Category: Bitterness

I feel a certain measure of confidence in pronouncing this vaporware

March 24, 2009 /

Wow. Wow. The guy who founded WebTV (you remember WebTV, right? Your grandmother failed to use the Internet on it) and the guy who got fired from Eidos (you remember Eidos from 2000-2005, right? You didn’t buy any of their Tomb Raider sequels) have decided to revolutionize the video gaming industry! They’re going to let you play hideously compressed PC games from 2007 without a keyboard or a mouse on a computer with no disc drive, hard drive or video card! Guess who sat around a lot of hotel rooms staring blankly at the N64 controller on the set-top box? (I bet you already guessed!)

To their credit, they have been able to startle some wide-eyed journalists by showing them closed tests on a cloud system with nobody on it, from which they disallowed screen caps or video. That puts them one step ahead of Infinium Labs. You remember Infinium, right? They failed to make the stupid fucking Phantom.

Oh, Centre, dear.

March 13, 2009 /

My alma mater is starfucking harder than ever before for its 2009 commencement speakers. At least when we randomly gave out a DHL to James Earl Jones in 2003, it was to a man who overcame a distinct handicap to become a respected actor. But Jerry Bruckheimer? Really?

I guess this is seen as a way to simultaneously give the students a treat and maybe earn a little donation kickback, in exchange for a piece of paper that nobody seriously believes is worth anything. If it were just Linda Bruckheimer, who actually has philanthropic ties to Kentucky, I’d be fine with it. But when you give someone a degree, even a worthless one, you’re endorsing their career and setting it as an example for students to follow. Spend your lives making hundreds of millions of dollars from empty spectacle without even providing any of the creative energy, kids! Bring the circus; let somebody else worry about the bread.

Nebuchadnezzar

February 12, 2009 /

I still haven’t posted about this, have I?

I was supposed to be in this picture. Last September, I got my acceptance letter to Clarion South 2009, which I’d resolved to attend way back when I was still in London. I leapt about with glee, of course, and then set out saving enough money to defray the cost.

I failed, and in December I withdrew my application.

So there’s that story! Maybe in 2010 I’ll be in a position to reapply; maybe not. I am quite sure that whoever got my spot made good use of it, and I hope the short fiction economy survives long enough for me to read the results.

“I cannot fucking believe this is allowed.”

November 14, 2008 /

The unlooked-for side effect of my generation’s financial crisis has been, for me, that the world of finance is suddenly quite interesting, and worth learning about. There’s nothing like open-mouthed horror and blind panic to inspire autodidacticism. I still know very little about how finance really works, of course, but the punch line is that most financiers apparently didn’t either.

In that vein, I recommend one of the most darkly hilarious articles I’ve read in a while.

September 1, 2008 /

Google’s making their own browser! Golly! Neat! Another goddamn rendering engine for me to test my CSS in!

Whee.

(I’ll probably like it.)

Tech Tip!® Minute

August 22, 2008 /

Remember, dear reader and also future Brendan, an attribute that’s hyphenated in CSS is camelCapped in Javascript! So background-image becomes style.backgroundImage. For no real reason except psychotic, alias-hating adherence to meaningless language conventions.

While I’m at it, ROLLOVER HIGHLIGHT IMAGES ARE GODDAMN POINTLESS. Nobody cares about them except graphic designers who have never written a web page, and even they ignore them on every site but the ones they themselves mocked up.

(Yes, I know rollovers need not make use of Javascript. These two blurts are only sort of related.)

Punch line!

I don’t even LIKE jeans

August 6, 2008 /

Yesterday, for my job, I implemented some web-marketing stuff that included me actually typing out the following text, which... well, I don't want to reproduce it for fear of google, but I've rot13ed it below; click the button to read it.


Where was I entering this marketing text, you ask?

A MySpace page.

It's not like I was pretending I hadn't sold my soul long ago. I just hadn't realized it was going so cheap.