All you have to do is leak it. – Not these days! The top influencers in social news sites have thousands of campaigns clamoring for their attention every day. The most popular people on Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter have millions of followers. Leak it at five or six key points, and it might stick… or it might get stomped on by the next story coming in one minute that’s leaking from ten key points.

Anyone can be an expert. – And everyone claims to be. Seriously, do a Google for “social media guru,” “internet marketing,” “buzz marketing experts.” Everybody says they’re these salty, veteran experts – when the entire concept didn;t even exist only a few years ago. Everybody reading this who’s old enough to drink can call themselves a social media expert, because you all are.

It’s easy. – It was easy the first ten minutes that IRC was running. Now the whole world is screaming for attention, and so of course you have to be heard over the whole wide world.

All you have to do is buy votes. – That, too, worked for about the first ten minutes. I’d say The Blair Witch Project was the last time people fell for that. Now astroturf is bleeding obvious. After 100,000 people in a row come along copy-pasting the same positive review of your product, it’s kind of telling that something’s up. Don’t have people lie, because once anybody even asks “Is this a viral marketing campaign?”, the jig is up.

It’s all one company. – Not even close! There are marketing firms that register all those accounts on Reddit and astroturf the globe for you. It takes hours of work for teams of people.

Social media is free!!! – Maybe posting an anonymous message on an image board is free, but that’s not gonna stick for more than about a minute. Most of the rest of the cheaper forms of social media marketing are called “spam.” When you get into the really advanced advertising campaigns, guess what, they all cost just as much as any other form of marketing.

All you have to be is good. – Ha ha ha ha! Hey, look at webcomics. Look at all the beautiful, smart, funny, witty webcomics there are out there, and they’re doomed to obscurity. Now think of the two most popular: XKCD (stick figures making lukewarm geek jokes) and the Oatmeal (blob figures making childish dumb jokes). They bought social media and you didn’t. You could wipe your butt and post the wad of toilet paper to a social media campaign and have the whole world worshiping it next week.

High traffic equals high sales. – Bzzzt! The most famous example that will go down in all of history is Proctor & Gamble’s Old Spice crap-fest. They spammed the Earth with that, it broke the record for the most deep-cover shills even employed on a buzz campaign. YouTube went down under demand to view the commercial. Then Old Spice sales went down 7%. Fail campaign is fail.

Now, a lot of cliches are necessary. Buying equipment in town and fighting in the woods is one example; you can’t have monsters harassing you while you’re picking out a new sword and it certainly wouldn’t do to have shopkeepers out there in the battlefield dodging fireballs. So that’s a necessary cliche.

Instead, here are a bunch of unnecessary Role-Playing-Game cliches which are just the product of lazy thinking and copying other games. Be the first to break these when you design the next game, and you very well could be on your way to being the next SquareSoft!

Note that we will be counting the character-based RPGs (Rogue, Moria, Nethack, Angband, Dwarf Fortress) as separate most of the time. They avert most cliches simply by not having graphics at all, but they actually count as more their own genre anyway.

Females in skimpy outfits – Why does my hell-knight need 180-pound polished titanium armor but my sorceress can go into battle wearing a bikini and take less damage? Yes, I know, it’s for the sex appeal. Hey, wait a minute. How about I just surf the web for porn if I want to see sexy women (or God forbid, get to know a real life one) and keep the inch-high, 1200-pixel sprite dressed like any normal warrior would dress?

Sewers. – What, does every damn game have a level being fought in a sewer? Jesus, enough with the sewer mazes already! Let’s fight in a circus, a corral, a bakery, anyplace but a sewer!

Fire and ice magic. – Yeah, yeah, yeah, we know. You kill the ice monster with fireballs and you kill the fire monster with ice balls. Like 653,918 games just like this one. Yawn! When can we get new magic trees that have evidence that somebody, oh, I don’t know, used some imagination? Have ether magic, with Will-O-th’-Wisp, ectopasma attacks, and ghost elementals. How about a sorceress whose magic is based on music and casts different spells by singing different songs or playing different music instruments? What about instead of a plain vanilla wizard, we have an alchemist instead, whose magic effects are limited to potions and transmutation? See how easy this is?

24-hour stores – Every NPC is open round-the-clock to sell you healing potions and armor. You know, you could be daringly original here and have shop-keepers go to bed, not be open on Sunday, only come out at night, etc. Seiken Densetsu 3 and later “X of Mana” series notably proved this can work.

No basic body functions. – I realize that it would be too tacky to have Port-a-Johns scattered throughout the dungeon, but still you could have mandatory rest stops. And why not have characters regularly need to eat and drink? Nethack is the only one so far that does this.

Treasure chests everywhere – Geez, can’t you just have stuff laying on the ground? Or put away in a stash? Or in boxes in a keep? Why do the little old lady in town and the dragon down on level 50 have the exact same treasure chest? Why do they all either unlock for anybody or all require identical keys? Why do all keys disappear after one use? I mean, it’s been decades now, isn’t anybody ever going to think of any other way to give me stuff?

Creatures never use their dropped items. – This one makes so much sense, and yet the only one that approached it is Nethack. A creature that drops class 18 armor should have been harder to kill. Worms have no business hauling human-body-shaped armor. A wizard who was packing a wand of fireballs should by damned have cast a fireball or two before we killed him. And so on.

Downloading ROMs for original arcade games is becoming less of a gray area every year and more of something almost completely legal. With each passing year, copyrights on arcade machine ROMs expire, companies that own the intellectual property rights fold up, and fewer and fewer people frankly care. Media conglomerates have enough headache making sure nobody pirates the latest film to worry about a 25-year-old arcade game that only about 100 people know how to run anyway. Go to ROM Hustler, have fun!

But there’s a lot of hazards to having a Mame machine hobby anyway, such as:

Interface screw – This is when the controls to a game just don’t map well to a keyboard because there are too many widgets. This is a very common problem. Remember that arcade machines were free to have dual joysticks, trackballs, paddles, dials, and any other wacky interface gizmos they could gin up. These games are virtually unplayable without the original case. Notable offenders: Major Havoc, Tron.

Computers don’t have gas pedals – This is a problem with driving games, which have their own interface screw problem. Gas and brake pedals, gear shifts, steering wheels, and then some, just don’t handle naturally on a keyboard and mouse. Even though it’s possible, very few games are playable this way. Notable offenders: Road Blasters, Hard Drivin’.

Diskless wonder – Laserdisk technology has gone the way of carbon paper copies, and with it the visually stunning games from this brief period in the ’80s. This is a damn dirty shame, because those games were sweet. Notable offenders: Dragon’s Lair, Space Ace.

My finger is falling off. – Some of the easiest games to translate to the desktop computer experience are shooters. The vertical scrolling shooter, starting with Xevious on forward, involved nothing more than firing and dodging. The trouble with some of these, is that they require continuous fire, and on an arcade cabinet there was just the one button you could slap with your whole hand, but on the keyboard you’re pretty much limited to rapidly hitting Control with your left ring finger until it turns purple. Note that this did not happen with those that allowed autofire. Notable offenders: Lethal Thunder, Scramble.

Sushi Fugi Yamaguchi – Games that kept their Japanese name and never got an American translation – and even if you know a little Japanese, they’re still impenetrable. After all, the very concept of video games was practically born in Japan and most of the video game companies continue to be Japanese, so what do you expect? But this hampers you if you’re going through ROM archives looking for something to play and you have no idea what this game is about. It’s also frustrating when you’re trying to find some game you used to play but you can’t remember the name, only that it was Japanese. Notable offenders: Shisenshou Joshiryou-Hen, Keroro-Gunsou Pekopon Shinryaku Shirei … de Arimasu.

99 words for Breakout – Bounce the ball off a paddle, beat up bricks at the top of the screen. There are thousands and thousands of these, they’re all exactly the same, and they all came out with clever names to make you think they were something else until you download them and have a play. Notable offenders: Bal Cube, Bomb Bee.

#1. DuckDuckGo is written in Perl using an Apache/ BSD stack.

#2. Perl works with SDL. SDL is the media-library for graphics, sound, disk access, and more. Which means that games can be written in Perl.

#3. This program runs. It is composed entirely of punctuation marks:

`$=`;$_=\%!;($_)=/(.)/;$==++$|;($.,$/,$,,$\,$",$;,$^,$#,$~,$*,$:,@%)=($!=~/(.)(.).(.)(.)(.)(.)..(.)(.)(.)..(.)......(.)/,$"),$=++;$.++;$.++;$_++;$_++;($_,$\,$,)=($~.$"."$;$/$%[$?]$_$\$,$:$%[$?]",$"&$~,$#,);$,++;$,++;$^|=$";`$_$\$,$/$:$;$~$*$%[$?]$.$~$*${#}$%[$?]$;$\$"$^$~$*.>&$=`

On a recent Ubuntu, I just got a couple of error messages, ($# $* no longer supported) but it worked anyway, running from #!/usr/bin/perl . It prints out “Just another Perl hacker.” Still that’s gotta count for something!

#4. They’re launching a project to translate the Java API to Perl 6. Which basically means that Perl will inherit a lot of Java’s leftover mojo. To hear people saying things like “Perl 6 has the potential to become a very popular language.” now, in 2010, is mind-boggling. Didn’t it already have its chance in, like, 1999?

#5. News still happens regularly in the Perl community. One example is PerlBuzz, a very happy little site ticking away like a grandfather clock logging all the goings-on in the Perl community.

#6. Big corps still use Perl. This includes Amazon.com, the BBC, eBay.com, Yahoo!, Slashdot, and the IMDB. These are top-ranking web destinations, serving hundreds of pages per second. So you though PHP had taken over?

But it reminds me, newbie programmers first starting out could use some guidance as to good types of comments to make in your code. So I thought I’d offer some of those.

Remember that code comments are for three types of audience: the casual user of open source just looking to quickly troubleshoot your program, the team programmer be it on an open source project or proprietary application, and you! Don’t forget that you, too, will someday have to maintain your own code and possibly have no clue what on earth you had in mind when you churned out this spaghetti.

Labeling blocks and sections. Probably the most obvious use of comments. It’s really quite simple: you’re just going to mark out where the main loop begins and ends, where you set up data structures for later use, parts that are functions, subroutines, and what-not, and other designated areas. This helps when you’re composing long blocks of something like…

   if ((Brick[4][5]==Dot[1][0])&&(Zee[7]!=Foo[9][0][1])){Zee[7]=Foo[9][Dot[1][0]][1];}

   if ((Brick[5][5]==Dot[1][1])&&(Zee[8]!=Foo[9][0][1])){Zee[8]=Foo[9][Dot[1][1]][1];}

   if ((Brick[6][5]==Dot[1][2])&&(Zee[9]!=Foo[9][0][1])){Zee[9]=Foo[9][Dot[1][2]][1];}

…where it would help to break it up with a comment mapping out that you’re parsing column 5 of the Brick array.

Explaining what variables and arrays are used for. Sometimes you’re going to run across something like:

Bar[6][6]=

  [[0][1][2][3][4][5]

   [0][1][2][3][4][5]

   [0][1][2][3][4][5]

   [0][1][2][3][4][5]

   [0][1][2][3][4][5]

   [0][1][2][3][4][5]];

…and have no idea what the heck it’s supposed to do. When initializing arrays, it’s helpful to indicate what the array is for, why it had to be set up that way, and where in the program it might get used. Sometimes it even helps to include a little visual grid in the comments to help other programmers get a picture of what’s going on.

Indicating requirements and versions. It’s always helpful to document the conditions under which your program was first written, compiled, and run. For example, mention “First built on Slackware 10.2 system using gcc 3.5, libSDL 1.0, calling ImageMagick v2.7.1.” somewhere near the top of the file. That way, years from now when gcc has developed a new pointer bug (ha ha) that causes your program to crash on future systems, it will help a knowledgeable programmer to quickly diagnose what the problem is.

Explaining the non-obvious. This is helpful when you’re writing the next Duff’s Device. Whenever you just came up with something so fiendishly clever that it makes you giggle for five minutes just reading it over and over, that’s the time to document it and explain fully the how and why of it. And be careful of brittle constructions that could break later, anyway.

Diking out debugging blocks. This is the one exception to Repeat Geek’s rule #2, because debugging really never is obsolete. Say you have a Texas Hold’Em game; at some point during testing, you’ll find it useful to force certain hands rather than letting them happen randomly, in order to make sure that certain win conditions are recognized by the program. After you’re done with that little block, why not comment it out along with an explanation for how to use it later?

Explaining why you did things this way. That’s the number one question you’ll find yourself mumbling if you read somebody else’s code and you don’t have them right there to ask. Because you might have done the same thing in a different way, or know a better way, or not know this better way that they used. Remember, it’s OK to be a niovice in a language you’re using, but just explain that in the comments, you wrote this inefficient data structure because you didn’t know a shortcut at the time, and it works anyway.

Nevertheless, you do see a decent gaming blog poke its head out of the fog every now and again. Play This Thing, itself a crackling-good gaming blog, also calls for better-quality game writing – just in case you thought I was the lone curmudgeon.

Rock, Paper, Shotgun is a great one. Jay is Games, also a great one. There’s some more out there, but the list grows thin. Remember Four Fat Chicks? Gone! It now redirects to Tap-Repeatedly, which is apparently hosting the archive. QuandaryLand? It’s poofed as well, although the adventure game reviews are archived here

But what if a genie was granting wishes today?

What kind of gaming blog would I really want to see?

1.Light-hearted ones. Don’t take yourself so seriously! Gaming is not life-and-death.

2.Novelty finders. I’ve seen nine hundred gazillion action first-person shooters and played almost as many. Do they make anything else any more?

3.Rare/vintage games. Abandonware, freeware, and shareware stuff is having a huge revival thanks to sites like Underdogs and the rise of emulators and simulators. Now we have a whole generation rediscovering games that play on DOSBox, ZSNES, XMAME, and so on, but we have no idea how to play them (manuals long lost) or if they’re worth our time.

4.Game criticism that treats games as high art. Sites like Quandary and Four Fat Chicks held video games up to this high standard that I’d like to see more of. I don’t give a rat’s hat about the FPS or how many polygons – is it art?

5.Independent game news. Independent games are cheap, interesting, and as hard to find as the last Pokemon. 99% of independent games don’t get enough exposure, the other 1% (Portal) get far too much. Where’s the next Portal coming from?

6.Free online web games. Billions out there, I’ll never discover them all.

7.Curiosa/trivia. For one thing, how about the names behind the games? Who did the voice acting for Dungeon Keeper 2, and what else has he done? Who drew Dr. Gordon Freeman? What the heck happened to those maniacs at Zeus Software who made that arcade game Biomechanical Toy?

And just for balance, I’d like to offer:

Gaming Blogs That I’d Just As Soon Never See Again:

1.Industry hype machines. Duh, if EA sends you free stuff, of course you’ll have nothing but good things to say about them.

2.Anything that uses a rating system. Four stars, 7.8, three joysticks up. Forget it. They all level off into a flat scale after awhile.

3.Echoes. I would just as soon see a gaming blog written by somebody who’d never, ever read anybody else’s gaming blog. rather than see the same boring stats urped up. “It has OK graphics and great sound; the action was smooth. I had problems installing it, so let me whine about them for three paragraphs to fill space.” Jesus, God, never again!

4.Mr./Mrs. Nice guys/gals. There is nothing like the gaming industry to produce politically correct drones who never say anything controversial. Get angry. Get outrageous. Gush like a fangirl. Dig up dirt. Sniff out scandals. Have a personality!

Fortean Times – Charles Hoy Fort was an American writer and researcher into anomalous phenomena. Most people will hear the name and think “Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster,” but the Fortean Society has stretched ever farther past there.

PostHuman Blues – The “PostHuman” movement explores what will happen after humans, in their present sense, cease to exist, whether by evolving into something else or just getting wiped out. Now that we know that, here’s a whole blog dedicated to dystopian futures, realistic robots that could replace us, mutations, genetic upheavals, apocalypses…

Amazing Illusions – At the intersection between your optic nerve and your brainstem lies a vast, unknowable territory where things can look as unreal as they are real. Nothing shakes up your perception like seeing something you know is impossible.

Crafty Puzzles – Puzzles aren’t just little self-contained mysteries. Every time you solve one, you learn a tiny bit of something about how the brain works. Why do we intuitively make the wrong first move so often?

Strange Clips – Simply put, it’s videos of bizarre phenomena. When we just checked, the front page has a cat trying to resuscitate a friend, an erupting volcano, Siamese twin crocodiles, and a dude who set off fireworks in his ears.

Psychonaut – The site is good enough to provide a definition: “One who trips or embarks on shamanic odysseys of discovery in the universe of the mind; a mental voyager.” Nevertheless, you’ve got some spooky stuff between your ears, or else you wouldn’t have those weird dreams you do.

The 6000 – This is just a blog of 6000 people – scientists, philosophers, religious leaders, artists, and other quirky characters. Each of them with their own unique point of view; many of them eager to challenge yours.

Slightly Warped – They have a cabinet of curiosities. Meh, maybe not all of them are fascinating weird science anomalies, but at this point in the list, are you going to complain?

SciCurious – Just a run-of-the-mill weird science blog. Focuses more on the established science-type stuff, in case you’re sick of ghosts and aliens.

World of Weird Things – Exactly what it says on the label. This one takes a more scientific tack, exploring fringe theories and bizarre hypothesis.

“Everything happens for a reason.” God, no, really? Hey, if I punch you in the face, that happened for a reason! It was because my fist was moving towards you! Ditto any other bumper-sticker/ Hallmark-card sized philosophy, including “It is what it is,” “It wasn’t meant to be,” and “What goes around comes around.”

Win. Fail. Epic. This. We’re so proud of baby learning first words, but isn’t it time baby was all grown up? Time for baby to use big sentences. The problem with these four words is that a family of cave people could make an entire vocabulary out of them, and that’s exactly what people do online.

Regardless irregardless irregardlessly undisregardlessly… Look, we know when we’re beat. We’re still trying to hammer it into people’s heads when to use “there,” “they’re,” and “their.” Seeing everybody struggle so hard with this root word “regard” and the many extensions… just give up. Find a new word to take its place. You can’t handle “regardless!”

“The [WHATEVER] community…” Suddenly every interest sounds like it has its own weekly meetings and board of directors. The Twitter community, the Apple community, the black community, the terrorist community… Let’s just assign community to the community community and be done with it.

Literally / ironically Ban them! Nobody knows what they mean! Nobody uses them right! Just get rid of them!

“Looks like somebody’s got a case of the Mondays!” In fact, anything from films more than 10 years old should go here. But there are especially times when this is inappropriate. Did you know, if you go to Haiti and visit the quake survivors and go to a widow crying over the graves of her husband and six children and say, “Looks like somebody’s got a case of the Mondays!” it’s legal for her to kill you?

FML It stands for “F*** my life!” Appropriate when you miss a turn and wreck your car, killing your cat who was riding on the windshield, you get out of the car and fall into a pit of poisonous vipers, and as you climb out, a police officer walks up and arrests you for littering, right when you notice you’ve lost your wedding ring in the ruckus. Not appropriate when your only problem is that you have a hangnail.

Begging the question No one, not even Danial Webster himself, has ever used this phrase correctly. People have no idea what it means and don’t want to learn.

We’ll give you this many points: Amongst the most original poses for your Facebook page is “just fell out of the sky.” And that looks like the same kind of bush related to Christmas trees, which mean it must be one uncomfortable bitch to lay in. Good thing the mescaline is keeping you from feeling it.

At first, we thought a clown was eating her out. But no, on closer inspection, that’s a cheerleader pom-pom, which leads us to believe that the subject of the photo used to cheerlead in high school. Leaving us with the riddle of Mrs. Cheerleader’s existence in her trash-strewn apartment. Is this a joke about pubic hair? A statement about pro sports? A come-on to your boyfriend in the circus? Remembered you weren’t wearing underwear and grabbed the closest cover you could reach?

A tribute to every American parent raising their kids on Ritalin, refusing to do anything to alter the kid’s course of becoming a worthless hooligan, exerting no control or discipline on the spoiled little brat, and then you end up with an animal on a leash. In Israel, our kids would never pull like that; we teach our kids to heel.

That is just a great look. Like you rolled in glue, ran through a thrift store, and bought whatever stuck. What are we reading? The New York Times Bestseller How to Find Girl’s Clothes in Size XXX-L.

And just as the hideous, green-skinned alien came at you with an anal probe in its webbed slimy hand, you jumped out the porthole and fell back to Earth. Though you were taking your chances on your body burning out in the stratosphere on reentry or breaking every bone in your body on impact, at least your butthole was nice and safe… Oh, NOOOOOOOOOOOO!

For my Facebook page, I decided to just be the corporate slave that I am. Here I am in my international tie and white shirt, the sign of trained peons everywhere. That must be a customer back there (with no tie! Ha!) and the boss behind you reflecting on how you’re such a kiss-up.

Thanks a lot lady. I used to have a hipster-meter on my desk, but it exploded into a million pieces as soon as I opened your picture. Even Beevis and Butthead look embarrassed to be on your chest.

About half the guys out there, trying to use Facebook for a poor man’s dating site, upload a picture of themselves with a beer in their hand which is supposed to say something like “Hoooo-ee! I’m a laid-back, hang-loose, party guy who’s fuuuuun to be with, girls!” But actually since they never smile in these pictures, ever, they don’t look like that much fun after all, and the picture actually ends up saying, “There is no photo of me in existence without a beer in my hand.”

Break it down: “out of favor”: Microsoft was never in favor, period. People do not work for Microsoft because they’re dewy eyed with love for the corporate world dictator. They work for Microsoft because it’s a paycheck, and it will continue to be a paycheck for years and years to come. When I said Microsoft is doomed, I didn’t mean this year. There’s a whole movie trilogy left to go before the end.

Now, considering cost a factor. No. Nobody who can call themselves a programmer has ever paid for a piece of Microsoft software. You know what? I want the respective ISPs of Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer to publish complete web-use history. Because I’ll bet you anything, anything at all, that they’ve downloaded cracked Visual Studio copies off of Bit Torrent just like everybody else. They’re just crossing their fingers and hoping for the really dumb ones to bother paying.

Now we’re left with the one true factor: developer-friendliness. It’s a little beyond that, even. Developing anything for a Microsoft platform is an experience of pure torture. I’m talking on a scale with Saddam torture. You look at the comments in there, and people are actually comparing QT/C++ favorably to Microsoft development tools. QT/C++, behind the KDE system for Linux, is like pulling out your toenails with pliers and then jogging through a pool of bleach, so now imagine Microsoft development being worse than that.

Developers will put up with it anyway. It’s a paycheck. That’s all it ever was, was a paycheck. If plumbers and garbage men can still come to work every day, then so will software developers.

First off, you’re grinding against momentum. It really isn’t any more difficult to get someone to change their operating system than it is to get them to switch to a different genre of music, change their eating habits, buy a different brand of car, drop their current mate in order to date someone new, or start or stop smoking. You’re been successful many times getting people to change in all these other ways, right? Then you should have no problem.

Second, information is your key weapon. There simply aren’t enough tech pundits in the blog world writing articles about the keen benefits of Linux, so strive to find every possible resource to launch at their inbox. Search Google daily for new “Top Ten Myths About Linux” posts and other advocacy articles, and then shower your target with them. Print them out and nail them to the door. Leave some lying around in the bathroom. Carry them with you and read aloud from them whenever you happen to be in the elevator together.

Especially in the case where you’re trying to get your relatives to adopt Linux, you can use your position as a technology-superior knowledge worker to your advantage. Since you’re always the one who gets called to remove that virus or reinstall Photoshop, you have a position of power where you can simply refuse to solve problems anymore until they start using your system of choice. You’re most likely the only person they can turn to, so stand firm. Remember the Stockholm effect here; your hostage will later think of you as their guardian.

You might consider taking it to the next level from advocacy to evangelism. Print out actual GNU manuals and bind them together into your holy book, put on penguin-themed robes, and just show up at their door like any other missionary. You’re doing it for their own good, after all, and if membership in some goody-two-shoes afterlife club is worth going door-to-door, then working to free them from the fetters of proprietary enslavement ought to at least be worth a little doorknocking.

Whatever you do, remember that you’re right. That’s really all you need! When you’re the one who’s right, the rest of the world always comes around to seeing it your way eventually.

Aries When flamers call you “elitist,” “egghead,” “nerd,” “condescending,” or “full of yourself,” just remember that it’s just N00B-rage talking and it’s the only defense the lazy-minded have against those who work to better themselves. Sadly, these people control the world anyway, not you.

Taurus You’re at your peak attractiveness. You’re a sex magnet, putting out pheromones that signal the opposite sex to follow in your wake, and your natural charm even carries over to casual friends who will feel compelled to bend to your will. Too bad you’re staying in all day playing World of Warcraft all by yourself with the shades drawn.

Gemini Your social circle highly values your natural tendency to bluntly state the truth. You’re sought out for your sincere, honest advice. Too bad that people will still hate you after they ask you to tell them what yoiu really think and you do.

Cancer They want you to reboot the server again. It’s their own fault; they were trying to surf porn at work and hosed the system. Lock up your office and take a walk. Tell everyone you have to get a new binary sorter that’s compatible with your ISO-standard router. Go home. Goof off all day. When your boss calls angrily at 9 PM, tell him the system is infected with nthe LiveJasmin popup virus and it’ll take a couple of days to get it back up. That will shut him up! They’ve all seen LiveJasmin.

Leo Even though you have the social skills of a cockroach, others say good things about you behind your back. They say you’re intelligent, dependable, studious, tenacious, and even funny. Unfortunately, what counts is what people say to your face, so no promotion for you, anyway.

Virgo Normally when you say words to the effect that you’d just as soon nuke the whole world and be done with it, you’re just blowing off steam. Not today. Today you really mean it, and your bitter hatred of the muggles has you teetering on the edge of going on a shooting rampage. Luckily, you’re too timid to act on it.

Libra That “girl” you mocked in Quake Tournament last night? Turns out that this one time, she really was a girl, and she’s had a crush on your for weeks and wants you to frag her with your rocket launcher so hard it punches her up against the wall. But you dissed her, so now she’s just spreading Facebook rumors about how you’re queerer than a fruit bat.

Scorpio Today you must clean out your bookmarks. You have piles of crap saved from moments when you didn’t have time to read or watch something, and you damn sure don’t have time to read them now. Half of them are dead links anyway. But you’ll get about ten bookmarks down the list, and then you’ll visit one wondering what the hell you saved it for, and then you’ll get sucked up in this cool site you forgot all about, and the next time you look up, there you are: you’ve lost a whole day aimlessly surfing the web again.

Sagittarius Your life is one big unpredictable Keno cage with balls bouncing off each other, and all you want is some peace and quiet. So you’re going to get it. You’ll take some time off, cancel some appointments, hold your calls, and arrange a sabatical for yourself where you’ll soak in seclusion and solitude, right before it hits you that you in fact thrive on chaos because that’s the only time you get anything done.

Capricorn Yes, your guro manga collection really does bug people out. Yes, your mother does stay up nights worrying about your death metal record collection. Yes, your cosplaying Vegeta at the last comic-con was so over-the-top, even those guys who dress like Klingons and speak the language were creeped out by you. Yes, your last girlfriend really did dump you because she couldn’t stand to hear you babble about your next adventure in writing a Ruby on Rails app. But continue to ride in your comfortable bubble of denial, anyway.

Aquarius What, you don’t know how to write your own L-system fractal in Inkscape? Well, sure, take a night and learn it. What’s that going to hurt? Sure, clutter your brain up with one more geeky pursuit of pointlessly trivial knowledge that couldn’t possibly do you any good and won’t even advance your career. It keeps you out of trouble.

Pisces Suddenly you have this surge of confidence, like you’re ready to clean out your apartment, pay your bills, organize your CDs, sign up for a gym membership, get a tan, go to a movie, and meet other people. But it’s 5:30 AM. Go back to bed and don’t worry; this will pass after you’ve had more sleep. These spontaneous urges to get your life together are just a symptom of your caffeine-addled brain fitfully trying to make sense of your life.

Email Spam

Obvious solution: Universal death penalty for spam.

Does everybody hate spam? Does it get you really, really angry? Does it get everybody you know angry? Don’t we all spend hours and days every year arguing in forums about what to do about it? Finally, isn’t this one crime which is easily identified and the detection of which would never produce a false positive? Police can use your IP address to pin you down in a matter of minutes should you commit any of a dozen other crimes online, but somehow you can send 40,000 emails per hour and nobody can find you. We have hundreds of laws making it illegal to do things like take drugs or watch naughty movies or other things which most people don’t care about. But we’ll never simply fix spamming.

Character Sets / Text Encoding / Universal Fonts

Obvious solution: Implement Unicode right. Install 10,000 fonts on each computer at the factory. Bake it in at the hardware level.

Display text! Just… text! What’s so hard about this? We have factories embedding a font and character set into the computer already – it’s called “BIOS” and it has a standard language and monospace character set embedded in the motherboard. When you turn a computer on, this is what it uses to display those first boot messages, along with the extra screens you get should you enter BIOS configuration. So why can’t we just make that a Unicode character set and BE DONE WITH IT??? No more black-diamond-with-a-question-mark on web pages, no more not being able to display the different kinds of quotes and apostrophes, no more having to redeclare your locale and download a codec and font set just to read two languages – if you could even read this, you have experienced a miracle of being able to display the text correctly which the web still gets wrong daily!

Markup Languages

Obvious solution: Oh, just quit being stupid!

If you “view source” on this page, you’ll find HTML, CSS, and Javascript at the most basic. Things like Actionscript to run the Flash banner and perhaps some XML to make it AJAX-y. From the server side, what you can’t see, that’s an addition of PHP to render the whole page, and a side helping of SQL to retrieve the data to go into the page… Did you keep count? That’s seven languages to display ONE web page!!! I’m flabbergasted. There’s languages like C and Python that can handle all of that at once. Aliens from space, examining how we send communication back and forth using this system, would conclude that we are idiots incapable of making toast without setting ourselves on fire.

Software Bloat

Obvious solution: Write smaller, simpler programs.

Nope, can’t have that! Thirty years ago, we were screaming for more powerful computers to run the 5-megabyte programs we had then. Today, we’re screaming for new computers to run the 5-gigabyte programs we run now. We still use the same features we used thirty years ago; the only thing changed is how much memory it takes to do the same thing.

Profitable Streaming Media

Obvious solution: Charge a regular subscription; all-you-can-download.

This is another one of those “What’s so hard about this?” problems. You pay a regular subscription for newspapers, magazines, cable television, and so on… there are some music and media services online beginning to wake up to this, but still the whole web is this big snarled up mess of sites that can’t make a profit, sites that want too much profit, and other site stealing content from the first two groups and sharing it for free.

Standards

Obvious solution: Just follow them.

Isn’t it amazing how many standards we have, for everything from RSS to compilers, and nobody follows them in the tiniest, most coincidental way? Why, why, why do we write them?

Getting Users To Learn Anything

Obvious solution: Read the manuals.

Isn’t it amazing how many computer books we have on the shelves at the bookstores and libraries, with everything from Email for Dummies to passing your A+ Certs, and we still have users going “How do I computer?” Why, why, why do we bother to write them?

There’s a lot of media out there like this. Stuff that would be fine, if only the fans didn’t ruin it for everyone else.

Twilight

Eh, vampires, could be fun. Remember, we were all Ann Rice fans just a decade ago (before she joined the Church of Latter-Day Idiots or Jehovah’s Morons or whatever its called). So Twilight might be fun to get into, except that here come 100,000 teenaged girls with sleeping bags to camp out in front of the theater the night before the movie opens. They’re here to jill off in the cheap seats, while I’d need a gasmask to withstand the pheremonal assault and earplugs to stop the squeees of climaxing teeny-boppers from driving me deaf. No thanks.

Dark Knight/ Iron Man

I dunno what happened to comic book movies. First they were campy and comic-y and childish – everything that makes superheros FUN! You know, FUN? Eff You En, FUN? Not serious business, not something to shoot each other over, not life and death, not something to get tattooed across your back, not a reason to be the World’s Biggest Asshole to everyone for all eternity. Can we please have a segregated section for hero-comix media? You Nazi skinheads with Heath Ledger’s make-up tattooed on your face can stay over there in your suicide cult – I’ll take my superhero movies in the 1960s campy, cheesy, childish fun way. To me, if it’s played by anybody who’s more of a serious actor than, say, Flavor Flav, I’m not watching it.

Watchmen/ V for Vendetta

Here again, when did it all become about building a religion around a freaking comic book? Yes, nice story. Yes, new age, darker than the classic, something new to say. Nice art. You know what? I didn’t run out and name my newborn son Doctor Manhattan. Everything from above applies here.

The Matrix

It got kind of old there for awhile, but just befor eit fades away, let me bid a fond farewell to the legions of trenchcoat-wearing little jerks, who all tried to read tons more into the series than was actually there. They’re the Wachowskis, boys, accept it. They made it up, they made it aaaaallll up as they went along, and they couldn’t care less about your retarded little religious theories. Now that you’re gone, perhaps I can finally rent the trilogy and enjoy it in peace.

Pokemon

It almost flies under the radar, since its so common, but we can’t let it go without mention that 90% of the drooling stupid memes out there are posted (and reposted and reposted and reposted and reposted) by Pokemon fans, who think their 999,999th Slowpoke, Mudkip, or Seaking gag is just as charminglky hilarious as the first. The rest of us wish Pokemon fans would die of slow, incurable cancer, if for no other reason than so we could sit down for the first time ever and actually enjoy an anime or video game from the franchise without feeling like we’re rolling in shit.

Because then I’d be trolling the open questions and posting stuff like this.

Oh, sure, no problem. See, we have these TV shows like Cops, Wildest Police Chases, Real Stories of the Highway Patrol, and so on. And these shows on every week since forever show people trying to run from the cops and they never get away ever. They use cars and motorcycles and helicopters and jet fighters and jetskis and just running pellmell like a crazy dip, and still they never get away ever. Millions of guys think they can outrun the cops, and it always goes, “He’s going… going… going… nah, they tackled him.” Running from the cops is a game show which nobody has ever won. So I imagine your little ten-speed Schwinn will look really nice wrapped around your neck after the cops catch you and throw you into a dark cell with Benny the Lonely Molester.

Anyplace in the world except where it’s anywhere near YOU, you pathetic loser virgin walking herpes virus!

Like this: /o_ \o/ /o_ \o/ /o_ \o/ /o_ \o/

Now that the show’s wrapped up, all eleven seasons should be available in the DVD boxed set. try Amazon.

Oh, what, you mean you Pottys actually CARE whether you’re bothering anybody or not? Gosh. Color me surprised. Anyway, yeah, let’s get all the Potty people into one room and say it once: It’s just a book about magic. It’s not the first series, nor the last series. Stories about magicians go right back to the times of Moses; stories about wizards back to the time of King Arthur. In fact Rowling ripped off half of the fantasy fiction universe for all her little story parts. It isn’t that you’re bothering the rest of us so much as you’re bothering the rest of us for really, really stupid reasons.

It isn’t just that you’re obviously posting your homework in here. It isn’t that you’ve singled out that you basically want other people to do your homework for you whole you stuff your face and run World of Warcraft raids. No, it’s that you go to a really retarded school with really dumb textbooks that ask really stupid questions that bothers us. Nobody is answering this question, on moral grounds. The book needs to be returned to the author, preferably over his/her head. And Americans wonder why they have so many school shootings.