The USS Quad Damage

I finished my assignment, and I'm going to be taking a small break over the weekend before I start studying for my exams. It shouldn't be so bad. I hope. The fear now is doing well instead of failing.

I wanted an old style razor so I wouldn't have to pay lots of money for blades, plus all the environment crap. I also don't shave regularly, which means sometimes I have a lot of hair to get rid of, and it inevitably gets stuck in between the blades in modern razors. My dad ended up talking me out of it. He used to have one, and he told me about how he used to get really bad cuts. Maybe he's not as gentle as I am with a blade near my face, but I got apprehensive and asked for refills instead. If printer cartidges could kill...

I recently ordered a logitech trackball from minidigital over the net. I'm not going to receive it for close to a month. I can't say my experience was good. Bad site design, coupled with misinformation, not to mention a total lack of information, got pretty annoying. After a week of emails going back and forth, I found out they didn't have any in stock, and they wouldn't have any in stock for 2 weeks. This is after they said they did have some in stock, and I should stay home to pick it up.

Despite this, I'm being pretty lenient. This thing, I can't just go to a shop and pick it up. Note the fact that minidigital's in Perth. It's gonna take a month before anyone in NSW's gonna have it in stock anyway (something about shipment). I've also found that people don't really give a shit about someone wanting a trackball. It's funny, I'm here, with my money, saying "give me a fucking product, I will pay for it!", but no one cares. I think I know the reason too. It's the same reason record companies want to make "superstars", because if everyone buys the one thing, they make a lot more money than people buying a whole bunch of different things, requiring their own parts and technical support and design and research. It's kind of scary that it's in the interests of big companies to remove choice and diversity. They want to get us used to not making a choice. They want us to shun and hate those that are different, because they make less money this way.

I should probably get to the point, and the title of the post:

I've been watching queer eye for the straight guy. I noticed I liked it not because it was about gay people making over straight people (seriously, that's not worth watching. It's not even interesting.). What makes the show interesting and funny is (gay humour aside) the captions. They make the guys look like superheroes. They pause the show on a frame and up comes this grandiose text of the guy's name and his special power: "Jai - Culture" or whatever. They even pause the show for mediocre things and put captions up. For example, one of them would say "Brown goes with red", and the entire show pauses and the text "brown goes with red" comes up at the bottom of the screen, like it's what they need to save the planet. It's not relevant, it doesn't even make sense, but it's incredibly funny.

The most recent one I watched had these hilarious bits. The straight guy was getting the back of his hair lasered. The gay guy says something like "What this laser does is, it fires a high frequency beam on your hair, which heats it up and..." etc etc. OK, so this gay guy, who knows nothing about how this thing actually works, is giving the straight guy a lesson in biology and high frequency electromagnetics. It has nothing to do with the show, but that's what makes it so funny.

This other bit where they're making glass beads and the gay guy talks about the flame, and a caption pops up: "Glass melts at 1400° Farhenheit". I wonder if people were making a note of that! "Oh, 1400°, I was only heating my beads to 1300°. So that's why my beads suck and I have bad breath and can't get a girlfriend! I'd best write that down for next time."

They should make all reality TV like that. "I'm going to buy some groceries". Caption pops up "Grocery shopping should be done once a week... on Thursday!". "Oh look, cantelope, Joanne says they're good for you", Caption pops up: "Joanne is a slut. Pay attention only to these captions"

... and that's the end of my story...