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! rants archive:
disclaimer:
the opinions expressed by myself may not be my own opinions
my opinions are subject to change at whim
if you find me too rude/ too sexist / too whatever : i don't care (i'm not really as rude/sexist/whatever as i sound)
the exception to the rule above: if you are a fine bit 'o trim and you find me too sexy, well i am baby but try your luck anyway ;P
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current rants found here -> ZenStarRants
rant 1: calculus
why? it shouldn't exist... i thought sin cos and tan were trig, what the hell are they doing in calculus ??? what the hell do i need calculus for anyway? i can't work out how much to pay when i go shopping with it (i might be able to work out something like the slope of a graph made by plotting the prices of everything on a graph though, but why would i want to - i wouldn't !)
yes i know i have to do it for comsci (pronounced: com sigh) but that doesn't mean it doesn't suck
thanks to MoonFlake for the help with this bastard maths
rant 2: lamers/clubs/and related
why? the lamers shouldn't exist and the clubs don't exist!
gone are the good days of endless parties of extreme decadence and hello the bastard era of no good clubs.
gandalf's... what's up with that place??? the alt. dancefloor is way to crappy and whenever i'm downstairs i feel like i'm at a high-school disco night or something. don't people have to show id or something? f'ing lamers
what happened to springfield? (i can hear a collected sigh of rememberance from all the old timer's out there who used to live in the dingy hole we loved so much). if another springfield opened up in an easily accesible position again i'd happily spend my friday nights (sat mornings) dancing away in a corner, and might even be social enough to get another girlfriend (shut up alastair!)
where are the parties people??? and not the namby-pamby-sit around and chat with no drinks-noone getting nekkid for the pool-everyone leaves early parties which seem to be the rage nowdays. f'ing hippies. we want substance, we want hot wimmin skinny dippin, we want alastair drunk and learing, we want schpat hiding d20s in his bellybutton, we want wimmin skinny dippin, we want loud harrassing music, we want copious amounts of booze, we want wimmin skinny dippin, we want wet t-shirt parties (without schpat being allowed to enter). Make it happen people, or at least get a party with a couple of strippers. don't worry about girlfriends, wimmin love wimmin too (and if they don't they're not worth it)
rant 3: irc
i can see myself getting flamed for this one, but here goes:
back in the day when the internet was only cool to people that didn't mind waiting 5 minutes to see an animated gif (ie: no f'ing kids) irc was filled with dysfunctional people who were looking for someone to talk to, either because they were too innefectual in real life, too lazy to socialise without sitting on their ass, were 40+ year old men looking for little boys/girls, or (in my case at the time) not intrested in real people 'cos you cant download stuff from them while talking to them.
this made a perfect breeding ground for people to chat about whatever they wanted because the person on the other end of the conversation was a monitor and keyboard. of course having been in claws '96-'98 i was perfectly at home talking to dysfunctional people (and it was kinda fun to annoy the morons who kept sayin "hi... a/s/l?").
i tried to recapture the glory days again over the last year and i discovered something: the irc crowd has become a bunch of f'ing hippies. little whiny brats that think they're "l33t" (f'ing leet as a day dead rat), pricks of varying ages constantly hitting on everthing they see, little cliques and in-groups. gone are the days of general chatting too... everyone has their private windows open and only chat to people they know.
what the hell? it used to be fun having 20+ people all talking over/under/around everyone else, holding 3 or 4 conversations at once, playing with people and causing a riot in chanel by chasing friends around with wiffle-bats. now it's only fun if you like staring at a quite main chanel (ie a window that does nothing) or if you like talking to asses.
the most intrest i get off irc nowdays is purely from bots... i go to bookserve and d/l an odd but interesting book maybe once every three months. unless you're going to sleep, or are under 14 and are looking for a date (possibly 30 years older than you) then you'll love irc. otherwise i no longer see the point.
rant 4: the matrix
oh yes... more flames a coming pa. ok, first lets get some base thing straight. uno) i have not seen matrix 2 yet, this rant is about matrix 1 (or the matrix). and duo) i did not think the matrix was a bad film (it wasn't the best but it was enjoyable and worth watching once or twice). now the rant: the matrix has far too many things wrong with it. i cannot fault the fight scences, they looked good. what i can fault is the intelligence of their machines, their stupid psuedo-science, and the tactics of the people of zion.
first the tactics of the people of zion: what the hell are people doing risking very precious lives (remember: those with the plugs that allow them to enter the matrix have to be people who were freed from the matrix. ie: no freeborns) on nothing but a prophecy? obviously there is some sort of ranking army of zion of which morpheus is a part (captain of a sub in fact). what army would let one of their captains spend years wandering around trying to find a myth. the only answer is a holy army looking for a prophet or something to that nature. now if this is the case then the entire army would be religious (at least on the surface, and especially in front of senior officers) and would carry many religious artifacts and pray lots before doing anything (also: how would you get this religion across to people recently liberated from the matrix? religious conflicts are bound to happen). there's not so much as a kind of bible visible on morpheus's ship. they are definitely not very religious. no artifacts, no shrines, no place to pray, no mentions of anything religious other than the prophecy, and one crewmembers rant about following instincts and base emotions because it's what makes us human, but the rest of the crew laugh him off as the mad one. there is no evidence of any doctrines that everyone subscribes to. in fact not everyone on the ship believes the prophecy is true... they just follow morpheus.
secondly the psuedo science: a short rant... everyone know the viability of using humans as batteries is extremely crap unless you like losing all your energy. this was explained away by mixing it with a form of fusion. it's a weak excuse to build the matrix. they should rather have said something like: "people only use about 15% of their brain and the machines are using the rest as cheap processing power in some bio-supercomputer." i would have been much happier with that sort of reasoning. and the reason for blotting out the sun: the machines did it to try kill the humans off as they (the machines) run on fusion power and don't need it... dun-dun-dun !
thirdly the machines intellegence: they are too stupid. their ai is obviously extremely good (just look at agent smith and his reasoning and thought processes) yet their army tactis are completely useless. why is there only one matrix? surely the machines would have seen the value in having multiple matrices in case one went down for some unknown reason or for testing purposes. and why are they so easily defeated by an emp blast? have they never heard of shielding and redundant circuits aimed at just such an occasion? the emp blasts are obviously a routine method of self defence for the subs yet the squids (hunter killer robot things... look like squids) fall apart whenever it's used. if redundant circuits make the thing too big (unlikely) then why don't they move in phases so when contact with phase 1 is lost, phase two move in and finish the job before the emp thing is readied again. or (as schpat suggested) why weren't the squids towing squids that were off (emp doesn't fry stuff that's off generally) with a mechanical switch to start them up if a little breaker circuit is fried by emp or something.
another tactics problem is this: the machines have been hunting morpheus for ages and when they finally get someone on the inside to give them a chance at killing morpheus they send one tiny squad of squids. surely they could have sent another squad or two at least? why have they not mapped the tunnels and set up booby-traps and mines or, better yet, put up signal jammers so that the subs have to come up even higher (and more in the open) before they can transmit into the matrix (remember that's the reason why they are down in the tunnels: they need to come close enough otherwise they can't get into the matrix).
finally: why don't the machines set up a fake matrix with no-one real in it that kills anyone that connect through massive electric shock or whatever. they'll be knocking off precious agents left-right-and center until zion figure out they've been had (or they could even sacrifice a "crop" of humans to make it seem more real to the zionites and simply set some machines in standby while they grow more "batteries").
the film is worth seeing once or twice for the flash, but it is kind of annoying when you realise no real thought was put into the back story but rather spent on cute tricks (like neo being an anagram of one) which we could have done without. hopefully they actually have reasons for these annoyances and the second and third film will explain them, but i doubt it. from most of the reports i've heard the next movie is just more flash (very good looking flash, but still flash) that is missing a certain something. i'll get around to seeing it eventually (probably).
rant 5: my spacebar
my spacebar squeaks. it's really f'ing annoying. it would be okay if it did it all the time, or under set conditions, but it doesn't. it just randomly squeaks. it's annoying. erm... that's the end of the rant. not really much to rant about (but it is really annoying sometimes)
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