I'm not entirely sure how this happened, but it seems that this month has been the site's most popular month yet, in spite of the fact I haven't really been posting anything. What's more, it doesn't seem to be due to people searching for things like "Lazy Town Porn" as it was with the December spike, but actually seems down to a couple of my articles being heavily circulated by people. The most searched for phrase which has brought people to the site this month was "Picture of a Leprechaun", which of course took people to the page for my Gnomeo and Juliet post. However, that article has only received 411 views so far this month, in contrast to the 3,500 odd views my Post-Christmas message about being pathetic on Facebook has garnered - which I thought was fairly impressive, given that in the other 2 months it was on the site, only 60-odd people actually viewed it. It seems, then, that this article, and my Science Corner one from around the same sort of time, have gone very slightly viral, drawing the most views without just turning up in people's Google searches, and I'm quite pleased with this. I hate when people are pathetic on Facebook, but dear God am I pathetic on Blogger - so, in short, thanks for the recognition, everyone who has been linking my articles and spreading the word - it's been fun.
Now, as you may remember from last year, this site sort of dies around March time, for unexplained reasons. Most of my favourtie articles from 2010 came from the period after I returned in April, and hopefully I'll be able to step my game up even further once I return this year. For now, however, I'm just going to write a short rant about a couple of things which are almost certainly of no interest to you, so feel free to go and watch Jesus vs The Zombie King instead.
...And this leads me into the first thing I want to rant about; YouTube. And Google. Why the fuck can I no longer access my YouTube account without a Google account? I'm sure you're all aware that, having a Blogger Account, I must also have my own Google account, so there shouldn't be a problem, right? Well, the problem arises in that I have more than one YouTube account. I have the account I set up in November which I featured my discussion on giving the right to vote to prisoners, and that remix of Cee-Lo Green which Gordon Ramsay sent me (I'm head of his fan club, incidentally), which I can still access fine since it is linked to this Google account. But I also have another account which I opened back in 2007, which featured a few of my older videos. For some reason, I now cannot access that old account without a Google account, in spite of the fact that I've been using it fine for the past 4 years without any problems. What's more, if you want to set up a new Google account, you have to give them your phone number. Why the fuck do we suddenly have this obsession with giving out phone numbers on the internet?
Google claims it's to make sure you're "not a robot", but if that's the case, then why do we still have those Captcha boxes where you have to strain to make out inappropriate phrases and type them into a box, unsure of whether they are case sensitive or not?
Another reason given (this time by Facebook) is "security". Well, anyone with half a brain could tell you that giving these companies more information to store online actually has the opposite effect of keeping your information "secure". For example, we all know how easily "security questions" can be foiled, so we don't use them. But passwords can still be cracked with relative ease by some of those 1337 motherfuckers out there on Computer Sciences III courses, and bearing that in mind, does it really make sense to give these companies your address and phone number? I actually once posted my Google Accounts password on this site (check back through my articles if you want it, I'm not giving it up without making you give me some more page views first!), because I'm not all that bothered if someone gets into this account (I use a different Password here to elsewhere). But if by hacking my account someone could gain access to my Address and Phone Number all of a sudden? Then suddenly it becomes a big fucking deal. Now, let's think about this in context - the simplest solution would be to not give out your password (duh), but then, should we really be posting information we wouldn't want people to know online even if we were confident our passwords were secure? Some would say yes. Chris Chan and Sarah Palin would beg to differ.
and no, 'Chris Chan' does not refer to THIS.
Now, obviously, the simplest solution would be to just buy a disposable SIM card to reactivate my account, then just chuck it. They're hardly going to need to verify it again, are they? And yet, can I really be bothered to go out and buy a new SIM card, and get a call from Google on it to verify that I am human and want to regain access to my YouTube account, when I could just bitch and moan about what cunts Google are on their own Blogging site instead?
This image is clearly the reason my Post-Christmas Blog post was so popular...
The other thing I wanted to bitch about is DVDs. In general. My brother bought a copy of The A-Team a couple of days ago, and I was considering whether or not to review it. However, despite the fact the thing was brand new and in a sealed package, it glitched to fuck about an hour into the film, and just wouldn't play any further. And this is not the only time I've had this happen. The exact same shit happened the other week when I was trying to watch Lord of War, though in that case, to add insult to injury, you couldn't fastforward through the fucking adverts, so I had to sit through them multiple times, just to see if I could skip a scene further on and avoid the glitchy sections (I couldn't).
What made the A-Team's glitchiness funny was the fact that at the start of the DVD, they had that shitty American Anti-piracy advert about "Bob and his friends are watching a real DVD, Jeff has invited his friends around to watch a pirate DVD" and ends with Jeff's friends all hating him and leaving because his DVD is such poor quality, whilst Bob and his friends have a great time, because theirs is real. So, if I should only avoid downloading movies because they are worse quality than real DVDs, then doesn't that mean if my Real DVD is shit quality I should just fucking Download everything instead? I mean, it's not as if Blu-Rays are any better than DVDs, they're basically the same fucking medium. So I guess I might as well stream films online. But since these can sometimes cut out, and you have to find them all over again (as happened when I tried to watch Requiem for a Dream on iPlayer), it doesn't make sense to pay for this service, as I'm getting fucked over if I pay to watch a film and it cuts out. So, I guess the only possible solution to this problem is illegal downloads. So fuck you, movie industry - I tried playing it your way, and you fucked me, so now I'm gonna play it my way. Fuck you.
And fuck her too?
...Aaaaaaaand that's about it for now, people. I'm working constantly at the moment (61 hours last week, plus coursework), so I don't know how often I'm going to be able to post, or even if I will be able to come up with interesting stuff to talk about, but keep checking in, and hopefully there'll be good times to come.
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Such a lovely post!!!
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