Digital Downloads Suck

So I've got the Lady Gaga album, and it's pretty nice, but i've listened to it a lot and want to loan it to my sister.

only I can't because it's a digital download!

options:

1. Not Loan Album

2. Break Law

If you're going to charge me a similar price to an actual object, one that you had to incur costs to create and distribute, then the same capabilities should come with it. If your item is distributed and manufactured for 1/1000th of that cost (server fees), then it should cost me less since I can do less with it (legally).

PSPgo Sucks

Sony's releasing an update to their popular? playstation portable.

It doesn't play your old games, because it can't read anything currently sold in PSP format. This, considering the lack of backward compatibility, would be a nice time to take advantage of the leaps in technology over the past few years, don't you think?

Well sony doesn't. Sony's idiots. The PSPgo is everything your PSPregular is, but smaller, more expensive and less compatible. As an added bonus, you will be completely unable to loan games to a friend or re-sell them if you are done with them.

90210 Season 2 Sucks

Rebecca Ingersoll-Rand Kirchner-Sinclair has delivered!

This is what the kids want! 1975 era depictions of virginity loss and alcohol abuse! Are you listening Gossip Girl? OC, you got canceled cos you didn't realize this!

The first half of the show is three of the four main girls strutting in slow motion eating ice cream. Then Annie, who had the only interesting conflict (and only for the last two shots of the season finale) finally shows up, looking for the dude she killed, who of course, has no name. If only all DUI's could be that way! All you get for killing a dude is some bad feelings. There's no one to answer to! Well, at least until Annie's life is going well and out of the blue dude's wife and kids show up in an amazing plot twist! I literally did not see that coming!

The show is the definition of obvious easy conflicts. No one will listen to Annie, Everyone hates her, everyone is unsure of their relationships (Silver's texting Ethan! Naomi's new man is married! Naveed wants to Fuck!), and no one listens to anyone.

90201 was never anything special, even the original. The difference is since then we've gotten some really good 'teen' shows between now and then. The bar is raised, and we've seen all of this before.

Maybe Melrose Place will shine into something nice?

Quicktime X Sucks

When I heard that quicktime pro was done, replaced by quicktime x, I was very pleased. While QT Pro is a fanastic little app, it gets progressively shitty to have to pay $25 for the exact same functionality as the previous version every time apple decides it's time to change the number on Quicktime.

The baby got thrown out with the bathwater however. Can't open image sequences, can't export image sequences. What we have here is Windows Media Player for a mac. Other than the pretty new interface (which is pretty,), there's nothing good here.

Apple even knew this, and stuck Quicktime Pro 7 in my "Utilities" folder. Next time just re-skin QT7 assholes.

G.I. Joe, the Movie, Sucks

It could have been so much worse, which would have been better. It goes without saying that it could have been better; saying that about a Steven Sommers movie is akin to saying Alaska could be warmer in the winters.

Wanted, the comic, Sucks (revised)

This comic is angry, racist, misogynistic and sloppily written.

I'm gonna write a lot about how much I hate it, but really, all you need to know is the above sentence and that the movie is incomparably better.

On the second page the narrator, doing his very best Fight Club monologue, points out verbally that his boss is an African-American. Later someone else veers off their conversational road to re-establish that Wesley's boss is African-American. You'd be right to presume the boss' ethnicity must hinge around a plot point with the hammering they're giving it. That boss has to have something to do with this story.

She doesn't. The boss is verbally observed to be black twice and a lesbian once and is promptly out of the story. She is not even listed as one of the myriad of people he shoots in the arbitrary killing spree that passes as his "training" later in the story.

Welcome to Wanted: The Comic.

Wesley is the son of the greatest assassin ever and he has been recruited by a group of super-villains that call themselves "The Fraternity". The name was chosen by internet poll on a teen comic book forum. Runner up: "The Corporation". There are no super heroes in this universe; all the bad guys teamed up in 1986 and killed them. Upon extinguishing the super heroes The Fraternity reformatted the whole universe's collective memory so that only they had any memory of the way it used to be. They now run around the new world like a bunch of trench coat wearing adolescents, killing and raping to their heart's content.

Yeah, raping. Supervillains and specifically the protagonist Wesley are super into rape. It's what Wesley does for fun now that he's in the Fraternity. And why not? After all, if I were in his shoes and my societal chains broke off I'd run right out and brutally assault everyone and everything. Right? Right? While I could forgive what came before, this was when I gave up trying to like the book. I mean, I get it: Wesley's a Super Villain. He's a bad person. Bad people rape. Bad people kill. He's also the protagonist of this obscenely masturbatory fantasy of Mark Millar's. He's celebrated on every page. He's your super hero Tyler Durden. And a rapist.

I have no idea what Mark Millar is like in person. I have no desire to find out. In my mind he's a 14 year old boy with a lot of anger issues inside a 30 something year old body. The two decades lost completely in a blindness of rage and an inability to figure women out even a little. Given my imagined set of circumstances, we can see how someone would at once dream of being of allowed to rape while at the same time dream of being trained to be a great lover. How fucked up is that? Did I mention that? That his trainer, Fox teaches him how to give good head? How broken is that logic? Wesley is the definition of narcissism. I find it hard to believe that after bragging about raping famous actresses he could have any desire to please a person. When does the ability to give good head come into play in rape and murder land?

What I do know about Mark Millar is he is a mediocre writer who had an interesting idea and little capability to carry it out. The question of what a society of outlaws does when no one can stop them is excellent, exploring that with a normal guy: also excellent. Millar never digs in, never gives it more than a passing thought. Everyone goes around killing and raping. That's the extent of it. It's boring. Mark Millar (and I suppose this is some feat) has made the two most traumatic events a single human can perpetrate on another into something boring. Murder's boring. Rape's boring; a masturbatory fantasy of a teenage boy and a way to turn the evil up to eleven. It's all very boring.

Fortunately for us Wesley repents for a page and cries about his bad deeds in a most insincere manner, then he kills all the bad guys, then he shoots his dad at the end, says "Bitch" arbitrarily a few more times and it's over.

The comic is a horrible pile of shit in every direction.

But hey, I like to be the bigger man sometimes, so here are some small ideas that would make "Wanted" suck less:

- The Shit Man, instead of being "the collected feces of the 666 most evil people" why isn't he the death shits of those people. Hitler shoots himself, ass relaxes, shit falls out. Shit Man should be that shit specifically, not just arbitrary bad guy shits. Also, do evil people shit really tiny, cos 666 human shits would be fucking enormous. Also also, have you seen that Kevin Smith movie Dogma? Just curious...

- Knock off Fox's ebonics. It reads like Americans doing British accents.

- Show Wesley, super assassin, doing a kill that is more difficult than just shooting at a guy. Other than a few frames where he's posing like Chow Yun Fat, Wesley never comes off as any more skilled than a magically invincible psychopath.

- Knock it off with the "the authorities leave us alone cos of our pins and license plates" nonsense. Don't go there, don't explain it. The Super Villains can reprogram minds. Done. Don't show me cops going "oh shit sorry sir, I didn't see your pin" cos now I start to think, "How soon after a cop gets hired do they tell him to let the people with the pins do what they want?" and then, "Is anyone counterfeiting pins? How hard are they to duplicate? Do they have holograms in them?" Imagining cops kow-towing to these pins forces me to punch all kinds of holes in the reality of the world. Regular people may not be as powerful as the super villains, but it's rather unlikely that people would just sit around and take it up the ass for two decades. So either the people get their minds consistently erased or the Super Villians aren't causing all that much trouble, neither of which seems to be the case in the book, hence my issue with it all.

- That part in the beginning where Wesley's dad is about to fuck two dudes and is all "I'm not gay, I've fucked tons of women." Is written out so specifically... I don't see a super killer who's banged 5,000 women as someone who'd feel the need to explain himself (even if he is insecure enough to keep track), extra especially in a world without consequence.

- As a subset to the above note, and a general writing suggestion: imagine every line you write being spoken aloud in a real world situation. If it sounds like your character is explaining a bit much, your character is explaining a bit much.

- As a second subset to the overly explanatory dad: were any of the 5000 women he's banged rapes? I suppose if the guy was raping his way to a high score he could still be a tad insecure about himself and his sexual proclivities.

- If you're going to constantly comment on how your girlfriend character is fat, you might want to have her illustrated as such. Katsuhiro Otomo said he didn't draw attractive girls because that was too easy. But hey, who's he?

- All I see in that two page spread of Wesley shooting his dad is cock and eyes rolling back. What word did you hold in your mind when you drew that? Roofiedudesex?

- The guy who's peins is a super villian: clever. How's that working out for you?

- Dear powers copy guy (there's a guy who can copy other people's powers, but only for a limited and specific amount of time), was Wesley there with a stopwatch when you got the flying powers from the other guy? Is there a stopwatch on your chest I didn't see? Do you flicker a funny color right before you lose the powers you stole? Cos man, he knew down to the SECOND when you were gonna lose them. Super assassin AND super time teller! Also, who were you? Was I supposed to care about you when you barged into the story sometime in book five, cos I was all WTF and like, maybe I missed the part earlier where anyone said anything about you at all.

- Okay, those last few weren't exactly suggestions.

- People come into and out of this story with very little motivation. I suppose in a book whose central context is a world without consequence it is fitting that characters would appear lacking in all motivation.

I've got a bit of a complex where when I read or watch or experience some form of public art or entertainment and said art/etc is godawful. My mind imagines how the whole thing could be an elaborate ruse by the creator of said work just to mock the consumers for enjoying it (or not). I've gotten into the concept before writing about Southland Tales, as well as the previous version of this essay. To deliberately and successfully pull off a stunt like that would make you a huge douche. Writing the comic Wanted also makes you a huge douche, albeit considerably less brilliant.

Demitri Martin Sucks

I liked him a lot better when he was called Mitch Hedberg.

Restaurant Websites Suck

Flash Intros? PDF Menus?

Are you trying to piss me off? I want to know when you are open, where you are located and what you serve. I'd appreciate if I didn't have to utilize a two plugins just to get such impossibly basic information!

Terminator 3 Sucks

Lady Terminator, midway through the movie, due to some clever physics calculated by the t-800, gets a heavy duty mobile crane slammed right on top of her. She is slowed down, but neither stopped nor permanently damaged.

Later, in the climax, she is pinned down and defeated by a helicopter. A Helicopter. A flying vehicle weighing at least one order of magnitude less than the crane simply due to it's need to function.

Uncompressed 4:2:2 Sucks

There's this "fad" out there in the "professional" video world to call certain types of video "Uncompressed 4:2:2" which while it could arguably be true, is completely misleading so for the sake of everyone involved (especially the people who are so scared of the word "compressed" and what it does to their precious footage) I'm going to explain why using that term makes you an asshole.

Compression, digital video swear word that it is, means that the computer figures out nifty ways to not keep the redundant data. To explain, we'll count ducks. There are five ducks in front of you. You could write down on a piece of paper "one and one and one and one and one" or you could write "five". You've used some of your knowledge and intellect to "compress" how those ducks are counted. Most compression formats are "lossy" which is to say they throw out visual data to varying degrees to save space ("approximately five ducks"), often significant amounts of space. This is where people get their panties in a bunch, as they don't want a reduction in visual quality.

(lossy) Compression = loss of visual quality = bad, or so the saying goes.

"4:2:2" is a form of pixel subsampling. There are three channels in a video signal, usually referred to as YIQ or YUV (there's a difference between those two, but it's heady). The first channel (the Y) is the luminance of the image. The second two add the color. In a 4:2:2 subsampled image, half the color information is thrown out. This is done for bandwidth reasons just like compression is. It also, just like compression, makes for a poorer final quality image.

So if you are reassuring a client that your "Uncompressed 4:2:2" or whatever is uncompressed you are an asshole.

The caveat to all this nonsense is that it's very hard to handle true uncompressed, non-subsampled imagery, and in many cases it genuinely does not matter. If you're going to edit something and do a light color grade, you'll be fine and no one will be the wiser. If you plan on working with the footage in a visual effects context you will likely run into some issues.

Bayer Patterns Suck

the bad news: Every digital camera (save one) and every digital video camera (under $100,000) uses what's called a Bayer pattern for it's CMOS or CCD sensor.

Sigma's SD14 is the digicam that doesn't, and high end HD/digi-film cameras such as the Sony F23, Thomson Viper, and Panavision Genesis, which are all out of your price range so forget about it.

but anyway, what is a bayer pattern and why should anyone care?

Because, in effect, every camera company is lying to you with your megapixel ratings. Your 14 megapixel camera is actually giving you something that's up-scaled by a factor of three, give or take.

let's take the RED camera, everyone's favorite boner-maker. RED is a 4k camera. This means that each horizontal line of an image that it makes is 4096 dots or long. Now, in a digital image, each dot, much like each dot on a TV, is made up of Red, Green and Blue. The whole issue comes about because in the case of digital camera sensors, each dot is not Red, Green and Blue.

Each dot is Red, Green, OR Blue. In a bayer pattern, the first line goes
G, B, G, B.....
and the second line goes
R, G, R, G........

then there's software on your camera that takes that upper quadrant of one Red, one Blue and Two green and it mashes it together to make four RGB dots.

That is complete fucking bullshit, and I'm pissed.

Your Facebook Correspondence Sucks

When I was younger and an idiot, I would occasionally find myself having an interesting conversation in a bar that I was pretty sure some of the nearby patrons would really enjoy. I would not be so brash as to turn to them and go "can you believe this?" Instead I would talk a bit louder, angle my body a bit to lure them in, and you know what?

It never worked!

you know what else?

You're doing it too! Only instead of being 22 and drunk you're 29 and sober. And everyone around you is sober, and Facebook is going to leave those messages up so long Andre the Giant stickers will get jealous.

We don't care, none of us, the people who are close enough to you to accept your digital friendship. Instead of publicly shouting your insincere hellos back and forth, why don't you construct an actual message of thought?

I suppose that would be too hard. Take too much effort when all you wanted to say was, "I had the kale salad at M de Chaya and it was off today, how are you?"

Your Reply to All Sucks

I know that Facebook and Twitter have you under the impression that people care about your day to day thoughts and activities, but sending a message meant for one person to 27 of us is uncouth.

It's very likely we are not friends. I know this because anyone one of my friends who "replies to all" on an email with something to the extent of "congratulations" or "yeah, I'll be there" has been scrubbed from my personal friendship records.

So you're happy our mutual email acquaintance graduated. I don't care. Write back to the one person who wrote to you, not the other 26 of us who happened to receive it. I do not care about your sentiment or availability. I did not ask.

What's your side project? Keeping up correspondences on myspace via the comments section?

The App Store Stucks

I read about the game "Go" and instead of swimming through the misery that is the iphone games selection on my phone, I go to the App Store via itunes. After twenty minutes of searching (itunes is not much better at searching and sorting than the phone) I find an app I want and buy it. It's reasonably expensive at $10.

The app downloads to my local itunes and goes wherever it goes. I don't immediately hook my phone up to it. I go over to my other mac and plug in my phone. Despite being connected to the same itunes account (a .mac account no less), my desktop and the itunes store has no idea I ever downloaded or purchased the app, so I can't install it via my desktop.

I come back to my laptop to install the game. It's not immediately obvious how to do so, but eventually I find the "Sync Applications" panel, telling itunes to sync all applications.

Itunes then proceeds to delete every application I've downloaded (free and paid) off my phone, then it installs the one.

I swear to god Apple has three smart people and they all quit sometime before the iphone came out.

As a bonus, just to show you they are ignorant douchebags, when I synch my addressbook, it asks if I want to merge or replace my contact list. Wow guys. Wow.

Maya for OSX Sucks

It's not that Maya on a mac is godawful. It doesn't crash much and does what it should, basically. The problem stems from the fact that whoever ported it must have been blind and relied on a series of diagnostic tests to see that all the functions were working.

I can guarantee they never once opened it up and saw the fonts hanging over their baselines, the ramps that disappear if you scroll up or down, and they certainly didn't try to scrub in the channel boxes while footage was playing. This is after their "service pack 1" to fix issues like those.

Again, it works, it just doesn't work nearly as well or snappily as the windows version. It costs the same. Thanks Autodesk.

That Song, Umbrella, Sucks

Since I'm on the topic of choruses, the one in "Umbrella" is fantastic. The problem is that after hearing the chorus so many times on so many montages, award shows, youtube anime videos and whatever else, I finally heard the real song.

My first thought was it's a b-side remix. B-side remixes always suck. Someone gets the great idea to pair down the song to some random beat and just keeps the vocals. Only in this case, it's the A-side.

She should have collaborated with Lil Wayne or T Pain instead of Jay Z.

Now imagine you're Thomas Jefferson, it's the late 1700s and you read that last sentence, from the future. Right?

Katy Perry's Grammar Sucks

I kissed a girl and I liked it
The taste of her cherry chapstick
I kissed a girl just to try it
I hope my boyfriend don't mind it

lines 1,3 and 4 are complete thoughts.

line 2 is not.

Outside of the very catchy chorus the song's forgettable, and outside of the song the album is a batch of Hilary Duff b-sides. All there is is that chorus, but what the fuck?

Why the sentence fragment?

The taste of her cherry chapstick what? You liked the taste? I'm guessing so, cos this song is all about (I'm not gay) kissing other girls (I'm not gay) and liking it. Complete your boring and obvious thought Katy Perry, whatever it is.

The Dock Sucks

Even at it's smallest, the stupid thing is taking up 5% of my laptop's vertical real estate. Thanks Apple for taking something that was really nice in Windows 2000, making it shiny, animated (magnification---oooooh!!) and bigger. Do I really want to look at all the horrid icons applications have? Maybe.

BUT MAYBE NOT!

People crap on Windows a lot. A lot of it's deserved, but at least with XP (I can't speak for Vista) I could make it look like Win2000, change all the colors around and customize it reasonably extensively. Recolor the OS down to the application level, change all the fonts. Its' really nice. My copy of Ubuntu isn't even as easy to muck around with, so I applaud Windows (XP)

Things I can customize in Apple's OS-X:

1. The color of the minimize/maximize/close gumdrops on each window
2.

That's right. There is no number two.

For all their "it just works" and "It's for people not robots" attitude, the choices in OS-X are nil. You get gray and white and more white and more white and a little more gray and some colored gumdrops. And you know what? You're gonna fucking like it!

I'm well aware that the reason Apple's popular is the same reason the Nazis were fashionable: fetishistic attention to detail and complete and utter uniformity. But I'm a "mac"; I'm your guy from the movie Dodgeball, with my comfortable clothes and desire to get high and make beats in garage band. I am an individual, and your operating system is not letting me shine.

Truth be told, I could give two shits about changing the font. Whatever they've got going on works well enough (except in Maya--are you reading this Autodesk?). I want two things:

1. As a working professional in the digital arts, I'd like to be able to make my OS a dark-ish gray so I'm not blinded by the mandatory bar across the top of my screen when I'm working on dark imagery. I don't need to "theme" color my os, but the ability to darken it down (and not that garish "cmd+opt+ctrl+8" nega screen).

2. The ability to not have the dock, but instead a drop down menu on the mandatory top bar where I could put my aliases instead. (Where have I seen this before.....?) Then, when I didn't need them (which is most of the time--and that is true for everyone) all my dock application icons aren't annoyingly in my way or popping up to say "hey" every time my cursor goes to the bottom of the screen.

Admit you screwed up. Admit the dock, like your shiny screens may impress the type of people who are more into shinyness than functionality, admit the dock is a bad design choice.

All I'm asking for is the option. I'd even be happy if it was command line only, I don't care how hard you have to bury it, but I want it.

Seriously, Whoever does Claire Bennet's Makeup Sucks

Holy good Jon Benet, why?

Painting the face of a tramp on a little kid only makes you a closet pedophile, so knock it off. Ever since that makeup commercial I know she doesn't have to look like a pederast's concubine. Please, for my ability to keep watching this new "rebooted" Heroes, stop it with the whore's makeup on Claire.

Adrienne Brody Sucks

Sure he made some movie where he played piano in the Holocaust (can that just be a separate Academy Award subset by the way? Best Performance/Movie/Director in a Holocaust movie?) but ever since Adrienne won or didn't win (I forget) he's done nothing cinematically noteworthy.

His entire career is spent looking smugly at the camera in Tag Heuer and Dior Homme ads. He's basically Paris Hilton for all he contributes to his "craft" these days.

No, he's worse. She's never won an Oscar.

The G.I. Joe Movie Already Sucks

Superbowl commercial iced with these two gems of dialogue,

"Technically, we don't exist"

and

Government Stooge: "What did you say your outfit was called?"
General Hawk: "I didn't"


Oooooh..... That simmer you hear is me in a stew of BAD-MOHTERF*CKING-ASS!!!!!

OH YEAH BABY!

Congratulations, by the way, to the Jimmy and Eric Olsen for winning Brietbart Junior High's "write your own G.I. Joe movie" contest.

Dubai Sucks

I went there once as a kid, when it was called Orlando.

Your Blog Book Sucks

Cory Doctorow blogs for boingboing.net. You know what he blogs about? Two things: anything steampunk related and himself. Cory has written books and good for him. I don't read not-his blog to find out about where he'll be signing them however. I don't care.

Maddox, who I consider to be one of the finest internet writers out there (his points are both concise and humorous) wrote a book. It's boring. It has no tooth. It's watered down in the way comedies about handicapped people are.

Your Internet Writing Sucks

That's write, your internet writing sucks, and by sucks I mean feels like eating twenty miles of camel shit that's been out in the sun for so long it tastes like a milkshake made of rotten rat carcasses and vomit.

Movie Trilogies Suck

The "doye" exceptions being stuff like Star Wars and Lord of the Rings.

I'm looking at you Pirates of the Carribean, you seven hour drive to nowhere.

Rick Warren Sucks

Goatee?

Should I have titled this post "Evil Rick Warren Sucks"?

Your Segment on Subliminal Advertising Sucks

Do it Inside Edition. Do it.

I must be audiovisual jesus, because I could tell you that's a flash of a McDonalds at without having to "frame-by-frame" it. It's a rather large and recognizable icon.

This seems to be what people mean when they talk about subliminal advertising. The problem is I have a hard time believing anyone under, say 60, can't make out the imagery, yet news segments like the one linked above always insinuate that you don't realize you saw something. Nope, I saw it. So did everybody.

"I could direct a better movie" Sucks

No you couldn't.

You know why I know this?

Because you didn't.

Souhtland Tales Sucks

While I hate Donnie Darko, I really, really wanted to like Southland Tales.

It's set in a dystopian near-future Los Angeles. It's cast includes Dwayne "the Rock" Johnson, Sean William Scott, Amy Pohler, Christopher Lambert and Justin Timberlake. I generally enjoy movies with those people and consider all of them a boon to a film.

Sure Donnie Darko is exactly the film a stoned teenager would come up with after watching NOVA's episode on wormholes, but second time's a charm. Right?

Right?

Nope.

It's god-awful.

I was gonna go with the idea, as I have in the past, that the film is some large meta-joke about poor films, the world and all sorts of stuff, but then I blew that apart with two thoughts:

1. Richard Kelley has never made a good film, so it's very likely beyond his capacity to create self-referential super-art.

2. It's extremely cynical, both of me and the imagined creator, to make something that is just one giant "fuck you" to everyone. The best analogy I can come up with is if you took a shit, then managed to convince people they liked eating it to the point where everyone happily would eat your shit, would seek out your shit to eat and would evangelize eating it on the internet, and then you laughed at them. It's a pretty elaborate ruse to pull off in popular media and thinking rationally I don't think either "Wanted" or "Southland Tales" are such attempts, as much as it would make me feel better about the universe...somehow.

There's a lot of problems with the movie, but by focusing on one, I can hopefully explain why it's so bad. The movie hates republicans, which, okay, fine. But it hates them in such a simple and childish way. Not particularly original other than replacing "Government" almost exclusively with "Republicans", but there it is.

A story, if you'll amuse me:

When I was in high school, I was going to write a play about futuristic people enslaving and torturing other people if I can remember correctly. I was sure that my depiction of the strife of these people was going to bring tears to the eyes of everyone who saw it. I was 16 or 17 at the time. I'm really glad I didn't write that play, but I feel that Richard Kelley's mind sees his stories exactly as mine did back then. When he thinks about his stories, sees the images it's all fantastic, brilliant moving stuff. His worlds are flush with culture and history. I'm sure of it, and that's fine. It's actually pretty awesome. The problem is, much like my aborted dystopian one-act, what the rest of us see does not glow the way it does in the creator's mind. It's awkward, clumsy, cynical and boring.

It's also way too damn long.