MrNepathy's Blog

Now before you all send me angry little comments defending your precious computers and telling me that computers save lives, make things more efficient, helped put humans on Jupiter and let you master rhubarb in Farmville, I’ll remind you that they also made Jar Jar possible. ‘Nuff said.

Well not really ‘nuff said because there are more paragraphs coming, and here they are.

Those of you expecting some sort of Matrix-inspired hypothesis about computers taking over the planet will be sorely disappointed. I’m not talking about some future scenario. I’m talking about hating what computers are doing now. Let’s start with my iPod, which I can only assume is A) now sentient and B) a complete jerk.

I’ve tried several combinations of options and check boxes through iTunes and still my iPod has taken it upon itself to decide what music I would like on it. Even when I had “manual selection” chosen, it would still delete and copy things every time I plugged it into my computer. Even though I selected the option to reserve absolutely no memory, my iPod insists on keeping 250 megabytes free at all times. I can only assume this is so that if I choose to, I can go on some Boggle-obsessed escapade where I must have every app related to colored-block games. My favorite deletion is when my iPod decided that I should no longer have music from artists that start with T. Maybe it got sick of listening to “All I Want.” Look iPod you’ll play my feel-good song and you’ll like it or I will choke your little… whatever parts are in you. Transistors? We still use those right? See what happens when I don’t get my Toad? Things get crazy. Papa needs his fix. My iPod’s latest gambit is letting me keep all of my artists, but it selects which albums I would like. It’s sort of stealth jerkery. “Look, see Dwayne, all of your artists are still there.” Like it decided I don’t need Born on a Pirate Ship but it kept Maroon. Also it won’t let me add new stuff from the computer. Why is it that the iPod which is synonymous with “MP3 Player” in the same way people use “Band-Aid” to describe any adhesive bandage regardless of brand, has the worst interface and makes it the most laborious to create playlists? And no, I don’t want to update or add Safari to my browser, thank you very much.

Whoever coded Microsoft Word should be summarily beaten with a giant pool noodle, especially if it’s the talking Paper Clip that did it. But if it’s the Paper Clip, replace “pool noodle” with “Conan the Barbarian style claymore sword.” I say this because Microsoft Word likes to insist on me formatting things its way. Hey Chinstrap, I don’t need you to indent for me. If I put weird parenthesis after random things that doesn’t mean put them all in a list. I should be able to number things as I please without you indenting them. I should not have to search to turn off this feature. Is there some sort of box that I need to check next to “I am not a moron and am in fact fully capable of operating a combination of the space bar and tab at will?” If I put asterisks somewhere that does not mean I want to create bullet points. Maybe I want to draw Abraham Lincoln, like so:

****

****

******

o o

O

V

(I assume that’s the face he had his final moments in the theater. “I went to see My American Cousin? I thought I was seeing My Cousin Vinnie. Dang! … Also that guy has a gun.”) (I apologize to Abe Lincoln’s family for that… not for the joke, but for the picture. I wanted it to be in color, for one thing. Sadly that is also better than I could do free hand.)

Also spell-check needs some serious work. I was working on something for a place called Cylicron, which I know sounds like the love child of the Gobot Renegades leader Cy-Kill and the planet-eating robot from Transformers: The Movie but that brings up a lot of questions I don’t have time for, like how do a robot planet and a robot motorcycle possibly have intercourse? My guess: carefully. Do they do it while listening to “Bad to the Bone” or would it be to “What a Wonderful World?” These are all very valid questions, but they have nothing to do with my point. Spell-check recommended the word “Celeron.” Yes, I can see how those would be close. Of course if I try to spell “onomatopoeia” and get just one letter wrong, it has no idea what I’m trying to spell. Seriously, how many words are close to that? I’m surprised it didn’t recommend “Mesopotamia.” Yet it recommend Celeron for Cylicron. I also object to whoever programmed some proper nouns but not others. It recognizes Skywalker but not Boba Fett? And it doesn’t recognize Leia. That’s sexism, and that’s wrong. We didn’t pass the ERA so that we can continue to keep people down. Actually we didn’t pass the ERA at all, despite Alex P. Keaton’s best efforts. It also recognizes “xbox” to suggest “Xbox” but it doesn’t recognize “Wii” or “Playstation.” That actually makes me laugh. Got to love a little jab at the competition.

Once you get past all of the little red Charlie-Brown’s-t-shirt lines under misspelled words, it starts in with the blue lines for its suggestions. It likes to throw apostrophes into everything, often suggesting the wrong thing. If I type, “You will like this apartment; Its wonderful windows provide great natural lighting” Microsoft Word will suggest “It’s.” Does the sentence “It is wonderful windows provide great natural lighting” make sense to you, because that’s the effective meaning it’s recommending. If you’re going to think for me, at least try to be correct. I can be a moron all by myself, I don’t need your help. It’s so irritating if I ever find the Paper Clip I’m going to grab it by its bendy throat and defenestrate it.

Do we really need Flash animation for everything? I was doing something for work and it involved downloading files from another company’s website. They were large spreadsheets and they downloaded rather quickly. Then I got to the part where I needed classification information. This required Flash, which I had to download and install. After that I went back to the website and went to the proper page where I was “treated” to an animated bar graph where I could watch the bars grow and then assume a static image. Of course the final image was almost completely useless to me and did not answer the question, but at least it was pretty for the two seconds it took. Hey website knuckleheads, I’ve seen the original Tron, your bar graph doesn’t impress me in terms of effects. Next time try more content and less “pizzazz.” You’ve made a pixilated Push-pop, congratulations. Sometimes I think website people just want to finally use that third semester class they took and so they’re more concerned with wowing me than they are with giving me useful information.

Which leads me back to Star Wars and that pear in Episode II. While computers make it possible to show amazing things, like say Iron Man blowing up a tank, that doesn’t mean they should be used to do something that can be accomplished by a string. In the scene Anakin floats a pear, or “space pear,” to Padme who apparently reaches out with the Force to eat the pear because there’s no way her teeth touched it. There’s something very wrong about the fact that AT-ATs, a fictional vehicle, walking across the tundra in a film from 1980 look more realistic than a pear, a very real fruit, being eaten in a film from 2002. Just because you can do something with a computer doesn’t mean you should. In the Michael Keaton movie Multiplicity, he plays clones. This is done with blue/green screens and some editing. In Episode III the clone troopers are replicated using computer graphics which just don’t do the job adequately. In a film universe populated with robots, lightsabers, space battles and giant monsters it shouldn’t be pears and people that remind me that I’m watching a movie. Computer graphics should portray our imagination, not hinder our realism. They should create the fantastic, not wreck the mundane.