Showing posts with label myspace. Show all posts
Showing posts with label myspace. Show all posts

Tuesday, July 15, 2008

"The Controversial Survey" - Part 1

I've been off MySpace for a long while now, since the site is really shamefully broken shamefully often. But today, feeling excessively bored and annoyed by Facebook's two-hundred-billion-fucking-widgets all of which are sending me constant invitations to "be bought", "be punched", "punch someone back", "go on the Oregon trail in so-and-so's wagon", "receive a pet", "receive a patch of grass", and so on, I decided I should peek in on the old MySpace page.

As I'm mucking about looking for show dates for a band named after a bland, starchy, snack food (yeah, I mean you ::points menacingly::) I notice there's been ... a bulletin posted a while back with the tantalizing title "The Controversial Survey".

I have mixed feelings about these survey things that circulate the social networks; most of them are shit (... I guess that's not that mixed). But I really fucking love controversy, so this worked out to slightly better than a wash.

Here, then, I present my responses to "The Controversial Survey":

Do you have the guts to answer these Q's and repost as The Controversial Survey?
No. This post is a figment of your imagination – go take your god damned meds.

Would you do meth if it was legalized?
No; but you can do it if you want to. In fact, I’d really prefer you buy your meth legally from the local 7-11 rather than blowing shit up when you drop your second-hand mixing flask in your garage.

Abortion: for or against?
I’m strongly for it. We have plenty of people already and, frankly, most people make bloody rotten parents.

Would our country fall with a woman president?
Yes, but not because of having a female president. The gender of our president isn’t likely to have any impact at all on our Romanesque shit-spiral into the lowest regions of decadence and depravity, and our overall attitudes towards the rest of the world should ensure that any leftovers from the impending implosion are mopped up nicely.

Do you believe in the death penalty?
No. In order to even begin discussing the death penalty as a viable form of punishment, you must be able to ensure with 100% certainty that it is never misapplied. Currently, our justice system is unable to ensure with any certainty at all that any law ever applies in any consistent way.

Do you wish marijuana would be legalized already?
Yes. Unless you’re willing to ban all potentially intoxicating substances (which is whole-heartedly foolish, and rampagingly ineffective to boot), there’s really no point in banning any of them. Besides, this is a tremendous missed opportunity for taxation – maybe we could use the revenue to pay for something frivolous for everybody – like fucking healthcare.

Are you for or against premarital sex?
For! Marrying someone you’ve never had sex with is just a steaming load of bullshit. Unless you’re legitimately asexual, sex is going to be an important part of your relationship – figure out if it works before you facetiously commit for life, make babies, have affairs, get divorced and fuck up your kids.

Do you think same sex marriage should be legalized?
If we’re going to keep heterosexual marriage legal (which is not necessarily a great idea), there’s no reason not to make homosexual marriage equally legal.

Do you think its wrong that so many Hispanics are moving to the USA?
No. However: the process of immigration in this country is a nightmare, and has clearly been designed with the intent of being impossible to navigate for virtually all immigrants; this needs to be fixed so we can actually provide a sensible legal process for immigration.

A 12 year old girl has a baby...should she keep it?
Abso-fucking-lutely not. It is probably the case that this baby will obliterate the 12 year old mother’s life (and very likely the lives of her immediately family, if they are present and involved), but of much greater concern is the fact that a 12 year old is utterly incapable of raising a child effectively in our society, and the baby is the one who’s about to be truly and seriously screwed because of it.

Should the alcohol age be lowered to 18?
Yes – in fact, even lower might be better. The issue is not young people drinking, it’s young people failing to have a sense of responsibility imposed on them that’s the problem. Let’s teach 14 year olds to handle alcohol responsibly while they still live at home, and maybe they won’t find it so god-damned fascinating and rebellious when they’re 21 and driving (not that they should be driving – but that’s a different controversial opinion).

Should the war in Iraq be called off?
That’s a bit like asking if we should call off the demolition of the old city hall after we blew the fucker up. We should be moving out of Iraq as efficiently as possible at this point – the problem is, we’ve made damn sure it’s not going to be very efficient.

Do you believe in spanking your children?
I can’t answer this one: if I ever have children, it will mean that my beliefs have shifted so fundamentally that any answer I provide now will be utterly meaningless. As for you spanking your children: no, I don’t believe in it. I do believe you shouldn’t have had children, though, and that your likely total failure to prepare for parenthood is likely the reason why you now have rambunctious brats whom you’d like to hit.

A mother is declared innocent after murdering her 5 children in a temporary insanity case...opinion?
A thing over there just happened that might be kindof shady, but maybe nobody is getting blamed, per se, for it… opinion?

This question is full of vagaries; generalizing guilt, innocence, and punishment into little snippets of provocative drivel is 90% of the reason our justice system is a train wreck of racism and generalized bigotry ruled by wealth instead of sense.

It's between you and a person who is being kept alive by life support machines… one has to die, who?
It depends: is the other person being kept alive by life support machines with no chance at all of recovery? Is he or she already brain dead? If so, then I’ll be happy to yank the plug from the wall and go on my way, feeling, frankly, like I’ve done my good deed for the week.

If, on the other hand, my fate-bound-buddy on the tubes is likely to recover in some measurable capacity, this becomes an entirely different question, and would no doubt have a much longer answer... to be fair, it probably still involves me not being the dead guy though.

Global warming: fact or fiction?
Fact. Next?

Are you afraid others will judge you from reading some of your answers?
I’ll leave it to your no doubt fruit-filled imagination to guess at this one.

Tuesday, April 10, 2007

Why does Firefox leak like a sieve?

I like Firefox... I like Firefox a lot. But: it leaks memory like a sieve. Either that, or ... get ready for it ... GOOGLE leaks memory like a sieve. Go ahead and leave your GMail or Google Homepage open for the better part of a day and watch the memory usage for FF climb.

I can get a way with it for a good long while... 60 MB, ok... 100 MB, ::sigh:: ok... 200 MB, getting clunky... 300 MB, time to restart my browser.

I'm very suspicious of the XMLHttpRequest situation. I have a feeling Googles creating an awful lot of extra request objects and FF isn't garbage collecting them. I seem to think I've run into this problem before, so it's not some baseless insight into the inner workings of FF. I also seem to think IE handled the situation a little more gracefully. At last, IE gets one point, I guess.

And on the topic of places getting one point: I'm not sorry I switched my blog away from MySpace, but I do miss the little emoticons a bit. Blogger lets me insert any image I want... but it's a big, complicated form and I just don't want to draw a smiley face for every emotion I need to express (...shut up, it's more than 2). Maybe there's an emoticon drop-down in beta over at Google... with some really fancy emoticons in it... SMART emoticons.

Hmmm... squishy

All right -- the truth is MySpace is crap. It's a terribly, clunky, badly broken site written in a language that never really matured (ColdFusion) on a collection of servers that was never really designed to scale up to uber-billions of hits per second. I just don't like blogging there.

I also don't like Blogger. It's clunky and hitting publish is a pain -- waiting for the uploads and the yada-yada, configuring FTP if I want to host my blog on another site. Meh.

So here I was today looking at the blogger page again (just thinking about hating MySpace) and the "New Blogger" is out of beta (Google seems to be getting in on the joke about their betas -- they left "beta" under the name and just crossed it out. Frankly I might not use a Google product if it didn't have "Beta" in the name somewhere now) and the whole thing seems a little more AJAX-y and all.

They added the all important ability to tag posts now too. All I need is some way to put a symbol (anybody up for [W[sometext]]) around some text and make links to Wikipedia automatically. [W[AJAX]] ... awwww crap. Maybe the next version of blogger will get this right.

Anyway, the blog, such as it is, lives here now, until somebody else gets it "more right" than Google has.