Haiku Are From Mars
Red dust blossoms lander
Solitary colonist flips switches
Home sweet home
Don’t facial me, Facebook!
Fuck off with this shiznit already!
I went to a party last night. I know, I know. That’s completely atypical behavior for your guru. I found out about it on Facebook and decided to RSVP. A friend of mine accepted a job offer and was moving out of town.
Of course, while at the party, which was held in a backyard, I found dog poop on my pants. I no longer bother asking, “Why me?” This sort of thing has become routine for me.
Facebook is something I use quite reluctantly and on a very minimal basis. I keep all of my privacy settings as restrictive as possible. Since new features get rolled out with me automatically opted-in this is an ongoing battle. Fuckers.
Part of maintaining my privacy is managing photographs of me. Controlling my profile is easy. I never upload any. Ever. But what happens when other people upload pictures of me to their Facebook profiles?
That’s when the fuck sets in.
Their settings may not be private. In fact, the pictures they upload may be open to the entire universe. Worse, thanks to Facebook’s “tagging” feature, people may be drawing little boxes around my face, providing a beautiful and convenient trail of breadcrumbs to shit I didn’t want online in the first place.
Fuck!
So I told everyone I knew at the party, “No photos, please. My people believe it steals your spirit.” No, I’m not a member of any tribal population. By “my people” I mean uptight motherfuckers and vengeful passive-aggressive assholes who will end you if you violate my wishes.
The problem? Everyone and their grandmother at the party had fucking devices all over them. Cell phones with cameras, smart phones, iPods, iPads and iPhones were all over the fucking place. Thankfully I saw no cameras, but what good is that when everyone is packing devices that will do the same damn thing?
Worse, they fiddled with these devices continually. They played with them as if they were as fun as their own damn genitals. “Oops. It’s been ten seconds again. Time for my to fondle my iPhone. Stand back! I’m not sure how big this thing gets.”
Disclosure: I also was packing a device. An iPod Touch. But I kept it in my pants while interfacing face-to-face with actual humans. I needed no app for that.
Long story short, this morning I woke up and received “notifications” from Facebook that I had been tagged in two photos.
Motherfuckers!!!
Yeah, one person at the party (who I had explicitly asked not to take my photograph) had posted images, two of which contained my fearful visage. Then, a different person at the party came along and drew the little motherfucking box around my face, “tagging” me in Facebook parlance.
I wrote the photographer and asked her to edit me out of the pictures or pull the pictures down. She replied, “I have removed the tags.” She didn’t do as I asked. Either she’s dumb or she thinks she knows better. Grrrr.
Yep. The pictures are still on the internet. Completely outside of my control. And I’ll bet you dollars to donuts that some other person can still come along, think they are being helpful, and tag the fuckshit out of them – again.
Conclusion
As a global citizen of this planet, and one not wishing my copyrighted bread and butter (my face) gets on the internet without my consent, there is only one option left to me. I’ll never go to another fucking function where there is anyone I know.
I’m going to get me a lawyer to start sending “cease and desist” letters to my so-called “friends.” Yes, once again, that is Facebook parlance.
Make no mistake about it. If I want a facial, I’ll do it myself.
It rubs the Jello pudding pops on its skin
Last night we watched a little TV. “Last Comic Standing,” to be all up and up about it. They’d show a few minutes of the entertainment, then a few minutes of commercials. I swear to God, it seemed like the mix was exactly 50/50. Probably not, but it sure felt like it! We finally got sick enough to turn the damn thing off and go to bed.
I guess we won’t know who made it through to the finals until later. Hell, maybe we’ll never know. Horrors! How will we ever survive The Not Knowing?!?!?!?!?
After the mind-numbing hell of the commercials, we’d finally be returned to the show. As the entertainment continued, there, at the bottom of our screen, the asshole characters from some future show would dance and cavort around like escaped mental patients, trying to remind us that there are other shows in the universe besides the one we were currently watching. I’d wager that fully one-third of the screen was consumed by this bullshit. Advertisers know that movement draws the attention of the eye. As usual they are subtle as ever. Look for a new troupe of epileptics to start hawking products soon.
That’s the rub, isn’t it? We all already know that. We know there are something like 3,000 television channels now. And we all know by now, we’ve been sufficiently trained, that we’ll never, never, ever watch a show on the telly without having details about the next shows shoved down our motherfucking gullets.
We get that. It’s a sad fact of life if you choose to watch the idiot box. It’s called that for a reason.
We know other things, too. Like that you’ll pump up the volume on commercials until our ears bleed. (See: CAN YOU HEAR ME NOW!!!) Subtlety doesn’t count for jack shit when you have the ability to sacrifice my quality of life in the pursuit of lining your pockets with a few more pieces of silver. Got it, old chap!
So today I’m on the internet and reading Google News. I clicked a link I found compelling and was taken to the Washington Post web site. I don’t know if they are especially notorious about this or not, but that’s the site where it happened.
Before I could get to the promise land of Content I was forced to watch a television commercial. That’s when it hit me.
I was being forced to watch advertising before I was taken to a web page that just happens to be crammed to the gills with … guess what? More fucking advertising! Talk about double-dipping. That’s like paying $5 for a gallon of milk at the register, then paying another $5 at the exit for the privilege of taking it outside of the store.
Some future shock predictions that we can look forward to:
- The ability to sell ad space on the inside of your eye lids.
- Advertising on the walls of your home.
- Logos visible from the surface of the moon.
- Whoring out the name of your city.
- Printing commercials on the surface of the food you eat.
- Subliminal advertising beamed 24/7 as radiation across the whole planet.
- Product tattoos on your forehead.
Don’t worry. It’s no big deal what you have to endure as long as some asshole is getting rich.
Meanwhile I finally went to a web site known as MyLife.com and attempted to opt-out from their bullshit. Mind you that I’ve never visited this web site before or signed up for anything. I clicked the “Unsubscribe” link in their email and found, amazingly, that I was already subscribed to all of this bullshit:
- New Member Alerts: Notify me whenever new members join My Groups.
- Birthday Alerts: Remind me whenever a contact has a birthday.
- Special Offers: Notify me of special offers for MyLife services.
- Tips & Tricks: Send me tips & tricks on new and existing features.
- Partner Offers: Send me offers from selected marketing partners.
Each and every one of these “notifications” was turned on by default, for a site that I’d never even visited before!
Someone kindly direct me to the “opt-out forever for everything” checkbox. MyLife? What a friggin’ joke.
Macrocost and the hot mail spam injection
In the beginning I established a Hotmail email address for the purpose of running my blog anonymously. For those not in the know, Hotmail is a web-based email service that is owned and operated by Macrocost.
Oops. Macrocost is my private little nickname for the corporation better known as Microsoft. That oh-so-clever name is made up of “micro” meaning “small” and “soft” meaning “limp.” What a name for a company! I think that about sums it up. No wonder their software can’t perform. Heh.
Anyway, it turns out that Microsoft also owns another little web site called Bing. It’s a search engine named after my favorite character on the TV show Friends. It’s a search engine based on the premise that people like pictures more than a clean simple interface. It’s also alleged to provide more relevant results than Google, the site it apes in a myriad of shameless ways.
Whatever. Be that as it may. My Hotmail account has been completely spam free … until today. That’s mainly because I give out the email address very sparingly and never use it to sign up for anything.
So who should my first spammer be? Yep. You guessed it. Microsoft. It was an advertisement for their Bing search engine. Bing’s fucking 30% cashback offer, no less. How very interesting. Hotmail is the home turf of Microsoft, so now Microsoft is going to use that built-in advantage to spam me. Fuck.
Remember that Bill Gates once famously said the solution to eliminating spam was to charge postage for sending email. Note that he didn’t suggest that companies restrain themselves. Or that Microsoft fix all the GAPING HOLES in their shit that makes so much spam possible. Nope, the option the generates more income is the one Gates supports. How very odd.
No doubt when I signed up for Hotmail I inadvertently checked some damn box or agreed to some obtuse and tiny language in their TOS that allegedly gives them permission to contact me.
Sorry, Microsoft. No dice. When you made me your opponent you failed to consider a few things like:
- I don’t do business with spammers. Ever. It’s the only real defense against spam.
- I don’t fall for that “cashback” bullshit. Ever. (See above link.) It’s an insult to my intelligence.
- I pretty much hate the crashing, BSoD (Blue Screen of Death) world that Microsoft has given us. At work my Microsoft Word 2007 running on Windows Vista can’t even paint my document correctly. I have to refresh my work all the time. And this is supposed to represent the best of the best that’s out there?
- Google’s results aren’t always perfect and as relevant as I’d like, but they are still light years ahead of Bing. And I don’t like the way Bing displays results, either. If I look for a city, don’t categorize the results for me into marketable shit links that you want me to click so you’ll profit from them like: vacation, homes, real estate, map, hotels, attractions, weather, etc. All that extra categorization shit does is reduce the display of the results I actually wanted. Just give me what I asked for. Please. If I was interested in real estate or vacation information, I would have actually bothered to include those fucking terms in my original search request. If there is one thing I can’t stand it is Microsoft trying to guess what I want so they can squeeze a couple of extra pennies from my visit.
Keep your grotesque spam out of my Hotmail, Microsoft. Or next time I’ll really get irritated. 🙂
Update:
I went to opt-out of the Bing 30% cashback spam, and got the response from Hotmail documented in the image below. “There’s a temporary problem.” Indeed. What a coincidence – I’m unable to opt-out! Mwuhahahaha! Of course, last time I heard, Microsoft policy was that they have to run their own shit on servers running Microsoft software, and that puts them at a distinct disadvantage compared to the rest of the internet world. Curse you, Microsoft. You won this round but I’ll be back!
Shouts from the Abyss 
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