The Primary Process Post-Citzens United

I had an interesting thought just now. We're not even at Super Tuesday and yet we've seen 20 debates narrowing down eight candidates to four. There are still FOUR candidates, even now. I'm just speculating here, but I don't remember there being such an insanely long primary battle before this one. Aside from the other factors like the lies and misleading ads Super PACs are saying, they're also keeping candidates in the running for way longer. I mean, any dude with ten million dollars can just up and decide to back their man, they're not losing if they have anything to spend about it.

I wonder when people will start putting two and two together and actually start demanding campaign finance reform through legislation. Sooner would be better than later obviously, but my countrymen always seem to find new and insanely irritating ways to surprise me, so who knows. One thing I am pretty sure of though is people are going to tire of this. It may not be obvious on its face, but there will be a reaction of some kind, be it insanely low turn out at the polls or huge chucks of the vote to go to third party candidates or even direct campaigning nationally to current legislators, anything's possible. But then again, somethings are more likely than others. Time will tell.

Skittles, Your Marketing Department Needs a Raise

This is absolutely brilliant. No major brand has embraced the viral video quite like this, and if it's a trend I hope it explodes in popularity:

The Wrath of Kuma

I was eating at Kuma's corner with three friends, and I was bothered in a way I haven't been in some time. Enough to actually write in this thing about it, since I'm not conceded enough to complain to a friend about my own hangups (at least this one). I hadn't eaten, I was a bit sloshed, and I was served last. A drink I ordered had taken an excessive amount of time, and I bitchily asked our waitress where my drink was. She said she was waiting on the bartender, bitched her out, then gave me my drink.

But when she gave me my drink, it came with a look and a gesture that I've never experienced and hope to never again. It was her dropping the beer onto the table, sliding it towards me, and giving me the most chilling look I've not seen in quite a long time. It was her discarding me as a person, saying nothing but "you have wronged me and I no longer consider you in any way." It was incredibly sincere, I've not seen such an honest expression of emotion in months and it chilled me to the bone. Simply put, I've never been discarded before. Even by an acquaintance, no one has rejected me so completely.

For the rest of the night it was the characteristic cold shoulder 'I am a black hole of scorn' type of service from her. When she eventually looked at me I called her over and apologized for being a bitch to her, but damage done. I'm a big fat pansy for feeling this terrible over a look, but most of the time people are a little two faced... trying to wear a mask, trying to hide one emotion with another, trying to give you what you want to hear and see, but not her. It was pure contempt, unfiltered and unmuddled.

Fascinating.

Butchering Watchmen For The Kiddies

This is the craziest video I've seen regarding the Watchmen. Alan Moore probably span around in his chair from the force of his ears exploding with steam when he watched this.

Staying Under The Radar In Vista x64 - Trickier Than You'd Think

Recently I've been trying to replicate some of the things that I felt made my XP system pretty secure onto my Vista x64 laptop, and I finally got around to (attempting) installing Peergaurdian 2 when I ran into a snag. For anyone who reads this blog (ha) and doesn't know what that is, basically it protects your computer from companies like Mediasentry, you know, one of those watchdog groups that work for the likes of the RIAA and the MPAA, effectively blocking them from seeing your internet traffic based on what IP addresses they use, which is stored in 'blacklists' which are (I think) ultimately updated by the BISS community, who as far as I can gather from their website/forums are just a bunch of people on the net trying to make it secure for those people who want/need it.

So, back to the Peergaurdian, I tried installing it and basically got an error message involving the driver for some reason. So, being inquisitive as I am, I did some web sluething and found out what the deal was. Basically Microsoft, in an attempt to make the OS more 'secure' requires that all of the drivers to have to have a special code signature that is provided by them so that, presumably, some malicious driver doesn't get installed or some such, but I doubt that it actually protects you from much. Normally this wouldn't bother me too much, but given the fact that it has a yearly fee attached to it, I can't say I'm a fan. This is a big reason that Peergaurdian 2 doesn't work on vista, they can't afford the yearly licensing fee. So given that, I wanted to find out how to disable whatever part of the OS checks for the driver signature. The Phoenix labs guys (Peergaurdian creators) have a method of doing this or you can apparently disable the check in the advanced boot menu if you press F8 before windows starts loading, but the latter method is only for the one session so you would have to do this everytime you wanted to boot up Vista and use Peergaurdian.

Enter ReadyDriver Plus. Apparently someone made a program, a mod of the program ReadyDriver, which installs itself onto your hard drive and, as far as I can gather, alters the windows vista bootloader to disable the check for your drivers by default. I haven't used it yet, but if do I'll post about any unwanted side effects I notice after the install. I'm probably just going to use the PeerGaurdian method posted on their RC1 download page, but I just wanted to make note of this program in case there's another program which uses unsigned drivers.

Now that I had found all of this out, I realized that if I wanted to dual boot operating systems that I couldn't use that program and boot from GRUB, since it wouldn't use the vista boot loader at all. That means I would need to find a way to boot linux through the windows boot loader, and luckily I found a way here.

So I suppose to sum up this whole post, vista is a freaking hassle.

Racism in Ohio, Political Style

Holy motherless son of a crap, apparently Al-Jazeera was at a Palin/McCain rally in Ohio and they did a piece about, I don't know, racism? Basically this is all tied to the comment Obama made during the third debate where he said how people at McCain's rallies have been heard shouting things like "terrorist" and "kill him" after his name is mentioned and the lack of addressing this by the McCain campaign, and this video kinda corroborates that claim. Actually, it really corroborates that claim. I'm not deluded enough to think that this is how all people in Ohio or all conservatives or whatever think, but it confirms the existence of some extremely nasty racism in parts of America, and it makes me cringe to think that people have clung to such backwards beliefs for so long.

McDonalds, Apparently Not Really Even Food

So I was wandering the web like I always do when I came across the picture above. It's a picture of a McDonald's Hamburger that's 12 years old. I never really knew how little food there was in McDonald's cooking, because even if you left that in the fridge for that long something would have started to grow on in, something from the air, something from the water, something from the meat or bread, ANYTHING. Bacteria is freaking everywhere, and yet here this burger is, clean and neat just like the day it was bought. I'm a little frightened by this burger, despite the fact that I don't even eat the stuff.

1996 McDonalds Hamburger