Windows Tweaks (That Don't Actually Do Anything)

In my experience, whenever you have a group of enthusiasts, such as gamers, gearheads, audiophiles, videophiles, or what have you, there's always a certain segment of "tweaker" types who must squeeze every ounce of performance out of their car, stereo system, gaming rig, and so forth. And invariably, this area is absolutely rife with bullshit claims and anecdotes.

Given my general level of OCD towards my Windows installation, I can't count the number of times I've come across various "Windows Tweaks" that will supposedly improve Windows' performance, and without exception, each one either does nothing to make your PC or faster, or actually make your PC more unreliable. Here are some of the more common claims I've heard, and why they're bullshit:

X-Box One - The Console Equivalent of Windows 8?

As the tiny handful of people who read this blog are aware, I am not a console gamer. The only gaming consoles I've ever owned were all Nintendo consoles, so naturally I wasn't particularly excited about the announcement of Microsoft's latest incarnation of the X-Box...until I realised what a cock-up the thing was.

Right away, Microsoft shot themselves in the foot by spending 30 minutes of the X-Box One reveal speaking about Kinect and TV rather than talking about, you know, actual games. Already they've created the impression that this isn't a gaming console, but rather a set-top box for TV that happens to play games.

And the games themselves? Endless sequels...Call of Duty, Halo, Assassins Creed, Battlefield, endless EA Sports titles...aren't you tired of this already? And when you're first rep on stage is someone from EA, who are probably the most hated company in the industry, that doesn't exactly make a good first impression.

Really, I have to ask: are people willing to pay hundreds of dollars for a console just to play prettier versions of the same tired genres as before? When it comes to the systems's drawbacks, you can mention how the X-Box One charges you a fee to play used games, or how it's always not backwards compatible, or how it's required to connect to the internet every 24 hours, but the one thing that will damn system will be the games. You'd think the industry would have realised from the sliding software sales that maybe, just maybe, gamers were tired of playing endless rehashes of CoD or Halo.

I hope this system bombs hard, because it's the shock the industry needs to realise how badly they've buggered things up.

Dragon Age II Is A Horrible Game, And You Are A Horrible Person For Liking It

The late, great Roger Ebert, reviewing the legendarily-bad film Battlefield Earth, remarked "I watched it in mounting gloom, realizing I was witnessing something historic, a film that for decades to come will be the punch line of jokes about bad movies." Well my friends, Dragon Age II, along with its partner in crime Mass Effect 3, is the Battlefield Earth of RPGs.

Great Games That Actually Suck: Dragon Age: Origins

I'd like to begin this review by saying that the title is rather inaccurate; I would not say that BioWare's RPG Dragon Age: Origins "sucks," but I'm afraid that "Great Games That Aren't Quite As Good As People Say They Are" just doesn't have the same ring to it.

Why I Hate Software Licences

You see them every time you install a piece of software - the End User Licence Agreement (EULA). Most people, I imagine, don't take the time the read the things, and just hit the "I Agree" button to continue with the installation process. But I actually take the time to read them (and trust me, that can take a while for some licences) because, like another form of Fine Print, one really ought to pay attention to what sort of rights you're signing away.

So why do I find EULAs so onerous and offensive? Here's why:

There's no option for negotiation: EULAs are what are known as "Clickwrap Licences" or "Shrinkwrap Contracts" because the only time you're presented with the licence terms is when you've already opened the software, at which point it may be impossible to return or exchange the software. And given that you cannot install the software without accepting the licence, it's essentially "take it or leave it" with absolutely no power on your part to bargain or re-negotiate the terms. I don't know about you, but there's something inherently ethical about selling someone a piece of software, and only presenting them with restrictive licence terms after the transaction.

Secondly, I am not a lawyer, but isn't there something legally dubious about a contract wherein the company has absolutely no evidence that the person using the software actually agreed to the contract. Someone could claim that their 13-year-old child installed the software (or someone else incapable of entering into a legally-binding contract). Or that their cat walked across the keyboard and hit the "Enter" key while the mouse pointer was over the "I Agree" button.

They're written in incomprehensible legalese: I've always found it amusing that EULAs ask the user to "please read carefully" and then present them with a list of terms that seem to be written so as to actively discourage people from reading them! With few exceptions, EULAs appear to be on a mission to mangle the English language into something unrecognisable. Consider this portion of the GOG.com EULA:

"Company’s failure to enforce at any time any of the provisions of this Agreement shall in no way be construed to be a present or future waiver of such provisions, nor in any way affect the right of any party to enforce each and every such provision thereafter. The express waiver by Company of any provision, condition or requirement of this Agreement shall not constitute a waiver of any future obligation to comply with such provision, condition or requirement. This Agreement shall be governed by the laws of the State of California and the United States without regard to its conflicts of laws rules and you consent to the exclusive jurisdiction of the courts in Los Angeles County, California. The United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods shall not apply to this Agreement. This Agreement represents the complete agreement concerning this License Agreement between you and Company."

All right, hands up, who here actually understood all that on their first try? Anyone?

Sadly, this sort of impenetrable language is all too common with EULAs. It's positively riddled with endless run-on sentences and countless modifying clauses that cause the language processing centre of my brain to shut down and makes me simply skim over the text without actually understanding what the terms mean. This isn't user-friendly language, this is lawyer-friendly language. If software companies want to ensure that consumers know what they can and cannot do with their software, then they ought to present the licence terms in comprehensible language, full stop.

And could someone tell me why the warranty terms are always presented in ALLCAPS? Way to make the licence terms even more difficult read, people!

They're way too long: I copied and pasted the EULA for Unreal Tournament 3 into LibreOffice Writer, and the entire document was 22,000 words long! That's long enough to be considered a novella by Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, which demands the question of just who the hell wants to read a goddamn novella-length document just to install a game? Can anyone blame users for just skipping over the bloody thing?

And that isn't the worst of it. PayPal's service agreement is just over 36,000 words long, longer than Shakespeare's Hamlet. Do they really expect users to dig through all that?

The terms are onerous and unenforceable: A ubiquitous term in any software licence is that you may disassemble, decompile, or reverse engineer the program.

Isn't that ridiculous? I copy some bits on to my computer, and they tell me I can't rearrange those bits in a certain way? They have the gall to say what I can cannot do with some piece of software in the isolated environment of my own computer? And furthermore, how would they even know if I *did* decompile the software? The only way a software company could ever obtain that knowledge was if I emailed them and said "YO I TOTALLY JUST DECOMPILED UR CODE, BITCHES!!!"

And it gets worse. Some EULAs demand that you do not release any benchmarks of the software (because it might make them look bad). Some prohibit the user from taking part in a class-action suit against the company, severely limiting their ability to punish a corporation for wrong-doing. Some notify the user that the terms of the licence agreement can change at any time without notice. A great many absolve the company of responsibility for any damage their software does to your computer, even if they were aware of the possibility. Essentially, a typical EULA can be read as litany of rights that the company wants to take away from you, written in a smug, condescending tone that seems to say, "We have all the power, pitiful consumer! Do what we say or else!"

So the next time you're confronted with one of those damnable EULAs, get your cat to agree to it.

Computer OCD

For this entry, I'm going to go a bit off the beaten path and talk about something a bit more personal. Specifically, my computer OCD. I finally realised just how bad my obsessive/compulsive behaviour is regarding computers after my twelfth install of Windows in the past two weeks.

Wikipedia describes "obsessions" as "thoughts that recur and persist despite efforts to ignore or confront them" and that they "involve a general sense of disarray or tension accompanied by a belief that life cannot proceed as normal while the imbalance remains." And that's certainly true about the elaborate ritual I would undertake before installing Windows on my PC.

Dear Adobe: Stop Sucking So Much

What the hell has happened to Adobe software?

At one point they were best-known for producing high-end, professional design software, such as Photoshop, Premiere, InDesign, and Audition. These days, however, they seem better known for producing software that's bloated, overpriced, and horrendously buggy.

How To Enhance Your Edition of Baldur's Gate

After the release of the latest patch for Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition (version 2014) I finally shelved it. The most recent patch ended up introducing several more bugs, so until that game finally gets all the issues ironed out, I went back to my GOG.com copies of Baldur's Gate 1 & 2. In all honesty, I've come to conclusion that BG:EE isn't really worth the $20 admission cost. Baldur's Gate is a very long game with a massive amount of content to experience, so do we really need yet more content? Because three new characters, a handful of new areas, and an arena mode are the only features that BG:EE adds that cannot be found through mods (which, I might add, are completely free).

So here is my own personal list of modifications that I use for Baldur's Gate 1 & 2, and the order in which I install them:

I Hate Job Hunting

Is there any worse experience than job hunting?

I've been unemployed for about a year and a half, and having sent into dozens upon dozens of CVs, I've had two interviews, and a whole lot of bugger all! And the longer you can go without work, the bigger that dreaded gap on your CV gets, which only makes employers more gun-shy about hiring you. Really, there are no words in the English language (or any other language) to describe my complete and utter disgust at just how much effort and just how much preening narcissism and self-serving whoredom is needed just to get an interview...at which point you're told, "Sorry, you're just not what the company's looking for."

I...fucking...hate it all! It's having doors slammed in your face over and over. It's being told again and again that you're a worthless piece of rubbish. It's being told that there are a thousand people who are willing to do this job, so what makes you so special? Having to pad the CV. "Personal Branding." "Networking." Polishing up the LinkedIn profile. It's all so bloody narcissistic and yet dehumanising at the same time. I'm told that I just have to work on "selling myself" when "selling myself" is something I typically associate with prostitutes. I think the worst decision our civilisation ever made is when we decided to let market forces dictate everything we do, so now we're forced to turn ourselves into pretty little commodities to be sold on some cold, inhuman job market whose only aim to get as much out of you as possible whilst giving as little back as is humanly possible. You're just a resource to be exploited; hell, the word is right there in the moniker the hiring department chose for itself: human resources.

Great Games That Actually Suck: Fallout 3

And now we come to the very nadir of my "Great Games That Actually Suck" series - Fallout 3. Now, don't misunderstand me - Fallout 3 is far from deserving the title of "Worst Game Ever;" instead, it's simply mediocre. But in a way, that makes it all the worse, especially considering that Fallout 1 & 2 are considered some of the greatest RPGs ever developed. Had Fallout 3 been a true stinker, we might have laughed at it as we would an Uwe Boll film and thought no more of it. Instead, it's practically offensive with its mediocrity, like following up a masterfully-prepared filet mignon with stale bread.

Book Review: Morris Berman - "Why America Failed"

It should be rather obvious at this point that it is not "Morning in America" any longer. Rampant unemployment, a shameful level of poverty, a healthcare system that denies coverage to millions, crumbling infrastructure, a supposedly-matchless military that cannot find victory in either Iraq or Afghanistan, a gridlocked government...the list goes on. So the question is, then, where did America go wrong? And how can it get back on track?

Great Games That Actually Suck: The Elder Scrolls V - Skyrim

As a child of the 80s, I was a pretty Nintendo-obsessed kid. The NES was the greatest gift anyone could ever bestow upon the world, and every game made for that console was beyond reproach. Nintendo could do no wrong in my eyes, and I considered every NES game released to be a masterpiece, regardless of whether or not it was actually developed by Nintendo.

That is, until my parents brought me a game they had purchased at a garage sale - Where's Waldo?

Great Games That Actually Suck: Mass Effect 2

The first Mass Effect was a game that was somehow enjoyable in spite of itself. Looking at its individual parts in isolation, it wasn't a very good game at all - the combat was generally dull, lifeless, and lacking in intensity, the weapons were bland and generic, differing only in some numerical statistic, planetary exploration was often tedious, and the game's dialogue system seemed intent on offering up paraphrases that bore no resemblance to what your character would actually say. Yet in spite of these flaws, Mass Effect created a compelling, believable universe that harkened back to the Golden Age of Science Fiction and seemed to offer huge array of possibilities for future installments. But alas, it wasn't to be. If the first game was a flawed attempt at making a Space Opera RPG, then its sequel is a half-hearted attempt at making a very generic sci-fi shooter.

Great Games That Actually Suck: The Witcher 2

I can't recall a game that received more hype than The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings. No, not from the sycophantic gaming press (who will gush over anything, provided there's advertising revenue at stake), but from the fans, who will simply not shut up about its "brilliant" storytelling and the "mature" attitude the game takes towards the player. Hearing all the near-unanimous praise, I purchased The Witcher 2 for the same reason many did, I think - as an alternative to the wretchedly awful Dragon Age 2.

"I wanna be a durrrrgon..."

Kevin O'Leary - Portrait of a Blowhard

John Maynard Keynes once said that "Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow work for the benefit of all." Well, I think "nastiest of men" is the most apt description for Canada's greatest windbag (closely edging out Don Cherry), Kevin O'Leary. That's right, this nasally-voiced asshole:

On Respecting Science

Imagine you're sitting down to watch some sci-fi film or TV show, and suddenly a massive space battle breaks out. Laser bolts are flying, ships are exploding left and right, and it is glorious.

Then some twerp comes along and snidely remarks that, "You realise there's no sound in space, right? You wouldn't really be hearing all those explosions."

Don't you just want to smack him?

"Un-American"

How many times have you heard the phrase "un-American" get bandied about in debates? How many times have you heard someone say that anyone who disagrees with his or her opinion must "hate America?"

I Hate Smartphones

I've always maintained that the telephone has to be the worst invention humanity has yet devised. There's just something inherently intrusive and dehumanising about it; that at any moment you might be interrupted by the jarring ringing of the phone, demanding that you take part of some sort of pitiful excuse for an interaction with a fellow human being. Second to instant messaging, speaking in the phone is probably the worst way people can interact with each other - separated by distance, with no face-to-face contact, no ability to pick up on the subtle cues of body language or other forms of non-verbal communication.

Madness? This is America!

My first post on this blog was a look at "Bill Gates' 11 Things Kids Won't Learn In School" which, as I quickly discovered, was not actually penned by Bill Gates. Nevertheless, I think it stands as a perfect summation of how Americans view life.

Here in Canada, we're constantly being exposed to American culture. Go to any major city and you'll find Wal-Marts and McDonalds, stores lined with American products, theatres playing American movies, and radio stations playing American music. I've always maintained that it is absolute folly for the government of Canada to neglect support for the arts, given that we live next to a country that aggressively exports its culture at every turn. At any rate, I'd wager that the average Canadian has, by the time he reaches adulthood, gained a very clear picture of American culture.

Video Games Are Not Art

"It's not porn, it's art!"

So goes the excuse for a film director to fill up his movie with nudity and sex. I wonder, then, how many egotistical game developers will scoff at the idea of producing a mere "game" and instead proclaim that their work is high art on par with Paradise Lost.

Modern Architecture Is Rubbish

What comes to mind when you think of classic, enduring architecture?

Dragon Age III: Inquisition - What To Expect

So BioWare is hard at work on the third Dragon Age III, and I have to ask, does anyone aside from die-hard BioWare fanatics actually think this game is going to be good? BioWare's track record of games developed under EA ownership has been a string of dismal failures: Dragon Age II, Mass Effect 3, Star Wars: The Old Republic, so I don't think I'm being overly pessimistic when I say that the odds are against Dragon Age III being a success by any measure.