Froge's Words of Wisdom

From Froge's inactive website. (Obviously, I don't agree with everything he says, but... Anyway, lots of F words below. Other curse words have been modified.)

🐳 Big ups to our favourite little web archiver (when did it become uncool to call programs "little"?), archive.is! As opposed to our favourite big archive, Internet Archive, (Odie's notes: which is great but very incomplete) archive.is (formerly archive.today - I guess they felt it was too demanding) is the easiest gateway to preserving content. It loads up fast, is available for everybody to use without making an account, lets you use a little bookmark to automatically check if a page is archived (and to archive it if that is not the case), and makes it easy to post to websites without without giving the webmaster any page views - so stop begging for views, or you'll get the hitless treatment! But, as opposed to the great big Internet Archive, archive.is is privately funded, and so can't be seriously considered an archive for the ages. So only use it when linking to blogs like this one, okay?

☔ Eff you to Web of Trust, which tracks the websites you visit, when, where, how, your ip address, through what browser and operating system, and associates it all to you. Any recommendations that I have made for the service, I am now disbarring. This is a simple, fatal flaw, and I'm a dumbass for not reading the privacy policy earlier. uBlock Origin already has a lot of third-party filters which block out malware, shock sites, and spam domains, so use that instead, as you should if you spend any time online at all. The lesson here is to always check the terms of software you use (and stick to FLOSS [Odie's notes: Free/Libre and Open Source Software] to prevent these accidents), and never assume something is safe to use until you've check out every aspect of the program.

☔ Eff you to the complete disdain for audio mixing that some producers have for their albums. The problem is simple, as is the solution. A song is too quiet, you turn up the volume, it ends, and dubstep blows your ear. I mean blows up your ear. The reason I'm telling these producers to eff their fannies is that going from a song as quiet as your fanny to one that's as loud as you is like rubbing your fingers while touching your ear lobe right before a gong gets shot with a sniper rifle - and you're in the gong. If you must make a song (if a sniper rifle was to your head, for instance), please ensure it's at an acceptable volume. You may have a whisper fetish, but it's like a diaper fetish. Put it away for the sake of others! (Odie's notes: More info here)

☔ Eff you to YouTube, for treating its proud legacy of millions of hours worth of music like it had never existed at all, removing entire libraries worth of content from public access (but not their servers, as detailed in their Terms of Use) whenever an account is banned, and allowing companies to restrict the playback, content, and distribution of videos to appease their interests. When a company gets to the point where they're wiling to destroy the content of the majority in order to submit to a minority, it's a stark reminder of how empires fall. YouTube's proud legacy is hundreds of thousands of dead links, on websites everywhere, because they can decide to remove what they host at any time, for any reason, or for no reason. And I know some selfish person is going to come along and say "it's their servers, not yours", but when you come to the point where your actions have the consequences to affect what is literally the entire World Wide Web, it stops becoming a private business endeavour and instead becomes a public culture crisis, if a company which provides a proud legacy of millions of hours worth of music can decide to destroy it all in an instant. When a private enterprise becomes a public phenomenon, it's time to stop treating it as a business and to start treating it as public property.

🐳 Big ups to my local library for providing what is really an unobtrusive way to get media at the highest quality, whether its books, movies, or whatever have you, as opposed to trusting a random rip online that eats up your data cap. Going to a library and ripping the content straight to your PC allows you to have physical-media quality content without trusting an intermediary, and though there are a great deal of OPSEC concerns (such as not checking out too many at once, not acting suspicious, not breaking the fucking disks). And for the sillies who think that it's "stealing" from a public library, think of it this way: they stood to make no profit off the materials when it was checked out, and now that I have a copy (having conveniently not stolen the media), they can do whatever they want with their physical media while I can do what I want with my digital media. It's the same freedom of information that made libraries common in the first place. To argue against piracy is to argue against libraries.

☔ Eff you to websites which rely exclusively on Javascript to work. It's like Stallmore said. Javascript is a necessary function for Web 3.0, whatever that is, because it allows websites to be more interactive. When you get to the point where you're relying on its functionality to work, there's a problem. Developers have to understand that when they use Javascript, they're essentially shoving an entire program into a website, and that makes web browsers churn and churn and churn until they eventually spit the output, costing far more memory and data for the user than HTML and CSS ever would. This is a killer for users on slow Internet - especially those on Tor, making some website next to unloadable on the network. And when you get to web browsers on older devices and older standards, for instance, games consoles and other gadgets, it becomes even more of a patience test. I'm not sure if web developers are aware of this, but HTML is a lot more "powerful" (scare, quotes, AND NOT air quotes, so I don't sound like a twenty-five year old mobile app developer, dead inside) than they take it for. The amount of obscure shit that you can find just by browsing through a reference list can replace a lot of what Javascript has to offer, and what it can't replace should be kept to a minimum, to avoid the inconveniences of having people leave your site out of frustration. Was this paragraph angry enough? If not, sorry.

🐳 Big ups to Libreoffice for being a FLOSS office application in a world dominated by Microsoft Word (oh, the flashbacks!). When it comes down to the bare wire, there are few thins more unsung than a free office application, but then that's what most good things are - boring pieces of technology which do their work so well that nobody notices them until something goes wrong. The unfortunate thing about today's economy is that boring things almost never sell as well as the shitty ones that look pretty and impress the sheep. For proof, look at any Apple device. When was the last time you praised Notepad for doing its job well? And the last time you praised the file explorer? Probably never. They work. Same with Libreoffice - it's boring, its free, and it's a little slow, but it's the best office application we have today.

🐳 Big ups to Penn Jillette for developing the Groundhog Day idea into something which affects the work of everybody in every career. You see, the simple notion of the movie Groundhog Day is this - you live the exact same day, every day, and over thousands of days, you become an expert at manipulating them. Jillette realised that show business works the same way. If you do an act once, you suck at it. If you do it ten times, you still suck. If you do it a hundred, then you're decent. But it's only once you're willing to do an act a thousand times, day after day, on-stage and off, that you begin to appreciate just how much impact you can make with it. Some of Penn and Teller's tricks have been done for decades, and they have practiced them literally thousands of times during their career, and have evolved them to the point where they know the exact optimal ways to perform them. Then can read their audience without effort, deliver their lines with a respect they didn't know was possible, and perform their magic in a way so simple that it takes years to properly cut down. All work is like that. If you give up, you get nowhere. If you keep trying, even on something that seems worthless, you eventually find the value in it. And if you take something that isn't worthless, take years worth of experience to it, and keep practicing and practicing at it, then you create something great. The greats weren't great because at birth they could paint. They simply found the value that was already there, and kept working until they could extract that value.

☔ Eff you to every video game emulator out there which is against piracy - Dolphin, PCSX2, and Citra, though I assume everybody else is pissing themselves over the filesharing scene. You make a piece of software that can emulate any video game within a reasonable degree of accuracy, in most cases making the experience better by adding improved graphics, savestate support, and the ability to hack the shit out of a game, and you want to prevent people from using your hard work? There are many, many reasons as to why this is hypocritical and classist, and I can only discuss them fully in a future article, but the basic reasons follow. Creating a device which plays games for free without the copyright holder's authorisation is a piracy machine, and to tell pirates to eff off instead of encouraging them to have fun is hypocritical. To assume that everybody has the financial means to buy luxury items such as games is classist, and to discourage them from being on an equal playing field as their richer peers is even more classist, and the crux of piracy is that it allows everyone, regardless of social status, to be equal. To claim that developers lose money from piracy is based on a fallacy that has been debunked by both economists and judges, and to continue spreading this lie is to support corporations instead of your users. I will continue to use your emulators in the way that you don't want me to, and so will the hundreds of thousands of users which keep your projects afloat. You may either fight an unwinnable battle against the Internet (remember - Internet always wins), or you can adapt to a changing market and appeal to pirates who just want to make sure nobody is left out. It's your choice, but right now, you're making the wrong one. Special shout-outs to the Citra developer who said that my previous post was bullshit without explaining why. I understand why you would be angry though. I was a lot more of an A-hole back then.

😺 Big ups to the video game emulation community for wanting to develop ways for future generations to play video games the exact same way that we can play them today by taking the power out of the hands of companies and into the people who actually care about gaming - the developers and users who want to see games grow and evolve and be even better than they were when they were released. It's a special type of community that has the ambition to go to war with the entire gaming industry for the sake of making gamers have the freedom to whatever they want with their games despite all of the arbitrary restrictions and copyright that companies place on their consoles. Kids fifty years into the future are going to be able to play video games just like we did (note: REALLY good article), because when all the hardware in the world collapses, we'll have our software to back it up. So if you want to partake in the fruits of their labour, check out some emulators like Dolphin and Desmume, and you can find a bunch of games on the Pirate Bay and Emuparadise. It's a brand new, free world, and I won't stand to have our liberty taken away from us.

😺 Big ups to Wikipedia. Sometimes you have to go with an obvious choice. Knowledge for free, forever? What a big goal, and you made it happen. Every single one of you who contributes to the encyclopedia, and those of which who try to solve its many bureaucratic problems? Thanks for giving back to the world.

😾 Eff you to our arbitrary copyright laws. Yeah, big subject for a callout, isn't it? Despite the fact that copyright was originally designed as a way to protect artists by having the government give them a temporary monopoly, it has instead, thanks to the efforts of years of lobbying (read, bribery), turned into a bloated monster that went from a reasonable fourteen years, to the entire lifetime of the author plus seventy years - and in some cases such as Mexico, life plus one hundred. It has gone from a tool to allow artists to express themselves without interference from third parties into a corporate weapon that allows multi-billion dollar companies to put a stranglehold on property that have acquired, snuff out free speech by preventing other users from making derivative works, and destroying culture by spreading iconic mascots, such as those of Disney and Nintendo, and then taking away from the very culture they enhanced by placing restrictions on how they can be used. Fair use isn't a good enough compromise. The only way to solve this mess is to reduce the power of copyright so that it benefits the people and not corporations, or abolish it outright, as I am afraid to think about how much of our culture we're losing by not letting our children benefit from what we have created now.

😾 Eff you to everybody who uses Cloudflare. One, if you're not Furaffinity, you're not important enough to get DDOS'd. Wasting five seconds of thousands of users' days because of your faulty beliefs in web security is selfish. Two, making me fill in three captchas because I'm on Tor, all from Google, you ironic crap, is a waste of my time. CTRL+W and you're out of my life forever. See you later, ass.

😺 Big ups to all my pals who upload movies, music, and TV shows to YouTube. Eff YouTube's broken-ass copyright system. Eff everybody who spreads art into the world and wants to restrict how it's used. But you pals - you who ignore all that bullshit and spread the good word to the world for free? You're the real artists here. Bless you for life, mates.

Apple and Tigger's Puppies!

Apple gave birth to puppies on Sep 9, 2021! They look very cute, of course. No pictures due to the newborns' pictures not being transferred yet, but hopefully this month or next, I can post pictures of them.

Their current names are:

• Jade (female)
• Opal (female)
• Brownie (male)
• Black Pearl (mischievous female; of course, she is named after Captain Jack Sparrow's ship)
• Greenie (sadly, he died after birth :( )

Black Pearl is the biggest, and Opal's the smallest. Brownie is Tigger's alternate name, and he looks like Tigger. Like their parents, all of them have brown patches somewhere on their body, but are mostly black and white except Brownie.

We officially have eleven dogs in the house now. :O :D

Good News and Bad News about Apple's Pups

Bad News: Brownie has died. :( D: RIP, Brownie.

Good News: Jade, Opal, and Black Pearl are now one month old and are very playful puppies and mischievous mutts (so was Brownie)! Whenever they see me, they come running and wag their tails! :D Opal recently managed to escape from her sleeping enclosure when I put her in, so we're getting a cage for 'em!

Opal is a lot like Honey, Jade and Brownie are (and were) a lot like Odie, and Black Pearl is a lot like Lemon and Ruby. Their brown patches have become lighter now, and it seems all of them have brown patches! (Except Black Pearl, for now. ;) )

At least we still have ten doggies in the house. :)

Pictures of the cute puppies (including Brownie and Greenie) are coming soon, hopefully!