1. Safe mode - for computers.
A great idea in and of itself, I'm sure, and a lovely little chintzy name. If you're unsure as to what it is, it's basically just the setting you bung your computer in if you fuck the shit out of it; it gives you limited accessibility and usability, but should prevent you from garnering any more nefarious attention. It prevents you from using things like the internet, or from accessing certain areas, etc.. That's all sublime, I'm sure, but it begs the question: why do you need to give such a patently obvious label to such a stupid idea? You only go in safe mode if you're retarded and have allowed yourself to be buggered over repeatedly by trojans and the like -- that or you're a technician. If the latter, you're fine. If you're stupid enough to end up in safe mode, then you're clearly not be trusted with anything -- you should carry a warning sticker "may cease breathing due to deficient neurological ability" -- and thus this, coupled with the fact that if you're that stupid you could probably damage yourself sitting very still on a marshmallow, makes me think the mode should be called "reasonably safe mode". After all, you never know what it is that you can do with enough idiocy -- and, as demonstrated by the very fact it exists, no setting on a computer can guarantee the safety or security of its usage. Self-defeating labelling for a breed of cretins. Fan-fucking-tastic. Also, this makes me laugh at the pre-emptive hilarity this in-built mode provides. Manufacturers are happy to bleat on and on about how their new system cannot be breached; how the security is infallible, and how the firewall and this and that file is impeccably designed and meticulously executed. And yet we still find ourselves with computers that have this mode built in -- yes, advertising should probably read:
"X new system: practical, simple, efficient; the other-worlds in your living room (no guarantee of use)."
Call me fastidious (please do, it does it for me) but I take umbrage with any system that has to include this safety caveat. This is, however, only when said system heralds itself as breakthrough technology, even for the simplest of minds: technology which is guaranteed for this many years, or that many hours; and technology which is inerrable in its infinite security provisos. If it proclaims itself as shit as it is -- fine by me. Not only that, and I don't know about your computer, but ours doesn't even let you know how to access safety mode. The irony when you have to search the internet - the shepherd of your downfall - to figure out how your system allows you to access safe mode; I mean, come on, come the fuck on; how the hell is that reasonable!? God damn if I could use an interrobang right now!?!? I just find it the height of hilarity that they give you this fucking mode that you really shouldn't have to use, and then make it harder to crack into than Langley. If such a circumstance emerges that you need to gain entry into safe mode; are you likely to have the wherewithal to figure it out? Chances are that your computer skills are so woeful as to necessitate a call to a tech support line, who will invariably inform you that you might as well just dump the bugger and get a laptop -- at least the new ones will just let you press F10.
2. Look out! There's adverse weather conditions.
Here's another 'warning' or 'sign' that makes me so very, very annoyed: "Dangerous conditions: only make necessary journeys." What? Why would I make unnecessary journeys? Surely that's nigh-on tautological!? Why would I plump for a method of transportation if it was wholly unneeded for me to do so? Surely the fact you're making a journey in and of itself produces the necessity? Surely the fact that you have consciously decided to go out means that on some level your journey is necessary? Or are you suggesting I'm going to be reckless and start randomly driving just for the hell of it 'cause there's a blanket of snow? Or perhaps you're suggesting I often poodle around in my car, just questing further and further afield until I find myself in need of the sign "next town 8 miles ahead". Great, how useful. So if you're assuming that I'm dumb enough to need a warning which implies I should take extra care when the roads are snowy, presumably I'm also going to need a warning the next time the sun is at its highest and flies into my eyes, square-on? Perhaps you should provide me on-the-ground, by-the-minute cautionary commentary the next time I intend to jump a drain: "When jumping drains, take extra care to use both legs." I mean come the hell on; if you require that kind of spoon-feeding, I genuinely think you're going to die anyway. As with the breathing sign for safe-mode users, presumably you need help wiping your ass? Here, have my laptop manual; Dell promised it'd never break down. Or did they? I didn't buy direct from them, mind, because it never turned up (but hey ho! I'd only been waiting 20-odd weeks).
The other element to this stupidity is that they see the need to reinforce why you need to take extra precautions: "Snow on the ground can make cornering hard, and increase the likelihood of icy conditions; you will find it harder to grip the road." Well, yeah, I mean, it's wet? That's... you know, that's what water does -- it's unlikely to improve the conditions is it? "There's a smattering of ground-frost tonight, but this should greatly increase the chance of you getting home in double-time." I know what things do, because, well, I understand how the world works. If I didn't, I'd probably be dead or something. "During thunder storms, do not shelter under trees" -- I know. Do you genuinely believe I could have survived twenty years on this planet without that knowledge? -- Good grief the man on the TV has the biggest nose --. Or those frankly preposterous warnings from the Met Office (or perhaps the AA - not associated, but inextricably linked, with 'Alcoholics Anonymous') that recommend you take provisions with you. For the love of all that is sentient, what are the chances you're going to need twenty litres of water: in case you get trapped with... what, someone who has magically found themselves stranded with you after just fleeing a desert? I mean, come on; don't you know anything -- water makes driving harder. Trust me. They told me.
3. Do not touch when boiling. Can cause burns.
Again, this simply beggars belief that people would need this warning. And it's so very obvious why things like kettles have to include this kind of stupidity, isn't it? Well, it is to me. As far as am I aware, it's because you sued the last time you picked a kettle up by its sides, not its handles, and it's because you had to go to hospital, and because you had third-degree burns, and because you had to pay your insurance company some excess to cover your mindless idiocy; and that poor kettle-manufacturing company had to shell out because you were stupid enough to grab a kettle. What you going to sue next, the sun? Fuck off. Get off my planet.
4. Not to be ingested.
For the christ of hell. I mean. What!? Although better than "not to be digested" (a laughable product of mistranslation) it still begs the question: can people not distinguish between what is food and what is not? If this warning went unheeded would people start chowing down on bits of wood, matchsticks, USB cables, charcoal, that awful 5p sweet which is meant to look like a hamburger and tastes like it was boiled in a vat of hate? There cannot be precedent necessitation in this scenario: you surely cannot be telling me someone accidentally once ate that silicon crap you get in new shoes!? Do you not know anything about how to function as people!? Sweet mother of pearl.
5. The following was a work of fiction.
Well. I mean. I know. It's a cartoon. It's a cartoon! I mean... I don't. I can't even explain this one. It just... I don't understand.
6. Windows Live Messenger.
Strike me down, Lord, please -- if sanctity can be sought; if you deign absolution upon my unworthy soul; cleans me, infinite acts of contrition will be yours, I promise. Why oh why does this need to be called "live"!? This implies too many things which I can't even begin to fathom out why they'd need to be dispelled:
A) There is an alternate programme which delivers messages arbitrarily, on a whim, or "unlive". I'm sorry, and I know I haven't searched, but I really doubt there's an instant-messaging client which propagates itself as the only provider of useless messaging?
B) Previous versions were confused as only delivering messages when they felt like it.
Let us face it, here, there is one major problem with the 'claim to live':
A) i) If it is delivered at all, it is delivered live. It would impossible to deliver an instant message 'unlive', simply because the act of delivery guarantees the fact that you are there, and you are receiving it at some point, and it is delivering it at some point -- live, in other words.
Absolutely farcical: what the hell was wrong with 'Windows messenger' or, as the good old days, 'MSN'?!?!? It also needs a fucking apostrophe. Possessive!
7. Dangerous driving could lead to accidents.
So could safe driving. So could getting in a car. So could writing this blog for any longer because I'm about to explode in a fit of inevitable hatred and self-loathing. Wait. Not self. You. You-loathing. World-loathing; ad infinitum. It reminds me too much of Ricky Gervais' question: "What kind of a society has to remind people not to rape?" It is precisely that. Then again, reading the news this week, you'd be forgiven for suggesting to Ed Balls that perhaps 'Why we shouldn't rape' lessons should become a compulsory element of childhood schooling. I also hate the use of "could", and what it implies: it should say "can" lead to accidents. The use of "could" opens this out to infinite interpretations (as I have demonstrated above), at least "can" implies just that the action in itself acts as a possible pre-cursor to a reaction -- that your action can have possible reactions. It isn't tied down with ambiguities like "could". I should design signage.
I'm only angry because it's all tautological, self-explanatory bilge. It's stupid.
I could go on. But I might rupture my whole face, and be forced to eat blended matchsticks delivered belatedly by a fatuous technician riding a lightning-storm and full of boiling water.
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I actually am in one of those 'let's just keep writing' moods, so I'll probably be on auto-pilot from here on out: feel free to phase out, close the window, gaze longingly at the freedom of the outside, masturbate furiously - whatever gets you through really. These past six or so days have been so hella rubbish. I really hate being ill, and especially because if you're a man, and you get ill, it doesn't matter how genuinely crippled you are: you're pathetic, and a woman could cope better. There's all that awful flu advertising on the television at the moment (which I was forced to watch, from the confines on my (what felt like a death) bed. The premise is that for men, their remedy is to lie prostrate in their beds, bemoaning life, composing their last will and testament, and generally just lie around like a waste of space; meanwhile, the women -- who from some twisted karma-god -- are suffering from the same affliction, and yet are coping much more admirably. Whilst the man just lies around like a sack of crap, the woman continues to go to work (what kind of laughable gender-role-reversal is this!?) and look after the kids, whilst managing to maintain the household. Well, that can fuck off as far as I am concerned. As all my updates of the past week should so: I was literally close to death. I was fingering the burning doilies of the River of Styx. As I proclaimed loudly to anyone who would humour me, I "have [sic] man-flu: it's worse than AIDS." It was true. I was bedridden and almost dead. Woe betide me to stop moving for just a second, though. It's a bloody self-defeating circle of hatred: if you keep going, keep ploughing on through the routine, people will accuse you of never being ill in the first place; and if you dare take a few days off, they'll say you're just hamming it up. Gentlemen: when I have mastered the art of genetic manipulation, I shall call you, and I will dole out life's worst plagues -- then we can show the other gender that we're really ill!!! ;(!!!
I'm still hoovering in that awful 'almost better' stage, where you think that you're going to be fine to go out and jump around, but then you do, and then you feel worse again. So, it's more reading and more relaxing. The only good thing about the plague, I guess, was the fact that I got to re-read the whole Harry Potter 'heptalogy' (or septology, I'm not sure). That was fabulous. I didn't skive off work, either. Oh no, never fear, I am as far from errant as is possible to be. They call me the 'bad weather facilitator'; although that may be because my dad is a cloud.
Not sure what else I want to harp on about, to be honest, so I guess I'll wrap it up here. I'll go watch... dunno, nah, fuck it. I'll listen to music, and then I will watch a Futurama film. That's a rockin' post-illness-recovery-Friday night. Just how I like it. Serve warm, with lashings of hot water bottle.
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