StumbleUpon | Darque's blog posts

http://Darque.stumbleupon.com/review/35951107/

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 18:14:36 -0700

I just watched President Obama address Congress. As usual, he was a brilliant orator. But one question - in precisely which country does he live? Why does he think that Republicans and Democrats can work together on anything? Maybe he didn't notice the fact that the Republicans were the ones in the corner heckling him and holding up goofy signs - I couldn't read them, but I assume they had something to do with illegal immigrants or his birth certificate. These are the people from whom he expects bipartisan support?

The Republicans are facing the foreseeable future as this: no, no, no. They will vote no on everything. Health care? No. Improving infrastructure? No. Withdrawing troops? No. Just, simply, no. There's no rationale behind it, no reasoning, beyond the simple hatred of all things Democratic, and the knowledge that they are sinking further and further into the minority. So why bother trying to woo them? Fuck them. They are irrelevant to any substantive discussion, with their death panels and birthers and deathers and shameless pandering to corporations, churches, and the criminally insane. Fuck them. If you want to get something done in Washington, Mr. Obama, you'll have to work around them, not with them. They hate you, and they will do anything they can to stop you, no matter what your aim or effort. Fuck them.

Also, what's with all the women in red dresses?

http://Darque.stumbleupon.com/review/34817767/

Wed, 29 Jul 2009 14:04:29 -0700

Tomorrow, we will be beginning Connecticon 2009, the premier anime/gaming convention in the state. I'll be running the Rock Band 2 tournament, so if you happen to be in the area and want to rock out, come on in and see me.

In the immortal words of Al Bundy... "Let's rock."

http://Darque.stumbleupon.com/review/32783982/

Wed, 13 May 2009 09:53:25 -0700

After all these years, and thousands upon thousands of Stumbles, I finally broke the Stumbletron. I hit the button, and it says, "Unknown Error." Yeah, I know what it is: I reached the end of the internet. Do I have to find another excuse for my insomnia now?

http://Darque.stumbleupon.com/review/32144196/

Sun, 19 Apr 2009 21:10:05 -0700

Yes, April 20 is the anniversary of the Columbine High School shootings. It's also Hitler's birthday. Both of those facts are irrelevant, however: April 20 is a holiday for entirely different reasons. If you don't know why, then don't worry about it, but if you do, Happy 4/20.

In the meantime, here's something I thought was cute: it is officially 4/20 here, Eastern Standard Time, and my SU blog here has 420 subscribers. But hey, "pictures, or it didn't happen," right?

Well, I thought it was pretty cool. So cool I spent 4/19 hoping that I got no new subscribers. Anyway, here's to the end of prohibition, mis amigos - a noble goal for next year.

(Parenthetically, anyone notice that I have 20,960 pages, and the counter indicates that I've got "21K+" favorites? It's read that for a while now, although I couldn't guess when it changed to 21K. Is it counting videos and photos? Is it just plain wrong? Is it simply so innocuous that I shouldn't even notice or care?)

http://Darque.stumbleupon.com/review/31447842/

Fri, 27 Mar 2009 00:25:00 -0700

Strange, it seems that there's a recent resurgence in the trend of furry-hating. There was a peak a while back (probably that insipid CSI episode), and then it sort of died down into a dull background noise. Hardly a scientific measurement, but I have seen more than a few folks cracking on furries in the last week or so, which is more than that background noise I've gotten used to.

No, I'm not really a furry. It's not like that. More like this: I've done much weirder shit than that, and thoroughly enjoyed it. Dressing up in a suit to have sex seems kind of tame to me, but these kids are utterly harmless and certainly not worthy of the scorn heaped upon them. I mean, they're just getting laid - and not even with children or animals or blowup dolls of Fred Thompson like some of you sick fucks, but actual consenting adults. Who cares if they feel like wearing mascot uniforms while they're getting some nookie?

So come on, folks. Leave the nice people in fur-suits alone. Save your shame and contempt on people that truly deserve it - like assholes who can't properly use its and it's.

http://Darque.stumbleupon.com/review/31445699/

Thu, 26 Mar 2009 22:35:13 -0700

Trolls these days. Nowadays the kids just cut and paste the same worn-out insults that our forefathers long ago got bored with. They think it's just fun to get someone to respond, but I know people that brought art to trolling. I miss Traviskab - now that was a troll worthy of respect. StumbleUpon says he doesn't exist, but those of us that remember, we know better. The man was a genius. He could make statues of Jesus weep with shame, with little more than a little riffing on abortion and the diet of city cockroaches.

It's like seeing misspelled graffiti on the side of the Met. The kids, they just don't understand. Considering that Travis's SU blog is simply gone, apparently the management didn't get it either. I guess the way to avoid being banned for trolling these days is to suck at it.

http://Darque.stumbleupon.com/review/31204539/

Thu, 19 Mar 2009 00:17:48 -0700

I wanted to see Penn Jillette's appearance on the Colbert Report. That sounds simple, right? When we want to see a specific couple of minutes of television footage, that's pretty much what the internet is all about these days, right? Well, not so much.

Sadly, my computer isn't happy playing videos from some websites right now. (Boo hiss, Adobe - why do you not love us Linux users?) Comedy Central is one of those websites. But at least YouTube and Google work fine, so no biggie. I go to Google to find the interview, and my first search was "penn jillette stephen colbert." This was the result:

I was going to do a fancy circle around the key parts, but it's late. The point is, a search under Google Video for "penn jillette stephen colbert" somehow returns three videos, two of them of Glen Beck and the middle a weird bash of liberals comparing Dennis Miller to Bill Maher on art funding. "Radical libertarian atheist magician interviewed by parody right-wing blowhard" is somehow equal to "right-wing fucktard bashing the President."

It's not like it was just the top pick of a bunch of unrelated stuff, either. Google produced only these three videos. And check out the "Related Videos," too: three different Obama-bashing sessions from Beck's uniformly uninformed Fox News show. Are they somehow related to Penn Jillette, maybe? Let's see: "Obama says give money to government, not charity," "Obama says buy stocks," and "Obama's global warming agenda," the last presumably a sinister anti-everything-good plot to take over the world using French words and people saying "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas."

Just when this conservative crap should be slinking to its corner to lick its wounds after its Election Day mauling, here it is taking over Google. Google, fer cryin' out loud! You have to give it to these guys, they're persistent. Tenacious as a herpes infection. Long after any self-respecting person should have said, "Shit, guys, I'm sorry, we've pretty much been making this up as we went along," they're still out there slinging their shit. And serious people end up having to take it seriously. What a travesty.

Good thing there's still the First Amendment. While others are forced to treat the dumbest of right-wing douchebaggery like polite company, I'm more than happy to call them assholes.

http://Darque.stumbleupon.com/review/31153761/

Tue, 17 Mar 2009 10:57:29 -0700

It's inevitable: within the SU reviews of any page that features a photo or photos of something unusual, interesting, strange, or funny, there will be one idiot claiming "photoshop!" or, even more grammatically offensive, "shopd!!!1!"

These are like the assholes who inevitably show up at a rock concert who, when given a few seconds of silence, will shout, "Play 'Free Bird!'" I await clinical trials to definitively determine whether these are actually the same individual assholes, but for now, let's suffice to say that they're at least the same kind of asshole. If they're not the same species of asshole, at least they're the same genus.

"Free Bird" and Photoshop have their places. The classic Lynyrd Skynyrd anthem will continue to out-live the humiliation placed upon it by the assholes - much like "Under Pressure" survived Vanilla Ice. That's what cool songs do - they get played, then overplayed, then turned into a cliche, and then forgotten, and then rediscovered as classics. And, I will readily volunteer, I still have "Free Bird" in my short music playlist. But that doesn't mean that I want to hear some local band mangle it - hell, I don't even want to hear a good band mangle it. A friend of mine who plays the guitar has a contingency plan for such an occurrence at a concert: he practiced playing "Free Bird" as muzak. One verse, and even the asshole who called for it will be taking it back. I wonder if it would instead make everyone in the audience wish for him to be tarred and feathered, but hey, at least it's a plan.

Meanwhile, Photoshop also has its place. Some ideas just don't work in reality, so you can't take the picture - but you can use Photoshop (or, better yet, GIMP) to create the image you want. Whether it's funny or alarming or just used to make a point, Photoshop has its place. And honestly, if someone's trying to pass off an altered image as genuine in some form that actually matters, such as in court, then yes, there's a perfect usage for the "Photoshop!" accusation.

The problem is when you take these innocent elements out of their usual and rightful place in the universe, and instead place them into the hands of people who are ignorant of their meaning, instead thinking they're reinventing humor. The thing is, neither of them is funny. They never were. You don't call for "Free Bird" because you want to hear it, but because you have this asshole gene in you that convinces you that it's funny, or that no concert is complete without some asshole calling for it. Likewise, people don't claim "Photoshop" when they think a picture has been altered, but just because they have the asshole gene that leads them to think that it's funny, or that no discussion of a photo is complete without some asshole calling it.

There are other examples, too - the first poster on a blog page whose entire message consists of "FIRST!!!1!", or that jackass that sings, "And you smell like one, too!" at the end of every rendition of "Happy Birthday." Maybe there's some insidious logic loophole in our sense of humor - what if, the horror of it, people actually thought that repetition actually makes unfunny things funny? Now that's a cruel joke.

So please, do yourself a favor. Refrain from this behavior. We are not animals, and we are not subject to every whim that crosses our minds. You don't want to hear Godsmack do "Free Bird." (Hell, you probably don't even want to hear Godsmack at all.) You don't think that the photo of an underwater restaurant is "shopd," nor do you care if the image of Darth Vader dueling Spock is really altered - as if we didn't already know. So please, exercise your constitutional right to shut the fuck up and not make an ass out of yourself.

http://Darque.stumbleupon.com/review/28519650/

Wed, 17 Dec 2008 22:41:24 -0800

To my lovely wife: As though we were made for each other... Beauty and the Beast. Of course, if anyone else calls you beast, I'll rip their lungs out.

http://Darque.stumbleupon.com/review/27833044/

Tue, 25 Nov 2008 10:12:10 -0800

Once again, a "brand new StumbleUpon." Once again, a home page that looks broken. Once again, things don't line up, columns are lining up off to the right and I can't scroll there, and it looks in general to be yet another POS update. Hey, SU: how about investing in some Quality Assurance people so that you can actually see what it looks like first, before you update and find out it's broken?