing with Vista freezes is that Vista has to be the one to fix them, or else. Do I ever miss the days when cntrl + alt + dlt could actually accomplish something. Now a days it feels like the operating system is fighting as much with me as it is with the paradoxes that plague it, and with its attention thus divided those errors have a much greater chance of victory. Even if you just try to exit out the frozen window (a natural user reflex) it seems like you're far more likely to worsen the problem, at least by making it last longer.

I've had two Vista laptops. One was high-end, with eight GBs of ram and the newest model GBA from ATI. I played Mirror's Edge on it, and the texturetaring was so bad that it was really bad. Conversely, my 2003 PC running XP played the game nigh perfectly, albeit with noticeably less processing power that caused it to lag a bit now and then. It took the US postal service to destroy my XP computer. My first Vista died within a week like a goldfish or something 'cause it simply couldn't handle my style. Now I've got this less-than-high-end notebook with specs that are none-the-less ABOVE that of my old PC in most respects. It can barely handle a valve title, and the texturetaring is omnipresent.

In conclusion, please developers, make games for Apple. Don't force me to try windows 7. 'Cause I will.

Playin' Silent Hill 3 again

A certain wrong "arguement"

Sometimes people who advocate for government healthcare deride private insurers and providers in like manner: "It's despicable; they're making money off sick people, you can't be allowed to make money off sick, innocent people!"

Now I know this isn't much of a post, but I just felt like pointing out that grocery stores make money off hungry people. The question then is, is feeding the hungry less important than treating the ill? You really are retarded if you say yes, but if no, and if you ever entertained the idea that profiting from treating people's ailments was immoral, then either you concede that notion was wrong, or admit you're a communist.

Celebrating two amamazering things!

Not even a week ago something phasmalogical happened, followed up yesterday by something absolutely hipsterific. The first one, almost a week ago, happened over the space of three days. On the first day I was talking with a good friend of mine, and remarked that I couldn't wait for the inevitable day when Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw of The Escapist's Zero Punctuation would finally review his favorite old game and mine, Silent Hill 2. Two days later, he did. Now I'm no psychic, and this momentous day really was inevitable; I'm sure lots of people saw it coming before I did, but that's really what's so amazing. I'd never thought about it all before then, which rates it as the most astounding and incredible coincidence I have ever experienced. That his review actually touched on issues in a similar way mine did was pretty awesome too.



The second thing, the hipsterific thing from yesterday, was that I actually got Silent Hill 2 to work on this puny office laptop running godawfullVista. SH2 PC is a notoriously glitchy game, but the internet is sprinkled with wisdom, and some of it is devoted to helping people like you and me play Silent Hill 2. From what I've heard it breaks in different ways for different people, but to celebrate my good fortune I'm gonna' tell you what at least helped me. Perhaps I'll be able to make this kind of information just a little bit easier for people to find, abundant though it already is. The key for me was to get it running on only one core processor. Before I did so it would frequently crash no matter what graphics or compatibility settings I used, especially after cutscenes and when I was using the flashlight.

First, start the game. Then reduce it to an icon. Start windows taskmanager. Look at the bottom left of the window and click "Show processes from all users". Click "Applications" in the top left of the window. Right click the Silent Hill 2 application and click "Go to process". Right click the process and select "Set affinity". You will be shown a small window with the names of all your core processors and a tick mark for each. Unselect all but one of them. This won't affect the rest of your computer.

Regardless of whether this helps your specific problem you'll probably still have to do it eventually, based on what I found out. Sadly you'll have to do it every time you start the game. But it has definitely worked for me. I've even been playing at full graphics, which are very good. I should also add that you should probably run the game as administrator or it might not let you save, and a compatibility with windows 2000 may or may not help, but doesn't seem to hurt. And get both patches.





James used Canned Juice.
It's super effective.

An extra thought

Hey. Just wanted to add something for all the people who think free trade is anything that needs to be imposed on countries one to another, and is therefor immoral. In fact there is no "New World Order" required; no two or more free peoples can avoid becoming dependent on one another perfectly naturally over the longterm as each assumes its ideal economic roles and concedes to the other work its citizens are less suited to perform. Freedom does not need to be imposed on anybody. Neither does every nation need to embrace freedom for an interdpendance scenario to work. Even if only two nations allow their economies to become completely (or even just significantly) free and unregulated, those two economies will more than likely merge in short order, irrespective of the distance between them. Citizens of each will not find many other better places to do business. If they've got natural resources or else valuable, they may not find any place better at all. They will invest primarily in each other and become richer together. They will also inevitably attract investments from less free countries whose eantrepanuers feel stifled.

Subsidies and tariffs and other forms of protectionism may persist in many other countries, and these will inevitably both tempt capital away (subsidies) and make trade somewhat difficult (tariffs) for any economically free country, but only at literally everyone's expense. Subsidies and tariffs distort the entire world market and make that entire market less efficient for everybody, including the nation engaging in this protectionism. It makes no sense, therefor, to answer protectionism with more protectionism like countries presently do. It's only going to make things worse.

And of course economic freedom shouldn't be imposed by any government on its own subjects, either. I do not think property is an inalienable right, myself. I used to, but have come to respect the idea more because it works than because it is moral. Or better, it's moral because it works. If anyone thinks it doesn't, they should be able to rally votes to elect a non-capitalist economy if that's what the people want. But democracy and social/political freedom works too, and I don't believe any country is justified dispensing with them, no matter how unpopular they may be. It is not any more reightous to impose socialism than capitalism, and citizens of either must be free to speak their mind and organize peaceful counter-movements. And if these prove unsuccessful, they must be allowed to leave the country with minimal difficulty if they are physically able. I would not lightly forgive a country where these freedoms are absent. Humans seem to be instinctually afraid of economic freedom, so we can forgive its nearly universal absence if we agree it's a good thing.