Portables Fashion Victims

I’ve started using portable softwares recently and I’m really liking it. By portable I mean self contained minimized versions, they’ve got all the functions minus all the bullcrap. I’ve got portable Nero 8 which is like 50mb stead of 300, portable PhotoShop, portable office, Dreamweaver and all kinds of crap I can’t live without. Of course you have to learn the procedure for making portable softwares, which is fairly complex but totally worth it if you are plaque with constant disk space constrain like yours truely.

Speaking of softwares, especially in relation to throttling as much juice as you can from your modest specs, for the past few years what has been constantly nettling me are these memory resident passively active statistical monitoring crapwares, that even trusted manufacturers like Apple bundled in everything they give out for free. I’m not an Apple hater, I think the iphone is really interesting and all but after such a big hype over their fagoty ipods and i-whatnots, I was really hoping they’d strip quicktime and itunes of their bonjours and home-calling crap.

What’s the deal with Apple and their hide-the-ugly-plumbing products anyway, seems to me like as the years went past they seemed more and more intent on sugarcoating their overpriced products with sleek and attractive design, without backing them up with enough inside spunk for the money. Personally, I think that’s pushing the envelope in the wrong direction, technology-wise. See the direction Microsoft is taking on Vista for instance, they’re simply making people dump almost half the computer in the world and for what?!! so they can make vista more theoretically functional and look as good as a Osx. It’s like all af a sudden they’re emulating Apple’s design because they think they’re in a push-come-to-shove scenario where people are ‘waking up’ to the fact that simplicity is the solution. What they don’t figure is that not everyone content on being another dumb fashion victim and they want a robush scalable OS that’s gonna work on their current specs and have a little more to offer then some UAC panel popping up so frequently its drives them nuts.

It’s not that I’m overly concerned about what these softwares can do to my system given the fact that I don’t use them and don’t plan on using them anytime soon. It’s just that we have two systems running here and my girlfriend’s planning on getting one of those Vaio lappy and apart from mending the wounds on the homefront, I’m sick and tired of people calling me about their system suddenly ‘hanging by a thread’ after they installed one of these things. I could seriously make a living disabling self starting ‘services’ if I start charging for it. Last time I checked even simply getting your system looked at and I mean, literally LOOKED at without doing anything could have you approximately 500 bucks poorer. And most of us have to pay because there’s no other way, because we’re too lazy or too ‘outgoing’ to familiarize ourselves with what we own. You can call yourself victim of conformity or you can blame manufacturers for their flawed insights but when you get down to it, it’s the majority and the people who did the most yapping in the general media who gets to decide our fate eventually in these kind of situation.

Censorship, Death and Che Guevara

One thing that struck me while reading 21 Techniques of Silent Killing by Master Hei Long was the descriptions of the techniques were as cold as the title. Considering the sensitive nature of its subject (Killing, Death) the Master’s words were so literal and industrial that you wouldn’t be blamed if at some point you thought you were reading a recipe from a cookbook. If you’re interested in these kinds of things and have the tendency to imagine yourself in the shoes of the person you’re reading about, the book pulls you in, rolls you around a bit and just throws you out disoriented, into the faggot that you have become in your mind. It’s not that this is so different from all the murder inc type instructional books out there in what it contains and traditionally, most of these books give the impression that everything in them are theoretical and that actually doing them hands on are plain crazy and if some crazy guy actually does them for kicks they’d be sorry it happened, but in 21 TSK forget about the friendly metaphors and parental warnings, the assumption is if you’re such a morally binding citizen why the fuck did you read this book, now fish out your trusty nunchaku and sharpen that shiv cos you’re no longer looking in.



I was thinking about it and I realized that, bearing in mind the serious business that killing is, books like this have a reason for being banned as oppose to how determined and stupid we all are to demand censorship be lifted on all things people like Master Hei Long throws at us. The military precision of the writing is well deserving of the seriousness of the subject. It diverts the generally gullible minds to straggle away to greener or sorrier pastures. Anyway, let’s digress a little here, let’s lift the damn censorship and hawk the Anarchist Cookbook in the next book fair for instance; it becomes a best seller because people buy them as survival guide. Then popular publishing houses started rolling out books about killing with funny anecdotes and college friendly manga type figures come next winter. Then just when you thought it’s the best thing since discovery channel some crazy nerd went John Rambo on his high school friends because nobody likes him and he stinks. Fact is when people started explaining about the gravity of the subject at the prologue of instructional books, they only spur interest, it’s like smoking is cool when you’re in high school and stupid high school kids think you have street creds or whatever but not so much when you’re addicted to it and you can’t shit unless you turn your toilet into an indian smoke signal.



Let’s be fair to our senses and think about what we’re fucking with before we shout ‘Ban Censorship’ to everything. We are slaves of generalization, we tend to worship everything new without thinking about what we really want. A few years back we saw Che Guevara as some sort of cool public enemy type revolutionist, sure he’s a great guy with great ideas, utopian but great anyway but many of the people sporting Che’s Ts don’t know anything about what he stands for or what the trend was all about. And people who think they’re above the rest delved too much into the little details and realized that he was all about torture and didn’t give a cow’s backlight about them. We either hide behind our ignorance to find the ultimate coolness or we dig up the reason the rest of the world is not and fail to see the big picture. Some of us are so blinded by the trend that we’d mistake a nipple suction for a bong pipe while some of us read too much into stuff to be a little more obscure that we’d masturbate with it. The upshot is that we trivialize the ideals behind great ideas and pass them off as seasonal whim for peer conscious pricks to boost their ego with. Somewhere along the line we just played down what could have been more to us then we never knew when it hit the air in a big way.