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10 things I hate

10. Wii

According to some, the only console that brought some innovation to gaming overall. According to me, the biggest crap Nintendo has ever released. Wii is generally like communism - good in theory, sucks in practice. It could have revolutionised video gaming, it could have been the best console, it could have easily defeat its rivals. But it didn’t. I mean, it actually is the best-selling console on the market, and it reached the kind of customers no one has ever managed to reach before - casual gamers, but Nintendo have completely forgotten about the more important consumer base, the hard(er?)core gamers. Because nobody wants to play Mario all the fucking time.

9. Public transportation

I actually have to use public transport to get to and from school almost everyday. And of course, it has many advantages - it’s cheap, relatively ecological and environment-friendly, and often there are the bus lanes which are really in case of a huge traffic jam. But the list of drawbacks is much longer, unfortunately.

First of all, public transportation in Kraków (where I live) is free for people over 70. One could think “heh, how many 70-year-olds would actually use public transport?”. Surprisingly, the answer is: all of them. The buses and trams, quite crowded without the billion grannies using them, often are filled with people almost standing on each other’s head because of the lack of room to breathe.

Another group of annoying people travelling by the same buses as I do that are the stinking homeless garbage collectors. Oh man, if you happen to be on a crowded bus with a bum standing next to you, preventing yourself from throwing up will be a very tough job.

The last annoying thing in public transportation I’d like to point out are the screaming children. When one of them starts crying, and by chance there’s another one riding the same bus, he will probably start crying as well, and then the third one, and the fourth one… This can drive you mad. Even though I do always wear earphones when travelling by bus, to clarify that.
I’m gonna have to get a driving license as soon as I can.

8. Pi (π)

Not that I hate it, I just hate the ambiguity it brings to mathematics. While you can give the exact area of a rectangle, (in most cases) triangle or even most of polygons, while working on circle- or sphere-related calculations, the exact value of pi is never known. Whether you will substitute it with 3.14, 22/7 or 3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937510, you will never get the accurate result.

While the value of pi has been computed to more than a trillion (10¹²) digits, elementary applications, such as calculating the circumference of a circle, will rarely require more than a dozen decimal places. For example, a value truncated to 39 decimal places is sufficient to compute the circumference of any circle that fits in the observable universe to a precision comparable to the size of a hydrogen atom.

Wikipedia

And even though the information I’ve found on Wikipedia (above) cheers me up, I never feel fully satisfied with my circumferences, because I know that pi’s expansion is infinite. That’s why I don’t use rounded corners on regua.biz.

7. AA battery-powered devices

With such a wide variety of rechargeable batteries we have nowadays, why are the good ol’ AAs still used? Of course, there are some situations where they have to be used (although one can easily replace them with rechargeable ones), but in my opinion they’re becoming obsolete. Would it be so hard to recharge your remote control connecting it directly to a TV with a cable built in the back of the television set? I don’t really think so.

For instance, one of the most annoying things in Xbox 360 as a whole is that its controllers are AA-powered. Obviously, it’s just a way to make more money (recharging set - £14.99, rechargeable battery - £9.99), but I still can’t understand why a NEXT generation console would implement hardware solutions that are not efficient anymore. Recharging is the future… provided that some kind of standard charger is invented. I don’t want to use umpteen of them, even now I have three different chargers lying on my desk.

6. Grapefruit

What’s the point in eating a fruit that you have to sweeten to make it eatable? Aren’t the fruit supposed to be tasty? First of all, you have to cut a grapefruit in half, because there’s probably no other way of opening it without making all of the pulp flow out on your shirt. Then, having tried it, you decide that it needs some sugar. After that, when you finally can eat it, you spend half an hour wondering how it is actually supposed to be eaten. Fork doesn’t work, and neither does spoon - you can only manage to consume the outer layer of the pulp. When you eventually use a blender to mix the pulp up and are happy about solving this difficult problem, you realise that it’s not even tasty. One cannot sum it up better than Randall Munroe did in his comic: fuck grapefruit.

5. 12-year-olds on Xbox Live

I understand that the average age of a gamer may have lowered over the past few years. I understand that 360 is the most popular console in many countries and that over 17 million people worldwide own it. I understand that a loving parent can get an Xbox 360 for their child’s 11th or 12th birthday. What I do not understand, however, is what these children find so amusing in screaming and shouting to their headsets or trying to act like professionals (“I threw a flashbang, go, go, go!” said with a voice of a 11-year-old doesn’t sound much convincing, believe me).

Microsoft decided to ship a headset with each 360. That was a good move allowing all people to communicate easily. All people, however, is literally all of the Xbox Live users. Even if you can’t play a game, don’t understand the rules or get pwned at every corner, why the fucking hell do you have to scream to the mic words like “aaaaaaaaheeeeeeeh”? Does it really help your self-esteem? Or you feel more adult while doing this with your squeaky voice?

Please, if you happen to be a 12-year-old reading this, take my advice: stop it. You can be easily muted in most games or even via the XBL settings, so why do you need this? Let’s all play peacefully.
…oh, I’ve almost forgotten. There’s always another way to solve this annoying problem. You can just commit suicide. Taking your own life is even supported by Wikipedia, so don’t hesitate and go for it. You’ve got my sincere support.

4. Jack Thompson

I do respect other people’s views, I do respect other people’s faith, but what Thompson has been doing is not, as Wikipedia nicely put it, “public advocacy of conservative Christian moral standards”. It’s just bullshit.

First of all, video games have become one of the most popular ways of spending leisure time in the 21st century. Fighting with them, as Jacky seems to be doing, will more likely humiliate him than change the way they’re being produced. Of course, if his anti-gaming crusade started in early 80’s, he could’ve accomplished something. But now, when the industry is worth trillions of dollars, he can’t do anything to stop children from playing adult games and game developers from including violence and sex in their games. He claims that youngsters can easily buy 18+ rated games, and that the games can damage their brain… okay, I agree with the former - buying an adult game when you’re 11 is not that difficult. But the brain thing? It seems that his brain has been damaged, not the gamers’.

What about movies? Aren’t many violent films shown on the TV at times like 8pm, when there are a lot of children watching? Oh yes, they are. Are the children’s brains damaged, do the children have no social life and keep killing everybody? No, Mr Jack, this is not true. So why the hell do you think that video games are capable of destroying one’s mind? Aah, just go fuck yourself perform an anatomically impossible sexual act on yourself.

3. Microsoft Windows

Microsoft has nearly dominated the OS market with their operating system. Of course, in this case setting ridiculously huge prices and screwing all the customers is logical, almost every company in the world would do the same. But what if the system that’s so popular isn’t the best out of all available? And what if the system that’s so popular isn’t good in the first place? It results in 90% of all OS users using the shitty one.

With each new version of Windows, Microsoft is limiting the users’ freedom to actually change anything in how the system works, dooming the users to the standard Windows behaviour. With Linux or OpenBSD, you can change literally everything you could dream of, and what’s more: if you happen to delete or damage important system files, it won’t display a blue screen and tell you to reinstall itself; it will gently download the missing files from the Internet and revive the system in a few minutes.

I completely understand why so many people use Microsoft’s OS nowadays - it’s the software. Developers prefer to create applications for Windows, because then they have bigger consumer base; and users prefer to use Windows because then they have more software available - and they all get stuck in a vicious circle. The only way to finally end Microsoft’s monopoly and let the users choose is to start developing a decent number of software for systems like GNU/Linux, BSD and MacOS. Viva la revolution!

2. Lech Kaczyński

During the history of modern democratic Poland, that is from 1989 till present day, no douchebag greater than Lech Kaczyński has held the office of the President of the Republic of Poland. Not only is he a midget (officially he’s 5′ 3″, but he looks much smaller compared to other politicians), not only is he stupid (mistaking other people’s names is usual behaviour of his), but he seems to be ignoring the Polish nation as well.

Since 1989, usually the same political party would win both the presidential and parliamentary elections. However, in 2007, due to incompetence of the government arising scandals involving major Polish politicians, the government decided to call for new elections and (unsurprisingly) lost them. Only now are the actual privileges and capabilities of our president visible; he has no rights at all, except for vetoing acts and complaining about everything the new government is doing. I’m glad that the fag Kaczyński will be leaving his office in two years’ time, because with an ally president the parliament could do so much more for the country, without the unnecessary fights with that stupid, fat pig.

And the winner is…

1. MySpace

Internet has been quickly developing over the past few years. With innovations like Web 2.0 and social networking, however, comes the incredible amount of thin shit called MySpace. The idea behind it was quite revolutionary at the time it was invented; however, as it was one of the first social websites in the Web, many kinds of different people registered and used it. And by “many kinds” I mean lots of emo kids, lots of 10-year-olds, lots of 40-year-olds and almost no people whose IQ is even slightly greater than 18. Ever read the so-called MySpace blogs? Despite the fact the every second word is either “lol” or “xD” and each sentence ends with “xoxo”, the main point of most of the blog posts is “just to say hi to all my friends, xoxo” or “just to tell you how tired I am, xoxo”. And when you eventually find a nice guy/girl you’d like to chat with, you decide to see their photos (which, strangely, everybody on MySpace wants to share with you) and find out that they are actually 43 years old an look like Chewbacca. This is not how social networking should look like.

Okay, I know that hating the users of a particular website doesn’t make you hate the website in general. So, what is it that I can’t stand in MySpace as a whole? The fact that after 1999, when it was launched, probably nobody has ever made a significant upgrade to the site’s code. It loads like a bitch, often displaying some weird server-related errors. And even if you don’t take the server and code issues into considerations… come on, just have a look at the profile pages. They literally look like 1999 websites, with tables and repeated images in the background (often the same colour as the main font). Then there are the overwhelming adverts, the craptastic music that automatically starts when the page has loaded, the photos taken in a mirror, the huge “about me” section that no one gives a shit about, and the bizarre flash widgets. This is not how social networking should look like.

The huge potential of MySpace - introducing new music bands, allowing people to easily communicate and reach their friends, meet new interesting people - has been wasted. Partially by the stupid way the website has been developed and managed, and partially by the people who use the service. No, I don’t want to be your boyfriend. Nor your girlfriend.