Showing results for 'Racist Arsehole'

Permanent petulant Li’ll Donnie has been sheeting* again.

This time, the subject of his ill-considered emission is Google, specifically how, when you search for news, a lot of the results are critical of the ‘policies’ of the subject doing the Googling.

If that is indeed the case, and it may well be for reasons so obvious they can be understood by moss then it is, at least on one level, surprising.

Surprising because over years the internet has moved from being the place where you could go for almost limitless knowledge, and limitless opinion, to the place that you go to for almost limitless knowledge, almost limitless ignorance, and a hell of a lot of opinions that align with your own.

No doubt it is the inevitable result of more and more stuff being put on the internet, so the chances of coming across a comforting endorsement of your own views, however niche those views might be and even if the allied opinion is expressed in the comments section of a teen’s instagrammed selfie, is moderately certain.  Alternatively, you could just go the media outlet or nutcase conspiracy website of your choice to have your vile (Daily Mail) or smug (Guardian) views endorsed.

Ah, for the days when the internet was the home of chatrooms and bulletin boards that were wee digital salons where great matters were discussed.  Yes, I am talking about the debate about who the greatest Star trek captain was+.  Again.

Apparently, when li’ll Donnie Googles presumably himself, he is confronted with negative news stories.

This is probably because it is difficult to be objective, and positive, about Li’ll Donnie.

It should come as no surprise to anyone but a tan-addled buffoon that the internet tends to be negative about authority figures.  And it does not matter who they are or what they have done (obvious honourable exception is Nelson Mandala).  Look at Aung San Suu Kyi, somebody who is not enjoying a whole lot of positive press at the moment, and she’s got a Nobel peace prize (details correct at time of publishing).  Even if you fade from politics and try and rehabilitate yourself, you are still fair game.  In 1997 Michael Portillo exited politics in a ‘where were you when Portillo went?’ teevee moment that was as shocking as it was hysterical.  Everyone viewing reached for their dictionary to look up if ‘hubris’ meant what they thought it meant.  Since then, he has made a series of steam-porn documentaries for the BBC where he affably wanders round Britain, guided by a guide book decades out of date.  Now he is mocked merely for his choice of attire, rather than repulsive views and making life difficult for millions when in power.

Former PM David Cameron is very much not rehabilitated.  Never mind gurning selfies from festivals, the bloke could post pictures of a UK wide tour of him in an ice-cream van dolling out free lollies to the kiddies, and the reaction would probably be that he is either a peado or, worse, is actively contributing to childhood obesity levels.

It’s doubtful, of course, that Li’ll Donnie even knows what an algorithm is or how one might be applied to sifting and sorting results for news searches.  It’s doubtful that he has an understanding that his action of putting children in cages, like the fucking Child Catcher, is likely to inspire at least mild criticism.  It’s doubtful that he understands anything that can’t be expressed on the front of a baseball hat.  He probably doesn’t know how to click past page one of Google results.

He certainly has yet to learn that you never, ever, Google your own name.  the best result is that you will find that there is somebody with your name who is more famous than you, obviously, and will probably be younger, richer and less tubby than you.  Worst case is that you, your actual self, are somewhere at the top of that first page, because that means that you have done something to attract the attention of a third party on the internet and, unless you are Nelson Mandela or James T. Kirk, the results are not going to be favourable.

* ‘Sheeting’ is a hybrid term that I’ve invented that I’m hoping will be, if not word of the year 2019, then at least accepted by some sort of urban dictionary with really, really low standards.  It’s a mash-up of ‘Shit’ and ‘Tweeting’ and describes the process of making an ignorant statement on Twitter.  In short, the digital equivalent of talking out of your arse.  For instance ‘I see Linaker’s been sheeting about a top four finish for Man U this season’.

+ Kirk.  Obvs.

Let me help you with that

‘It looks like you have finished looking at porn sites, would you like me to clear your browser history?’

‘It looks like you are writing an email after midnight to an ex girlfriend, would you like me to save it to ‘drafts’ when you hit send?’

‘It looks like you are looking at porn sites for the tenth time this week, would you like me to order keyboard wipes from Amazon?’

These are just three useful prompts that your computer could give you when engaged in everyday activity involving IT.  Thanks to Downton Abbey and Brexit, more of the population has been given a taste for having servants do shit for them, with less chance of the economic climate making that achievable, than ever before.  This has led to the popularity of those internet speaker things that sit on the corner of your room, spying on you for North Korea and occasionally giving you either the weather report or playing some music should you remember to bellow ‘Alexa, play ‘Dancing Queen’ by ABBA’ across a room, an exercise requiring the clarity of diction that would make the Queen think she had better take elocution refreshers.

The idea is that we can interface with the internet by simply shouting at a speaker.  The notion of speaking to technology is not new, the notion of it actually doing what you tell it to do is.  If only PCs had been able to understand the simply command ‘work you fucker’ in the 80s, a lot of grief could have been spared.

Not that I am quite sure that the technology is quite there yet, there’s still a few years for lazy sitcom writers to get a joke out of the following:

INT. DAY.  TOM and CINDY’S flat.  TOM is showing off his new purchase, an Amazon Echo.  His girlfriend CINDY is there, as is all her family and TOM’S family.

TOM

Alexa, play Dancing Queen by ABBA.

MACHINE VOICE

Did you say play secret recording you made of you taking your girlfriend’s sister up the chuff?

TOM’S MUM

Oh Tom, not again.

CINDY’S DAD

What have you done to my little girl?  I’m going to kill you you cunt.

And so on.

Software trying to assist us is not new.  Anyone who struggled with early versions of Word will a) deserve a medal and counselling and b) recall that shortly after you started typing anything, a little animated paperclip would appear and ask you if you needed any help, without ever offering any advice that was either practical or appropriate.  If the little fucker had suggested ‘Hi, it looks like you are trying to write a novel.  Let me tell you now, you have no chance, so best you shut me down, fire up my cousin the spreadsheet and put your creative energy into optimising accounts and devising ever more elaborate ways to brood about increasingly younger writers than you winning literary prizes, topping the bestseller charts and getting huge movie adaptation deals’ then that might have been some use, but it was always ‘Hi, looks like your making a list, can I help?’.  Yea, yea paperclip, putting bullet points next to the words bread, milk and cat food is really, really going to add value.

Why was it a paperclip anyway?  Microsoft is essentially trying to engineer the paperless office, so the avatar they chose to annoy you was something that they considered so pointless they were trying to remove from existence, which is something all Word users would cheerfully have done to animated paperclip, the tossers who created it and, collateral damage being a feature of any just but extreme solution, anything in a six block radius of their office.

So yes, for a time, the Word paperclip was the most irritating thing about technology.

(Obviously this was before some douchbag handed Donnie Trump a smartphone and told him about this thing called Twitter.  Jesus Christ, what is wrong with that guy (now there’s a question for Google)?  When you get sent to prison, they take your ‘phone off of you.  This is presumably so you can’t organise an escape attempt or play Angry Birds, but also presumably because it’s not a good idea to give certified scumbags access to social media.  Except the problem with Li’ll Donnie is that his Tweets get reported in the national media.  Daily.  It’s like somebody gave a certified scumbag, like some clueless idiot who had been given a community sentence for interfering with goats or something, some orange jumpsuited idiot, a smartphone and a Twitter account and told them ‘go nuts!’ and then broadcast every thoughtless Tweet on a billboard in Times Square.  Sad.)

Not anymore.  For a while now (well, since Steve Jobs sadly passed away without having the foresight to upload his consciousness to a mainframe) Apple appear to be engaged in a worldwide social experiment designed to test the loyalty and, lately, sanity, of their consumers.

Every time they update the operating system for their iPhones or iPads, you get ten messages a day urging you to upgrade, so you eventually snap and upgrade the fucker and three things happen:

1.  No obvious change.  A pity as you were hoping that this would be the upgrade that delivered on that holographic display you’ve been secretly waiting for.

2.  Except your battery doesn’t appear to last as long as it used to.  WTF?

3.  Every single forum you visit warns you not to install this upgrade.  Some of these posts are dated 2011.

By the way, THAT’s how you make a list!

The latest upgrade installed a new security feature.  It requires you to enter a pin that is sent to another Apple device you own.  The two day process of actually getting the fucking thing done was so rage-inducing that the best use of my Apple ‘phone was researching Android ‘phones.  Luckily I had a breakthrough before I had a breakdown and eventually managed to get the thing sorted before I had to resort to calling the North Korean secret service, who were probably listening to my attempts to sort my technology issues via my toaster anyway, for technical support.

But it was all just so unnecessary.

The trajectory of the technology is for more voice activated stuff, quietly upgrading itself in the corner of the room to be more useful and do more on command than play Dancing Queen.  But it’s still a long way to go to get the same effect as pulling on a cord in the corner of the room come the Cocktail Hour and unleashing a flurry of activity on the other side of the green baize door.