WillWybrow.com

Throwing my lot in with the Skype window photoshops. Next stop: bandwagon central.

1. Get rid of old things
2. Make things that are staying look nicer
3. Do more things (maybe)
4. ?????????
5. Fuck

Fuck you. ACTUALLY FUCK YOU FOR BEING THIS FUCKING DUMB.

Article, tweets.

Here is a quick test to find out how good your opinions are, using the student fees protest as an example case. If you thought:

“The protest was a bad idea, students should just suck it up and pay. It’s a reasonable price for your improved job prospects.”

Sorry, you don’t score any points this time. Not only does your opinion suck, but I’d bet you are a really indignant person who uses the fact that you work and pay taxes to complain about everything and I can’t shake the intuitive feeling that you probably have a weirdly-shaped head so you are going to have to look elsewhere for now.

“It’s about time someone stood up to the Government’s evil plans but it’s a shame the day was ruined by a handful of people smashing up Tory HQ.”

Uh oh, you said the magic word, ‘ruined’, and now you too lost all your points. You strike me as pretty boring and way too idealistic and we all know that people with ideals are always trying to ruin your day with them. Zero points.

“Disregard protest, acquire riot!”

Correct! Whether through apathy or ignorance you’ve arrived at the correct stance that the Government are going to do whatever they want and the worse things are now, the slimmer the chance they’ll get re-elected when their term is over. You might still be hanging on to the tiny thread of hope that comes with the alternative vote referendum that the Lib Dems might not completely let down everyone who voted for them (and hopefully Miliband will step up and do something at this point), or you might not give a single fuck. But at the same time, it doesn’t take a genius to realise that rioting is fucking badass and those guys who smashed up 30 Millbank and lit fires outside were pretty awesome, turning an otherwise shitty and forgettable event into something that brings the angry right-wing kids out from under their rocks to decry what they feel is the lefties’ false sense of entitlement to a publicly-funded (or at least heavily supported) higher education and also the boring lefties themselves have popped their heads up to loudly denounce any connection with the people doing all the fun rioting and to promise that all the actual students there were well-behaved and peaceful because everyone in Whitehall will probably think “oh, since it wasn’t any of the students fucking up that building I’d guess we’d better listen to them and do what they want, right?” and everyone will live happily ever after.

Wearing things is such a bastard. Everybody’s so happy to have the temperature inside buildings sky-high, and seemingly more so when it’s the winter. I can’t keep dealing with this. To go outside and get to places I’ll put on a jacket and be warm but inside places I’ll have to take it off and be encumbered by it to not be too hot. What’s the answer?

As far as I’m concerned, the solution was worked out long ago back when we were schoolkids and used to tie our school sweaters around our waists by the arms when it was too warm. And if it was cold enough to warrant a coat, there were nice secure coat-pegs you could leave it on during the day. I guess what I want really is for trying jumpers around your waist by their arms to not look so ridiculous and also for university to have (possibly named) coat pegs inside lecture rooms.

It’s hassle at gigs as well. Nobody wants to be bundled up in clothes in the middle of a room full of hundreds of dancing bodies. But the walk back to the train station at the end is always an icy choke-hold that can’t be avoided (unless you bring a coat and put it in the cloakroom at venues which a) aren’t always there, b) aren’t always free and c) require you to queue up for ages at the end with all the other chumps who risked taking advantage of the facilities).

Marty McFly’s jacket in the future was able to automatically adjust size. That’s a pretty shitty feature really, but what I’d like is some variation where clothes can adjust how well they insulate you. That would be just fine by me. But until someone works it out, I guess I’ll just resign to be hampered by lugging a jacket around inside or cold because I didn’t bring one out with me.

Probably.

Backstory (Facebook link, sorry).

I love overhearing people because I can silently and smugly judge the balls out of them for the awkward shit they say to each other. On the way into university this morning some dude behind me was talking to some girl about his course. Complaining about it, I think. Turns out that after taking a course in politics, he didn’t really like politics. Except for, in his words, “development”, which, to people on undergraduate degrees in the University of Warwick’s Politics department, presumably means something more specific than the common definition of the word. Ultimately, he told her, there wasn’t much to do with development in his current year, just a module called “Development and Gender”.

and that’s less about development and more about gender and I don’t want to sit through a bunch of feminists’ opinions. I’m not anti-feminist but… I just can’t be bothered with all that

By this point I’d had him pegged as more-or-less a tosser and I missed a couple of lines in the conversation that I couldn’t hear over the sound of my involuntary but very powerful eye-rolling. Upon returning to the conversation I caught a line from the girl including the phrase “thorny caress”. The guy jumped on it for some reason with this:

A thorny caress? That’s a very poetic description. A thorny caress like what your grandma gives you.

*AWKWARD SILENCE*

Ha, yeah, sometimes I take things too far!

Sure you do, pal. I had to interject here and I turned around and laughed in his face. “Too far?” I asked him. “What do you mean by that? You want to hear some real inappropriate comments?” They looked pretty perplexed that I’d interrupted them so I carried on. “More like the thorny caress of the rough pubic area of one of your mum’s old friends from school that she used to keep in touch with against your six-year-old cheek as he rakes his sweaty, semi-erect penis across your lips from base to tip, even though he’s meant to be baby-sitting you. All the while, he’s clutching your head between his grimy hands and leering salaciously as he thumbs the tears out of the corners of your eyes, telling you not to say anything to your parents or he’ll have to hurt them and your then three-year-old sister who was curled up naked in the foetal position on his kitchen floor, shuddering and bleeding from his turn molesting her. The thorny caress that you wake up startled to the flashbacks of, drenched in cold sweat and alone in your bed.” Pay attention, guys, because if you want to impress a girl you’ve really got to show them how much better you are than other dudes, especially at this kind of thing.

Well, we’d stopped walking by now and I wasn’t about to stand there while they processed my gloriously-painted scene so I turned away and kept walking, heading to lectures.

I think the moral of the story is: don’t be a dick about gender equality. Maybe?

The case for not calling Twitter a social network

When it comes to connections, Twitter doesn’t have ‘friendships’ as such. It is entirely based on one-way connections; you follow someone you find interesting but they don’t have to follow you back, nor should you expect them to. If someone finds your tweets interesting or your @ replies engaging then you can get to know someone on Twitter and become mutual followers.

With a social network you have to request someone as a friend and it has to be verified by the other person. It’s a service for people you already know in real life to index your online presence, rather like a phonebook or contact list, and of course to show the world how many people you know.

You’re not obligated to follow people you know in real life on Twitter. But with Facebook, you kind of are obligated to accept their friend request, because you can always take them off of your homepage and stop your status updates reaching them. But that’s what Facebook is for. While it’s often useful to follow people you know on Twitter (the #bskcrew, for example) because you can keep people updated with relevant local news and info and organise meet-ups. But just because that kid you never spoke to who used to sit across from you in English class in school is on Twitter, doesn’t mean you will end up necessarily following each other, even though that’s exactly the kind of person we populate our social network friends list with.

Also on social networking sites you have a profile page. Twitter’s ‘profile’ field is a 160 character bio that’s optional to fill in. Twitter doesn’t list any contact details and it doesn’t have a page full of your favourite music. It doesn’t have photo albums and it doesn’t have Flash games where you can swap cows with your aunt. Not that there’s anything wrong with this stuff, but they’re strictly social network things and that’s not what Twitter is.

You could argue, of course, that you can use Twitter to network with people socially, and so it deserves the description. But it’s kind of a new term and while yes Twitter might fit the literal wording, it doesn’t fit the idea that the phrase was coined to describe.

But people have made friends on the internet since it started and nobody’s bothered to call messaging boards or IRC ‘social networks’. Probably because they lack profile pages and photo albums and lists of favourite bands, and the only way to identify a user is by their username (and on a forum they might have a small, square avatar).

So?

Okay, up to this point, all I’ve done is say I think it’s wrong to classify Twitter as a social network. I haven’t got to the point where it makes you a cunt.

It’s because, you bunch of dickholes, now everyone wants in. If there’s one thing that average internet users can do really well, it’s ruin a web service with their presence. Once upon a time, Facebook was only open to university students. Remember that? It was a useful tool for organising events and keeping in contact with new university friends. Those were the days. But, of course, it’s for socially networking. So everyone needs to be on it so you have a complete set of people you know in a handy list. Your aunts and uncles are on it. Your ten-year-old sister is on it. People’s grandparents are on it. Emotional teenagers are on it. But that’s fine. We can deal with that because that’s what Facebook is for. But then someone said that Twitter is the new social network du jour and like the bandwagon-jumping pricks they are, a whole teeming mass of ill-educated, unfunny, culturally and educationally bankrupt people have swarmed in and are ruining it. They’ve heard it’s a social network and so they’re trying to use it like it’s “the new Facebook” or similar… they’re getting all their friends to sign up and diluting all the nice people with horrible people. And they don’t understand that it’s normal for people to follow each other because of shared interests, not because of some real-life meeting. They don’t know that’s what the nice part of the internet is about.

So you’ll get some tossers who, for no reason, delete you as one of their followers even though it doesn’t affect them in any way to have a particular follower. If a person is @ replying you with shit then there’s a handy block function but removing a follower because you don’t know them is not how Twitter is supposed to work you fucking cock muncher argh fuck all this

TL;DR butthurt over being deleted from following someone

Twitter has just introduced a ‘people you may know’ feature, lifted straight out of Facebook, it seems, right down to the position on the Twitter website is appears in.

Why? I’m not sure it really enhances the user experience much. With Facebook, you make friendship connections with people you’re meant to already know from real life. So if you and some third party have a lot of mutual friends then there is a chance that you will know that person as well, through one or more of said mutual connections.

But Twitter isn’t like that. You don’t follow people you know just because you know them. You follow them because you might be interested in their updates. I wouldn’t automatically follow someone just because I know them and I wouldn’t expect any of my friends to put up with any of the tweetstream spamming I do unless they actually get something out of it.

So all the ‘people you should follow’ feature can offer is suggesting Twitter accounts that the people you follow are following. That’s not really helpful. If everyone followed every suggestion we’d all end up following each other and that would make Twitter pointless.

A better option would to be some kind of semantic analysis or hashtag logging that suggested people who hashtag the same kinds of topics as you. But that is almost redundant because hashtags are clickable to find out who else is talking about that stuff. It would require some long-term data collection to build up a profile of hashtags that could then be compared like a last.fm profile to match your tweet-compatibility.

I think this could be another feature that the Twitter team is trying to monetise. We’ve all seen the ‘promoted’ button next to certain trending topics… how long before Coca-Cola appears in your ‘people you should follow’ box with a little ‘promoted’ sticker next to its name?

I thought I’d at least have already quit Facebook by the time Twitter got ruined.

Saw this last night. I have a few thoughts on it that aren’t really related to how much I enjoyed the film. Here goes:

Woody’s arm was better

At the end of Toy Story 2, Woody’s arm was all bulbous and poorly repaired. This was a pretty big plot element because his breakage is what sets off the whole story about the broken penguin Wheezy and is how Woody is found accidentally by Al. Thus the resolution of this at the end of the film ties off the whole adventure nicely. But in Toy Story 3, Woody’s back to normal.

Bo Peep is gone

Woody’s love interest is gone! If, like me, you didn’t think much of Bo, this is probably a good thing. She wasn’t good for him anyway. Who wants to date a woman who’s already got sheep? Woody should find someone younger and have some sheep of his own, right? I personally always shipped Jessie and Woody because I like him more than Buzz but we can’t have everything, right?

If there were a Toy Story 4…

…then it’d be worth it just to have Timothy Dalton and Kristen Schaal playing the new toys. And Whoopi Goldberg as that cool-looking octopus was good, and Richard Kind (that hypochondriac, Harvey, from Scrubs) as the bookworm was a nice touch but I don’t think the new characters really had enough to say. The film could have done with being thirty to sixty minutes longer possibly. I reckon it’s a shame they wasted Kelsey Grammer as the villain in Toy Story 2 because he’d have made a good Lotso. It’s good that they didn’t play out the older-and-revered-father-figure-turns-out-to-be-evil thing for very long before the “reveal” that Lotso was the villain because that was basically cut and pasted from Toy Story 2.

Spanish Buzz was hilarious

but very unrealistic. There’s no way an action figure would contain that much processing power. I’m guessing his developing personality would have to be stored in some kind of flash memory and that his ‘demo mode’ would live in some EEPROM on the circuit board inside along with his default settings for Spanish Mode. Maybe Buzz is running a quad-core i7 processor inside his back? Actually, yes, I’m sure that’s it. And if you unscrew his chest there are 2 USB ports and a DVI out and he’s got two SLi GeForce GTX 480s in his legs and can run Crysis at 60FPS on full settings.

“lol Ken is gay”

Also pretty funny I thought. Though it would have been better had he actually turned out to be gay. Not only would it have been a positive message for kids but it’d probably have the religious right up in arms and “controversy” that sparks off those nutcases is always a good thing.

That’s probably enough for now. I did really enjoy the film (though I think I enjoyed Inception more) so thanks, Pixar, for not fucking up for three whole films. I am sure the Toy Story trilogy will enjoy its place amongst the Great Trilogies. That is until some years down the line someone says “why don’t we resurrect Toy Story?” and then they make Toy Story 4.0 where an evil iPad has taken over the world’s digital infrastructure and Shia LaBeouf has to team up with an aged-looking Woody who’s past his prime in order to take down the culprit by using explosions.