It’s the best time of the year. The leaves are changing into an arboreal fireworks display, it’s getting a little cooler out, fresh apples are in season, and Halloween is right around the corner! That means trick-or-treating, costume parties, an unhealthy amount of sugar ingestion, carving jack-o’-lanterns, and horror movies! Alright! Let’s watch some axe-wielding psycho chop up teenagers for the nine-hundredth year in a r-what’s that? Whaddaya mean you don’t like horror movies? Don’t like being scared? Uhhhhghghg… Okay, fine. I have some other movies we can watch that don’t match the definition of “horror,” but will still get you primed for the season. I haven’t actually rewatched most of these movies recently, since I’ve been spending any free time I can get watching horror movies like a normal person, so my descriptions are all based off of my memories of whenever I last watched them, IMDB summaries, and […]
This New Convenience is Rather Inconvenient
I hate flying. I don’t hate flying because I’m afraid of being on a plane. I have a good enough understanding of statistics to know the likelihood of my flight crashing, being hijacked by terrorists, being shot down my a hostile military, or disappearing altogether are next to nothing. My basic understanding of statistics also lets me know that I have an almost guaranteed chance of encountering at least one of the following: I could write an entire essay on how utterly useless and ineffectual the TSA is, but the fact that you can now by a FastPass to skip the line has already done the job for me by proving what we knew all along: that they’re completely full of shit. However, to the TSA’s credit, they’ve actually started to implement a few changes in their security screening process that has made it slightly less of a pain in […]
The Tyranny of Touch-Sensitive Controls
Do you like your electronics to be easy to use? Have good functionality? Not require regular referrals back to the owner’s manual? Apparently not, because if you did, I wouldn’t be writing this article. As a capitalist, I understand that businesses are incentivized to appeal to consumer demands. The greater variety of demands in the market, the greater variety of choices. But the inverse of this is also true, which must be why every headphones customer other than me prefers they be sleek, solid pieces of plastic, because god forbid someone prefer to have a few unsightly buttons sticking out. I used to have a great pair of Sony headphones. They had a power button, a button for play/pause, a button to turn the noise canceling on or off, a volume switch, and a fast forward/rewind switch. Each gave me an unmistakable “click” to know when I had pushed it. […]